But the myths are so much better than the reality...
2 comments:
Squires
said...
"Around the same time as universities were popping up all over Europe, the Crusades were bringing Europeans into contact with advanced Muslim ideas of science and technology. Ideas like the compass and the astrolabe came to the West via Muslim Spain and came in handy during the later Age of Exploration. Italian merchants came back from trading in North Africa and gave us another innovation: Arabic numerals."
The problem is, nearly all of that "Muslim science" was not Muslim. Those "Arabic" numerals, for example, were the invention of Hindu mathematicians. They were adotped by the Persians, and then Muslims learned of them after invading Persia (burning the Royal Libraries while they were at it).
And that Arab Muslim we're always being told invented algebra? Well, he wasn't Arab, he was Persian. And he as likely as not was a Zoroastrian, publicly pretending to be Muslim to avoid persecution - a common practice for centuries, and one further suggested by his nickname. And he didn't invent algebra, he just wrote a book on the study of it; algebra dates back through the aforementioned Hindu mathematicians, to Diaphantus of Alexandriaria, to the ancient Babylonians.
So why did he write in Arabic, under an Arab name, dedicating the bookt o Allah? And why do Muslims, and Islamophiles in the West, insist on repeating myths about "Muslim" scientific progress?
The answers to each are related. The first is because writing in Persian, under a Persian name, much less dedicating it to Ahura Mazda, would have gotten his book burned. (Courtesy of Muhammad's declaration that all which precedes Islam is an "age of ignorance".) The second is because without these myths, what we'd have to face would be 1400 years of Borg-like stagnation, "advancing" only through the assimilation of the advances made by dhimmis, or acquired by plundering infidels.
The myth of Muslim science works much the same way as when some geeky American lad tells all his friends he has a hot girlfriend in Canada - it's all about compensating through confabulation.
2 comments:
"Around the same time as universities were popping up all over Europe, the Crusades were bringing Europeans into contact with advanced Muslim ideas of science and technology. Ideas like the compass and the astrolabe came to the West via Muslim Spain and came in handy during the later Age of Exploration. Italian merchants came back from trading in North Africa and gave us another innovation: Arabic numerals."
The problem is, nearly all of that "Muslim science" was not Muslim. Those "Arabic" numerals, for example, were the invention of Hindu mathematicians. They were adotped by the Persians, and then Muslims learned of them after invading Persia (burning the Royal Libraries while they were at it).
And that Arab Muslim we're always being told invented algebra? Well, he wasn't Arab, he was Persian. And he as likely as not was a Zoroastrian, publicly pretending to be Muslim to avoid persecution - a common practice for centuries, and one further suggested by his nickname. And he didn't invent algebra, he just wrote a book on the study of it; algebra dates back through the aforementioned Hindu mathematicians, to Diaphantus of Alexandriaria, to the ancient Babylonians.
So why did he write in Arabic, under an Arab name, dedicating the bookt o Allah? And why do Muslims, and Islamophiles in the West, insist on repeating myths about "Muslim" scientific progress?
The answers to each are related. The first is because writing in Persian, under a Persian name, much less dedicating it to Ahura Mazda, would have gotten his book burned. (Courtesy of Muhammad's declaration that all which precedes Islam is an "age of ignorance".) The second is because without these myths, what we'd have to face would be 1400 years of Borg-like stagnation, "advancing" only through the assimilation of the advances made by dhimmis, or acquired by plundering infidels.
The myth of Muslim science works much the same way as when some geeky American lad tells all his friends he has a hot girlfriend in Canada - it's all about compensating through confabulation.
They have good PR, don't they? Maybe they invented that?
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