[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.
Yes some do say this. But the flaw in this reasoning is that mohamed himself was an even worse plague than Al-Ghazali.
The astrolabe was invented by the Greeks.
He was inviting them back to the philosophic dialogue that transcended their civilization as they studied the Greek philosophers.
In the 11th century, missing writings of the Greek philosophers were discovered in Spain. The bishop of Toledo gathered Muslim, Jewish and Catholic scholars and proceeded to work on translating all of the newly found philosophic writings into Latin. This effort led to the flowering of Europe's universities as each worked to complete the translations and then adapt the philosophy.
At the same time as the West worked to incorporate the knowledge, the top Muslim imams decided that they would no longer allow the study of the Greek philosophers.
This philosophic dialogue within Europe caused the flowering of the Renaissance. And the demise of thought within the Muslim has stunted their knowledge and they are stuck in the 11th century.
Pope Benedict invited Muslims to join the dialogue the had at one time transformed their culture.
But they said no.
Radical Islam doesn't need a "Reformation". Radical Islam IS the Reformation.
I’d thought better of you, Mrs. Don-O.
Odd that your church reaches out so, to what you term the “Reformers” of Islam today, while the heirs of the Protestant Reformation reject them.
The cognitive dissonance must be deafening.
Mrs. Don-o has a point. The Puritans were iconoclasts, not above the use of violence, banned Christmas, etc.
If “Reformers” are the people who want to “rediscover” the “original form of the religion” based upon a narrow reading of the scriptures then early Protestants and Muslim extremists today share a few traits.
I did not say the Islamic Reformation was or is morally, spiritually, or intellectually equivalent to the 16th century Christian Reformation. If you assumed I was saying that, it is not so. Whatever the net result, the 16th century Reformers were trying to draw nearer to Jesus, and Jesus is the true Savior of the World. Their faith communities retain much that is of truth and value, and retain as well many of the means of salvation which Christ gave to His church, and--- as the Catechism teaches --- Protestants and Catholics are brothers and sisters in Christ.
None of that is true of the Islamic Reformation. They are trying to draw nearer to Muhammad, not Jesus; and their very founder, in practice and in precept, was in a large measure demonic.
The Catholic Church --- as a previous poster mentioned --- tried to reach out to Islamic scholars pn the basis of reason in 2006 when Pope Benedict gave his Regensberg address. That yielded, as far as I know, nothing except rioting on 3 continents and 19 dead, including an elderly Italian pediatrician missionary nun in Yemen who was shot in the back.
Nevertheless, we maintain our missionary outreach in any Islamic country that will allow it. And the intellectual outreach to Protestant world has been much more fruitful. It enables me to enjoy the friendship of co-believers like yourself.
Have a good and a godly day, Regulator. Please pray for me as well. I am having some moderately disabling health difficulties right now, just as we in TN are involved in a big push to amend our Constitution in a pro-life direction. If you know any Tennesseans, please urge them to go out there and vote for Proposition One. Early voting is October 15-30.
Thank you.
While the Greeks invented the astrolabe, it was the Arabs that really put it to good use. Trying to find the direction of Mecca proved to be a huge boon for improving the quality of mapmaking, easing travel through the unending sand dunes of the Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula.
They must know, they just don’t want to tell it.
What are you babbling about?
Ten posts and you still won’t answer my question?
Are you afraid to answer it?
It’s been at least three days. Are you afraid to answer it? Will you keep ignoring it?
Here’s the question: Are you against making tourists pay to see the Sistine Chapel as is done everyday?
Thanks Fractal Trader. Gosh, it's almost as if they sobered up from their bloodletting intoxication as a consequence of The Crusades.
Islam as practiced has waxed and waned throughout history. Unlike some other FReepers, I think that the movement to show Islam in a better light is of benefit to the West.
We need to strengthen moderate Muslims who make up 80% of Muslims worldwide and weaken the radicals who kill for fun and glory.
We need more critical studies of Islam, the Koran and Mohammed, particularly ones that undermine the radicals position without openly attacking all of Islam.
Tell that Lebanese idiot to ask millions of dead and enslaved Hindus, Christians, Jews, animists and Zorastrians what they think of Muslim Medieval “civilization”.
What an ass.
Although Tamerlane used Islamic ideas and forms to promote his program of conquest, I have the distinct impression that his primary goal was restoration of the Mongol empire built by Genghis Kahn, not the promotion of the Caliphate. The link below describes 3 great conquerors in detail. Tamerlane is the most recent, and the information provided after you click “more” is quite detailed and complex. He was not shy about destroying a number of important Islamic cities.
http://asianhistory.about.com/od/profilesofasianleaders/p/TimurProf.htm
I agree with much of what is being said about the dangers of militant Islam. However, their success and survival has actually been aided by some of those seeming silly rules. For example using the left hand for bathroom purposes and the right hand for eating, which is often from a communal pot or tray, reduces the spread of a number of serious bowel centric diseases like cholera, disentary, etc. Arising in the desert with limited water for washing made that even more important, and ensured the survival of Mohammed’s armies.
I read that book, and it made great sense to me.
May St. Michael take a little look at Islam, and sharpen his sword.
True!
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