I was looking for an essay on the technological fall of the Arab world...

[KareBear]

trying to further understand the history behind how the great Islamic empires of Europe's Middle Ages fell so far behind the modern world, and came across this article.

The website this is hosted on seems pretty skewed towards an Anti-Islamic feeling, so I'm not sure how valid this is. Can you guys read over this and let me know if you have a more accurate article I can read?

http://www.faithfreedom.org/Articles/perkins30325.htm

All in all I thought this was pretty interesting, I just can't determine its bias.

[Malikshah]

1. Read Marshall Hodgson

A collection of his essays-- Rethinking World History.

There's an interesting chapter on the "Great Western Transmutation."

Don't think it's online, though-- i'd avoid the online stuff like the plague.

[Bridget Burke]

2. You might need to do more than "read an article"

In fact, I'd recommend a good liberal education. You know, books & all that. As is shriekingly obvious from the website, this is totally anti-Muslim. I'd suggest you look into the Mongol conquests in detail; they were rather a big deal. Also, colonialists did not always look at Islam with disdain. The British, for example, often preferred Muslims to Hindus in the Indian subcontinent.

Please. Let us know what you think.

[KareBear]

6. Well I think your right ;)

Being a product of a very rural public school I honestly can't remember a single subject on Middle East history after the Sumerian cuneiform discussion. However I was asking an honest question here not trying to spread any form of anti-Islamic feelings. I fully appreciate the responses for information sources posted so far! :)

[SoCalDem]

12. because of where they were geographically, they were

"criss-crossed" by every invader.. I think that years of of constant war, just gradually broke down their society..

here's a site that looks promising..

http://arabworld.nitle.org/texts.php?module_id=5&reading_id=45&sequence=6

[starroute]

3. Blaming Islam for the decline is probably not accurate

The question of why Europe surged ahead in the Renaissance while the rest of the world felt behind has never been answered satisfactorily.

In the 13th century, the Catholic Church in Europe was also cracking down on Aristotelian philosophy. The leading intellects of the time were forced away from empirical science and towards debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It wasn't until the 1400's that things really started to open up.

Most Moslems seem to blame their decline on a combination of the Mongol invasions and the impoverishment of the land. The article fudges a bit in mentioning only the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258. The invasions actually began some 30 years earlier and were enormously destructive, because as nomads the Mongols had an innate hostility towards settled society. As late as 1400, the wars of Tamerlane were still chewing up the countryside and destroying the ancient irrigation systems.

The population of Europe began to grow rapidly after the Black Death in the 1340's. The populations of India and China were surging as well. But in the Middle East and North Africa, the population barely increased. There just wasn't the carrying capacity for more people.

I suspect that the traditionalism and otherworldliness of Islam in recent centuries has been the result of this physical impoverishment. Look at the United States today -- the poorest and most backward parts of the country are also the most conservative and fundamentalist. If all of the US was economically in the position of Mississippi or Montana, we would be no different than North Africa or the Middle East.

[lanparty]

4. Easy food ==

More specialization in a society. The more hands required to make bread, the less hands to tinker with weird contraptions.

[KareBear]

7. I can see this is true to some extent

but why then did early civiliation start out in places like Egypt and the fertile crescent region? Yes they had the Nile flooded soil and the twin rivers to help, but surely Europe would have been easier to grow food in given that argument. Maybe Europe just didn't have the population? I'm ignorant of those facts. Any historians among us?

[Speck Tater]

5. The bias of the site is revealed by...

... going its home page which is headed by the statement:

"The movement of ex-Muslim secularists and humanists to lead Muslims out of faith of hate and into the fold of humanity."

and includes statements such as:

"Islam is a religion bereft of commonsense that is utterly against reason. Logically challenged Muslims try to confirm their faith with fancies and puerile beliefs. Only a cursory look at what they regard as miracles reveals the deplorable intellectual bankruptcy of the benighted followers of Muhammad."

Because of this bias I would double-check any statements they put forward as "facts" and pretty much ignore any conclusions or opinions presented unless you, yourself, feel that they are justified by the facts.

That does not mean, however, that their facts and conclusions are automatically wrong.

It's one thing to be tolerant, but that doesn't mean ignoring a fact just because that fact is unpopular or contradicts someone's religious belief. I believe that both Christians and Muslims have the right to believe what they want. I also believe that they are both wrong, and that their beliefs do more harm than good.

We all agree, I'm sure, that Naziism is bad for the society that adopts it. But, hypothetically, what if it could be shown that Christianity, (or Islam, or Buddhism, or Shinto) was detrimental to the society that adopts it? Does being liberal mean we are forced to turn a blind eye to those facts?

[KareBear]

8. I really should have looked at the main page first

But you are right, minus the bias's it had some very interesting "factoids" in it. Enough to make me want to learn more.

[Toronto Ron]

9. I recently read a book that deals with such issues:

Nonzero : The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright. It has much to say about the evolution of technology, i.e. why it happened when and where it did. Check out the reviews and customer comments at amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679758941

[voice of reason]

10. also . . .

Guns, Germs, And Steel by Jared Diamond

Paperback: 480 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.33 x 9.22 x 6.20
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company; (April 1999)
ISBN: 0393317552


Approaches this from a different perspective than Non-Zero (a great book)

v.o.r.

[KareBear]

11. Ordered this one from Amazon ;) Thanks gang!!! <nt>

[Yupster]

13. I'm no expert, but I've always thought

the problem was the separation of church and state, or lack thereof.

The separation allows innovation and new ideas which brings about progress. I believe the most helpful thing Jesus ever said for western civilization was "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's", therefore allowing the separation of church and state.

I think that is a big difference holding back the Moslem world.

I don't buy the geograqphical explanations. The same geography that makes you a crossroads of invasion, also makes you a crossroads of trade which should spur innovation and progress.

USA Today had one of their little pictograms yesterday. It said there were 192,000 patents granted by the patent office last year. Can you believe that? 192,000 new inventions a year. That's up from 100,000 just four years ago. The times, they are a changin'.

[Aidoneus]

14. Single word explanation:--"Cannon"

As for the site, the very hostile bias is obvious.

[Cusp]

15. If you read only one book about Arab resistance to progression,

Make it "The Crisis of Islam" by Bernard Lewis. He is the foremost Western authority on all things in the Middle East. He's also the professor of Middle Eastern studies at Harvard, and written a dozen or so books on the subject. "Crisis" is a lengthened adaptation of an award winning article he wrote in the New York Times post 9/11, for a NY public hungry for answers.

He is absolutely unbiased, and I for one greatly appreciate facts presented for me to make my own conclusions. It's a quick read too, under 200p. Pretty up to date too, written in '02 I think.

I'm glad someone on here asked about this precise topic. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the most important work of non-fiction in America in today's climate.

[cap]

17. bernard lewis is pretty biased...

check out reviews of his book in the arab world. Balance this with Edward Said.

[newyawker99]

18. Hi Cusp!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[kodi]

16. less a fall, but a decline due to ascent of religious dogma over reason

Islam, in the 12th century had extruded from it any line of heterodoxy. And it is the presence of such heterodoxy in the West that has lifted it beyond the Islamic world in economic strength. This Western heterodoxy is called rationalism

It is true that a summation of some of the glorious things brought to the world by Muslims and Islam would fill volumes and museums. Yet with all that this civilization, one that spanned the Eurasian continent for over a millennium, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it declined intellectually, philosophically, economically, and scientifically.

The evolution of a fierce orthodoxy in Islam after the time of Ibn Rushd throttled the brightest intellectual and scientific culture the world ever saw up to that time. The manner of distrusting human reason and leaning towards mysticism in al-Ghazali's "the Destruction of the Philosophy" served as a standard for later Islamic theology and served as a cudgel in the hand of those who swayed the Ulema against rationalism.

The stress brought about by this roll back of rationalism in Islam was not overnight, and there were still magnificent achievements by Muslims across a wide range of arts, sciences, architecture, and medicine, but the damage was done and the stifling of rationalism played as major a part in the decline of intellectual thought in the Islamic world as did the Mongol invasions in the 13th century to their physical empires.

The West has had the dynamic tensions of the Cities of Man and of God in conflict, viz., the Greek Paganism and Rationality versus Judeo-Christian Morality and religious iconography. Islam snuffed out this conflict long ago.

It is hard to believe a scientific renaissance will ever come from Islam if each new scientific fact discovered is merely defined as a mystical revelation of Allah, and any disputes about the features of such discoveries are considered within the realm of discourse for definitive truth by a council of mullahs.

Any such efforts of theology into a field requiring rationalism like science smacks of Lysenkoism (or Bushism).

Not withstanding his own influences by Western rationality, I would recommend Muhammad Iqbal’s “Six lectures on the reconstruction of religious thought in Islam,” he thought that, as the West has come to see in their religious icons, that Islam, its sacred tenets and texts must be rethought and reinterpreted allegorically.

my personal opinion; although we find many outstanding islamic writers, artists, and scientists, dogmatic islam has stifled muslim intellectual thought for centuries.

[bobbieinok]

19. for discussion in Christian history ----- Max Weber

a brief discussion here of his work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/weber.htm