First of all, let me say in advance that I didn’t mean to tie the two questions together.
The first question is simply whether this old argument is still the one accepted by everyone. From what you write here and in the notebook, I understand that it still contributes somehow to grounding belief in the superiority of Judaism.

The second question is unrelated, just a request for an explanation. You are very fond of common sense and even intuition, so I ask: according to my logic, the majority tends to be right. So I need a reassuring explanation of how it is that so many people, including learned and intelligent ones, follow belief X or Y rather than my belief.
You write in the notebook that a person born into a certain religion is not blamed by God, especially since he builds for himself his own comfort zone. That’s very nice for him, but I, from the side, am trying to understand how such a strong belief — like mine — is shared by only zero point something compared to Christianity. Maybe to put it more bluntly: I tend to trust a thousand smart people more than myself and my crowd.
In short, I have no doubt about the belief itself. From reading the foundations of Christian belief, I don’t even have the slightest possibility that they are right. I am asking how a logical accident on such a global scale can happen.

Intelligent people can follow mistaken beliefs. That happens not infrequently, including within the Jewish world. It can stem from various biases, a priori worldviews, urges, and so on. If that explanation reassures you — good. And if not — also good. Either way, the question of what this or that intelligent person thinks won’t get you anywhere. There are opinions in both directions, and only you are supposed to decide your own views and path.

I’m not trying to make the question get me anywhere (that’s how my spiritual supervisor always answered me when I asked questions like these…). It’s just that a logical distress is weighing on me.

Then tell him that for distress you take a pill.

Thanks for the enlightening answer…

Islam accepts the revelation at Mount Sinai? Where?

Islam believes in the revelation at Mount Sinai, except that God revealed Himself to Muhammad and informed him of an “important update.” It seems to me that Sinai is also mentioned in the Quran, and Muhammad even swears by Mount Sinai (perhaps in another context).

[Update: a comparison between the Bible’s and the Quran’s treatment of the giving of the Torah, in B. S. Garsiel, Bible, Midrash, and Quran: An Intertextual Study of Shared Narrative Materials, p. 149.]

With God’s help, 8 Iyar 5778

Christianity spread at first thanks to the “convenient” factor. It gave the masses “instant Judaism”: monotheism that liberated them from pagan myths and a nice ideology of love, but without the burdensome yoke of the 613 commandments. You go once a week to church, hear music and a sermon, and celebrate — why not?

In the next stage, the rulers of the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, persecuted the minorities, and forced them to accept the ruling religion. The only ones who stubbornly remained were the Jews, who were humiliated and persecuted so that through their humiliation they would prove the truth of Christianity. After 1,500 years of preaching, “their ancestors’ practice remained in their hands.”

Islam began by force. Muhammad and his men conquered the Arabian Peninsula, and from there within a few decades conquered the entire area from Afghanistan to Spain and imposed Islam as the state religion. Those who remained in their previous religion were burdened with heavy taxes and degrading decrees, so most of the inhabitants accepted the ruling religion. After 1,300 years, “their ancestors’ practice remained in their hands.”

And Judaism? A people of opinionated, stiff-necked individuals, who even in the First Temple period were politically divided most of the time, apart from a few decades in the days of Saul, David, and Solomon. After hundreds of years of political division, the people were exiled by Assyria and then Babylon, and became “a people scattered and dispersed among the nations” throughout the world, suffering for thousands of years from subjugation, persecution, and humiliation — and yet they held fast to their Torah and faith, faithfully bore a not-easy yoke of commandments, and maintained their bond to their land. Not by “force” and not by “convenience,” but by steadfast faith!

With blessing, S. Tz. Levinger

S.Tz.L.,
The claim that Islam was imposed by force is not accurate. If Islam succeeded, it was not because of force but because it offered progress to this part of the world, as Maimonides writes in the Laws of Kings.

What has happened to Islam in the last hundred years is sad and does not reflect this civilization at all as it existed for 1,200 years. For example, Muhammad forbade Muslims to raise a hand against one another. This prohibition was taken so seriously that all the political wars in the Muslim world were conducted between armies of slaves: the Seljuks, the Mamluks, and the Janissaries. Today’s reality, in which Muslims murder one another, is sad for anyone who knows even a little of the history of Islam. Perhaps it indicates Islam’s spiritual collapse in the face of modernity, and still it is sad in light of what the region had been until the modern period.

With God’s help, 8 Iyar 5778

Islam conquered the world in a storm in the days of the first Caliph Umar, from Afghanistan in the east to Spain in the west. The local inhabitants who wanted to remain in their religion suffered under a heavy tax burden — land taxes, poll tax, and degrading conditions (see Wikipedia, entries “dhimmi” and “Pact of Umar”) — and because of this almost all of them converted to Islam, and it was they who brought developed culture to Islam. The desert savages only knew how to fight.

The heavy tax burden imposed on non-Muslims caused most of the Jews to leave the Land of Israel, and caused the Jews of Babylonia to abandon agriculture. If in the days of the Sages most Jews had land, in the period of the Geonim it was necessary to enact that debts be collected from movable property, because most Jews no longer had land.

Internal wars among Muslims were routine. The first to be murdered was Muhammad’s son-in-law, the Caliph Ali, who was assassinated by an assassin on the orders of his rival Muawiya, founder of the Umayyad dynasty. And ever since, internal wars and assassinations never ceased. In the family of the Ottoman sultans it was customary that whoever rose to power would eliminate all his brothers so they would not rebel against him. So there was no “idyll” there.

Indeed, riots against Jews were fewer in the Muslim world than in the Christian world, for several reasons: the religious establishment was weak. There was no independent worldwide church as in the Christian world. The caliph was first and foremost a political leader, and he was interested in stability so that the dhimmis could continue existing as a source of income. Muslims did not have any special complex toward the Jews who had murdered their idol, and the fact that they did not drink wine also spared a lot of rampaging by an inflamed mob on “their festival days” — but it was no “paradise” there. See the book by Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmis: Protected Peoples.

Indeed, in the last few decades terrorism presenting itself as Muslim has increased, whether for nationalist reasons, or because of the encouragement the Soviets gave to terrorism, or simply violence for its own sake under the influence of the horror films their youth watch as an integral part of an “ambush culture.”

In short: It is upon us to praise the Master of all, who has not made us like the nations of the lands, but has bequeathed us the heritage of our ancestors and taught us to be “bashful, merciful, and doers of kindness.”

With blessing, S. Tz. Levinger

S.Tz.L.,
The Mongols also conquered the world in a storm, and still it is hard to speak of a Mongol legacy. In the Muslim world, the imprint was not minor. In India the Mughals were preceded by Muslim policy, not Mongol policy. In China they were overthrown by the Yuan, and in Russia the Orthodox Church set the tone. It is not impossible (especially regarding Russia), but it cannot be compared to the Muslim transformation. Islam changed everything — in Iran, where the earlier Persian heritage was almost completely replaced; in the broader Middle Eastern space; and in places like Indonesia, where it was brought peacefully. If Islam had been like the Mongols, the Arab dynasty would have been overthrown quickly and the historical imprint would have been tiny. Events unfolded differently and proved that Islam had a great deal to contribute.
The struggle between the Umayyads and Ali was exactly the last moment before armies of slaves appeared on the scene for the reason I mentioned: Arabs did not want to raise a hand against one another. Even in the Ottoman sultanate, the murders were carried out by slaves in order to circumvent the prohibition (an Islamic legal fiction).

Today those prohibitions are a dead letter, and that is a shame.

Moshe,
Do you mean to say that the claim that Islam believes in the revelation at Mount Sinai is based on Surat al-Baqarah: “And when We made a covenant with you and raised the mountain above you, saying: Hold firmly to what We have given you! They said: We hear, but we will not obey; and Moses gave them the calf to drink”? Clearly there is a quotation here from the biblical story, but this is not a matter of fragments of stories (after all, the Quran took other fragments of stories too, including some that the owner of this site may not be sure really happened), but of the principled question: did Allah Himself reveal Himself to the masses of the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai and give them Torah? Does Muslim belief include such a thing?
Your words that Muhammad received an “important update” are certainly not the belief of Islam, because Islam holds that the Torah was corrupted. It does indeed believe in earlier prophets like Moses, but not that the Torah as we have it is the word of Allah. As stated, the question is whether it accepts at all that there was a mass revelation by Allah and that commandments were given there.

I definitely don’t understand this well enough, and I don’t know whether you are right or not. My impression is only that even if this is not one of their core beliefs, they do not deny the story itself; in any case, I don’t feel that what happens there is crucial for me [even though your words may contain a refutation of Saadia Gaon’s argument].

The Mongols conquered quickly and disappeared quickly. The Muslims remained to rule the places they conquered for hundreds of years, and in most of them Muslim rule remained for more than 1,200 years!

With blessing, S. Tz. Levinger

The Mamluks and Janissaries were Islamized in childhood and were Muslims in every respect. The rulers used them because they had no family to whom they would be loyal against the ruler. The permission to murder another Muslim was presumably because the enemy was a criminal / unbeliever and the like, whom it is a commandment to fight!

But that is exactly the point — if the Muslims had been like every other horse people in history (the Kushites, the Huns, the Mongols, and others), their impact would have been only destructive and would have quickly disappeared. If it did not quickly disappear, apparently the impact was somewhat more positive.
The Mamluks and Janissaries were Islamized as slaves, and their legal status under the mufti was that of slaves (like there is slave-conversion in Jewish law). Otherwise the legal fiction would not have worked. By the way, slavery was not inherited, and they constantly had to bring in new shipments.

Moshe,
I didn’t say they deny it. Rabbi Michael is claiming that Muslims believe there was such an event, and from that he brings additional support for belief in it. I’m only wondering whether that support itself is based on anything or whether it is just a baseless statement (or perhaps he has a tradition that this is the Muslim view, and therefore didn’t bother checking…).

Indeed, I hinted at that in the parentheses. It would be interesting to check, but I don’t feel it is essential for me. I was already convinced thanks to the Christians…

Really? The fact that people who believe all sorts of bizarre things believe in the revelation at Mount Sinai adds to your faith?

On Wikipedia, under “Revelation at Mount Sinai”: “The revelation at Mount Sinai is considered a supreme revelatory event in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.”
It is clear that Islam claims the Jews falsified the Torah, in which it had been written that Muhammad is the true prophet. See for example here:
http://maraah-magazine.co.il/3456
You yourself mentioned this. But that itself shows that in their view there was an event and Torah was given. The confirmation one wants to bring from Islam is not for the details of the Torah but for the occurrence of the event.

Given the fact that everyone agrees that there was such an event, but only we have a tradition about it, since Muhammad and Muslim tradition arose no earlier than the seventh century CE, I assume the conclusions about who is more plausible — them or us — are self-evident.

To sharpen the point: clearly Islam accepts that Torah was given to the people of Israel, and the question under discussion is whether it accepts that there was a mass revelatory event (if it is talking about a Torah that Moses brought, then the whole point collapses). I also accept that in Islam the Children of Israel reached Mount Sinai (even the midrash that God held the mountain over them like a barrel appears in the Quran that I quoted), and of course the Quran also believes in miracles. But we are not talking here about miracles; we are talking about a revelation of God to the masses. So for that I would be glad to hear evidence.
Wikipedia is not evidence for anything in matters like these; it only gives popular information (it has a lot of value, but not as a source for something unclear), and as stated I agree anyway that Islam accepts that Moses received Torah from Sinai. From the link one might perhaps understand that this is what al-Tabari thought, when he says that the Children of Israel heard the word of Allah, but it is not at all clear that he means direct hearing here, and his words could just as easily be referring to hearing the word of Allah from Moses.
And my question is not who is more plausible (perhaps when I write my autobiography I will tell about my thoughts of converting to Islam, thoughts that never arose).