It WAS Islam
Jun 4, 2009 Faith and Works, Orient
“IT WAS ISLAM… that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.” Obama in Cairo.
Yes, it was Islam. Um, but what has Islam done for me lately?
June 4th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Based on what I’ve studied, this is hogwash. You’re partly right that there USED to be enlightenment, but this was despite Islam, not because of it. Many of these things existed before the prophet (compass, navigation) and were simply improved upon by non-muslims (Persian zoastrians, christians, jews, etc…) in these cultures. The prophet forbids music, dancing and any image glorifying the human form. Even the dome of the rock copied Byzantine architecture and was built by Byzantine craftsmen. In Islam, the mind of Allah “cannot be understood” and there is no value in pursuit of scientific discovery. Read Robert Spencer’s “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades.”
June 4th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Well, I can’t touch my friend Robert Spencer on this, and bow to his far superior knowledge Eric, but … how about Bernard Lewis?
June 4th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I second Eric’s comment with a hearty Yea! Bernard Lewis has bought the politically correct myths of Islam. Islam did NOT “[develop] the order of algebra” but simply stole ONE of the many independently developed algebraic systems (from conquered Hindus as it turns out) and then “developed” it as a tool for superstition–using it primarily for horoscopes and the like. Heck, the Muslims who used the stolen Hindu maths rejected much of what they stole! (No negative numbers in the stolen Muslim variety, for example.) The idea that algebra (the very name is a slur on those the Arab plunderers stole and degraded a full-blown system from) came to the West from Muslim cultural exchange is unsound. As with algebra, so it goes with every single solitary “advancement” or cultural “contribution” ascribed to the Islamic world I have been able to track down: the net sum of Islamic contribution to the history of the world has been misery, torment, slavery, mass murder, oppression and more of the sort. From its inception, following the explicit example and instruction of The Butcher of Medina, Mohamed himself, Islam has been a bloody cult of hate and oppression.
Rabbit trail: The myth of Islamic cultural contributions is almost as wrong-headed and pernicious as the myth that Medieval philosophers, scientists (such as they were) and theologians believed the Earth was flat. (Heck, even Wikipedia gets that much right, “Recent scholarship finds that since about the 3rd century BC, virtually no educated person in Western civilization has believed in a flat Earth.”)
BTW, algebra was already in use long, long before some magpie Arabs using their hate cult as an excuse stole the Hindi system. Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians solved quadratic equations and Greeks used a geometric algebra with superior mathematical insight to the degraded Islamic version.
And as I said, as in mathematics, so in the rest this magpie culture stole from others. The very best mind to come out of Islam–Averoes–had only one great contribution to make: his commentary on the quintessential Western infidel, Aristotle.
*feh* If one took all the genuine positive contributions of Islam to the world and rolled them into a ball, it’d be too small to play catch with.
June 8th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Who invented curved swords?
June 9th, 2009 at 8:45 am
And it was Christianity that gave us the University, genetics (Mendel), international human rights (Francisco De Vitoria), geology, modern atomic theory (Boscovich), heliocentric theory (Copernicus), seismology (Clavius), etc., etc., and that’s just for starters. There are many more contributions in the fine arts.
Funny…even if the cited claims were true (which they’re not), they sorta’ pale in comparison…
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