While, the West did learn from Islamic Civilization, the standard story is based more on anti-Catholicism, anti-Germanism, and Occidentalism than truth.
ping
Still the case, BTW. Islamic societies have been the most incurious on earth, with the possible exception of Chinese society, especially pre-1900.
Their common characteristic is an invincible belief in their own superiority. They have nothing to learn from other societies, which are by definition inferior, so why study them?
Excellent article. The West did not learn from Islam, but the other way around - until Islam consolidated itself into the anti-intellectual force that it is today, something that happened fairly quickly.
One place not extensively discussed by the author is Spain, the first place invaded by the Muslims. Shortly before the invasion - which happened only a few decades after the invention of Islam as a warrior cult dedicated to spreading Arab ascendancy - St Isidor of Sevilla (who is the patron saint of the Internet, btw) published a huge work that was to be a compendium of “all human knowledge.” It naturally included the thought of Aristotle and others. This was during the alleged “Dark Ages.”
Islam was quite new at the time, and the first groups of Muslim rulers in Spain were recently Islamisized by an Islam that had not yet fully consolidated its awful laws and anti-artistic and anti-intellectual vision. The actual fighters were Berbers from North Africa, but the ruling caliphs were from the fairly advanced pre-Islamic cultures of Persia and Baghdad. To them, conquering Spain was simply like any other territorial conquest, where they got the goodies produced by the conquered territory, including large numbers of slaves and girls paid as tribute every year by the Northern Spanish kingdoms. They repressed Christians and Jews, collected huge taxes from them and limited their religious practice, but did not kill them. They were interested in raiding Spain primarily so that they could good live the good life themselves - luxuries, harems and palaces.
The Middle Eastern court physicians and other intellectuals the Persians and others brought with them actually learned from Christian scholars and Jewish physicians. In turn, they contributed Greek texts that had been conserved in the formerly Christian and Jewish Middle East but in many cases had been destroyed elsewhere during the collapse of the Roman Empire. However, even this was possible only because Islam was at that point a new religion that had not consolidated as the legal or political system it would soon become. Within relatively few years, in fact, these Islamic rulers would be attacked and overthrown by other Muslims, ignorant and fanatical North African Arabs who regarded themselves as the true Muslims, while the Persians and others were lax and heretical in their eyes.
Southern Spain had been Rome’s prime colony and had produced “Roman” writers, philosophers and even emperors prior to the barbarian invasions. The Germanic barbarians were Arians but eventually adopted orthodox Christianity, shortly prior to the Islamic invasions, and hence even the barbarians were beginning to integrate into the stream of learning that flowed from Greece, and which had always been important to Spanish scholars.
It was Islam that put an end to this. Aside from some lovely decorative art - simply using Middle Eastern traditional styles and construction techniques, btw, and not essentially “Islamic” in any way - Islamic areas ceased to be important intellectual areas. The famous “School of Translators,” dedicated to the translation of Biblical and Classical texts and employing Christian, Jewish and Arab scholars, was of course established in Toledo and directed by a Christian king, Alfonso X, as more and more of Spain was reconquered from the Muslims. Alfonso X is known for his contributions not only to literature, but to law, and his legal code, the Siete Partidas, is a foundational code for European law.
I’m just adding some details about Spain because leftwing history loves to depict Spain as a squalid mess upon which the Muslims bestowed their great culture. This is far from the truth, although, as the author points out, one can perhaps attribute the Muslims some role in this because their attacks stimulated the Christians and Jews to defend their own ideas and cultural history.
Anyone who wants to see the influence of Islam need only look at the Middle East, where the former intellectual centers that actually had conserved Classical learning prior to the advent of Islam went dark and became ignorant, violent, despotic pits once Islam strengthened its grip and was fully developed as the evil it is today.
Bookmark for later.
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