Enough of the “Jobs Was Muslim” BSÂ (Debbie Schlussel)
Steve Jobs, the co-founder and (until very recently) the Chief Executive Officer of Apple, died yesterday at the young age of 56. He is being universally remembered and hailed as a creative and entrepreneurial talent of the first rank, earning numerous mainstream media comparisons to other giants of American business like Rockefeller, Edison and Henry Ford. In short, he was the consummate genius that only a free, non-Muslim society could conjure up.
Steve Jobs’ brilliant life and career should always remind all of us that people can not reach even a small fraction of their potential under the shadow of Islam. It is mainly in the free, democratic Western World where most of the world’s creative and inventive talents are born or choose to make their homes. It is mainly in the West where one finds, even now, the freedom to innovate, to pursue your dreams, and to reap failure or success based primarily on your merits and abilities. Freedom nurtures genius and ingenuity; totalitarian creeds destroy them.
Societies that lack fundamental freedoms and true tolerance for gifted individuals — namely, Islamic societies — are remarkably consistent in failing to produce noteworthy human capital or talent. The rare exceptions we find to this maxim — the ones who manage to escape the death grip that Islam has on the minds, souls and psyches of so many — prove this rule all too well. The world would have been much poorer if Steve Jobs had not been blessed with being born in a free society, in America; a society that allowed and encouraged him to reach for the apex of achievement in any field he so chose. What if Steve Jobs had had the misfortune to have been born in a place like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? What would have become of his talents then? Would the world had been for the better or worse for it?
Let us take this time to mourn and remember the late, great Steve Jobs, but let us now especially remember the lesson that his life teaches us: freedom of the individual is one of the most important gifts imaginable to the human race. The human enterprise cannot and will not progress nor succeed without it.
This is a lesson that islamists are incapable of understanding, and it is one of the reasons that any islamic society is moribund and sick.
Jobs was a Buddhist.
mr yermemi, a little honesty would hurt, we cant just simply denie that the seed he was created from was muslim. cause otherwise it would be hypocritical, beside his biography is well known to the word that his father was indeed a muslim.
Shut up Anti-facist!! Mr. Jobs was NOT a muzz, and you pathetic scum have NO right to even insinuate that his genius has anything to do with you!!! Now FO to hell
You can find genius minds in every corner of the earth, there was a time when the muslim world was the turning point of discovery and knowledge. It was muslims who translated the works of greeks scientists into arabic and taught it to the world. So even if steve jobs was raised as an arab muslim he have fulfill his destiny. A particular religion does’nt change the destiny of a genius.a genius is a work of God and that work is not limited to any religion, race or a geographic location. Perhaps steve might have done better if he was raised as an arab or muslim because he is connected biologically to his forefathers the geniuses of their time. Remember algorithm is a procedure in a computer programming and the word(algorithm) is been derived from the of its founder, ALKHAWARIZMI. Who was an arab muslim and who also invented algebra. Very recently a muslim from Nigeria designed one of the best cars in the world chevyvolt his name is Aliyu zailani. So pls stop limiting the works of God to a particular religion or race. He created all and He is just in His creation. Well done steve! You shall continue to live as long as time lasts!
You are a genius, Ibrahim.
Al-Khwarizmi was no Arab. He was a Persian Zoroastrian who was forcibly converted to Islam.
The Greek mathematician Diophantus has traditionally been known as the “father of algebra” — in recent times, Arabs have made claims (like they always do) that al-Khwarizmi, who founded the discipline of al-jabr, deserves that title instead….
Did he really? And now all of Africa are driving them all over the place, right?
Today the christein/jewish world leads the world in creativity yesterday it was islam and tomorrow it might be asians and so forth. Creativity is from God. In as much He is creator then creativity is His attribute he endow that give to whomever seeks it irrespective of his religion or race.
ibrahim,
imo you are right and wrong.
there is no correspondence between religion and intelligence/creativity
Islam never had a golden age, and much that is attributed to muslims was stolen. muslims have accomplished little of value and islam even less.
pls my friend dont be sentimental towards a particular faith this is what is clouding our inteligence from seeing the truth. Napolean hill in his book think and grow rich under principle of persistence he narrated the biography of muhammad the prophet of islam at the he was saying when the democratic army of islam aproached jews and christians to joined them in humane warfare because what they brought was not a new faith but rather its a continuation of the teachings of moses and jesus. The jews and christians did’nt embraced it the only thing they accepted from the muslims was the place of learning the university and remember the very numerals that you ve been using ever sinced your nursery school was brought to you by muslims. It was the muslim arabs who brought gum powder to the west from china when europe was in its dark age the the abbasid caliphate of islam is busy producing eminent scientists and marvelous discoveries.scientific Words like ALCHEMY,ALMANAC,ZENITH,EARTH,ZERO,ALCOHOL and many others have been derivedfrom arabic. Pls my friend go and read wikipedia under islam and science.
pls go and read wikipedia/islamscience
First, read this:
The Myth of Islamic Inventions
Then continue:
The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth
By: Serge Trifkovic
FrontPageMagazine.com
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, Averroës 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.
pls go for wikipedia science in midieval islam am sure its better for an objective mind. I did’nt sugest any islamic book or any book authored by a muslim nor will i sugest the books you just mentioned because they are authored by critics. If we are objective lets go for wikipedia to see the truth, and the truth shall set us free! Thanks.
It matters little what is your cultural, religious, or national background, the key is an imaginative mind harnessed to the access to finance.
Jobs would have been unknown to the world if money had not backed him. If he had had innovative ideas, they would have been ‘stolen’ and gone to someone else who had the ‘money backing’.
All the great ideas, and talents, need promoting, and money
backing is what promotes.
Don’t believe me? Then get a great idea and try to get it to market.
ibrahimbabakara
islam accoplished little!!! and please read the correct literature – wikipedia is not of sufficient quality – the truth will set us free and it is NOT islam.
kaw you know your problem? You re egoistic and irrational and these problems have blinded your eyes and reason from seeing the truth, unless and until you free your self from these sickness you will be lost for life. Open your eyes and see the beauty of handwork of God in our world appreciate and build on it, this is exactly what the muslim world did and this has always been the way of leading giant genius minds like Einstein.God/Nature reveal his truth in most the world cultures, civilizations and religions including islam only the blind who choosed ignorance will deny this TRUTH. So pls dont let your hatred towards islam prevents you from seeing the beauty of life.
Ibrahim, your problem is that you are a fool. I am well aware of the beauty of life and the wonder of nature, with or without a god, and I am well aware of the desire of islam to destroy both. If you wish to preach go preach to your fellow muslims – they need your words – we (I) dont. If you really wish to enter into a debate try writing something intelligent.
Thanks alot kaw for calling me a fool just because i advised you to stop seeing things from your narrow minded perspective but also to see things via the minds of others freeing your self from limitations and restriction of hatred. I pray to God to forgive u for ur hatred utterances. And may your name kaw or cow(sounds alike?) not influence your attitudes to behave like one,and may He make u more human not a COW as you are named!
Uh, who the heck gave you permission to post my entire column on Steve Jobs in your comments section (and not even note that it’s by me)? This is a cease and desist demand that you remove it immediately. As you well know, I write exclusive commentary for MY SITE, not yours, and it is copyrighted. I don’t rip you off. Don’t rip me off. Please respond You at first posted two paragraphs of my work, then stole and paraphrased the rest of my work as your own opinion. Then you went and ripped off the whole thing posting it as your comment. That is UNACCEPTABLE.
Again, please remove it immediately and let me know that you complied so I don’t have to contact your ISP to get them to remove the page. You did the “fair use” thing with the two paragraphs in your initial post (then ripped off my opinion by paraphrasing and present as your own–which was sleazy, indeed). Now you rip me off entirely. You know better, but you stole my hard work from me anyway. from me anyway. It’s bad enough you promote another thief of my work Slobbert Spencer and his car loan fraud girlfriend Scamela on your site. STOP STEALING FROM ME.
Uh, who the heck gave you permission to post my entire column on Steve Jobs in your comments section (and not even note that it’s by me)? This is a cease and desist demand tht you remove it immediately. As you well know, I write exclusive commentary for MY SITE, not yours, and it is copyrighted. I don’t rip you off. Don’t rip me off. Please respond You at first posted two paragraphs of my work, then stole and paraphrased the rest of my work as your own opinion. Then you went and ripped off the whole thing posting it as your comment. That is UNACCEPTABLE.
Again, please remove it immediately and let me know that you complied so I don’t have to contact your ISP to get them to remove the page. You did the “fair use” thing with the two paragraphs in your initial post (then ripped off my opinion by paraphrasing and present as your own–which was sleazy, indeed). Now you rip me off entirely. You know better, but you stole my hard work from me anyway. from me anyway. It’s bad enough you promote another thief of my work Slobbert Spencer and his car loan fraud girlfriend Scamela on your site. STOP STEALING FROM ME.
ibrahim,
you are a fool – there is little point in a discussion with you as you are very clearly limited in intellect. Go and preach to your fellow muslims because they need help – we don’t. Now stop wasting bandwidth you tiresome twit.
To the poster calling themselves Debbuie Schlussel – if you are indeed Ms. Schlussel them you should be intelligent enough to connect to the SA here privately here – so if indeed you are the author of the article (And no one questions that Ms. Schlussel write the article) in question then take your concerns and post them directly to SY – and resolve the issue between yourselves like civilised people. and not like the muslim parasites that comment here using pseudonyms.
Debbie Schlussel:
Please confirm that this is indeed from you and I will take the post off instantly.
As I have clearly linked the whole article to you, I say thank you much for nothing and that is as far courtesy in the blogworld goes.
For you to throw hissy fits over something that is not worth money or time tells me everything I need to know about you.
Your vicious, infantile roundabout attacks on other counter-jihad bloggers are a clear display of paranoia, envy and an inflated ego.
What is the message worth if it doesn’t go beyond your blog?
to think you waste your time on this rubbish..pur-lease!
Get a life, all of you!
Sheik,
I suspect that the poster was a mohammedan – a clumsy effort to sow distrust amongst colleagues and collaborators in order to weaken a perceived threat.
ALKHAWARIZMI. did not invent algebra – he added some extensions, and he was NOT
arab but Persian. As usual, the Hindus were there first. As for the muslim who supposedly designed a top-line car – didn’t happen – and if a muslim was involved it was part of a team.
A fool is always a fool, deaf dumb and blind, seek help kaw(cow).
Ibrahim,
You are an ignorant fool Рone would like to call you deaf, dumb and blind but that would be dishonestly accentuating your capablilties 100 fold. As before, arab muslim made small improvements on earlier greek works, and the major mathematical break throughs came from the hindu world Рthen came people like (not listed in either temporal or alphabetic order) Euler, Newton, Gauss, Legendre, Poincare, Riemann, Fermat, Hilbert, Banach, Laplace, G̦del, and the list goes on Рand that is just mathematics Рif we add contributors to physics, chemistry, life sciences the list gets rather large Рand guess what ibrahim Рyou piddling little twat Рthere are very few muslims in this rarefied atmosphere. One could suggest just you should seek help, but you are too dumb to even do this so ibrahim Рkeep on dreaming on imagined achievements, but do try to stop molesting the family donkey. You should not try and emulate your profit (yes ibrahim Рthe spelling here is deliberate Рthink about it if you can) in everything (but clearly you are doing very well in stupidity). Even better ibrahim Рinstead of pissing on the rest of the world because they achieve why not try and do the same!!! Now stop wasting bandwdth you tiresome and unimaginative looser.