[Medieval Islamic astronomers predict eclipse of the moon]
Posted on 10/22/2014 6:05:08 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
[Medieval Islamic astronomers predict eclipse of the moon]
Earlier this year, as conflict raged in northern Syria, two professors, one Lebanese and the other American, both from elite universities in the Washington, D.C. area, passed the long night at Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan, drinking tea. They pondered the weighty issues of the region: whether the nation-state paradigm was the residue of colonialism or a reality to which nations of the Middle East must conform; American military engagement and its consequences; and, of course, the sources of violent extremism. At one point, the Lebanese professor lamented, “These extremists are the worst thing ever to happen to Islam.” The American professor casually observed that they wished to reject modernity and return to the Middle Ages. “But the Islamists are themselves modern,” the Lebanese professor responded. “The violence against ideas and freedom and the dignity of the person—this is all modern, not medieval. Islam’s Golden Age was actually fairly free and tolerant of diverse thought.” The American professor arched a skeptical brow.
The American professor’s position will take no one by surprise. It pervades western institutions, from the media to academia to the foreign policy establishment. The assumption has scarcely been challenged in the public square. “These people want to roll back the clock to the Middle Ages,” it is said. But the Middle Ages they envision isn’t the one of historical fact, for medieval Islam was generally diverse in its culture and institutions, and capable of assimilating new and complex modes of thought.
Recent conquests by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the declaration of the Islamic State (IS), and the putative restoration of the caliphate have only reinforced misconceptions about Medieval Islam. Unlike Islam in its Golden Age, today’s radical Islamists demonstrate a capacity only to destroy, not to build. In the rubble may be found the remains of a once-thriving civilization, predicated not merely on faith but also reason and pluralism.
As historian Ira Lapidus observed, the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, seeking “cultural legitimacy” during their successive dynasties (661CE–1258CE), shunned an Arab-centric caliphate in favor of a diverse “imperial elite,” which consisted of “Inner Asian soldiers, Iranian administrators, Christian ecclesiastics, and Muslim religious scholars.” There was, to be sure, civil war and unrest, and not a few tyrants; even the otherwise enlightened Harun Al Rashid was, Bertrand Russell wrote, “accompanied by the executioner, who performed his office at a nod from the caliph.” But the caliphate proved remarkably durable, and as Europe struggled to emerge from barbarism, science, philosophy, and education were thriving in the Middle East. Christopher Dawson, an eminent historian of Catholicism and the Middle Ages, noted that the medieval Muslim world became “the scene of an intense intellectual activity,” from Spain to Afghanistan, “which showed itself not only in philosophy but in mathematics and astronomy and medicine.”
It was Islam that brought Greco-Muslim scientific culture to Western Europe, giving rise to centuries of material and intellectual progress. The tireless translations of Gerard of Cremona, Plato of Tivoli, and others should not be taken for granted, nor should the transmission and assimilation of the “new” learning—algebra and trigonometry, engineering and agriculture, astronomy and chemistry, and perhaps above all philosophy—much of which was met with hostility in Latin Christendom. Even the thought of Thomas Aquinas was briefly banned by the thirteenth century Parisian bishop Etienne Tempier. That Reason resisted subordination to faith in this epoch marked a significant achievement for intellectual progress in the West. And so alchemy became chemistry and astrology became astronomy; similarly, the assimilation of Aristotle’s systematic reasoning became Scholasticism, a forerunner of the scientific method. None of this was a foregone conclusion, though it has been taken for granted during the Enlightenment and since.
Edward Gibbon called the medieval age “the triumph of barbarism and religion,” but Dawson and others argue that Gibbon’s beloved Rome itself was to blame for failing to assimilate the scientific culture and methodologies that arose in ancient Greece. It was Islam that brought the seeds of that culture to Europe. Dawson also notes that while both Christendom and Islam were deeply religious, Islam had “entered into direct relations with Hellenism and was able to draw on the rich resources” of Greece, whereas medieval Europe “only possessed an indirect and secondary contact with Hellenic tradition,” never fully assimilating the scientific culture of Greece. Muslim civilization readily assimilated the achievements of Greece and produced a flourishing intellectual life in its own right. It was, he continued, “in Spain and Sicily that the Christians first met the Arabs and Jews on equal terms, and came under the influence of the brilliant civilization that had developed in Western Islam from the tenth to twelfth centuries. It was here that the eyes of Western scholars were first opened to the riches of Greek and Arabic learning and to their own scientific backwardness; and it was here…that the Christians put themselves to school with the Arabs and the Jews and laid the foundations of the new scientific culture of the West.”
The credit the West owes to medieval Islam thus cannot be overstated; it is also not widely known. Perhaps this is because it is impossible to imagine the present-day Islamic State giving rise to Scholasticism, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Today’s Islamist fundamentalists are the successors not of these enlightened medievals, but of the modern revolutionary. The ranks of ISIS resemble the materialist ideologues who beheaded nuns and children in Paris during the Reign of Terror, or the revolutionaries who compelled children to execute adult prisoners in Cambodia’s “killing fields.” Theirs is a violence not merely against the flesh, but against the rational order, against reason.
From the appalling savagery that has seized the Middle East, whose public squares are today filled with crucified corpses and severed heads, some look for a Solzhenitsyn to emerge, one who will challenge the intellectual and spiritual underpinnings of this extremist experiment.
But it is westerners who hope for a Solzhenitsyn; it was also westerners who introduced to the Middle East toxic ideologies, terrorist techniques, victimization narratives, and an entertainment culture that glorifies sexual promiscuity, drugs, and violence—all of which have contributed to reactionary extremism in the region. It is increasingly clear that the Middle East’s encounter with western modernity has brought neither stability nor prosperity; rather, much of the Muslim world has recoiled in horror at what it regards as moral depravity and decline.
Many westerners have also recoiled in horror in recent decades and have similarly looked to the fundamentals of religion as an antidote. Westerners—Americans in particular—are accustomed to distinguishing between the popular culture and the actual values of the people. The average American shares little in common, for example, with a movie star, and this kind of class distinction is implicit; to those who encounter America principally through film and television, however, this distinction is not necessarily understood. (A friend who served in Afghanistan recently told me that it was widely believed by Afghans that Americans are not at all religious and essentially live in pornographic films.) The depravity of pop culture icons does not, of course, encapsulate the full reality of the West, but it is this vacuous culture that Muslims encounter as the face of modern, western democracy—and there is little in it which they regard favorably.
Future historians are likely to regard the modern epochs of Europe and the Middle East as more barbaric than the medieval. Indeed, the term “modern,” with sufficient distance, is likely to supplant “medieval” one day as a synonym for backwardness and barbarity. Humanity would have been better served had misconceptions about medieval Islam—pervasive among Islamist extremists and Western intellectuals alike—never taken root. Perhaps the best weapon against militant Islamism is greater comprehension of the stark contrast between the culture of reason, art, architecture, diversity, philosophy, and science that characterized medieval Islam and the violence and barbarism that characterizes militant Islamists (who, as of this writing, have not yet succeeded in constructing so much as a website). The choice is not between western democracy and fundamentalist extremism; this is a false dichotomy. Rather, Muslim civilization has within its own history and culture an alternative to both violent barbarism and contemporary western permissive culture. Until this is discovered, the barbarism is likely to worsen.
Andrew Doran writes from Washington, D.C.
A most interesting post, Mrs. Don-o
the golden age of islam is a myth, islam has always been a violent barbaric satanic religion
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=21117
I don’t know much either but my bet is they stole it from someone whom they slaughtered in the name of allah.
Islam was a cult that used barbarism and death as a means to promotes it’s culture
That’s when they sacked Hagia Sophia and turned it into a mosque.
Medieval, modern - Islam’s history was always a bloody rather than a golden age...especially for the non-Muslims.
You’re right. They have been evil since the beginning. Just read about how Mohammed had old ladies pulled apart with camels because they had no use.
The implication here is that Greek culture had to be brought to the West. Let's say it plain: Greek culture IS the West.
The Roman Empire in the East did not fall in the Dark Ages. The Empire based at Constantinople -- and which used the Greek language, remained powerful for almost 1000 years after Rome fell. It was rich, cultured, and militarily dominant for much of this time.
Monasteries of Europe held on to much ancient culture, and the Byzantine Empire based at Constantinople held on to much more. Yes, one can say that some culture was held in the Middle East, and the Arabs did have some access to things which they preserved -- but their role is not nearly as significant as some seek to claim.
Note also that Muslim conquerors such as Tamerlane destroyed much culture in the Middle Ages, and left mountains of skulls in the Middle East and in India. Tamerlane was not an anomaly. He was reasonably standard for Muslim conquerors -- the more gentle, cultured Muslims were the exceptions to the rule.
In short -- if one wants to say that Muslims in the Middle Ages were better than Muslims today, that may be true -- but the Muslims of the Middle Ages were no prizes either.
That might come as a surprise to Indian historians.
Maybe. Maybe not. All I know FOR SURE is that MOhammed’s sword is one of the big attractions at the Topkapi museum in Istanbul.
I was there in ‘93 and was appalled to see muslim mothers telling their children how holy and special those swords are. Those kids probably belong to ISIS today.
What Arab Civilization?
This letter was sent to Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard Corporation, in response to a speech given by her on September 26, 2001.
November 7, 2001
Carly Fiorina
Hewlett-Packard
3000 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1185
Dear Madame Fiorina:
It is with great interest that I read your speech delivered on September 26, 2001, titled “Technology, Business and Our way of Life: What’s Next” [sic]. I was particularly interested in the story you told at the end of your speech, about the Arab/Muslim civilization. As an Assyrian, a non-Arab, Christian native of the Middle East, whose ancestors reach back to 5000 B.C., I wish to clarify some points you made in this little story, and to alert you to the dangers of unwittingly being drawn into the Arabist/Islamist ideology, which seeks to assimilate all cultures and religions into the Arab/Islamic fold.
I know you are a very busy woman, but please find ten minutes to read what follows, as it is a perspective that you will not likely get from anywhere else. I will answer some of the specific points you made in your speech, then conclude with a brief perspective on this Arabist/Islamist ideology.
Arabs and Muslims appeared on the world scene in 630 A.D., when the armies of Muhammad began their conquest of the Middle East. We should be very clear that this was a military conquest, not a missionary enterprise, and through the use of force, authorized by a declaration of a Jihad against infidels, Arabs/Muslims were able to forcibly convert and assimilate non-Arabs and non-Mulsims into their fold. Very few indigenous communities of the Middle East survived this — primarily Assyrians, Jews, Armenians and Coptics (of Egypt).
Having conquered the Middle East, Arabs placed these communities under a Dhimmi (see the book Dhimmi, by Bat Ye’Or) system of governance, where the communities were allowed to rule themselves as religious minorities (Christians, Jews and Zoroastrian). These communities had to pay a tax (called a Jizzya in Arabic) that was, in effect, a penalty for being non-Muslim, and that was typically 80% in times of tolerance and up to 150% in times of oppression. This tax forced many of these communities to convert to Islam, as it was designed to do.
You state, “its architects designed buildings that defied gravity.” I am not sure what you are referring to, but if you are referring to domes and arches, the fundamental architectural breakthrough of using a parabolic shape instead of a spherical shape for these structures was made by the Assyrians more than 1300 years earlier, as evidenced by their archaeological record.
You state, “its mathematicians created the algebra and algorithms that would enable the building of computers, and the creation of encryption.” The fundamental basis of modern mathematics had been laid down not hundreds but thousands of years before by Assyrians and Babylonians, who already knew of the concept of zero, of the Pythagorean Theorem, and of many, many other developments expropriated by Arabs/Muslims (see History of Babylonian Mathematics, Neugebauer).
You state, “its doctors examined the human body, and found new cures for disease.” The overwhelming majority of these doctors (99%) were Assyrians. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries Assyrians began a systematic translation of the Greek body of knowledge into Assyrian. At first they concentrated on the religious works but then quickly moved to science, philosophy and medicine. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and many others were translated into Assyrian, and from Assyrian into Arabic. It is these Arabic translations which the Moors brought with them into Spain, and which the Spaniards translated into Latin and spread throughout Europe, thus igniting the European Renaissance.
By the sixth century A.D., Assyrians had begun exporting back to Byzantia their own works on science, philosophy and medicine. In the field of medicine, the Bakhteesho Assyrian family produced nine generations of physicians, and founded the great medical school at Gundeshapur (Iran). Also in the area of medicine, (the Assyrian) Hunayn ibn-Ishaq’s textbook on ophthalmology, written in 950 A.D., remained the authoritative source on the subject until 1800 A.D.
In the area of philosophy, the Assyrian philosopher Job of Edessa developed a physical theory of the universe, in the Assyrian language, that rivaled Aristotle’s theory, and that sought to replace matter with forces (a theory that anticipated some ideas in quantum mechanics, such as the spontaneous creation and destruction of matter that occurs in the quantum vacuum).
One of the greatest Assyrian achievements of the fourth century was the founding of the first university in the world, the School of Nisibis, which had three departments, theology, philosophy and medicine, and which became a magnet and center of intellectual development in the Middle East. The statutes of the School of Nisibis, which have been preserved, later became the model upon which the first Italian university was based (see The Statutes of the School of Nisibis, by Arthur Voobus).
When Arabs and Islam swept through the Middle East in 630 A.D., they encountered 600 years of Assyrian Christian civilization, with a rich heritage, a highly developed culture, and advanced learning institutions. It is this civilization that became the foundation of the Arab civilization.
You state, “Its astronomers looked into the heavens, named the stars, and paved the way for space travel and exploration.” This is a bit melodramatic. In fact, the astronomers you refer to were not Arabs but Chaldeans and Babylonians (of present day south-Iraq), who for millennia were known as astronomers and astrologers, and who were forcibly Arabized and Islamized — so rapidly that by 750 A.D. they had disappeared completely.
You state, “its writers created thousands of stories. Stories of courage, romance and magic. Its poets wrote of love, when others before them were too steeped in fear to think of such things.” There is very little literature in the Arabic language that comes from this period you are referring to (the Koran is the only significant piece of literature), whereas the literary output of the Assyrians and Jews was vast. The third largest corpus of Christian writing, after Latin and Greek, is by the Assyrians in the Assyrian language (also called Syriac; see here.)
You state, “when other nations were afraid of ideas, this civilization thrived on them, and kept them alive. When censors threatened to wipe out knowledge from past civilizations, this civilization kept the knowledge alive, and passed it on to others.” This is a very important issue you raise, and it goes to the heart of the matter of what Arab/Islamic civilization represents. I reviewed a book titled How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs, in which the author lists the significant translators and interpreters of Greek science. Of the 22 scholars listed, 20 were Assyrians, 1 was Persian and 1 an Arab. I state at the end of my review: “The salient conclusion which can be drawn from O’Leary’s book is that Assyrians played a significant role in the shaping of the Islamic world via the Greek corpus of knowledge. If this is so, one must then ask the question, what happened to the Christian communities which made them lose this great intellectual enterprise which they had established. One can ask this same question of the Arabs. Sadly, O’Leary’s book does not answer this question, and we must look elsewhere for the answer.” I did not answer this question I posed in the review because it was not the place to answer it, but the answer is very clear, the Christian Assyrian community was drained of its population through forced conversion to Islam (by the Jizzya), and once the community had dwindled below a critical threshold, it ceased producing the scholars that were the intellectual driving force of the Islamic civilization, and that is when the so called “Golden Age of Islam” came to an end (about 850 A.D.).
Islam the religion itself was significantly molded by Assyrians and Jews (see Nestorian Influence on Islam and Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World).
Arab/Islamic civilization is not a progressive force, it is a regressive force; it does not give impetus, it retards. The great civilization you describe was not an Arab/Muslim accomplishment, it was an Assyrian accomplishment that Arabs expropriated and subsequently lost when they drained, through the forced conversion of Assyrians to Islam, the source of the intellectual vitality that propelled it. What other Arab/Muslim civilization has risen since? What other Arab/Muslim successes can we cite?
You state, “and perhaps we can learn a lesson from his [Suleiman] example: It was leadership based on meritocracy, not inheritance. It was leadership that harnessed the full capabilities of a very diverse population that included Christianity, Islamic, and Jewish traditions.” In fact, the Ottomans were extremely oppressive to non-Muslims. For example, young Christian boys were forcefully taken from their families, usually at the age of 8-10, and inducted into the Janissaries, (yeniceri in Turkish) where they were Islamized and made to fight for the Ottoman state. What literary, artistic or scientific achievements of the Ottomans can we point to? We can, on the other hand, point to the genocide of 750,000 Assyrians, 1.5 million Armenians and 400,000 Greeks in World War One by the Kemalist “Young Turk” government. This is the true face of Islam.
Arabs/Muslims are engaged in an explicit campaign of destruction and expropriation of cultures and communities, identities and ideas. Wherever Arab/Muslim civilization encounters a non-Arab/Muslim one, it attempts to destroy it (as the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan were destroyed, as Persepolis was destroyed by the Ayotollah Khomeini). This is a pattern that has been recurring since the advent of Islam, 1400 years ago, and is amply substantiated by the historical record. If the “foreign” culture cannot be destroyed, then it is expropriated, and revisionist historians claim that it is and was Arab, as is the case of most of the Arab “accomplishments” you cited in your speech. For example, Arab history texts in the Middle East teach that Assyrians were Arabs, a fact that no reputable scholar would assert, and that no living Assyrian would accept. Assyrians first settled Nineveh, one of the major Assyrian cities, in 5000 B.C., which is 5630 years before Arabs came into that area. Even the word ‘Arab’ is an Assyrian word, meaning “Westerner” (the first written reference to Arabs was by the Assyrian King Sennacherib, 800 B.C., in which he tells of conquering the “ma’rabayeh” — Westerners. See The Might That Was Assyria, by H. W. F. Saggs).
Even in America this Arabization policy continues. On October 27th a coalition of seven Assyrian and Maronite organizations sent an official letter to the Arab American Institute asking it to stop identifying Assyrians and Maronites as Arabs, which it had been deliberately doing.
There are minorities and nations struggling for survival in the Arab/Muslim ocean of the Middle East and Africa (Assyrians, Armenians, Coptics, Jews, southern Sudanese, Ethiopians, Nigerians...), and we must be very sensitive not to unwittingly and inadvertently support Islamic fascism and Arab Imperialism, with their attempts to wipe out all other cultures, religions and civilizations. It is incumbent upon each one of us to do our homework and research when making statements and speeches about these sensitive matters.
I hope you found this information enlightening. For more information, refer to the web links below. You may contact me at keepa@ninevehsoft.com for further questions.
Thank you for your consideration.
Peter BetBasoo
http://www.ninevehsoft.com/fiorina.htm
~~~~~
And that about covers it, imo.
There is a reckoning coming, I think. The West is going to have to give up a lot in terms of comfortable multiculti political correctness and the strange conviction that even its most inveterate enemies are really pals if only we talk nicely enough, and face the hard fact that "moderate" Islam has funded and encouraged real monsters. At which point there is no such thing as "moderate". And that's the point we're at.
There are all kinds of accounts on what befell villagers in the path of Mohammedan armies as they invaded Europe those three or four times.
Islam created nothing. It conquered by the sword the culturally, morally, scientifically, spiritually, and humanly superior Eastern Roman civilization and lived off the accumulated social capital for centuries, even as it ran the remains of that civilization into the ground. Islam is Satan’s mockery of true religion.
Islam must be destroyed.
The golden age of islam existed because they held all the major trade routes and conquered very educated and well off areas. Once Europeans got around them and the land trade routes dried up, Islam’s golden age ended.
Thanks Fred, I thought this sounded somewhat familiar.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.