Bedtime Stories for the Islamic World (Stuck on failure without embracing enlightenment)

To: agere_contra

RE: Islam invents nothing: it has merely appropriated the mathematical and medical work of the Persians/Assyrians.

Isn’t Persia, Iran and isn’t Assyria, Syria ?
Aren’t these countries Islamic ?

4 posted on Friday, July 09, 2010 10:01:55 PM by SeekAndFind

To: SeekAndFind
Those countries are Islamic now.

When each one was taken over, it was a thriving country with an impressive history of accomplishment in medicine, astronomy and so forth. Their accomplishments, schools of thought and centers of learning were quickly eclipsed under Islam, dying out or becoming static and introverted in a generation or so.

After Islam set in, all these countries produced was tedious geometric art and repetitive calligraphy. Oh, and hate. Lots of hate, especially for their Jewish populations.

This process of fine institutions becoming recondite, introverted and useless isn't a mysterious one. It can be seen in the present day: just check out what NASA's mission statement has devolved into in just two years.
6 posted on Friday, July 09, 2010 10:24:12 PM by agere_contra (Obama did more damage to the Gulf economy in one day than Pemex/Ixtoc did in nine months)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]
To: SeekAndFind

When Islam overran cultures, those cultures would generally limp along for about 100 years until all the pre-Islamic generation and people influenced by them were dead. That’s the only reason any “Islamic” cultures had anything: it was all remnants of their pre-Islamic civilization.

The only reason culture endured a little longer in the early days of Islam, when it was taking over the much more advanced ME societies such as Persia and Baghdad, was that Islam, which fundamentally rejects reason, was not fully consolidated and didn’t have a firm enough hand to stamp out learning (as it did later).

Interestingly, some of the early Muslims in Spain (whose rulers were mostly not Arabs but were from other parts of the ME) were less harsh in crushing Spanish Christian and Jewish culture, and were therefore considered heretics by subsequent generations of North African Muslims and were actually themselves later overrun by them.

The dynamic of Islam is anti-rational because it is based on a god who is bound by no internal law of his own and has no bond of relationship with his own creation; his adherent’s only hope is to placate him with ritual practices, but even this is not reliable and death and disaster lurk around every turn. Not a creative environment, to say the least.

It took a few centuries for this insane view of life to really consolidate, and now it is the basis of all Islamic society.

7 posted on Friday, July 09, 2010 10:26:51 PM by livius


In the 16th century, astronomer Taqī al-Dīn built one of the world’s great observatories in Istanbul. It rivaled that of the pioneering Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe — while it lasted.

“Taqī al-Dīn’s observatory was razed to the ground by a squad of Janissaries, by order of the sultan, on the recommendation of the Chief Mufti,” Bernard Lewis writes in his book What Went Wrong? “This observatory had many predecessors in the lands of Islam; it had no successors until the age of modernization.”

NASA administrator Charles Bolden caused a furor when he revealed that President Obama had directed him “to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science . . . and math and engineering.”

This shouldn’t be hard to do, so long as Bolden is well versed in accomplishments rising out of the Middle East many centuries ago. It gave us what we know as Arabic numerals (although they originated in India). It gave us algebra and the rudiments of trigonometry. It gave us medical pioneers in the tenth and eleventh centuries. (A significant proportion of these scientists and physicians were Christians and Jews, according to Lewis — a fact Bolden had best keep to himself.)

It’s wonderful to feel good about the work of Ibn Sīnā of Bukhara, who compiled an indispensable medical encyclopedia before his death in 1037, but it implicitly raises the question of what Muslim science has done for us over the last millennium or so. The Muslim world would be better served by a frank discussion of how so much of it came to be sunk in backwardness and ignorance, although NASA’s administrator is not the natural person to lead such a discussion (nor, if he’s as smart as advertised, will he volunteer for the task).

Historian David Landes puts it starkly: “The vast bulk of modern science was of Europe’s making, especially that breakthrough of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that goes by the name ‘scientific revolution.’ Not only did non-Western science contribute just about nothing (though there was more there than Europeans knew), but at that point it was incapable of participating, so far had it fallen behind or taken the wrong turning.”

The short version of the story is that in the battle between science and religious obscurantism in the Islamic world, obscurantism won in a rout. Landes recounts that when the Muslims conquered Persia in the seventh century, the commander on the ground was forbidden to distribute the vast collection of captured books and scientific papers. Word came down from on high: “Throw them in the water. If what they contain is right guidance, God has given us better guidance. If it is error, God has protected us against it.”

The West had its own incurious religious authorities, as Galileo could attest. But in the West, the material world slowly became disenchanted, creating an expanded space for rationality. Worldly rulers and the church separated, creating an expanded space for freedom. The countries that were most open to technological advance — primarily England at first — became the most powerful, in a virtuous circle.

“Astonishingly, the regime in which oppression and dogmatism prevailed was not merely wicked, but actually weaker than societies which were freer and more tolerant!” the social scientist Ernest Gellner explained. “This was the essence of the Enlightenment.”

How to react to the Enlightenment’s absence from parts of the Muslim world is one line of division between George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bush’s freedom agenda aimed to create the predicate for future success in stagnant Muslim countries; Obama’s outreach agenda is much more accepting of the Muslim status quo.

Perhaps Bush was too ambitious, or Obama is too complacent. All we can know is that unless it embraces the essence of the Enlightenment, too much of the Muslim world will remain sunk in failure, pitied by the foreign bureaucrats who come to tell it bedtime stories about past glories.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com.