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To: GRRRRR
from minute one I couldn't see the supposed attraction of obama. it was as if every time he opened his mouth to speak, cotton candy or some other wisp of nothing would fall out.

muslims take care of own who grow too big for their britches.

he said the muslims created the arch? i can't say the Romans invented it but i know they used it centuries before islam even existed.

333 posted on 06/04/2009 6:20:20 AM PDT by fortunate sun (Tell me what books you want to ban and I'll tell you what type of politics you hold.)
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To: fortunate sun

Muslims created nothing. All of their supposed “learning” consisted of theories or practices they had stolen from more advanced cultures when they overran them (numeric concepts from the Indian peninsula, for example). Even these didn’t last very long, because Islam is so fundamentally anti-knowledge that the famous “scholars” were regarded as heretical almost immediately and suppressed.

One of the reasons they lasted longer than usual in Spain was that Spain was probably the most intellectually advanced of the former Roman colonies at the time of the Islamic invasion. It had been Rome’s primo colony, and a lot of well known Roman writers were actually Spaniards. Even in the 7th century, intellectual activity continued in the former Roman cities of Spain, particularly Sevilla. Isidor of Seville wrote a compendium of “all human knowledge” in that century, and it included Aristotle and what he could glean of the Classical thinkers, most of whose works had been lost.

When the Muslims invaded, their leaders were from cultures that had been fairly advanced before their conquest by Islam (Baghdad and Persia) and at that point, they were only recently converted to Islam and it hadn’t quite solidified. So the Islam that came to Spain was milder and less consolidated, and the Muslims who accompanied the court were not very Muslim and fairly advanced intellectually because of their original cultures. However, this didn’t last: Muslims from North Africa, who were much more “orthodox” and much more Arab, regarded Spanish Muslims as heretical and attacked them and replaced them. This happened more than once, because Islam would moderate when it came into contact with Spain’s Christian and Jewish population, and the more hard-line Muslims would have to come from their homeland to “correct” it.

Furthermore, the Christian kings who were dedicated to learning, such as Alfonso X, employed scholars of all kinds, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, in their courts. So while some of the scholars may have been Muslim, they were often not living or doing their intellectual activities in an Islamic environment, and furthermore were very influenced by non-Islamic sources.


355 posted on 06/04/2009 6:38:53 AM PDT by livius
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