Islamic "Science" and Other Nonsense

Enza Ferreri Blog ^ | 1 August 2013 | Enza Ferreri

[Enza Ferreri]

The video that you can see by clicking on the link just below this post title is that of a BBC lynch mob against Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League, during the programme called - a misnomer - FreeSpeech on BBC3. It is not free speech if you verbally abuse and even incite to murder someone for exercising his right to free speech, as it happens in this "debate".

Interestingly, the comments to the video on YouTube reveal how the audience was cherry-picked by the BBC to fit its political bent and in no way represents the British general public. That's reassuring, because a country whose population the studio crowd faithfully represented would be a cross between the Soviet Union and Pakistan.

Horrendous ganging up against one person by clueless people - or worse - is a more apt description of the situation. A bloke in the video, apparently a "musician" I'd never heard of called Akala, who talks about Islamic culture pioneering mathematics and science, must have been listening to Obama instead of going to school. Has he ever heard of Euclid, the father of geometry, and Pythagoras? Muslims did not pioneer anything. All they did was translate intellectual treasures from the original Greek into Arabic and preserve them in the library of Alexandria. The numbers we use and call "Arabic" were actually developed in India and translated from Sanskrit into Arabic, hence their name.

Islamophile Barack Hussein Obama has been big on the subject of "Islam Has Contributed To The Character Of Our Country" in his celebration of Ramadan, recently but not for the first time. He also mentions "Muslims who helped unlock the secrets of our universe", whose names he must have been hard pressed to find because he didn't say them.

In reality, science and Islam are fundamentally incompatible, which is why, despite the propaganda, there are no Muslim scientists in the history of the Islamic world. The only rational thinkers of some influence that world has produced, Averroes and Avicenna, were not real Muslims, but apostates. Avicenna (980-1037) was an Aristotelian who tried to reconcile formal logic with Islam and failed. Averroes (1126-1198), also influenced by Aristotle, had his works burnt and his disciples persecuted.

The very notion of God in Islam, a being whose power is so absolute that cannot be limited by reason, logic or the laws of nature, and who can at any moment change the order of the universe at his will - if Allah arbitrarily so commands, tomorrow the sun will not rise - makes it impossible to have a Muslim science. Science, a systematic method of looking at things combining empiricism and logic, developed only in Christianity.

Even putting aside this little faux pas, that mercifully for Akala - who is a writer, artist and entrepreneur, no less - nobody disputed (another indication, if necessary, of the lacklustre intellectual standard of this audience), it was evident that Robinson's opponents, namely the whole studio, couldn't stand up to him.

Siara Khan never defined "racism" and how opposition to Islam could be racist. Muslims can be of all races.

The tone of the debate and the level of the participants are demonstrated to be low by the fact that, while all the "debate" - which mainly consists in hurling abuse of "racist" at Tommy Robinson - revolves around racism, you have right from the start something contradicting that premise: a white Muslim. Racism is unjust discrimination on the basis of race. If you "discriminate" against all races, whites included, you discriminate against no race, ergo you are not racist.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

“When men speak of you they speak of scientists and poets!
Burn your books! Make warriors of your poets!
Have your scientists invent new poisons for our arrows!”—Bin Yusef, opening lines to EL CID.

[DManA]

if Allah arbitrarily so commands, tomorrow the sun will not rise - makes it impossible to have a Muslim science.

If that were true then Christians can't do science either since we also believe the Sovereign God can do anything he pleases. Just that most of the time He interacts with this world through His natural laws, the detail of which we can tweeze out via the scientific method.

[himno hero]

I love the argument... if they are soooo smart.... where are their Nobel prizes for hard sciences?

Why is it the mouthy Iranians are trying to recreate weapons the Jews created over 70 years ago?? Better yet? Why are they using JEWISH technologies? Such fools....

[ZULU]

Just look at how technologically deprived Islamic States are. It says it all. Most of them can’t even make their own rifles.

[mjp]

In reality, science and Islam are fundamentally incompatible, which is why, despite the propaganda, there are no Muslim scientists in the history of the Islamic world.

For mohammedans, Allah is not presented as a lawful creator but was conceived of as an extremely active God who intrudes on the world as he deems it appropriate. Consequently,there arose a major theological bloc within mohammedanism that condemned all efforts to formulate natural laws as blasphemy insofar as they denied Allah's freedom to act.

The koran states ""Verily, God will cause to err whom he pleaseth, and will direct whom he pleaseth." If God does as he pleases, and what he pleases is variable, then the universe may not be lawful. Thus, mohammedan theology did not provide the necessary fundamental assumptions for erecting the concept of science based on observations leading to the formulation of natural laws.

[agere_contra]

Excellent point about ‘limiting Allah’.

Islamic thought also has a bizarre version of truth where two contradictory facts can both be true at the same time.

This is vital to Islam because Mohammed contradicted himself constantly, and the Allah he describes is arbitrary.

But it makes a nonsense of formal logic and synthesis.

Find an apparent contradiction in an experiment or observation? Western thinkers would dig deeper, find out what’s going on and formulate a more general truth. But Muslim thinkers might say ‘the created world contradicts itself, so what? ‘.

[Slyfox]

He also mentions "Muslims who helped unlock the secrets of our universe", whose names he must have been hard pressed to find because he didn't say them.

Around the time the west discovered that all of Aristotle had been translated into Arabic, whereby it had been saved, and the west began to translate Aristotle into Latin thereby pushing the Renaissance into gear - the Islamic leaders decided to sideline their achievements via Aristotle. They stopped any intellectual advance from that point because their mullahs told them to. So, intellectually, Islam is still stuck in the 1200s.

[Enza Ferreri]

No, the Christian God is rational and logical - which the Muslim God doesn’t have to be -, that’s why He gave an order to the universe and created laws of nature.

[DManA]

I said three things:

That God is sovereign and can do as He pleases.

That God mostly works through His Natural Laws.

That we can learn the workings of these laws.

Which if these do you say NO to?

[RansomOttawa]

Muslims did not pioneer anything. All they did was translate intellectual treasures from the original Greek into Arabic and preserve them in the library of Alexandria.

Say what? The Library of Alexandria was established by the Ptolemaic dynasty, who were Greeks, something like 800 years before anyone ever heard of Mohammed and his foolish superstition.

[Enza Ferreri]

I say no to what you wrote: “If that were true then Christians can’t do science either since we also believe the Sovereign God can do anything he pleases.”

I explain in my previous comment in detail what is wrong with that sentence.

[DManA]

You explained that you didn’t understand what I wrote.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Enza Ferreri.

• Richard Dawkins Branded "Racist" Over Anti-Muslim Remarks
• Professor Richard Dawkins embroiled in Twitter row over Muslim comments

[GOPJ]

In reality, science and Islam are fundamentally incompatible, which is why, despite the propaganda, there are no Muslim scientists in the history of the Islamic world.

Reflected by Islams poor showing in Nobel prizes...

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Enza Ferreri.

In reality, science and Islam are fundamentally incompatible, which is why, despite the propaganda, there are no Muslim scientists in the history of the Islamic world. The only rational thinkers of some influence that world has produced, Averroes and Avicenna, were not real Muslims, but apostates. Avicenna (980-1037) was an Aristotelian who tried to reconcile formal logic with Islam and failed. Averroes (1126-1198), also influenced by Aristotle, had his works burnt and his disciples persecuted.

[Enza Ferreri]

I admit that you sometimes don’t write in the clearest possible way, but let’s try again. You wrote:

“if Allah arbitrarily so commands, tomorrow the sun will not rise - makes it impossible to have a Muslim science. [This was quoting me. Then your comment:]

If that were true then Christians can’t do science either since we also believe the Sovereign God can do anything he pleases.”

I interpreted you correctly or else you said something and meant the opposite. You said that Christianity, like Islam, believes that God can do anything He pleases.

But the difference is that the Christian God is inherently rational, therefore He created a rational universe, regulated by laws of nature which can be understood by men. Allah, instead, for Islam is not limited by anything, including reason or logic.

I hoep that you inderstand it now.

[Enza Ferreri]

Thank you.

[Fred Nerks]

Placing the comment from your website written by anonymous here:

All this nonsense has it’s roots in a book written by Philip K Hitti, first published in 1937, in which is claimed every single human endeavour and innovation as arabic. When Obama speaks of arabic accomplishments, he’s simply repeating the contents of ‘History of the Arabs’

From the back cover of the 10th Edition:

Philip K Hitti was born in Lebanon in 1886 and lived in the USA for the most part since 1913, teaching first at Columbia and later at Princeton, from which he retired in 1954 as Professor of Semitic Literature and Chairman of the Department of Oriental Languages. The author of many works on Oriental subjects, Professor Hitti has been active in numerous roles related to the study of Near East languages and politics, and to the promotion of international cultural organisations.

~~~~

To read Hitti, one would need to believe that that arabs invented EVERYTHING. It’s probably the most puke-worthy 757 pages I have ever forced myself to read.

[Fred Nerks]

A Talk With Philip Hitti

Written by John R. Starkey

excerpt:

Arabic literature is among the richest in the world. Even today, very few people realize that. There was a professor at Yale who concluded after years of study that Arabic literature up until the year 1900 was far richer than even English literature.

You see, there was a time when the Arabs were masters of an empire which extended from the Pyrenees in Spain to the frontiers of China. North Africa, southwestern Europe, western and central Asia, Turkey, Persia, everywhere Arabic was the chief language of learning. Imagine the output in history, philosophy, science, literature! Of course, in each locality there were variations, influences from the native language and culture. But officially Arabic was the written language.

That is why you have a very rich Arabic literature, and it scares people. Not just because of the amount, but also because the backbone of this literature is poetry or elegant prose such as you find in the Koran. And that floors the American students. In addition, the quality of most translations puts people off.

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/197104/a.talk.with.philip.hitti.htm