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Where Thought Flowered (The West Owes a Great Debt to the Intellectual Scholarship of Arabs)
Baltimore Sun ^ | April 5, 2009 | Stephen O'Shea

Posted on 04/13/2009 8:59:52 AM PDT by nickcarraway

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To: Mmogamer

Man! Don’t say stuff like that w/o some details. I’m perfectly willing to believe it, and I know that the classics were preserved in the “East” and all. But I also know Ptolemy and Euclid and to some extent Aristotle came to us through the Muslims. And that ain’t hay.


41 posted on 04/13/2009 6:27:27 PM PDT by Mad Dawg (Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.)
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To: Mad Dawg

Lots of that also came from Constantinople; I’m pretty sure
since Byzantine culture was Greek very early on that lots of classical works were passed on to us from them. Not to mention Roman law codified under Justinian I that passed into European law right down till modern times.


42 posted on 04/13/2009 7:15:20 PM PDT by Mmogamer (<This space for lease>)
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To: Mad Dawg

LOL...as someone who lives up here...I would say that is an entirely accurate analogy.

Sadly.


43 posted on 04/13/2009 9:11:30 PM PDT by rlmorel ("The Road to Serfdom" by F.A.Hayek - Read it...today.)
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To: PapaBear3625
“The Dark Ages of Western Europe began with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire around 400 AD.”

There are scholars who dispute that. Read Henri Prienne
“Mohammad and Charlemagne” an oldie but goodie.

The central government in Rome may have collapsed, but some of the “barbarian” successor states like the Ostrogoths in Italy and Visigoths in Iberia wished more to carry on in the Roman tradition than to destroy the culture and society. The spread of the Islamic menace through the Mediterranean, along with the kind of endmenic slave-rading and plundering naval actions so typical of Muslim bahavior towards all non-Muslims created a cultural break between western Europe and Byzanitum which was still a bastion of Greco-Roman culture.

“An interesting aspect to the fall of Rome was that it happened during a Global Cooling period, when dropping temperatures produced lower harvests (and thus less revenue to support the Legions), plus causing mass migrations of barbarian people looking for better farmland.”

It may have been a contributing factor in some cases, but the main reason for the initial Volkerwanderung was the conveyor belt of nomad warriors from Central Asia bringing the Huns westward.

The Roman Empire sort of self-destructed due to many factors like the lack of a clear order of secession, which drove a whirlwind of civil wars for imperial control. In the 200’s Roman civil wars pretty much devastated the military leadership of the legions as well as their manpower, driving them to recruit more and more barbarians en mass to fight against their own people under their own leaders rather than to gradually assimilate and Romanize them as they had done earlier. We SHOULD be taking notice of that. Currently, the influx of illegal aliens is so overwhelming our society that our ability to acculturate these people and assimilate them successfully has been seriously compromised, threatening the fabric of our society.

44 posted on 04/14/2009 6:48:50 AM PDT by ZULU (Obamanation of Desolation is President. Non nobis, non nobis Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.)
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To: Mmogamer

Well Euclid came to ‘the West’ because some monks snuck into Muslim Spain and copied it. Aristotle and Ptolemy MOSTLY came to us through Muslims. it’s not that Byzantium didn’t have this stuff. It just wasn’t reaching the West from there, or not a lot anyway.


45 posted on 04/14/2009 6:49:27 AM PDT by Mad Dawg (Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.)
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To: nickcarraway

Muslim “science” is mainly if not totally a ocpy or a plagiarism and extension of Greek science.


46 posted on 04/14/2009 9:03:45 AM PDT by eleni121 (The New Byzantium - resurrect it!)
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To: ZULU
The spread of the Islamic menace through the Mediterranean, along with the kind of endmenic slave-rading and plundering naval actions so typical of Muslim bahavior towards all non-Muslims created a cultural break between western Europe and Byzanitum which was still a bastion of Greco-Roman culture.

I agree. Rome was more a Mediterranean civilization rather than a European one, whose prosperity depended on free sea trade along the Med coastline. Islamic pirates cutting the sea lanes between Byzantium and the rest of the European Mediterranean devastated the Med economy. Plus Europe no longer had access to North African grain, and the overgrazing by Arab herders turned North Africa from the breadbasket of the Roman empire into the desert wasteland it is today.

47 posted on 04/14/2009 9:33:36 AM PDT by PapaBear3625 (The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money -- Thatcher)
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To: PapaBear3625

“Plus Europe no longer had access to North African grain, and the overgrazing by Arab herders turned North Africa from the breadbasket of the Roman empire into the desert wasteland it is today. “

Good point!! I forgot about that.

The Romans had turned North Africa into a wealthy province with irrigation and farms. The Muslims in true arab style converted it back into a wasteland by neglect and damage.


48 posted on 04/14/2009 11:00:46 AM PDT by ZULU (Obamanation of Desolation is President. Non nobis, non nobis Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.)
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Was the Islam of Old Spain Truly Tolerant?
(The Religion of Peace and its idea of inclusiveness)
The New York Times | September 27, 2003 | Edward Rothstein
Posted on 09/27/2003 1:05:33 PM PDT by quidnunc
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/990694/posts

The Real History of the Crusades
crisismagazine | April 1, 2002 | Thomas F. Madden
Posted on 11/22/2003 4:23:29 PM PST by dennisw
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1027242/posts


49 posted on 04/20/2009 4:32:20 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/____________________ Profile updated Monday, January 12, 2009)
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