Many discoveries were made in the period 750 – 1250 AD according to Muslims. Critical analysis of this period shows that many of the advancements and discoveries we falsely attribute to Muslims were actually made by the ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean area, or by the ancient Chinese and Indian civilisations.
O.K.. And your point is just what? The Renaissance, correctly hailed as a new flowering of civilization in the Western World, following the Islamic period, your essay refers to, flowed from a rediscovery, outside the monastic depositories of ancient materials, of some of the greatness of Greek and Roman acievement. It was also, partly, stimulated by contact with the Islamic civilization in the Near East, from the Crusades, etc..
Neither what your essay asserts, nor the facts of the Renaissance, detract in any way from either flowering of civilization.
Secondly, you should consider what is involved in the whole discovery/invention process. All invention is based upon discovery and finding new applications for what already exists. Even something as unheard of, until the last century, as atomic fusion, was simply based upon disovering the always existing properties of radioactive materials, and rearranging and processing them for new uses. It is very true, what a wise man wrote many generations ago: "Man can invent nothing in science or religion but falsehood." The quest is to discover what is true--whether the pursuit be science or religion--and better apply it. The Moslems did real good in pre-Mongol Baghdad. The Northern Italians did real good in the Renaissance. The leaders of all that "real good," were very bright people.
That is enough processing of individual trees in the forest for right now.
Cheers!
What you fail to process is that “history” is not in question, only your speculative claim that Arabs are genetically inferior to European Americans because of genocide 600 years ago. Find a historical site that makes that same claim. Find anything, any site, any where on the net the echoes the theory that Arabs are “genetically inferior” to European Americans. You can’t. It’s just your wild speculation from whatever personal issues you have that I have no interest in digging up.
"Class differences do not usually arise from exploitation--as the Marxists and other Socialists hypothecate--but through different traits and different levels of ability."
More thoughtless neo-Nazi consistent babble. In an advanced and free society, there may be a strong correlation between genetically rooted ability and social class. But with few exceptions, Chinese society has been dominated by strict class and clan structures with little or no upward mobility. I wouldn’t want to speculate on how much if any genetic superiority over the population there was among 19th century Chinese leaders.
Islam’s so called golden age was just a step above the dark ages of the West. It was in decline prior to Tamerlane’s conquest. What separates the West’s progress from the stagnation of the Middle East is our reformation. Islam generally solidified into the social and intellectual fundamentalism that it suffers from today, (explained in Allah Attacks Aristotle: The Philosophical Roots of 9-11 ) Many historians believe that ther’s evidence that Islamic stagnation is culturally based, supported by this is from Study Warns of Stagnation in Arab Societies:
The whole Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one-fifth the number that Greece translates," the report said. In the 1,000 years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun, it concludes, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year… Books are not being translated, in part because of Islamic pressures, said Ms. Abou-Saif, the author of "Middle East Journal: A Woman's Journey Into the Heart of the Arab World" (Scribner, 1990). "A whole gamut of religious literature are best sellers," she said.It’s implausible that your “genetic inferiority” claim is responsible for Islam’s failure to embrace foreign books. Srdja Trifkovic elaborates in The Myth of an Islamic Golden Age
This age was marked by, among other things, intellectual achievement. A number of medieval thinkers and scientists living under Islamic rule, by no means all of them "Moslems" either nominally or substantially, played a useful role of transmitting Greek, Hindu, and other pre-Islamic fruits of knowledge to Westerners. They contributed to making Aristotle known in Christian Europe. But in doing this, they were but transmitting what they themselves had received from non-Moslem sources…"All invention is based upon discovery and finding new applications for what already exists. "The problem with turning this list of intellectual achievements into a convincing "Islamic" golden age is that whatever flourished, did so not by reason of Islam but in spite of Islam. Moslems overran societies (Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, Syrian, Jewish) that possessed intellectual sophistication in their own right and failed to completely destroy their cultures. To give it the credit for what the remnants of these cultures achieved is like crediting the Red Army for the survival of Beethoven in East Berlin under Walter Ulbricht! Islam per se never encouraged science, in the sense of disinterested enquiry, because the only knowledge it accepts is religious knowledge.
…after the brief period of flourishing, first in Baghdad and then in Spain, the history of Islam has been that of a long decline without a fall. What started as a violent creed of the invaders from the desert soon ran out of steam, but the collective memory of earlier successes lingered on. It was still invoked as the proof of the divine approval and superiority. The fact that history was no longer on the side of Islam was for centuries blurred by the success of Turkish arms. It was not until 1683 that the menace to Europe was finally crushed at the gates of Vienna, but for long before that the Islamic world had little interesting to say, or do. Not even a prime location at the crossroads of the world could supply an antidote to the slow poison of Islamic obscurantism.
Always reliant on the plunder of its neighbors and robbery of its non-Muslim subjects, Islam was unable to create new wealth once the conquerors had run out of steam and reduced the vanquished to utter penury. Pre-Islamic Egypt was the granary of Europe, just like the pre-Bolshevik Ukraine; now both have to import food. Pre-Islamic Syria and Asia Minor suffered a similar fate under Caliph Umar to the highly developed and prosperous East Germany and Czechoslovakia after 1945. Both Islam and Communism oppose the preconditions for successful economic development in principle as well as in practice. In both cases, attempts to copy Western methods of production failed because they were not accompanied by the essential changes of social, political, and legal structure; the problem of Ottoman experiments with modernization were remarkably similar to the tinkering with various “models of socialism” a hundred years later.
That’s inanely simplistic. Invention constructs entirely new and productive systems, technologies and entities that add value from existing primitives, something that continues to be promoted by the intellectual and political freedoms valued in the West since the Renaissance .