Tag: golden age

The “Golden Age of al Andalus” is the ultimate Arab fantasy. Its a Fata Morgana that equals flying carpets,  72 virgins,  28 pearly boyz and  60.000 servants in Mohammed’s bordello in the sky.   But nothing constructive or ‘golden’ can come from a bunch of fanatical zealots who base their whole worldview on plundering,  enslaving and murdering all those who do not adhere  or submit to their belief system.

Emmet Scott/Islam Watch

We have traditionally been told that the first two centuries of the Spanish Emirate, supposedly founded in 756 by Abd’ er Rahman I, constituted a veritable Golden Age of Spanish history. And indeed the opulence and prosperity of Spain during these years is contrasted very favorably with the poverty and ignorance of Christian Europe in the same period. The following description of eighth-tenth century Cordoba, written by English historian H. St. L. B. Moss in 1935, may be regarded as fairly typical of the genre:

“In Spain … the foundation of Umayyad power [in 756] ushers in an era of unequalled splendour, which reaches its height in the early part of the tenth century. The great university of Cordova is thronged with students … while the city itself excites the wonder of visitors from Germany and France. The banks of the Guadalquivir are covered with luxurious villas, and born of the ruler’s caprice rises the famous Palace of the Flower, a fantastic city of delights.”

The picture Moss paints was derived from medieval Arab annalists, who spoke of a city of half a million inhabitants, of three thousand mosques, of one hundred and thirteen thousand houses, and of three hundred public baths – this not even counting the twenty-eight suburbs said to have surrounded the metropolis.

Over the past sixty years intensive efforts have been made to discover this astonishing civilization – to no avail.

Continue reading The Myth of Spain’s Islamic Golden Age

 The ruined churches of Kosovo and Northern Cyprus are a foreboding of what is going to happen everywhere else too when Moslems have it their way.

Nurit Greenger often posts on Daniel Pipes website. She explains how it came to the following exchange,  here.

I see it very important to share this exchange with broader audience.

NG wrote: “When this world fell into the hands of the Muslims-Arabs, the Arabs inherited a great culture, from Alexandria, Egypt, to Aleppo, Syria and beyond. Thus the early “Golden Age” of Islam was as a result of the good fortune of being in the “right place at the right time.”

Ianus: The Arabs didn’t inherit anything, they robbed, with raw force, everything, reducing a higher culture to a lower civilizational status! The question should be rather, What would the Byzantine civilization have looked like if the Moslem invasions, their wanton destructions, mass abduction of people into Moslem slavery, massacres and mass forced conversions into Islam, that accompanying them had taken place? My modest answer is: The Arabic “golden” age would have looked, by contrast, like a new stone age, an era of regress and barbarization, which it finally turned out to become.

Continue reading The Arabs didn’t “inherit” anything. They robbed, with raw force, everything, reducing a higher culture to a lower civilizational status!

Islam’s Golden Age: An Archaeological Nonentity

How Islam Shaped the Medieval World?

Breaking news: the Muslims saved civilization!

Shameless Islamo-propaganda:

“Scholar of Islamic thought to speak,” from the Ithaca Journal, April 11/JW:

The second Arts and Sciences Humanities Lecture, “How the Muslims Saved Civilization: the Reception of Greek Learning in Arabic,” will be given by distinguished scholar of Islamic thought Peter Adamson, professor of ancient and medieval philosophy, King’s College London.The lecture will be held at 4:30 p.m. April 13, at the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall. A reception will follow the lecture in the Ruth Woolsey Findley Gallery of Art on the lower level of Goldwin Smith Hall. Both events are free.

Dr. Adamson is likely to be retailing the idea that Islamic culture was once a beacon of learning and enlightenment — a common myth, and one that is ultimately meant to make non-Muslims relax and love the jihad.

But in fact, much of the most common claims about the great achievements of Islamic culture have been exaggerated, often for quite transparent apologetic motives. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873), translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another Christian named Abu ‘Ali ‘Isa ibn Zur’a (943-1008), also translated Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate — not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia — by Assyrian Christians.

The point here is simply that the great achievements of Islamic culture are being exaggerated for political and apologetic reasons today. For this sort of thing to go on at jihad-justifying Islamic websites is one thing, but an academic should know better. Emphasis on “should.”

If anyone makes Dr. Adamson’s lecture and he takes questions, these would be some facts that one might politely and respectfully ask him about.

John J. O’Neill’s latest guest-essay on the Gates of Vienna concerns the lack of any substantive evidence for a “golden age” of Islam.

In my recently published Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization, I have argued in detail that Islam, far from being a force for enlightenment in the so-called Dark Age, was actually responsible for the destruction of the literate and urban civilization that we now call Classical; and that, if anything, it was Islam that caused Europe’s descent into backwardness during the Middle Ages. In the same place I have argued in detail that the Islamic Golden Age of the late seventh to the mid-tenth centuries, during which the world of Islam is supposed to have basked in the light of science and learning, is a complete myth, and that no such epoch ever existed. The evidence for this is archaeological.

Muslims claim that the period of the Emirate and the Caliphate was tolerant to the surviving Christianand Jewish dhimmis living on the conquered land provided that they followed stringent dhimmi rules imposed by the Islamic occupiers. The Caliphate during the tenth century has been called an Islamic Golden Age by Muslims though critics challenge this as a myth pointing out that this supposed golden age was preceded by the brutal slaughter of tens of thousands of native spaniards by the invading Muslim armies. In Muslim culture, Andalus today is a nostalgic symbol of an earlier “Golden period” of Islam.

Continue reading Golden Age, Golden Myth