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To: edge10
"...to help [Muslim nations] feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering ..."

What "contributions"? Those contributions were made by Arabic cultures long before Islam even existed. Muhammed wasn't even born until 600 years after the birth of Christ. I think the Arabic cultures' profound contributions to math and science were done even before the Birth of Christ, let alone the birth of Momammed.

The claim that Islam "contributed" in any way to profound math and science knowledge that came out of ancient Arabian civilization is a lie, a pure falsehood.

Islam is evil, I am beginning to think more and more, and its followers are misguided at best.

33 posted on 07/05/2010 1:23:16 PM PDT by Finny ("Raise hell. Vote smart." -- Ted Nugent)
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To: Finny

You are mistaken. The Arab contributions to mathematics and science took place during the Muslim era, though the contributors were a mix of Muslims, Christians and Jews (there used to be Arab Jews, but I digress), and were in an indirect way, in part, due to Islam. In particular Islam’s militancy led to the conquest of parts of the Roman Empire (by your leave, there was never such a thing as “the Byzantine Empire”, the notion was invented by Western Europeans who wanted to dispossess the Christian East of its Roman heritage) and of India. Access to both Greco-Roman and Hindu science and mathematics led to some advances largely by combining the two and making inferences which were not that big of leaps. Algebra was Diophantus plus the Hindu notion of zero, but the beginnings of trigonometry were genuinely of Arab/Persian origin (a real advance unlike algebra, but based on mixing old Greek problems with Hindu numeration).

In medicine, the Arabs took off were the Greeks left off and made some advances during the Muslim era (again, not just Muslims, but Christians and Jews contributing, too).

But all of Muslim science came to a grinding halt, due to the rejection of the Aristotelianism of Averroes and Avicenna in favor of Al Ghazali’s occasionalism: the idea everything happens by the direct will of Allah, which except as revealed in the Qu’ran is unknowable. Once Sunni Islam went down that path, it became the intellectual, cultural and commercial backwater it remains to this day.
Shi’ite Islam remained fairly vibrant culturally until its embrace of Khomeniism in the 1980’s.

Perversely, Islam represented a step forward from Arab paganism, even as it represented several steps backward from Arab Christianity and even Arab Judaism. (Yes, things were that bad among Arab pagans in the 6th and 7th centuries after Christ.)


90 posted on 07/05/2010 2:32:18 PM PDT by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know. . .)
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