[mgc1122]

And the Arabs’ intellectual prowess since Islam?

[Egon]

In the immortal words of Janet Jackson: “What have you done for me lately?”

[jagusafr]

As I understand it, the “intellectual scholarship” of Islam was merely permitting the intellectuals of the subjugated nations to continue to practice their professions. It had nothing to do with anything Islam brought to the equation. Much like “Islamic architecture” and “Islamic engineering” and “Islamic art” were merely coopted from the conquered peoples.

Colonel, USAFR

[chesley]

All very well, but that was then, and this is now. And now they are barbarians at best, savages at worst.

[Melchior]

The denigration of the superior scholar Samuel Huntington is reprehensible. Anyone who has not read The Clash of Civilizations really is missing a major historical landmark.

[Vigilanteman]

I shall never forget a visit to the Smithsonian and a traveling exhibit of Persian Art. Not only did it rival anything the Greeks or Romans put out during their hey day, but it made anything the Europeans did look like kindergarten crayon drawings by comparison up until about 740 a.d.

I asked one of the staff what happened to send Persian Art and Culture into a nosedive about that time and why there was so little after that time. She was evasive as any good government bureaucrat but finally admitted that time was a time of great warfare. I knew not to ask what brought on that warfare because I knew it was a time of forced conversion to Islam and replacement of the tolerant Zorastian religion with a religion of intolerance and political oppression.

The flourishing of Persian culture after that time coincided with periods when secularization forced relaxation of the iron grip of Islam, the most recent example being from the early 1930's until 1979.

[ClearCase_guy]

The Arabs had access to ideas of the Greeks, Romans, Indians and Chinese. Because Islam was located in a central location, these ideas passed through the Arab civilization and helped to enrich it.

But Islam contributed little on its own. And it turned a blind eye to outside influences centuries ago. The Silk Road ended, and European sailors began sailing around Africa to trade with the East, because the Arabs were inhospitable. Coincidentally (or not!) Arab civilization stopped shining so brightly. After perhaps 1500, the Arabs stayed the way the were, as Europe continued to progress.

I believe one could make a strong case that Arabs did little on their own, but made some good use of the work of others. When the Arabs stopped dealing with outsiders, and were left to their own devices, their progress came to a grinding halt.

Doersn't speak well of them, IMO.

[Nervous Tick]

Didn’t the mooselimbs give us Zero?

And you can take that either way you want.

[a fool in paradise]

the so-called City of Peace served as the intellectual center of the world, and its library, much like the Library of Congress, the world's foremost, thanks to the caliph's largesse.

never mind the Libary of Alexandria or how it came to be destroyed...

[rlmorel]

In his GREAT book “What Went Wrong?” by Bernard Lewis, he points out that a time frame from thirteenth to the 17th century sometime (I don’t remember exactly where) only one book was translated from the western world into Arabic.

One.

It was a book on venereal diseases, and because that was considered to be a “Frankish” disease, it was acceptable for a muslim physician to own and use a Frankish book, or at least to translate it.

During that same time, tens of thousands of books were being tranlated from a multitude of languages into other languages, but only one was translated into Arabic.

I recall it was a period of more than 100 years with only one book translated from ANY language into Arabic.

That is what went wrong with Islam. They never thought infidels had anything constructive or worthwhile to offer, not much different from today.

Even more telling, when a european ship was beached after the crushing defeat of the Muslims at Lepanto in the 16th century, there was a debate amongst the muslims who were undecided on whether they could steal any features from the beached European ship and implement those changes into their own ships. Because it was an infidel contraption, they had to have a religious ruling on it.

THAT is why Islam is where it is today.

[Flying Circus]

Fr. Stanley Jaki has an interesting book called “Savior of Science” that talks about why science hit dead ends in most cultures, including Islam. Islam failed to put together many realizations received from other cultures and advance them to the next level. The Christian West flowered soon after it got access to much of that material putting ideas together that never occurred to Islamics or to the cultures to absorbed.

Islam failed to add much to the accumulated knowledge because their concept of Allah was not bound by internal consistency. Since Allah’s will was subject to change at anytime, so was the reality of the world and there was no philosophical foundation on which to build a systematic study of creation. Christianity had the foundation of an ex nihlo creation and an unchanging and loving God whose will was absolute but firm that allowed Western science to quickly outpace the rest of the world.

[SunkenCiv]

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	Gods Graves Glyphs	Thanks nick! As rats do, Moslem Arabs fouled more than they ate; they (as had Constantinople and various western monasteries; and more to the point, a monastery in what is now Iran) preserved fragments of classical learning, and that is most of their contribution to modern thought. The practice of law in Europe became much more systematized when a surviving copy of the digest of Roman law emerged from the reconquest of Iberia; the Muzzies had taken over in the 9th century and it took the various Christian kingdoms about six hundred years to kick them out again. Don't ask me for names, but modern methods of the diagnosis of disease owe something to a Muzzie-era doctor; the study of optics had an important medieval middleman in the Moslem world; the use of the lateen sail is often attributed to Arab sources (Phoenicians), but the Greeks and Romans of the early centuries A.D. were already using them, as well as the with-the-wind square sails (European Age of Sail ships used both, and crew size skyrocketed). To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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[CaptRon]

That phrase suggests a brave viewpoint for a historian nowadays, one at odds with the us-vs.-them mentality copied from the Cold War and pasted on to any consideration of things Islamic.

The Muslims preserved much knowledge they got from conquered countries (is it ok to say conquered?), but real advances? Not so much.

[Citizen Tom Paine]

Read the book “What Went Wrong” by Bernard Lewis. It takes about 7 hours and is very interesting. Then draw your own conclusions,

[ZULU]

The fact of the matter is that Islamic expansion created the European Dark Ages. The loss of communication and trade via the Mediterranean when the Mohammedans seized all of North Africa from the Christians, along with the Levant, Sicily, Southern Italy, Spain, Portugal and Southern France prevented the exchange of ideas, trade and information via the easiest method of communication.

Constantinople alone managed to hang on as a civilized state while the Mohammedans in TYPICAL Muslim style bankrolled their “empire” by looting, plundering, slave dealing and warfare with one another and their Christian neighbors.

Islam is a piratical faith and a piratical culture.

This book is just so much pablum for politically correct imbeciles. If the Muslims had not turned the Mediterranean into no man's land for western Christians they could jolly well have gotten all the Roman and Greek Culture they needed from the Byzantines, without having it distilled through Islamic hands.

[eleni121]

Muslim “science” is mainly if not totally a ocpy or a plagiarism and extension of Greek science.