Posted on 01/11/2002 8:52:14 AM PST by ml/nj
OK, irrigation and crops. Irrigate from where? Grow crops where? In order to irrigate you need a large body of fresh water to draw from and, if you've ever looked at a map of the area, fresh water is sadly lacking. Now roads. Build roads for what? The camel was the animal best adapted for the area and it made a poor draft animal. Better to load it up and use the caravan trails. Produce anything worthwhile? Scientific knowledge may not be worthwhile in your opinion but the rest of the world, fortunately, thinks otherwise. Finally, sitting on the floor. I suppose that they could have built chairs, except that wood was in limited supply - that's one of the reasons it's called a 'desert'. So sitting on the floor beat standing around.
Hope this was helpful.
I hate belly dancing.
Look. I think that I have a more jaded view of the Islamic melieu than most.
But I did ask a serious question, and Non-Sequitur provided the most direct, informative response on the thread. I think you ought to pay more attention to the topic of the thread and less to your (perhaps deserved) hostility to Islam.
ML/NJ
Thread over. The Arabs have added "zero" to civilization.
Well, for one thing, Greeks are Europeans.
It involves no shame for modern Europeans to recognize that Medieval civilization was built on a synthesis of Greek/Roman and Hebraic/Christian elements. In the same way, the Golden Age of Islam was built on a synthesis of Greek and Persian elements.
If you think the debt that European civilization owes to the Greeks is PC, your education has been sadly neglected. PC people have actually been attempting to downplay this historical debt for decades, Greeks being much too pale-skinned for their tastes. Read The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant, published pre-PC in 11 volumes from the 30s to the 50s if you are actually interested in learning some facts about the roots of our civilization.
They also have a lot about the great accomplishments of Islamic civilization during its (unfortunately long-past) heyday.
Or possibly you're more interested in denying the facts of history if they conflict with your agenda.
While in general agreement with your post, I believe that the Muslims do NOT consider that the Zoroastrians are 'dhimmi', people of the book, mostly because they were not. Zoroastrianism was an entirely separatge pagan religion, founded roughly in the same period as Buddhism, but in the Persian Empire. It was an ethical religion, and some of its beliefs passed into the Roman West, most especially the worship of the lesser Zoroastrian deity, Mithras. The symbol of Mithraism was a Sacred Bull, and that of Zoroastrianism was the fire.
While accepting Christians and Jews as followers of the same God, Islam gave the Zoroastrians the choice of converting or being executed. To this day islam has a horror of the 'fireworshippers'. As a result, not one Zoroastrian remains alive in the Persian homeland. A number of refugees fled to India, where they remain, and are known as 'Farsi', Hindu for a Persian. The Zoroastrians believe in a good creator god 'Ahura Mazda' and a nearly equally powerful evil god 'Ahriman'. They are known to their Hindu neighbors especially for their practices in desposing of the bodies of the dead. Instead of burying or cremating corpses, the Farsi leave the bodies exposed in walled courtyards, set aside for the purpose, where they can be eaten down to the bones by birds and other scavengers. This does not improve their reputation in the areas of India where they reside.
Do you understand the term "synthesis?" I am not one of those who discounts the critical importance of Christianity in the founding of our civilization. However, Christianity was only one of the roots. The other was ancient Greek civilization, as modified by Rome.
I would never claim that medieval civilization owed much of anything to Mohammed as a person, or to Islam as a religion. However it really does owe a lot to Islamic civilization, which was based on the older Greek and Persian civilizations. The Arabs created little, but they were very effective at combining the elements they found in new and better ways.
One significant reason why the High Middle Ages took off when they did was the infiltration of new Greek works or in some cases better translations. These came from the Moslems, mostly thru Spain, or in some cases Sicily. The Church, which had always had a high regard for Greek philosophy, was faced with the task of figuring out how to fit these new (to them) texts and the ideas they contained into the edifice of Christian theology. This great mental challenge took many decades to be acomplished and created great controversy and was a huge stimulus to intellectual life.
The fact that medieval civilization was greatly influenced by contact with what was at the time the much higher Islamic civilization is not a new or PC idea, although it may be exaggerated by some for that reason. Recognition of this by Western historians goes back for many centuries.
I think you may be confusing a couple of ideas. One is the Afrocentric idea that the Greeks (and therefore Western civ) somehow "stole" technology from Africans and that therefore Western civ is invalid. The other is that all civilizations are influenced by other ideas with which they come in contact.
The second is true, the first is ludicrous. Very few civilizations have arisen in isolated areas. Cross-fertilization of ideas seems to be essential to the development of advanced civilizations. That some of these ideas were transmitted from Islamic cultures to Western cultures is not an insult to the West.
Healthy cultures are willing to absorb good ideas, whatever their source. It's like the English language, which never saw a word it couldn't absorb. Compare this healthy attitude to that of the French, who are trying desperately (and unsuccessfully) to keep their language "pure." Which language is thriving and which is losing influence?
Much of the decline of Islam is based on its isolating itself and rejecting outside influences, as the French language has done, only much more so.
Western culture is the English language of cultures. It thrives on the free and open market of ideas, not rejecting some because they are from outside its bounds.
I think that would be Pol Pot
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