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To: Wil H
Correct, this whole posting is meaningless. Using the Nobel Prize as a yardstick for ANYTHING other than liberal bias is a waste of time

Not really. The Peace and Literature prizes are politically based, but the science prizes are not. The fact that moslems have won very few of those is telling.

The Muslims have contributed much to our culture over time. Baghdad was once a major center of art and science.

Again, not really. Moslems never contributed much at all, at least in comparison to their numbers. When Baghdad was a center of art and science, the majority of its population was Christian, as were the majority of its scholars. Mesopotamia lay between two great civilizations - Rome and Persia - and carried forward, for a time, the intellectual inheritance of both. Eventually, Islam destroyed that civilization, as it destroyed advanced civilizations in Egypt, Persia, north Africa, Afghanistan, Sogdiana, the Indus Valley, and elsewhere.

The alleged "contribution" of moslems to Western culture largely consisted of making available translations of ancient Greek works that had been lost in the West. It is interesting to note, however, that very few works were ever translated directly from Greek to Arabic. Generally, a book would go from Greek to Chaldean to Arabic - Chaldean being the language of Iraqi Christians - or even from Greek to Aramaic to Chaldean to Arabic. The translations, you see, were actually done by Christians. Moslems had no interest in learning Greek and very little interest in learning anything except the Koran.

It is also worth pointing out that the Rennaissance did not occur because a few scholars read a few books at universities in Islamic Spain. It happened because the moslems finally conquered Constantinople, creating a mass influx into Italy of Greek scholars from Byzantium. Those scholars, of course, had no need for Arabic translations of Chaldean translations of Aramaic transations of Greek works. They had the original books in Greek, which in Byzantium had never been lost at all.

By the time of Saddam Hussein, Christians constituted less than 2% of the population of Iraq, but they were still over 20% of college graduates. More books are translated into Spanish every year than have ever been translated into Arabic since the beginning of time. The anti-intellectual nature of Islam continues.

18 posted on 01/22/2009 11:37:08 AM PST by tvdog12345
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To: tvdog12345

Thank you for the update.

I knew that “muslim” and “arab” where not interchangeable in this case.

The muslims like to claim all sorts of cultural contributions, I guess I should know better than to fall for their propaganda.


19 posted on 01/22/2009 12:06:00 PM PST by Wil H (No Accomplishments, No Experience, No Resume No Records, No References, Nobama..)
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