Posted on 07/10/2010 2:35:04 AM PDT by Scanian
In the 16th century, astrono mer Taqi al-Din built one of the world's great observato ries in Istanbul. It rivaled that of pioneering Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe -- while it lasted.
"Taqi al-Din's observatory was razed to the ground by a squad of Janissaries, by order of the sultan, on the recommendation of the Chief Mufti," Bernard Lewis writes in his book "What Went Wrong?" "This observatory had many predecessors in the lands of Islam; it had no successors until the age of modernization."
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden caused a furor when he revealed that President Obama had directed him "to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science . . . and math and engineering."
This shouldn't be hard to do, so long as Bolden is well-versed in accomplishments rising out of the Middle East many centuries ago. It gave us what we know as Arabic numerals, although they originated in India.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Having heard that sound myself many times in Iraq, I can assure you there is nothing "pretty" about it. It's damned creepy, actually.
This article is not very good. It repeats by insinuation the Galileo myth; with one exception, it fails to point out forcefully that the “achievements” of Islam in these countries were mainly the product of the Christian cultures and people they overran; the Arabs didn’t create algebra....in fact, virtually nothing attributed to Islamic culture was created BY Mohammadans....and then it repeats the post-Enlightenment canard about the “Enlightenment” somehow being responsible for modern science...
Actually, during the barbarian (Germanic tribes) invasions, many of the original Classical manuscripts existing in Europe had simply been destroyed or lost, not “purged.” The Classical works were still available in Byzantium, but they were lost during the Islamic invasions starting shortly after Mohammed’s invention of his cult in the 7th century.
One of the bright lights in the Dark Ages was (pre-Islamic) Spain, where a monk, St. Isidore of Sevilla, wrote a compendium of “all human knowledge” in the 7th century, including quotes from Aristotle, although most of the original works of the Classical thinkers were lost by that time.
One of the reasons that the Muslims always boast about Islamic Spain is that Spain, as Rome’s closest and most important colony, actually had still retained seats of learning at the time of the Muslim invasions in the 8th century; the Muslims simply took these over. Since most of the original Muslim rulers of Spain were recently Islamicized peoples from places such as Syria and Persia, rather than ignorant Arabs, they still retained remnants of their learned past (the pre-Islamic Persians were particularly noted for astronomy) and were able to take advantage of the Christian and Jewish scholars already working in Southern Spain.
Of course, as Islam consolidated, it became more and more hostile to learning, since Islam is fundamentally anti-rational at its core.
This is not news!
It must be noted that the rationale for knocking down Taqi's observatory had little to do with science.
Taqi is reputed to have used his tower to examine astrological events with the purpose of improving his predictions. Alas, that failed ~ he missed out on such things as a major Ottoman military defeat, the Black Death, etc.
According to one reference this allowed someone to convince the Sultan to knock down the tower and save money for further military pursuits elsewhere without distraction.
At the moment our own Sultan is knocking down the (metaphorical) towers at Cape Canaveral, and to a degree that's allowing him to spend more money on his war in Afghanistan (NOTE: "his war" isn't necessarily the same as "our war").
Makes me wonder if somebody was using NASA for astrology eh!
LOL. Maybe send our guys up there spray paint the moon into a permanent crescent shape.
That's where "zero" and algebra started.
To the West, in Egypt, trigonometry had been developed by the ancients who were certainly not Christians ~ ask Moses about that part!
The early Moslem conquests involved Syria and the Levant, Egypt and much of North Africa which were technically Christian. The big battle between Islam and Christianity occurred much later than the first few centuries.
Spain's history is far more complex than anything that can be covered in a paragraph, but suffice it to say it too had succumbed to the total economic and social collapse occasioned by the arrival of the Dark Ages in 541 AD.
A: Because it's set in the future...
CC
It appears (I am still reading) that it became a heresy against Islam to use reason and intellect to explain the natural world since the entire justification of this religion was an utter submission to Allah in total suspension of intellect. This combined with the concept that everything is explained and all the rules are laid out in the 12th Century Sharia Law leaves little wiggle-room for intellectual expansion.
Gotta give the muslims credit for something... no one makes a better suicide bomb vest.
I’ve read some things like that myself elsewhere. Apparently it had to do with the rediscovery of Greek philosophy around the time of the Crusades. The medieval Church responded with Scholasticism, which allowed that reason and faith could coexist. The Muslim scholars (some guy named al-Shafi or something like that, among others) pretty much tossed out reason and said “faith only!” It does explain a lot about why the Islamic world has places that might as well still be the year 1200.....
Most of the lands overrun by the Muslims in the “Golden Age of Islam” were Christian...North Africa and the Middle East. Persia is probably the most significant exception. The Muslim attack on what we call “India” today came much later (beginning at the end of the 12th century - and it was genocidal in its ferocity).
As for achievements, you seem to have missed the word “mainly”. The point was, and is, that Islam has always been culturally parasitic, but a parasite that ultimately destroys its host culture.
Here is a link to an article by a historian at Northwestern that you might find interesting: http://www.mmisi.org/ir/41_02/fernandez-morera.pdf
You may also find this of interest (a letter from an Assyrian software entreprenuer attempting to educate Carly Fiorina): http://www.ninevehsoft.com/fiorina.htm
Finally, the phrase “the Dark Ages” was a propagandistic phrase coined by the poet Petrarch to exalt classical antiquity in the service of the Renaissance. Serious historians understand that the Middle Ages were far from dark and produced a great deal of technological progress, among other things. The demise of the Western Roman Empire was hardly a bad thing.
“(NOTE: “his war” isn’t necessarily the same as “our war”)”
Speaking of that, if he is such a good Muslim, why is he at war with Muslims?
This seems to be a flaw in the story about him being a closet Muslim, unless someone can explain that.
Some Muslims were very creative in the architecture for their mosques and the very artistic tiles they designed and fired for them. Muslims also had a hand in making the Damascus steel used in their superior swords during the Crusades. The other "Islamic sciences" has been debunked. They appropriated from superior cultures in India and Persia.
Muslims were not scientists and the Egyptian Pyramids were not designed/engineered/built by blacks as some Afro-centric charlatans like to teach in America
As a learned Community Organizer Obama knows how to keep the blacks in the ghetto agitated by telling them how great they are and how many things they have accomplished.
Obama is doing the same to the Muslims. Namely, tell them how great they are so they remain agitated and opposed to the USA.
A conservative’s natural instinct is to solve problems, while Obama’s natural instinct is to create problems. When we understand that is Obama’s agenda we can thwart it.
You will not convince any one any thing. There are many here are so insecure about their own beliefs they tirelessly look under rocks to find fragments that might undermine their beliefs.
As with the Obama administration, Facts are irrelevant
a “wish I knew this before” bump
interesting. wish I had your memory and education.
Even their architecture was taken from other more-advanced pre-Islamic societies in the Middle East. Don’t forget that these were cultures that had produced things such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (which were long gone by the rise of Islam, although Baghdad, Syria and Persia still had beautiful buildings and urban centers).
Mohammed’s Arabs had virtually nothing prior to their rampage. They were tent-dwelling nomads, and everything they appropriated, even in the middle east, was produced prior to the rise of Islam. The conquest varied only in how long it took the Muslims to destroy these other cultures and reject the things they initially seized from them.
It literally became dark, all sunsets were red for many decades afterward, plant growth withered in Northern and Western Europe, and a good deal of the event was reported in the British chronicles of that day (SEE: King Arthur, et al).
Europe's economy collapsed for roughly the next 500 years, and China's for the next 300 years. Things weren't all that good for several centuries later either.
All you need to understand how a bunch of un-educated guys dressed in last year's rags were able to move out of Arabia and conquer Damascus is note that even Byzantium hadn't paid its troops in over a century when the legions met the guys from Mecca.
The early Moslems did most of the conquering with Byzantine armies and Byzantine navies ~ who they paid!
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