Medieval Golden Age, Modern Barbarism (Islam more civilized 800 years ago)

First Things ^ | ct 20, 2014 | Andrew Doran

[jjotto]

Not to mention that Jews were the brains and administrators of the supposed ‘Islamic’ golden age.

[punditwannabe]

I’m disappointed in First Things, they are a Conservative and intellectual publication, why don’t they know this information you’ve shared? Bummer.

[Kenny Bunk]

This is a very popular theme in modern academia: namely that the Muslims were in advance of the European contemporaries in the 14th and 15th centuries. They point with glee toward the earlier Muslim takeovers of Spain and Sicily, of course always neglecting to report that Rome and the Byzantines had left much behind for them to plunder and claim as their own.

After the fall of Constantinople, when the Muslims had captured all of the Byzantine Empire, they were feasting in great measure on the intellectual leftovers. Most are in agreement that as many Byzantine Greek intellectuals fled the Muslims, they arrived in Europe with full academic baggage, which did have a great effect on the scholars of Italy, Spain, and even far off Germany and England.

But the Muslims also grew more intolerant, their grasp of "Western" thought became less and less important to them and they grew to despise it. Now once again, they only seek to plunder the benefits of Western Christian Civilization and its technologies, while enslaving, converting, or killing Christians, now much weakened and quite intimidated by them.

So yes, your author is quite correct. It might be very much better for us if today's Muslims were to go "medieval" on us, but at the foundation of the Muslim belief system lies profound intolerance and ultimately the use of violence and military force to convert or kill the infidel.

[cardinal4]

They have always been savage barbarians..

[driftless2]

Let's say the world of Islam one thousand or so years ago was not quite as barbaric as the current one. Then why did the world of scientific and innovative Islam disappear? How is it that the supposedly backwards world of Christianity had a renaissance 700 years ago and totally eclipsed anything the world of Islam created? And totally eclipse Islam today.

How does a purportedly wonderful and tolerant society turn into a retrograde, static society of people who live to kill infidels, oppress women, and turn up their noses at science and learning? Maybe that scientific and tolerant world of Islam never was.

[wtd]

Another opinion is discussed in this book, revisiting a theory by 1920s Belgian historian Henri Pirenne suggesting ancient classical civilization, which Rome had established throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world, was not destroyed by the Barbarians who invaded the western provinces in the fifth century.

It was destroyed by the Arabs, whose conquest of the Middle East and North Africa terminated Roman civilization in those regions and cut off Europe from any further trading and cultural contact with the East. According to Pirenne, it was only in the mid-seventh century that the characteristic features of classical life disappeared from Europe, after which time the continent began to develop its own distinctive and somewhat primitive medieval culture.

• Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy by Emmet Scott

  For a civilization that purports such greatness, where is the list of achievements? Even the short list is concocted of scientific achievements by first or second generation reverts, where free thought wasn't completely eradicated. Beyond that second generation, the plunder of wealth from conquered civilizations diminished rapidly and further jihad was necessary. islam brings absolutely NOTHING to the table.

[MrBambaLaMamba]

Outlaw Islam and expel all Muslims.

[Fractal Trader]

ping

[Vince Ferrer]

The Not So Golden Age of islam

[LambSlave]

I’m tired of reading crap about Muslims/Africans inventing algebra- they couldn’t even invent the wheel. They were no farther along than the Babylonians or Egyptians thousands of years before them- they could solve scripted word problems that they copied from antiquity, and would today be recognized as a type of problem that we would represent as an algebraic equation... For example, “One of these plus another chicken is three chickens. These is two chickens”. Rene Descartes, an evil white European Christian man, was the sole inventor of what every school child in America and the civilized world today knows as algebra, which is to say symbolic algebra.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Thanks for posting Mr. BetBasoo’s letter to Fiorina. It was most enlightening and believable.

[ebb tide]

May St. John the Baptist protect Isalm...Pope St John Paul II

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

Medieval Islamic astronomers predict eclipse of the moon

The rest of us have been doing it since the time of the Babylonians.

[Jacob Kell]

Some might say that that was the result of the influence of al-Ghazali, a Persian scholar considered by many to be the second most influential Moslem after Mohammad himself. His being Persian was relevant, because Persia was VERY xenophobic, and he was no exception. He started out by being knowledgable in classic Greek texts, before deciding that any knowledge outside of the Koran and it’s commentaries was unnecessary, if not harmful to the Moslems. His influence spread out of Persia like a plague, and it was basically all downhill for the Mozzies since.

[RayChuang88]

I think what waylaid Islam was the fundamentalist Wahabi religious movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the 18th Century. Indeed, much of what we know about the philosophy of Islamic extremists in 2014 came from understanding this person's work.

I also disagree that Islam created nothing. After all, modern mathematics was pretty much created by Islamic scholars, including our decimal number system, much of modern algebra (after all, the very word algebra came from the Arab word Al-Jabr), and trigonometry. Why such interest? The Arabs wanted to know which direction was the holy city of Mecca was located anywhere in the world so they could face the city in daily prayers, and created a lot of sophisticated mathematics to determine the direction. Indeed, they created the astrolabe--the predecessor to the modern sextant--as an aid to find the direction of Mecca. And that very research became the basis for modern map making and navigation as we know it today.

[RegulatorCountry]

“Earlier this year, as conflict raged in northern Syria, two professors, one Lebanese and the other American, both from elite universities in the Washington, D.C. area, passed the long night at Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan, drinking tea. They pondered the weighty issues of the region:”

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com

[vladimir998]

Nine posts since this morning and you still won’t answer my question?

Are you afraid to answer it?

It’s been at least two days. Are you afraid to answer it? Will you keep ignoring it? Are you afraid to answer it?

[Squawk 8888]

Interesting thesis when one considers that the rise of Islamic extremism started with the decline of the Ottoman Empire and accelerated after Turkey became a republic.

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

The credit the West owes to medieval Islam thus cannot be overstated

The West does not own anything to islam.

But this ludicrous narrative, that muslims used to be science-loving scholars, or that there used to be advanced muslim civilizations long ago (like Atlantis or ancient astronauts) appears frequently in literature, obviously for the purpose of reinforcing anti-Christian and anti-Western sentiment in the reader. Here is an example from Inorganic Chemistry: A Textbook for Colleges and Schools. By E.J. Holmyard, MA, MSc, DLitt, FIC, etc. Used as a textbook from the 1920s to the 1940s in British schools:

When the empires of Byzantium and Persia were overthrown by the armies of Islam (seventh century A.D.), the Muslim conquerors, after they had settled down, began to encourage learning... the Arabs, who soon developed a passion for the science... therefore the establishment of scientific method is the great achievement of the chemists of Islam... Muslims were the first chemists of the world... Fostered by the Muslim rulers, science in Spain flourished, and chemistry might at the present day have been in a much higher stage of development if the great disaster of the defeat of the Muslims by CHARLES THE HAMMER at Tours in A.D. 732 had not taken place. This triumph of the forces of reaction was a great blow to science in general and chemistry in particular, and although the Moorish power in Spain was not finally overthrown until 1492, irreparable damage had been done.

Generations have been raised on this tripe, written by traitors to civilization.

[Forward the Light Brigade]

Islam needs a reformation—and it needs it now. What we are facing is an anti-Colonalism that dates back 100 years or more—built to toss out the Europeans. Now it has become a puritanical fanatic cult—bent on changing all Islam into their black and white version of Islam. Its like if the Puritans came back and forced all to wear black and white, be whipped and hung if they didn’t comply with church teachings—One thing—they never cut off heads (save for Indians).