[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl-IHCBbOGc[/youtube]
The Myth of Islamic Contribution to Human Civilization
When the Arab Muslims, a collection of backward, nomadic warrior tribes who did not even have a fully developed script, conquered Egypt, Syria and Iran, they took control over some of the world’s largest centres of accumulated knowledge. To say that “Muslims” or “Islamic culture” created the civilizations of the Middle East can be compared to an illiterate person storming into the planet’s largest library, killing all the librarians and then claiming to have written all the books there. The cultural superiority of the Middle East in relations to Europe did not begin with Islam’s entry into the area. In fact, it ended with it. One of the great riddles of history is how this once-dynamic region could become the world’s number one problem spot. It so happens that this decline coincides with the region’s Islamization, although some would claim that it had already started before this. Islam’s much-vaunted “Golden Age” was in reality just the twilight of the conquered pre-Islamic cultures, an echo of times passed.
It is true that no civilization exists in a vacuum. Modern Western civilization owes much to Egyptians, Persians, Sumerians, Byzantines, Assyrians, Jews, Indians and Chinese. We owe little, if anything to Islam.
From the Twin Myths of Eurabia by Fjordman
Muslims claim credit for Western science, even for things before Mohamed…. (Vlad)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTPJVnxbpqo&feature=related[/youtube]
Hilarious!
* Islamic Inventions? NOT!
* The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth
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Sheikh Yusuf al Quaradawi: Muslims will Conquer and Rule Europe!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6SDpblB0Bc&feature=related[/youtube]
Yes: Yusuf will save the Europeans from their materialism, and Euope will become Islamic without the sword…
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More Islamic stupidity:
Muslim scientists and clerics: It’s time for Mecca Time
“A prominent cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, said modern science had at last provided evidence that Mecca was the true centre of the Earth; proof, he said, of the greatness of the Muslim “qibla” – the Arabic word for the direction Muslims turn to when they pray….
The meeting in Qatar is part of a popular trend in some Muslim societies of seeking to find Koranic precedents for modern science.”
– from the article above
Muslims are touchingly aware, even as they outwardly express other, more triumphalist notions, that Muslim socieities have been, from every point of view, failures — failures in their encouragement of despotisms, failures in the inshallah-fatalism that underlies economic stasis, failures in their societies, where both women and non-Muslims are subject to unequal and intolerable treatment.
And among those many failures, the dreamy belief that there was once a “Golden Age of Islamic Science,” its achievements greatly exaggerated, with no recognition of how much was simply taken, lock, stock, and algebra-gunpowder-and-printing barrel, from India and from China, and claimed for Islam and for Muslims.
When one looks at the non-orthodox beliefs of, say, ar-Razi (Rhazes), realizes that many of those whose achievements, in lands under Islamic rule, were not Muslims but Arabic-using Christians and Jews, or new converts, only one generation, or poossibly two, away from a Christian or Jewish miilieu, and that much that has been described as “Islamic science” or “science under Islam” took place despite, not because of, Islam, which in spirit and letter is opposed to free and skeptical inquiry, and unlike Western Christendom, has remained so opposed, and will always do so. Muslims do not want to recognize the failures, the absence of achievement in science, after the first few hundred years of Muslim conquests. Nor do they wish to recognize that the end of the period of scientific achievement oin Dar al-Islam can be linked to the mass conversions in lands conquered by Muslims that inexorably brought about a change from a largely non-Muslim to a largely Muslim population. Islam discourages the very attitudes that the enterprise of modern science most requires. And there is no solution for this, except either to forego participation in that world-wide enterprise, or to limit the power of Islam over the minds of its adherents, and its role in their lives.
The desperate attempt to read into the Qur’an all kinds of modern developments in science reflects this felt inferiority behind all the Muslim bluster about “Islamic science” or, in George Saliba’s version, “Arabic science.” (which means, or should: science as conducted by those who, whether Muslim or not, used Arabic as their main language). Since Islam encourages the habit of mental submission, the number of those who believe in conspiracy theories, and in crackbrain theories of every kind, are not merely present, as they are in all societies, but in fact far outnumber the handful of those whom we might recognize as fellow inhabitants of something like the same mental universe that all the rest of us inhabit. These crackbrain theorists locate in some vague Qur’anic phrase now all of vulcanology, and now, in another phrase, all of Mandelbrot’s fractals, and over here, in this phrase, we can find Muhammad setting out the double-helix in all of its Mill-Hill glory. No need for Watson, Crick, Maurice Wilkins, or Rosalind Franklin to come along. It was there, all of it, already, in some phrase in the Qur’an, if only poor naked forked Infidel man had known where to look. But he didn’t, the dope.
Posted by: Hugh
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I cannot agree with your statement that “cultural superiority of the Middle East in relations to Europe did not begin with Islam’s entry into the area. In fact, it ended with it.” Algebra did not exist before Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi developed it in his book, The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. Analytic geometry did not exist until Ibn al-Haytham developed it. Most importantly, the scientific method, with its emphasis on the systematic testing of hypotheses with discreet, verifiable experiments, did not exist until Ibn al-Haytham introduced it in Kitāb al-Manāzir, (Book of Optics). Contrary to your suggestion that Muslims simply accepted a storehouse of knowledge, Ibn al-Haytham pointedly challenged the accumulated wisdom and insisted on independent discovery of truths through experimentation. “The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them,” he wrote, “but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration.” As I point out in my book Ibn al-Haytham: First Scientist, the world’s first full biography of the scholar known in the West as Alhazen, European scholars such as Roger Bacon, John Peacham, and Erazmus Witelo did not arrive at the scientific method independently. All three of those scholars wrote summaries of De Aspectibus, the Latin translation of Kitāb al-Manāzir and adopted the methodology it demonstrated, repeating Ibn al-Haytham’s experiments step by step and sometimes word for word. The scientific method did not merely advance the understanding of the physical world. It provided a new standard for establishing truth in general. No longer would mere opinions, rhetoric, authorities, or even logic be sufficient to establish the truth regarding any phenomenon. The Europeans began to expect facts to be backed with tangible, physical proof, arrived at objectively, using the scientific method developed by Ibn al-Haytham.
Contrary to your suggestion that Muslims simply accepted a storehouse of knowledge, Ibn al-Haytham pointedly challenged the accumulated wisdom and insisted on independent discovery of truths through experimentation. “The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them,” he wrote, “but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration………………….
But you make our point exactly! In Islam, there is no study, no questioning. The koran is the word of god and therefore perfect – period. I say that if the earth is round, the koran is wrong – because the earth is flat in the koran.
3 links for you, Bradley Steffens:
http://jihadwatch.org/archives/019354.php
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/018746.php
http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=4D818187-782D-4AA9-BEFA-64C5A00D9677
muslims have not contributed a single scientific discovery or educational discovery they stole everything from the rest of real civilisations
ban islam
ban islamic migration
deport all muslism now
I am not surprised that Muslims have blocked out these videos. Censorship is required in Islam to promote its lies. As Allah said, ”Do not ask questions as some did and left Islam” The God of truth does not fear information because He is confident that truth does not need to be protected from lies. It will stand on its own veracity AND POWER and Satan, even with his censorship, will not prevail.
Satan knows his time is short, and he is working overtime to push his lies and shut out the True Living Word of God, the Bible. Re 12:12 ¶ “Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.”
And as was told to John by Jesus; Re 12:9 So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
Allah boasts in being the best deceiver, and the MOST proud one, In the Bible, both titles were given to Satan.
Bradley Steffans,
You are incorrect in all your points. Credit for development for all of the mathematics and technique of science you mention goes to other civilisations – in particular the early Hindus contributed very significantly to mathematics. The most famous muslim mathematician, not an arab but a Persian, made their work available to other (he did make some contributions himself). The scientific method is directly traced to the Greeks. I suggest you do a little more reading.
I just went around and around with Scientific American on this subject. Scientific American apparently does not take kindly to criticism of their articles. My objection in the form of a comment on the article was deleted and I am no longer welcome there. My response to a misguided person who answered me remains.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=forgotten-history-muslim-scientists
This article was about an exhibit in New York that repeated all the misinformation that Muslim children are taught in madrassas, in the generally successful attempt to make them believe that Islam is perfect and it has done everything important in the history of man. Although we know that they did not invent human rights or democratic government, someday they will claim to have done so.
Quote:
Algebra did not exist before Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi developed it in his book, The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing.
end quote.
And calculus did not exist before ….
Quote:
Algebra did not exist before Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi developed it in his book, The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing.
end quote.
I don’t know what you are quoting. I can’t even tell if you are serious.
Regarding Muhammed ibm Musa: “In Renaissance Europe he was considered the original inventor of algebra, although we now know that his work is based on older Indian or Greek sources. (Toomer, Gerald (1990). “Al-Khwārizmī, Abu Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn Mūsā”. In Gillispie, Charles Coulston. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 7. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ISBN 0-684-16962-2.) cited in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C4%81_al-Khw%C4%81rizm%C4%AB
The Greeks and Romans certainly had a sort of math that approached calculus — their feats of engineering would have been impossible otherwise. The Indians probably did, as well. Formalizing it was the work of Newton and Leibniz. It’s been an interesting weekend. I think I’ll close this page.