Posted on 01/15/2008 5:15:30 AM PST by forkinsocket
JEDDAH, 15 January 2008 — The history of science and civilization, as taught by many institutions in the West, often fails to include more than 1,000 years of Islamic heritage and civilization, according to Dr. Salim Al-Hassani of the UK-based Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization.
“The Renaissance couldn’t have happened out of nothing,” said Al-Hassani while speaking at Dar Al-Hekma College here yesterday. “In the West, there’s total ignorance of the contributions of other civilizations. Did modern civilization really rise from nothing?”
Al-Hassani explained how many Western discoveries are of Muslim origin. There was a lost age of Muslim innovation and invention that Muslims are not communicating to the West, he said. It is not included in the their history syllabus or textbooks either.
During Umar ibn Al-Khattab’s reign in 634 A.H., Muslim women took the lead in different ways. He appointed Samra bint Nuhayk Al-Asadiyya as a market inspector in Makkah and Ash-Shifa bint Abdullah as an administrator of the market in Madinah. “Later, Ash-Shifa was appointed as the head of health and safety in Basra,” said Al-Hassani.
Al-Qarawiyyin, a spiritual and educational center that led the Muslim world for over 1,200 years, was founded and built in 859 C.E. by a young princess, Fatima Al-Fihri, who migrated with her father Mohammed Al-Fihri from Qairawan (Tunisia) to Fez in Morocco.
“Fatima vowed to spend her entire inheritance on building a mosque suitable for her community. This remarkable story is a typical example shedding some light on the role and contribution of women to Muslim civilization. Such a role is the subject of widely held misconceptions about Islam,” said Al-Hassani.
In 1993, Prince Charles said in a public speech at the Oxford Center of Islamic Studies that if there was much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there was also much ignorance about the impact of Western culture and civilization on the Islamic world.
“It is a failure which stems, I think, from the straitjacket of history which we have inherited. The medieval Islamic world, from Central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished,” said Charles. “But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history.”
Al-Hassani founded www.muslim heritage.com attracting 60,000 visitors daily in order to change misperceptions about the role of Muslim inventions in today’s schools, universities, homes, hospitals, market, cities and the world. He was one of the key speakers at the first Arab Knowledge Economy conference that was held in Jeddah on Jan. 12-13.
And from Venetians. And from Persians. And from Greeks.
Arabs were not his sole tutors, and he knew enough about the system of calculation he was using to know that it was Indian, not Arabic.
my understanding is that some of the Greek texts, especially in mathematics, were eventually translated into Latin and vernacular from Arabic translations.
The argument can be made that several texts were only available in Arabic because Muslim invasions of Greek territories and the destruction of Greek monasteries had rendered the preferred Greek originals unavailable.
It's hard to call that a net contribution to scholarship.
I would also point out that many of these Arabic texts were translated and preserved by Arabic-speaking Jews, not by Muslims.
My point is not that there was absolutely no interaction with Muslim sources in the Renaissance, but that Muslim contributions are far, far less than what Muslim and philoIslamic sources would have people believe.
If the Muslim invasions had never happened, Hindu and Persian mathematical research would have continued, and countless treasures of Greek antiquity in every field would have survived.
As it stands today, all the surviving texts of the Athenian golden age can fit in an standard set of bookshelves from Home Depot. And that's not the fault of all the Greek monks who studiously preserved those texts until they were murdered by janissaries.
That’s the whole point, to take Christ out of everything.
That COMMON era crap just irks me to no end.
Don’t know about Spain, but I know that it’s taught in Portugal.
Constantinople was a Christian city...and they sacked it, not the Muslims. By the time the Muslims got to it less then 200 years later, the city had shrunk so much that it had individual villages inside the walls.
I will only say that once I was discovered to have instruments of math instruction....
But let's not protract this discussion . . .
ping to post 50 and 65
And with some versions, it goes on and on. Only math dweebs can really appreciate this stuff!
if you only knew . . .
Diophantus of Egypt is credited as the "father of Algebra" (400 years before Mohammed), and Algebra was developed gradually over centuries from China to India to Persia. Arabic numerals predated Islam. That is the point. Arab culture produced much, but post-Islamic conquest, those developments declined rapidly.
The book? "The Bible for Dummies".
I kid you not.
I am not familiar with “The Bible for Dummies”, but I suspect it was not prepared by conservative evangelicals.
By chasing Christians out of the middle east?
‘Renaissance Couldn’t Have Happened Without Muslim Input’
These towel hats, currently living in the 6th century, have the nerve to imply they are the seeds of western knowlege.
What arrogant @$$wipes.
Your attitude is not very useful, I think. Civilizations are interconnected in all kinds of ways. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that. I’m feeling too lazy right now to actually look anything up, but to give a small example, I went to the National Folk Festival this summer and heard, among other things, classical Persian music. I was surprised at the similarity to classical Indian music. This is not surprising, considering the geographical proximity of ancient Persia to India. Various traders were instrumental in spreading cultural influences.
The name-calling (towel hats, arrogant @$$wipes) does nothing to protect us from Islamic extremists. In fact, it helps them by further alienating more moderate Arabs.
Rockefeller showed them how to pump oil.
“This article is a piece of nothing.”
And from the Arab News no less. Go figure.
It still sounds too much like the strange-looking sheep trying to explain away the wolf’s tail dragging along behind him.
It would be more accurate to say that Syrian, Greek, Persian and Coptic cultural achievement peaked before Islam mostly because Islam conquered those cultures and crippled them with shahada, jizyah and jihad.
Avicenna was a Persians who flourished in the Bukhara area in the first half of the eleventh century. Bukhara was militarily conquered by the Arabs in 750. They tried to rule and convert it for a hundred years without success until around 840 the Saman clan - prominent Zoroastrian nobles who converted to Islam - made it their capital.
The largely Zoroastrian population at that point began converting to Islam.
It is possible that Avicenna was only a third generation Muslim and still had Zoroastrian relatives.
Alhazen may have been Persian. He was from Basra, which was a mixed Persian and Arab city at that time. He was an almost exact contemporary of Avicenna and he was obviously very well-versed in Persian/Indian mathematics.
Clearly both were building on Persian cultural achievements - there was no Arab mathematics in the late 900s for them to draw on - but there was plenty of Persian and Indian work.
One could also mention Alfarabi, a Muslim philosopher and scientist of Baghdad in the 900s - who was tutored in the disciplines by a Monophysite Christian priest named Yochanan bin Hailan. Again, an example of a Muslim thinker who did not base his work on Islam or indigenous Arab culture.
Averroes was an Arab who lived 150 years after and 2,500 miles away from the other two. He was considered an apostate from Islam, however and his philosophical models were Greek - again there was no indigenous Arab philosophy to build on.
There was also a great period of Muslim-Jewish cooperation at the time with Maimonides in Egypt.
Of course, the only reason why Maimonides was living in Egypt instead of Cordoba is because he and his family escaped being put to the sword like the rest of the Jews of Cordoba at the hands of Sunni fanatic Abd Al-Mumin.
He prospered in Egypt under the leadership of the Kurdish non-Arab Saladin, who is acknowledged as one of medieval history's most uniquely tolerant monarchs.
Certain Arab thinkers proposed something close to heliocentric theory centuries before Copernicus did.
Bishop Nicolas Oresmes did as well.
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