Posted on 12/01/2024 9:11:16 AM PST by RandFan
Watching a documentary on the Muslim world i.e Constantinople, the grand buildings, mosques, infrastructure, design, technology, markets, culture etc.
Now I look at various countries and I wonder what went wrong.
What happened there? They were quite advanced at one stage weren't they?
The argument that can be made is that perhaps the Moors have stolen from other civilizations?
It was on your favorite network.. The BBC.
They wont answer the difficult questions and it ended as I indicated
Most of the responses here are generally correct, because the answer is complex. When Islam took over Egypt, it obtained what was left of Greco-Roman science, engineering, and philosophy, and unwittingly handed it over to the Europeans as the latter conquered lands in the Crusades. By the time Mongol muslims took over India, it had obtained Indian mathematics, chemistry, and philosophy, and unwittingly handed them over to the Europeans, partly through the Crusades and partly through the Byzantine Empire.
Europe democratized knowledge via the printing press which spurred the rise in literacy, and so science and engineering advanced by leaps and bounds. Printing came much later to Muslim countries, so literacy didn’t spread until much later, and in some places never spread at all.
Europe also had a steam valve to control its political pressure cooker. Europeans who wanted to battle the authoritarian hierarchy, along with Europeans who could not make an effective living at their rank (whether nobility or peasant), went to the Western Hemisphere instead, while in the Muslim world, authoritarian governments like the Ottoman Empire and the Moguls squashed individualism and advancement, and those who might have benefitted from individual effort had nowhwere to which they could emigrate.
The leapfrogging of technology in the 1800s could only occur in a religiously free, capitalist environment, and that was true throughout America and most of western Europe, and totally untrue in any Muslim country or empire. That has only accelerated in the two centuries since. Is there were no oil in the Middle East and Indonesia, Islamic societies would still be backward, because they would not be able to purchase Western technology.
[george costanza]it says Moops on the card[/george costanza]
Built on the bones of others.
Since Mohammed, the Moslem world has been ruining civilization, demanding subserviance or bringing death.
In olden times, it was by the sword. More recently, via infiltration, divide and conquer in a quasi-peaceful manner.
Thanks for the post! A very good explanation and I learned a lot!
Please read the linked letter in Duncan’s post 15 up thread.
Don’t be a gullible “Islam is the religion of peace” Bushie.
That’s another interesting perspective and they’ve squandered (squandering) the oil and gas money too.
May be they like it better that way…
Inbreeding + theft and perversion of Christian/Zoroastrianism/Judaism teachings by the false prophet moon gawd.
Inbreeding + theft and perversion of Christian/Zoroastrianism/Judaism teachings by the false prophet moon gawd.
I’m very surprised at the limited exposure to the best thinking on this issue. This is from former Voice of America director, Robert R. Reilly, in his 2010 book “The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis”. The answer amounts to the overwhelming by an irrational religious view, of the Arabs’ intellectual heritage from the Greeks (we wouldn’t have received a number of texts of Aristotle during our philosophical, formative period, without their having passed through Arabic translations): that the omnipotence of Allah (what all Arabic speakers call Him, even Christians in the Melkite-Greek Eastern Catholic Rite), that God’s “Almightiness” is so predominant that He is not limited by rationality; and so, rationality is not in His Nature; whereas we say that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is The Word, intrinsically rational, that God knows Himself infinitely, and that that infinite self-knowledge is the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, Jesus.
In Islamic thought, things don’t have their own instrinsic nature—there’s no natural law—the way they behave is solely because Allah wills it. In the Muslim religious view, God doesn’t grant His created things their own stability, He so holds them in temporary, provisional existence from moment to moment that without His constant vigilance they would seek to exist—which is technically true, but God gives things their own autonomy, what is called in Christianity, “Providence”, so that we creatures are allowed to effect our own limited power and will, ultimately to be tested if we will prefer God’s will to our own.
From “The Imaginative Conservative” book review of Robert Reilly’s “Collapse of the Muslim Mind” by Stephen Masty, March 1st, 2011:
Robert Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, tracks the murderers of Muslim philosophy in 9th Century Baghdad, when Hellenistic Reason and analysis were slain by a brutalist movement called Asharism: Osama bin Laden’s Suslov and the last Emir of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Ayman al-Zawahiri, still refers to Asharites and related allies. If you think that half-forgotten theologies don’t matter anymore, brace yourself.
In the mighty empire that ruled Islamic lands from Morocco to Afghanistan, just before the Caliph Haroon al-Rashid of The Arabian Nights, the prevailing Muslim orthodoxy was in some ways more strongly influenced by Ancient Greeks than were Europeans until almost the Renaissance. Islam led the world in science due to its respect for Reason, inquiry, and adaptation: even their Prophet Mohammad once ordered the faithful to seek knowledge “as far as China”—almost akin to modern space travel. Yet their Caliphs were often brutal and a revolution triumphed with grave repercussions.
The Asharites, their allies, and progeny, believed it blasphemous that anything could limit the power of omnipotent God: even God could not limit His own power, they said. It was worse than presumptuous to suppose that God would create Natural Laws which made events predictable, effectively tying His own hands. No, the theologians insisted, every single thing that happens on earth or in the heavens—from a falling leaf to the rising moon—occurs because God consciously wills it to happen. Suddenly, there were no more rational, physical causes of repeatable, dependable, and predictable events, only Divine actions willed individually. Suddenly, there was no justification to study the movements of the planets or the medicinal effects of plants, because tomorrow God may change His mind and make the planets revolve in the opposite direction or turn a cure into a poison. There was no room for moral analysis based on Reason because God was unknowable apart from His commandments in the Koran, instructive tales of His final prophet in the Hadith, and Sharia law derived from the two. No rational causes meant no inquiry; no inquiry meant no science or philosophy; and no science or philosophy meant “shut up and do as you’re told”—which must have appealed to monarchs and clergymen. “The gates of Ijtihad (interpretation),” they declared famously, “are closed.”
From there came theological deductions rendering Free Will, self-determination, and human rights anti-Islamic, at least by Asharite interpretation, and Reilly makes the thought-process clear. Sufism arose as a mystical and anti-authoritarian counterbalance, but like similar movements among the Hassidic Jews, the Hindu Bhaktis and modern Christian Charismatics, it focuses primarily on the transformational effects of Love and so, while ever popular, it never resurrected Reason and thus the Asharite Establishment did little to oppose it.
Asharism may remain, crudely speaking, the orthodoxy of the Sunni Muslim majority. However, since the end of the powerful Sunni Caliphates almost a millennium ago, Sunnis lack any formal structure through which to amend their theology. They have no College of Cardinals or Lambeth Conference, and every congregation can select its own imam (preacher) for any reason. The Shia Muslims, whom Reilly ignores unfortunately, have a formal mechanism for debate, theological review, and adaptation but Sunni Islam is a daily election with no mechanism for counting the ballots, so it remains theologically paralysed in the Asharite Dark Ages. Thus, Reilly contends, Spain translates more books in a year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years.
Reilly guides us to the mouth of Osama’s cave: through retrograde ‘advances;’ past the radical, 18th Century, Wahabi movement that still seeks to ‘restore’ an idealised Islam that never existed; beyond the 20th Century Islamist groups so logically attracted to European Fascism. He quotes dissident Sunni scientists, but never says how Sunni reform may be introduced perhaps because no mechanism survives.
Nor does he fully address the vast majority of Sunni Muslims for whom Asharite orthodoxy plays little appreciable part. Coleridge tells us that, “The great majority of men live like bats, but in twilight, and know and feel the philosophy of their age only by its reflections and refractions.” So, like the bumblebees supposedly unable to fly, many Sunni Muslims still go to work at the hospital or the university, the bank or the laboratory, unaware that there is supposedly no Reason, no predictable Cause and Effect, no Man created in the image of God and neither rights nor democracy, just mute obedience. Yet millions of them demonstrate for democracy—not clerical rule—on the streets of Tunis and Cairo, Sanaa and Benghazi, Amman and Manama. Theology can be ignored.
Asharism may retard Sunni Muslim thought but neither always nor everywhere, nor among everyone equally. Believers may choose comfort among the contradictory advice given by any religion while their masters are more calculating: Seneca said, “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.” Asharism may suit those who aspire to power while it is ignored by the multitudes embracing diverse or even contradictory influences. C.S. Lewis said, in Mere Christianity, that different religions may look at God through dustier or clearer lenses—individuals may too.
Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order describes the unique patrimony of American values and structures, priorities and attitudes bequeathed by the Ancients and Churchmen, Enlightenment figures and Founders. Reilly mentions correctly, but in passing, that the largely-Sunni Turks, Indonesians, and others have their own approaches to Islam coloured by their own histories and cultures. But his book focuses on the modern threat of Asharism: especially on Arab Sunni Islam; more especially on encroaching, Saudi-defined, Sunni Islam; and primarily through the draconian if fanciful Wahabi-Saudi interpretations that inspire Al Qaeda and are now so dangerous to East and West alike. Thus he may underplay several distinctions: first that Asharite-Wahabi-Saudi Islam remains quite foreign—and sometimes repulsive—even to many Sunni Arabs (so far).
Next, while crafting a new myth for wartime England, Tolkien knew that Jerusalem and Athens, Rome and Christianity are foremost but not the only influences upon Northern European culture. We have legacies of our pagan forbearers: Celts and Saxons, Norsemen, Ostrogoths, and others whose mythologies he adapted. In every Muslim land ancient, pre-Islamic cultures still affect modern thought and behaviour. Pushtoons retain their pre-Islamic, tribal code of hospitality and vengeance (described elsewhere on this website), to the point of naming a village after a pig—a beast which is anathema to all Muslims—just to prove that their ethnic traditions of honour can outweigh the strictures of their faith.
My Dutch Orientalist friend, Dr. Kees Rietveld, corresponds that our own notions of Free Will began in Transoxiana east of the Arab lands. Zoroaster, born in Afghanistan perhaps 900 years before Christ, revealed a dualistic religion in which our every action represents a vote for either Good or Evil, which collectively determine whether the universe will ultimately be controlled by God or the Devil. Lacking mechanisms for redemption, this places a fearsome moral burden upon every believer in every waking moment. From parts of Iraq to all of Iran, to Afghanistan and beyond, the religion of most of these non-Arab, Aryan peoples (related linguistically and otherwise to Europeans) was Zoroastrian until the advance of Islam during Europe’s Dark Ages. Enclaves of Zoroastrians still practice in Iran and the environs, and devout Muslim Iranians and Afghans nevertheless celebrate the Zoroastrian New Year (March 21st on a solar, not their usual Muslim lunar, calendar), during which some still leap over a small fire, recalling sacramental fires, to purify the past year’s sins and leave sorrow behind.
Among the non-Arab, West Asian Muslims with whom I have worked for 25 years—rather than Arabs of whom I know less and Saudis not at all—I see attitudes that may be coloured by Asharism but perhaps not importantly. Either their pre-Islamic influences, such as Free Will and causality, are rooted more deeply than this one aspect of Sunni orthodoxy, or conflicting values co-exist.
My pious and intelligent Afghan driver, Fatah, tells me every night that he will collect me at 6:30 on the following morning, “Insha’llah (God willing), if we are still alive,” now ritualised to the point that one of us laughs and finishes the other’s sentence. We both expect that he will drive me to work, but we both recognise that the Almighty may have other plans. ‘Man proposes, God disposes,” he often adds, (quoting Thomas à Kempis in his c. 1450 Imitation of Christ, which I told him in return for his many splendid tales of the Prophet of Islam). Does Fatah believe in Causality, and for that matter do I? A Christian prays for a miracle, asking God to interrupt His Natural Law to cure a naturally-occurring cancer, while a Sunni Muslim prays for a miracle to sustain the usual order. Both of us believe that God holds all power: the Christian expects the status quo while the prudent Muslim takes nothing for granted and seeks God’s permission.
Maulana Jalaludin Balkhi (1207-1273), the Sufi poet buried in Turkey and known outside of Afghanistan and Iran as Rumi, provides a clue. Early in his Masnawi, a masterwork of mystical poetry in nearly 27,000 couplets, he tells of an arrogant physician who neglects to ask for God’s favour and so his patient sickens further: then another doctor applies the same remedy but asks God for help and the patient recovers. The difference is God’s doing, consistent with doctrine, but then why bother with the medicine and not just pray without it? And why administer that particular potion instead of making the patient swallow, say, a collar-button or a piece of 13th Century Turkish Delight? The Prophet of Islam said, “Trust in God but tie up your camel.” Clearly, Maulana Jalaludin and his vast audience (of medieval Anatolian Muslims, Christians, and Jews) understood that curing a certain disease requires applying a certain remedy: this is causality. Then God may, or may not, require a prayer: is this also causality or simply God demanding remembrance? It leaves room for the poet’s fellow Sunnis to engage in reason and causality, medical investigation, and analysis, as they do today.
It reminds me of driving with my Irish-American grandmother, who conducted a litany of mandatory Hail Maries that seemed to take longer than the journey itself. Reason and causality let her rely upon duplicable phenomena from the Buick’s internal combustion engine; experience let her rely upon Grandpa to keep the fuel-tank full; and the Hail Maries were “just simple good manners respecting the Mother of God, so stop fidgeting, pipe down, and say your prayers like a decent Catholic! Now repeat after me…” Prayers were also insurance: she reasoned but hedged her bets. My Muslim friends and acquaintances seem similar, and I doubt that even the most inflexible Asharite would swallow the collar-button instead of the penicillin tablet because only God’s Will matters and causality does not exist (only a Christian Scientist would be happier eating the collar-button). To risk raising Richard Weaver’s ghost, ideas may not always have consequences.
There is no denying Islam’s fall from scientific leadership as Reilly reports, but is Asharism the reason? Neither do the Humanities thrive in Muslim countries which are often poor and spend little on education, like many poor, non-Muslim or partially-Muslim nations. In many Muslim countries today, as in Ireland a century ago, the choice for an ambitious young man is often the seminary or emigration.
Citing considerable spending on (usually mediocre) scientific research facilities in most Muslim countries, contrasted with benighted Sudan and Pakistan ‘Islamicising’ the paucity of science there, The Middle East Quarterly explains that Islam is not “the key problem facing scientific achievement in the Muslim world. Rather, the low level of achievement results from the cumulative effect of multiple factors, and not from a single dominant cause.”[1] They cite reasons including ‘turn-key,’ foreign-made, industrial projects staffed by expatriates that eclipse skilled local jobs and discourage developing expertise; few English-speaking students and little scientific material available in indigenous languages; a lack of resources caused by poverty and other spending priorities; government incompetence and suppression of enquiry and dissent (everywhere, not in science alone); and disinterest.[2]
Disinterest may be encouraged by a lack of scientific facilities, schooling and jobs: in my own experience, Muslim youth studying abroad prefer the applied sciences, such as medicine or engineering, over all other disciplines. In America in 1996, Muslims were more likely than the average to have university degrees (67% to 44%), and 43% of US Muslims were either students or engineers, doctors, or dentists (engineering and medicine employed 23% of working US Muslims).[3] While their presence in America may imply immigrants with a secular bias, it does not sound as if Asharite Sunni orthodoxy is a major deterrent to scientific or other secular educational advancement in most Muslim lands. It sounds to me like a common development problem requiring material and attitudinal changes.
Yet ideological Islamism, Asharism, or Wahabism is clearly an aggressive, backward, messianic movement imperilling Muslim and Western civilisations alike. Thought to have first spread with Saudi funding during the rise of oil prices and OPEC in the early 1970s, and still alleged to be financed primarily by Saudi Arabia’s private and public sectors, it has already wrought great damage while, as Dr. Rietveld observes, we invest in development and they invest in conversion. Even in many advanced countries the sons of Western-educated Muslim lawyers and physicians, who could be studying at Harvard or Oxford, prefer to memorise the Koran in a language that they cannot read while being misinformed by radical Islamists. In Afghanistan and Pakistan this foreign, implanted radicalism is more widespread, virulent and violent. But there may soon be a forum for Sunni reform in a pan-Islamic Caliphate perhaps to be re-established by the Turks as part of a democratised Neo-Ottoman Empire (described on this website), and pro-democracy uprisings may hasten it. Meanwhile, to our vast peril, our masters refuse to confront Pakistani-led Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan because its military protectors have nuclear weapons, and we ignore the engines of Asharism because Saudis have oil.
Robert Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind is essential reading for anyone interested in the radical beliefs which threaten 1.2 billion Muslims and the rest of the world. It should, however, have been called “The Closing of the Islamist Mind” for it does not wholly speak for Sunni Muslims, less for the non-Arab Sunni and any Shia.
If one lacks a general understanding of Islam, start with Karen Armstrong’s brief and very readable Islam: A Short History, or the fuller and thoroughly-rewarding Islam in Our Time by Malise Ruthven. Otherwise, go straight to Reilly.
That a big picture.
That is the idea of Occasionalism, which denies the possibility of cause-and-effect.
That is, it used to be that Islam believed that striking a match against a hard surface "caused" the match to ignite. There exist "intermediate" causes in the sense that the universe works somewhat independently of the constant attention and intervention of Allah. Today is warm because the sun is shining. Sunshine "caused" directly (in an intermediate sense) the day to be warm. Sort of like the watch and the watchmaker. The watchmaker makes the watch but the watch works otherwise on its own. There is space between the Creator and Creation. So there can be things like cause-and-effect and free will.
A different Islamic school of thought felt uncomfortable with this notion, since it would seem to contradict Islam's central tenet of the absolute sovereignty of the will of Allah. So, that school of thought said that Allah does not work through intermediate causes. Rather, Allah is aware of and performing all of the watch's functions himself. Nothing moves on its own. Not a single gear moves because the spring was wound. It moves only because Allah wills that it move in the moment that it moves.
Similarly, we see the match strike the hard surface, and then we see the match ignite. But the former did not "cause" the latter. The match was struck only because Allah willed it to be so, just as the match ignited only because Allah willed it to be so. The pattern that we observe of a match struck followed by a match igniting reflect merely the habits of Allah's mind - the latter in no way "causes" the other.
This is called philosophical Occasionalism.
The Occasionalist school won a total victory over the other school which accepted cause-and-effect.
It's clear that you can't have anything like western science if you don't have cause-and-effect of intermediate causes. Put another way, you can't have western science if you don't have some sort of space between the Watch Maker and the Watch.
That's why Islam went from being a comparatively enlightened civilization to being the anti-science dead zones that they are today.
That's why the Muslims add "inshallah" (if Allah wills it) to everything. It would be impious for a Muslim to say "it will rain tomorrow" as a meteorological prediction based on empirical data. To the contrary - if it rains it will do so only despite all that and only as an accidental attribute of the habits of Allah's mind - if it does rain it means that Allah tomorrow directly wills that it rain and only for that reason. Adding "inshallah" is for them a pious reminder nothing happens without Allah directly and irresistibly willing it to be so.
It's also clear that in such a system there can be no talk of free will. If a man strikes the match, it is only because Allah willed that he do so. The man has absolutely no freedom to do otherwise. There is no free will in Islam.
Islam quite literally lost its mind about 800 years ago. And it has not recovered since.
What happened there? They were quite advanced at one stage weren’t they?
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Short answer: No.
They took what they wanted from the conquered and destroyed the rest. On the pronouncement that if something is in the koran, is is superfluous and must be destroyed; if something is not in the koran it is anathema and must be destroyed.
Islam is singularly responsible for the destruction of Classical Western Civilization and Classical Christianity. Most of the lost works from antiquity were destroyed by one muslim caliph or another. Some works appealed to various wealthy muslims who preserved particular works here and there - usually claiming the work as their own. The only historical documented invention by muslims is the modern cell phone bomb.
All of the ancient structures where muslims conquered were designed and built by slaves - mostly Jewish. The Arabs only put out the money and selected the design they wanted. This is much like the modern Gulf States building sprees, replete with slaves - although not Jewish ones.
Most of these ‘historical documentaries’ are adverse to offending Islamic sensibilities.
Istanbul is in a crap hole of a country - when you leave the city, there is an abrupt change to rural, replete with hovels & beggars. All the city’s historic buildings were made by Christians - after the fall of Constantinople (Istanbul) the muslims converted churches to mosques.
Same for the Dome of The Rock which was built as a tourist attraction by a 8th century caliph to keep his court happy after he moved his capital on a whim. When the court became restless, he moved his capital back to Amman in today’s Jordan. Asds you might surmise the building had noting to do with the ascension of Mohammad. Who was likely ( if he existed at all ) killed by assassins in Medina
Islam is a fraud. But people there have no choice. To leave Islam is an automatic death sentence legitimatized in the koran.
bttt
During the 14 th century Islamic states like Moorish Spain as well as Constantinople were centers of higher learning and preserved much of the knowledge from the ancient Greeks that had been lost in the West since the fall of the Roman Empire. However, fundamentalist Islam took over and essentially moved Islamic societies back to 7th century tribalism where it has remained mired to this day..
The Crusades and then later the Spanish inquisition along with a few other Inquisitions.
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The Crusades, after the first one, were all failures. The Spanish Inquisition did nothing. The major battles did.
We are currently in a major battle with Islam, but most of the world does not see it that way, believing Islam is a religion - it is not, and stands for peace - it does not. The West became weak and soft, leaving the way open for Islam to take huge steps over the heads of kindly Christians and know-nothing peace makers.
Which is why if the West was actually strong it would have nuked Mecca and Medina, reducing the absolute god to a weakling, unable to save them. Not doing so was a great victory for Islam.
I could start with Carter in regard to stupid decisions on Islam but I’ll start with Eisenhower. The Suez Crisis, we should have allowed France & the UK to impose their will on the situation. Doing what we did we demonstrated to Europe we weren’t reliable on Middle East issues. This set the stage for their later and continuing cowardice. Then Carter came along, by not backing the Shah we breathed life into dying Islamic fundamentalist. Don’t think it was dying? You can find pics on the Internet of stylishly dressed (European styles, perhaps a bit modest!) Iranian and Afghan girls going to school, socializing with males in other words looking and acting normal! You can find similar pics in other Muslim countries. (Exception Saudi Arabia its madness later ecame the minimum of mad mo behavior!) All that all got swept away. The Shah should have been allowed to crush Fundamentalist Islam in Iran. If the had happened the bacillus would not have spread.
That sounds like straight out of Wikipedia, a whoely untrustworthy, so called source.
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