Golden Age of Islam is just mythology
jackkincaid
> http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=4626
>
> 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.
There's truth in that but it doesn't explain why some of the
philosphers, mathematicians etc. of the early caliphates were Muslims.
I don't think it's right to say 'Islam only encourages religious
knowledge' because Islam is a belief; it exists in a person's head. It
can't encourage people to do anything they didn't already want to do.
But the political Islam, or Islamism, or whatever - the desire to
impose shariah law on everyone - that definitely discourages freedom
of thought, and it was that imposition which destroyed the early,
tolerant (by contemporary standards) period of the caliphates (which
is referred to by some as the 'golden age of Islam').
Averroės is a good example - a great Muslim interpreter of Greek
philosophy, he, above all others, is responsible for the 'enlightened'
legend of Islamic Spain - but he was purged by Islamic extremists.
The problem is, without a concept of a division between religion and
politics, any society dominated by Islamic belief will be prey to
extremism - at least, to a greater extent than societies dominated by
other religions. When the caliphates imploded, middle eastern culture
never recovered; when the Mughal empire in India rotted away that
society never recovered either. This is the central truth of the
history of Islam - yet so many Muslims still long for a 'return' to a
'golden age' nobody can possibly recreate, and which, if they were,
would collapse again within a generation.
>
> The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth
> By Serge Trifkovic
> FrontPageMagazine.com | November 15, 2002
>
>
> Second in a series of excerpts adapted by Robert Locke from Dr. Serge
> Trifkovic's
>
> new book The Sword of the Prophet: A Politically-Incorrect Guide to
> Islam
>
> 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, Averroės 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.