More?
Many of their other “inventions” and “discoveries” were basically extrapolations of prior work of the Greek, Hindus and Persians, and others, from manuscripts that ended up in their hands after Europe purged their versions during the Dark Ages.
Many of their other “inventions” and “discoveries” were basically extrapolations of prior work of the Greek, Hindus and Persians, and others, from manuscripts that ended up in their hands after Europe purged their versions during the Dark Ages.
Gee, to hear Obama tell it, the Muslims have invented about nearly everything in the world that you can think of, right?
Remember his speech in Cairo? Remember the long list of Muslim inventions? Nearly every one of those seemed spurious and laughable to me because in my reading of history I don’t recall any Muslim inventions at all. I have heard over and over that they invented algebra, but I think that was taken from the Greeks — am I correct?
And now, we need to help the Muslims with their rocket technology — that is to say, we need to help them learn how to shoot rockets that land on top of our heads instead of just using jumbo jets next time — is my interpretation correct?
Actually, during the barbarian (Germanic tribes) invasions, many of the original Classical manuscripts existing in Europe had simply been destroyed or lost, not “purged.” The Classical works were still available in Byzantium, but they were lost during the Islamic invasions starting shortly after Mohammed’s invention of his cult in the 7th century.
One of the bright lights in the Dark Ages was (pre-Islamic) Spain, where a monk, St. Isidore of Sevilla, wrote a compendium of “all human knowledge” in the 7th century, including quotes from Aristotle, although most of the original works of the Classical thinkers were lost by that time.
One of the reasons that the Muslims always boast about Islamic Spain is that Spain, as Rome’s closest and most important colony, actually had still retained seats of learning at the time of the Muslim invasions in the 8th century; the Muslims simply took these over. Since most of the original Muslim rulers of Spain were recently Islamicized peoples from places such as Syria and Persia, rather than ignorant Arabs, they still retained remnants of their learned past (the pre-Islamic Persians were particularly noted for astronomy) and were able to take advantage of the Christian and Jewish scholars already working in Southern Spain.
Of course, as Islam consolidated, it became more and more hostile to learning, since Islam is fundamentally anti-rational at its core.
This is not news!
It must be noted that the rationale for knocking down Taqi's observatory had little to do with science.
Taqi is reputed to have used his tower to examine astrological events with the purpose of improving his predictions. Alas, that failed ~ he missed out on such things as a major Ottoman military defeat, the Black Death, etc.
According to one reference this allowed someone to convince the Sultan to knock down the tower and save money for further military pursuits elsewhere without distraction.
At the moment our own Sultan is knocking down the (metaphorical) towers at Cape Canaveral, and to a degree that's allowing him to spend more money on his war in Afghanistan (NOTE: "his war" isn't necessarily the same as "our war").
Makes me wonder if somebody was using NASA for astrology eh!