That myth is assisted actively in universities and academia, to anyone with a sane understanding this mounts to treason, not only to our civilization, our society, learnings, cultures, but also to our future generations, the traitors are the teachers, academics, professors, deans and the rest who makes such treason possible, what right do they have to rewrite our history and replace it with hatred againts the Jewish people and against ourselves.
Source: World Net Daily - LONDON – Jonathan Evans, the director-general of MI5, has warned the government that donations of hundreds of millions of pounds from Saudi Arabia and powerful Muslim organizations in Pakistan, Indonesia and the Gulf Straits have led to a "dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses," according to Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.
Eight of Britain's leading universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted more than 236 million pounds sterling, about $460 million, in donations from Muslim organizations, "many of which are known to have ties to extremist groups, some have links to terrorist organizations."
The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth
From: FrontPage Magazine.
The hatred of Western Civilization, and the corresponding urge to glorify anything outside it, especially if it can be depicted as a victim of the West, is a well-known phenomenon of the contemporary liberal mind. One of the forms it has taken in recent years is the attempt to artificially inflate the historic achievements of other civilizations beyond what the facts support. The noble savage myth is a commonplace; what is more complex is the myth that has been bandied about concerning the supposed "golden age" of Islamic civilization during what we know as the Middle Ages.
The myth of an Islamic Golden Age is needed by Islam’s apologists to save it from being damned by its present squalid condition; to prove, as it were, that there is more to Islam than the terrorism of Bin Laden and the decadence of the oil sheiks. It is, frankly, a confession that if the world judges it by what it is today, it comes up rather short, being a religion that has yet to produce a democratic or prosperous society, or social and cultural forms admired by neutral foreign observers the way anyone can admire American freedom, Japanese order, Israeli courage, or Italian style.
Some liberal academics openly admit that they twist the Moslem past to serve their present-day intellectual agendas. For example, some who propound the myth of an Islamic golden age of tolerance admit that their goal is,
"to recover for postmodernity that lost medieval Judeo-Islamic trading, social and cultural world, its high point pre-1492 Moorish Spain, which permitted and relished a plurality, a convivencia, of religions and cultures, Christian, Jewish and Moslem; which prized an historic internationality of space along with the valuing of particular cities; which was inclusive and cosmopolitan, cosmopolitan here meaning an ease with different cultures: still so rare and threatened a value in the new millennium as in centuries past."
In other words, a fairy tale designed to create the illusion that multiculturalism has valid historical precedents that prove it can work.
To be fair, the myth of the golden age of Islam does have a partially valid starting point: there were times in the past when Moslem societies attained higher levels of civilization and culture than they did at other times. There have been times, that is, when some Moslem lands were fit for a cultivated man to live in. Baghdad under Harun ar-Rashid (his well-documented Christian-slaying and Jew-hating proclivities notwithstanding), or Cordova very briefly under Abd ar-Rahman in the tenth century, come to mind. These isolated episodes, neither long nor typical, are endlessly invoked by Islam’s Western apologists and admirers.
This "golden" period in question largely coincides with the second dynasty of the Caliphate or Islamic Empire, that of the Abbasids, named after Muhammad’s uncle Abbas, who succeeded the Umayyads and ascended to the Caliphate in 750 AD. They moved the capital city to Baghdad, absorbed much of the Syrian and Persian culture as well as Persian methods of government, and ushered in the "golden age."
This age was marked by, among other things, intellectual achievement. A number of medieval thinkers and scientists living under Islamic rule, by no means all of them "Moslems" either nominally or substantially, played a useful role of transmitting Greek, Hindu, and other pre-Islamic fruits of knowledge to Westerners. They contributed to making Aristotle known in Christian Europe. But in doing this, they were but transmitting what they themselves had received from non-Moslem sources.
Three speculative thinkers, notably the three Persians al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna, combined Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism with other ideas introduced through Islam. Greatly influenced by Baghdad’s Greek heritage in philosophy that survived the Arab invasion, and
especially the writings of Aristotle, Farabi adopted the view — utterly heretical from a Moslem viewpoint — that reason is superior to revelation. He saw religion as a symbolic rendering of truth, and, like Plato, saw it as the duty of the philosopher to provide guidance to the state. He engaged in rationalistic questioning of the authority of the Koran and rejected predestination. He wrote more than 100 works, notably The Ideas of the Citizens of the Virtuous City. But these unorthodox works no more belong to Islam than Voltaire belongs to Christianity. He was in Moslem culture but not of it, indeed opposed to its orthodox core. He examples the pattern we see again and again: the best Moslems, whether judged by intellectual or political achievement, are usually the least Moslem.
The Moslem mainstream of this time, on the other hand, emphasized rigid Koranic orthodoxy and deployed Greek philosophy and science solely to buttress its authority. "They were rationalists in so far as they fell back on Greek philosophy for their metaphysical and physical explanations of phenomena; still, it was their aim to keep within the limits of orthodox belief." But when the thinkers went too far in their free inquiry into the secrets of nature, paying little attention to the authority of the Koran, they aroused suspicion of the rulers both in North Africa and Spain, as well as in the East. Persecution, exile, and death were frequent punishments suffered by the philosophers of Islam whose writings did not conform to the canon.
On the other side of the Empire, in Spain, Averroës exercised much influence on both Jewish and Christian thinkers with his interpretations of Aristotle. While mostly faithful to Aristotle’s method, he found the Aristotelian "prime mover" in Allah, the universal First Cause. His writings brought him into political disfavor and he was banished until shortly before his death, while many of his works in logic and metaphysics had been consigned to the flames. He left no school.
From Spain the Arabic philosophic literature was translated into Hebrew and Latin, which contributed to the development of modern European philosophy. In Egypt around the same time, Moses Maimonides (a Jew) and Ibn Khaldun made their contribution. A Christian, Constantine "the African," a native of Carthage, translated medical works from Arabic into Latin, thus introducing Greek medicine to the West. His translations of Hippocrates and Galen first gave the West a view of Greek medicine as a whole.
The "golden age" of Islamic art lasted from AD 750 to the mid-11th century, when ceramics, glass, metalwork, textiles, illuminated manuscripts, and woodwork flourished. Lustered glass became the greatest Islamic contribution to ceramics. Manuscript illumination became an important and greatly respected art, and miniature painting flourished in Iran. Calligraphy, an essential aspect of written Arabic, developed in manuscripts and architectural decoration.
In the exact sciences the contribution of Al-Khwarzimi, mathematician and astronomer, was considerable. Like Euclid, he wrote mathematical books that collected and arranged the discoveries of earlier mathematicians. His "Book of Integration and Equation" is a compilation of rules for solving linear and quadratic equations, as well as problems of geometry and proportion. Its translation into Latin in the 12th century provided the link between the great Hindu mathematicians and European scholars. A corruption of the book’s title resulted in the word algebra; a corruption of the author’s own name resulted in the term algorithm.
The problem with turning this list of intellectual achievements into a convincing "Islamic" golden age is that whatever flourished, did so not by reason of Islam but in spite of Islam. Moslems overran societies (Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, Syrian, Jewish) that possessed intellectual sophistication in their own right and failed to completely destroy their cultures. To give it the credit for what the remnants of these cultures achieved is like crediting the Red Army for the survival of Chopin in Warsaw in 1970! Islam per se never encouraged science, in the sense of disinterested enquiry, because the only knowledge it accepts is religious knowledge.
As Bernard Lewis explains in his book What Went Wrong? the Moslem Empire inherited "the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle east, of Greece and of Persia, it added to them new and important innovations from outside, such as the manufacture of paper from China and
decimal positional numbering from India." The decimal numbers were thus transmitted to the West, where they are still mistakenly known as "Arabic" numbers, honoring not their inventors but their transmitters.
Furthermore, the intellectual achievements of Islam’s "golden age" were of limited value. There was a lot of speculation and very little application, be it in technology or politics. At the present day, for almost a thousand years even speculation has stopped, and the bounds of what is considered orthodox Islam have frozen, except when they have even contracted, as in the case of Wahabism. Those who try to push the fundamentals of Moslem thought any further into the light of modernity frequently pay for it with their lives. The fundamentalists who ruled Afghanistan until recently and still rule in Iran hold up their supposed golden age as a model for their people and as a justification for their tyranny. Westerners should know better.
Serge Trifkovic received his PhD from the University of Southampton in England and pursued postdoctoral research at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His past journalistic outlets have included the BBC World Service, the Voice of America, CNN International, MSNBC, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Times of London, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is foreign affairs editor of Chronicles.. Robert Locke is Associate Editor of Front Page Magazine.
5 comments:
This is an interesting article, though as a student of Middle Eastern history, I must say it is woefully inaccurate. I am a staunch supporter of Western culture myself, and often lament the racism people display particularly to Americans (though "American" is technically not a "race," the basic injustice and irrationality are similar enough). But, I do so as a supporter of truth and reason as the benefactors of fruitful discussion.
On this note, I do agree that the "Golden Age" of "Islamic" science is indeed a myth, perhaps (though I have no conclusive evidence) perpatrated by apologists for Islam. Edward Said actually commented upon this, seeing it as an aspect of Arab nationalist rhetoric (see especially his book "Culture and Imperialism"). But, I agree on its mythical nature for different reasons.
Basically, I see the whole myth as a historical entity which has changed to suit different purposes over time. In the 18th and 19th century especially, it was used by European orientalists to justify dominion over the East. That is, it was an admission of a one time, long-ago "golden age" which, because of religious intolerance and cultural propensity towards stagnation, came to naught, and thus it was rightful for advanced, European societies to overtake such backward peoples. This rhetoric, while not entirely consistant itself, was generally the timbre of Middle Eastern scholarship in Europe and the West up until the advent of multiculturalism, which simply replaced the negative, imperial justification with a new, positive connotation which was just as essentialist and just as contrary to the facts. In the Middle East itself, of course, the idea went through its own transmutations, from a call to reform and modernization in the 19th century under the likes of Al-Afghani and Muhammad 'Abduh (who believed in post-"Golden Age" stagnation, which could be undone by a return to the original precepts of Islamic culture) to modern nationalist movements of the post-colonial 20th century which basically used this "Golden Age" as a self-congratulatory pat on the back in the name of Arab pride.
This is, of course, all wrong from the perspective of historical fact. But, the posted debunking of the myth also engages in some information which is very unfortunate. In the interest of truth and a lively discourse based on reason and empiricism, I would like to respond on some points:
"The myth of an Islamic Golden Age is needed by Islam’s apologists to save it from being damned by its present squalid condition; to prove, as it were, that there is more to Islam than the terrorism of Bin Laden and the decadence of the oil sheiks. It is, frankly, a confession that if the world judges it by what it is today, it comes up rather short, being a religion that has yet to produce a democratic or prosperous society, or social and cultural forms admired by neutral foreign observers the way anyone can admire American freedom, Japanese order, Israeli courage, or Italian style."
This is an interesting and complex argument as to why apologists select centuries-old scientists and philosophers, especially considering they have many modern ones to draw from (i.e. who are not psychopaths like Bin Laden). I posit that some of the problem is ignorance of modern reformers and supporters of human rights within the Arab world. In the West, for some reason I have yet to conclude decisively, Arab thinkers in general are ignored in both the media and in general education, so there is a lack of knowledge in that regard. As far as people born in Arab countries, it is worth noting that, basically without exception, every country in the Middle East is a dictatorship, and thus freedom of information suffers. Arabs might learn a thing or two about such-and-such a medieval thinker, but only insofar as to inculcate an Arab pride to support nationalist governments (or, they may learn that these figures explicitely drew their influence from Islam, which is another fabrication of propoganda). What many of them don't learn about is the plethora of modern era thinkers and artists who were absolutely pro-reason and pro-democracy. For instance, the radically liberal (even by Western terms) poet Nizar Qabbani is banned in many Arab countries, despite his distinguished career as an official in the Syrian Foreign Ministry and as a poet. As for those who are actually taught, their free-thinking nature is often downplayed, as in the case of Al-Afghani or Muhammad 'Abduh (see especially the historical work of Kedourie and Nikki Keddie). And this is not to mention the fact that, even since the 19th century, there have been politicians in the Arab world who have supported every degree of secular government, ranging from religion-free democracy to fully atheistic communism. Obviously, these are all politically volitile subjects, and education systems under the control of repressive regimes are unlikely to bring them up or teach them objectively.
"To be fair, the myth of the golden age of Islam does have a partially valid starting point: there were times in the past when Moslem societies attained higher levels of civilization and culture than they did at other times. There have been times, that is, when some Moslem lands were fit for a cultivated man to live in. Baghdad under Harun ar-Rashid (his well-documented Christian-slaying and Jew-hating proclivities notwithstanding), or Cordova very briefly under Abd ar-Rahman in the tenth century, come to mind. These isolated episodes, neither long nor typical, are endlessly invoked by Islam’s Western apologists and admirers."
I'm wondering what is meant by "neither long nor typical." Some people have placed the cultural and scientific "golden age" from about 800-1100 AD, though recent scholarship has tended to favor the figure of 800-about 1400 AD, which would take into account all the great Andalusian developments from Ibn Rushd (Averroes) to Ibn Khaldun. Furthermore, the Ottoman Empire itself, though not famed for the exact same flowering of culture, is still well known and documented as a powerful political force at least up until the 1500s by the most conservative estimates, and up until the late 17th century with the final defeat at Vienna by most contemporary historians. Keep in mind that this is the period assigned as, more or less politically/militarily, as Ottoman superiority over Europe, which, after the final siege of Vienna, was only replaced one hundred years later by a clear European advantage in all areas during the 19th century.
To me, that signifies that the East was not backward or less cultured than the West for significant periods of time, but on the contrary, only suffered a condition of clear inferiority for a relatively short period of time (roughly the so-called "long" 19th century, before which were periods of either clear superiority of the East or relative equality). Now, this is not to devalue the incredible advancements of Europe during the time, and as any historian of Europe can tell you, the 19th century was monumental in Western history. This is entirely true. But, it serves no purpose to downplay clear Eastern advancements and culture any more than it does to downplay the significance of the Industrial Revolution and so forth in the consequences for Europe in the 19th century. To paint a picture of a mostly stagnant East compared to a usually advancing West does a profound disservice to BOTH histories as they actually occurred. The volitile and earth-shattering implications of the 19th century are of profound historical value, and basically identify a clear shift from the pre-modern to the modern era in all parts of the world.
" This age was marked by, among other things, intellectual achievement. A number of medieval thinkers and scientists living under Islamic rule, by no means all of them "Moslems" either nominally or substantially, played a useful role of transmitting Greek, Hindu, and other pre-Islamic fruits of knowledge to Westerners. They contributed to making Aristotle known in Christian Europe. But in doing this, they were but transmitting what they themselves had received from non-Moslem sources."
I think it is correct to say that not all of them were Muslim, either nominally or substantially. Indeed, many Christians and Jews contributed to this movement to a great degree, and they are still lauded in Arab countries who idolize the golden age. In addition, there were what we might call "free thinkers," who did not believe in revelation per se, but believed in some sort of divinity, however loosely defined. And, of course, there were staunchly religious figures who nevertheless produced wonderful research and scholarship. It truly was a full spectrum of beliefs represented during this time. For some, this has provided justification for assuming Islam is the source of scientific progress (as indeed faithful Muslims can be found among them). For others, it means that free thinking or even atheism is the source of scientific progress (as free thinkers and defacto atheists can be found among them). But, the facts demonstrate only the conclusion that a variety of clearly brilliant individuals, regardless of background, found a common discourse in science and philosophy. To me, this means leass for religion or irreligion, one ethnicity or another, but demonstrates pretty well the universiality of science and the power of reason to bring diverse peoples together on a common playing field, even if they are rivals. But then again, I am a bit of an idealist.
"But these unorthodox works no more belong to Islam than Voltaire belongs to Christianity."
I whole-heartedly agree, and I would at that they no more belong to the East than Voltaire belongs to the West. The ideas of great thinkers transcend all boundries, both ideally and historically (People of Europe read al-Farabi just as people of the East read Voltaire!), and thus belong to all human beings, regardless of artificial boundaries, whether those boundaries are created by the negative essentialism of racist ideology or the positive/complimentary essentialism of apologist/multiculturalist ideology. Even as a Westerner, I deserve as much of a claim to al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and their ilk as any Arab, and every Arab has as much of a claim to Voltair, Newton, or even Emerson and Thoreau, if they are so inspired. Great knowledge belongs to no culture, but to all of humanity.
"The Moslem mainstream of this time, on the other hand, emphasized rigid Koranic orthodoxy and deployed Greek philosophy and science solely to buttress its authority. "They were rationalists in so far as they fell back on Greek philosophy for their metaphysical and physical explanations of phenomena; still, it was their aim to keep within the limits of orthodox belief." But when the thinkers went too far in their free inquiry into the secrets of nature, paying little attention to the authority of the Koran, they aroused suspicion of the rulers both in North Africa and Spain, as well as in the East. Persecution, exile, and death were frequent punishments suffered by the philosophers of Islam whose writings did not conform to the canon."
I don't see how one can identify a "Muslim mainstream," as it was in flux during this time. Several different philosophical schools were competing against one another (sometimes literally: the financial situation of any scholar depended upon patronage from the ruler). Thus, you had the free-thinking Mu'atazilites, the theological Mutakallimun, and even the more "rigid" theologians of the 'Asharite school. And, of course, there were outlyers who fit into none of these catagories. It's hard to pin down a "mainstream" during this time; after all, the Caliph al-Ma'mun made a Mu'atazilite rationalist doctrine official policy, and began persecuting those who resisted. It really depended upon historical circumstance and, truthfully, political and social interests.
"The problem with turning this list of intellectual achievements into a convincing "Islamic" golden age is that whatever flourished, did so not by reason of Islam but in spite of Islam."
I agree that singling out Islam as some reified entity which cause scientific advancement is irrational and unfactual, and even identifying it as a main cause it false, and I have not yet met or read a legitimate historian who has claimed otherwise. But, it is a false dichotomy to state "not by reason of Islam but in spite of Islam." It sets up the idea that either Islam was essentially a cause or it was essentially an inhibitor. Neither of these is true. Historically, we must admit to what Islam was at the time and in the context, and thus be able to admit specifically how Islam, as a historical (rather than simply a reified or theological) entity contributed. For instance, it is fair to say that the Cluny Reforms led to the Crusades, not because of anything essential to Christian theology, but because of the historical forces working at the time of which Christianity was a part. In this sense, I think it is fair to say that Islam played a role during this time due to the provisions of religious education which feature primarily literacy, but also instruction of the useful arts, sciences, and philosophies at the discretion of recognized experts. Add in the highly sophisticated methods of jurisprudence, which demanded logical precision, as well as calculating the direction of the qibla (demanding mathematical precision), and other things, and one can make a very reasonable argument for Islam being a facilitator of scientific advancement. However, it is important to note that this does not mean Islam is inherently scientific or that it absolutely beyond context supports science. Rather, it is a simple recognition of the fact that cirtain historical circumstances came together at this point in time to produce what we now call the "golden age" of science in the Middle East.
"Furthermore, the intellectual achievements of Islam’s "golden age" were of limited value. There was a lot of speculation and very little application, be it in technology or politics. At the present day, for almost a thousand years even speculation has stopped, and the bounds of what is considered orthodox Islam have frozen, except when they have even contracted, as in the case of Wahabism. Those who try to push the fundamentals of Moslem thought any further into the light of modernity frequently pay for it with their lives. The fundamentalists who ruled Afghanistan until recently and still rule in Iran hold up their supposed golden age as a model for their people and as a justification for their tyranny. Westerners should know better."
This is absolutely ridiculous. First, "limited value" is a completely relative statement with no reason nor evidence behind it. What was the value of William Harvey's discovery of the pulmonary circulation of the blood? What was that compared to the less well-known and almost ignored discovery of the same phenomenon almost 400 years earlier by Ibn Nafis? History records its own heroes, villains, and ciphers, often without any objective basis.
Second, the idea that there was little application in technology or politics is completely false. In the areas of technology, medical advancements are probably the most pronounced, but also the alchemists inventing new methods and tools which are invaluable to modern chemistry (such as distilation and extraction, discovered/invented by al-Razi) as well as important to contemporary metalurgy and production. Also, the Banu Musa contributed substantially to engineering, especially numatics, which resulted both in experimental treatises and actual public works projects commisioned by the Caliph. And, Ibn al-Haytham is perhaps one of the most exceptional figures of the period, writing a book on optics which describes, in detail, exact experimental proceedure which produces his conclusions (effectively, the modern scientific method). These aren't exaggerations, they are true-to-life facts. Brilliant minds produced fantastic knowledge in all areas of scientific thought, and it wasn't because they were Arab (many weren't), and it wasn't because they were Muslim (many weren't). Why? Because they were just really, really smart. That's it. Europe, and even America, had its own smart people, too. Intellect doesn't seem to be a sole quality of any one nationality. As I side before, science is a universal language, and it unites people across all cultural boundaries, and thus declaring one science an exclusive property of a people or a region is complete nonsense. It belongs to all of us.
And finally, I'd like to address the last part about the "frozen" nature of Islam, and the going back, or "contraction" of Wahhabism. This shows no knowledge of the discourse of modern Islamic reform, which is a highly complex and diverse topic which has its roots all the way back into the Naqshbandiyya movement of Moghul India all the way to the 20th century Salafism of Rashid Rida and the militant Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood. In between, there has been every shade of difference one can expect. Even Rashid Rida himself, as a student of Muhammad 'Abduh (who was in turn a student of al-Afghani) was an incredibly liberal reformer. He probably truly believed in Islam, but was as willing to go as far as to conditionally justify usury (clearly a sin in Islamic law) as legal in modern circumstances! Compare that to the revivalist/fundamentalist Taliban, who shot women who left their houses unescorted (NEVER have I read in any legal treatise the designation of the death penalty for such a thing, and indeed it was common practice for much of the Middle East, especially for poor women, to leave the house and work in the market place, i.e. public). The issue of Muslim fundamentalism is so incredibly complex, that the way the contemporary discourse portrays it is absolutely unconscionable. I recommend especially reading John Voll's book "Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World" for a decent background on the subject, though it goes much deeper than even Voll can accomplish in a single treatise.
So, I hope that you and others read this, and I hope that it is taken as a constructive amendment rather than a useless criticism. Too much of the discourse about Islam and the Middle East is controlled by pundits of both sides who seek to promote a political agenda rather than the truth. In my mind, proponents of truth and reason can always come together, even if they disagree. Perhaps that is my bias, which I inhereted from, on the first hand, Muhammad 'Abduh (an Arab Egyptian who believed firmly in the primacy of reason and the ability to resolve Western and Eastern culture), and on the second hand, my wonderful Arabic language teacher Dirgham Sbait, who is as much of a patriotic American as he is an Arab, and who, by no coincidence, sites his biggest hero as Muhammad 'Abduh! There is so much parity between the cultures that it is wrongful for both the apologists and the racists alike to separate the two and treat them as essentialistic, reified entities. This is not only counter-factual, but counter-productive. If we can get some real intellectual together, perhaps with different ideas, but with a willingness to correct and to discuss in an intelligent manner, then maybe some light can be shed.
Amazing length of islamic apologism.
There have been but a handful of Arab/islamic thinkers, the rest were converts from the oppressed (converts) subjects from the cultures which were crushed and suffocated.
The original article do expose the myth for what it is, and apparently it touches the exact core of the subject that the socalled 'golden age' is but a myth, the golden age only existed because of the islamic conquest of higher and more sophisticated cultures.
The islamic society is 'atomized', and do not encourage thinking, intellect or progress.
It only happened despite of islam and it's rigid barbaric lawcode.
True they translated works from Greek but they discharted Plato and Socrates.
And the European renaissance was due to the Byzantine which fled Constantinoble prior and after 1453 after it was looted, pillaged and countless of books and scriptures were burned, they fled mainly to Venice, the former East Roman Empire had kept the knowledge and works from the Roman and the Greeks, islam destroyed a houndredfold more than it ever gave back.
India, the islamic crusaders conducted a large scale genocide counting in the millions, the barbary states in North Africe, Algier, Libya, Marocco are responsible for millions of European slaves captured as far as Iceland, not to mention the looting, raping, pillaging.
Islam is a backward culture inferior to any other culture, perhaps except from the animanist in Africa, it has conquered with horrible primitive barbarism, the Persians, Chopts, Kabyles, Assyrians, Babylonians, remants of the Hellenistic, the Hindus, The buddhist etc.
Islam has got it it's socalled 'golden age', not from merit, but from looting and plunder.
It is an ugly supremacist religious political subculture.
hey get of your Jewish High Horse and accept the fact that intelligence and reason dooooooo exist outside Judaism and stop perpetuating such hateful one sided behaviour - what is to be learnt from the Golden Age of Islam - myth or not - is that peoples with different beliefs can get along !
Golden Age of Islamic World may be mythologised to the extent, however, it was truly a progressive and inventive era. If we should reject that idea because Arabs built their civilisation on Greek, Roman, Persian etc. foundaments, shouldn't we reject idea of Greek achievements because they were based on science of Egyptians and Mesopotamians, idea of Roman achievements because they were based on Greek ones, Western achievements based on Roman etc. The very fact that Arabs appreciated Greek knowledge, translated it, wrote comentaries and upgraded disciplines founded by Greeks and other previous civilisations discredits such claims. If Arabs were only barbarians looting and destroying ancient cultures, why did they appreciate these ancient books and scientific texts and translated most of them in only hundred years after foundation of Islam? Wouldn't just burning them be more appropriate behavior for primitive barbarians? The very fact that they showed such intelectual sensibility to understand the importance of the texts while pagan school were banned at the time in Byzantine Empire testifies that Arabs were more than savage conquerors. It is enough to study architecture of Moorish Spain to find out that buildings constructed by them employed excessive use of geometric design and creative architectural models non-existent in previous civilisations, which proves that Islamic civiilisation DID create its own expression in science and art.
I am a Muslim born atheist. In my country, Bosnia, which is a secular country, we promote peace between religions and dialogue between civilisations. Everyday I fight Islamic religious fanatics who spread hateridge and violence. But Western antiislamism seems no less harmful to me sometimes then religious fanaticism of Muslims. Some people really have to understand that Islamic World is a world of values (which may seem to have no worth to you, but still these are values) and tradition, of history and civilisation. We have to be critical both to these Islamic exclusivists and also to antiislamists who impose image of Muslims as an evil, wicked and inherently violent sort of people who are not able to produce anything but destruction and violence. This image of inherently destructive people is disgusting and it reminds me on Nazi depiction of Jews.
How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs
Peter BetBasoo
Book Review (online book)
http://www.aina.org/articles/hgsptta.htm
When the Spirits Collided: Islam and Christianity in the Course of Western Civilization
by DARIO FERNANDEZ-MORERA
- See more at: http://www.libertylawsite.org/book-review/when-the-spirits-collided-islam-and-christianity-in-the-course-of-western-civilization/#sthash.BC6uKWMk.dpuf
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