0 Votes
The Amazing Influence of the Islamic World
There’s an exhibition touring the UK right now celebrating some of the most amazing inventions and science throughout history. But you won’t find Newton or Leibniz in this showing because the entire content is of Muslim origin. From the site, ‘The unique content of the exhibition has been planned to generate awareness and appreciation of the scientific discoveries Muslims have made over a time-span of 1000 years. The lasting legacy of Muslim inventiveness and scholarship still serves as a beacon to inspire and motivate young people around the world.’
Without a doubt, the progress handed down from the world of Islam and showcased in this exhibition is amazing. However, one can’t help but wonder, what happened? It would seem that it’s been awhile since anyone associated ‘innovation’ and ‘Middle East.’
Similarly tagged OmniNerd content:
- How do you get from Brigham Young to Mitt Romney?, by Jackson about 1 year ago
- 10 Things You Didn't Know About Donuts, by VnutZ almost 3 years ago
- What DID Jesus Do, by Jackson about 3 years ago
- George Washington's Overdue Books, by VnutZ about 3 years ago
Print Friendly
Write an Article
Whatever happened to Ibn Rushd Averroes ? by LordDilly
Amazingly enough, I’d just finished reading a post on a blog called Tigerhawk about this very same thing before heading on over to Omninerd. The O-nerd post says "It would seem that it’s been awhile since anyone associated ‘innovation’ and ‘Middle East’"- I’d say so. About a thousand years (except for shampoo). The Tigerhawk post talks at length about an historical personage named Ibn Rushd Averroes, who lived in Southern Spain near the end of the 12th century. Averroues has been cited by no less a personage than Thomas Aquinas as The commentator of works of Aristotle, and one of the root causes for the flourishing of the Renaissance in Europe.
Like Galileo, Averroes was persecuted and silenced by the religious hierarchy of his day- however, unlike Galilao, that persecution against heterodoxy persists to this day in the Muslim world, which is probably why Averroes wasn’t mentioned by the "1001 Muslim Inventions" people. Also, don’t you think someone putting together that whole deal might’ve thought about the fact that the only thing Muslims have contributed to the world during the last millennium was oil and suicide bombers (and shampoo)?
Amazing! by Anonymous
Wow! This is really phenomenal. I wonder why nobody in the Western world ever discovered or invented anything.
Au contraire! by jmarkdavison
>It would seem that it’s been awhile since anyone associated ‘innovation’ and ‘Middle East.’"
Suicide bombings? Videotaped beheadings? Using mosques to hide weapons? Al-Jazeera? Airliners as missiles? Terrorizing Western newspapers into self-censorship?
There is plenty of innovation going on in the Middle East.
Isolationism by maodeshou
I think the decline of arts and sciences in the Muslim world has been a direct result of bad governance and a kind of isolationism. There was an wrticle a few months ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education (which i’m not finding a link to because everything on their site requires you to be a subscriber) talking about a guy who’s starting a company to publish classic works of Western philosophy in Arabic. He’s in Damascus, and he’s being harrassed and threatened- not by religious extremists but by the government because, guess what, John Locke is kind of big on freedom. This article also said that the number of books that have been translated into Arabic ever, in the history of the world, is approximately equal to the number that are translated into Spanish every year.
Until it was destroyed by the Mongols, in 1258, Baghdad was arguably the most advanced, richly complex and cosmopolitan city in the world. Clearly, nobody was preventing Averroes from translating anything, even Western philosophy. The contrast is stark. Muslim rulers at this time, as in most of the world, could be quite harsh, but for some reason they were not afraid of knowledge, of interaction physical or intellectual between their people and the wider world. This has changed, and everybody is the worse for it.
suggested reading by nickfranklin
What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Modernity and Islam in the Middle East, by Bernard Lewis.
interesting book. some people say it’s great, some people say it’s crap. (link to the original article in the Atlantic… you can only read it if you’re a subscriber, sorry.
al-Ash'ari by nickfranklin
in the tenth century, Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari started teaching a philosophy that described human acts as created by God is to say without free will behind them. in his paradigm, human reason was incapable of determining pretty much anything… even right and wrong could only be understood by divine revelation. two major effects:
1. as a result of his teachings, fiqh (islamic jursiprudence) began the shift from ijtihad (in this context, read "innovation") to taqlid (in this context, read "stagnation".) predictably, work in the sciences slowed and stopped.
2. eventually, al-Ash’ari’s ideas became the groundwork for the philosophy of ibn Tamiyah, who did his best to bring Islam "back" to it’s original sources and in doing so laid the groundwork for Wahhabism.
what’s interesting to me:
(DISCLAIMER: i was raised in a buddhist household, and so my understanding of judeo-christian religion suffers—or gains, if you like—from an outsider’s perspective.) it’s always seemed to me like the asharites and the folks pushing humanism and devotionalism in the sixteenth century would have got along pretty well…
anyone else want to run with that?
sorry this is choppy. n