Atheists & Agnostics
Related: About this forumWhy the Arabic World Turned Away from Science
Long but excellent and detailed article in New Atlantis, by Hillel Ofek. The article analyzes the well-known "Golden Age" of Islamic science, and what killed it. Along with a history of skepticism in Islam, and how free-thinking became (literally!) a curse instead of a blessing.
This article may be more applicable in The Other Group, but I figure most of its denizens hang out in here anyway. At least if recent alerts are any indication.
Some bits from the article:
This may sound like the punch line of a bad joke, but when Nature magazine published a sketch of science in the Arab world in 2002, its reporter identified just three scientific areas in which Islamic countries excel: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction...
At a deeper level, Islam lags because it failed to offer a way to institutionalize free inquiry. That, in turn, is attributable to its failure to reconcile faith and reason. In this respect, Islamic societies have fared worse not just than the West but also than many societies of Asia. With a couple of exceptions, every country in the Middle Eastern parts of the Muslim world has been ruled by an autocrat, a radical Islamic sect, or a tribal chieftain. Islam has no tradition of separating politics and religion.
The story of Arabic science offers a window into the relationship between Islam and modernity; perhaps, too, it holds out the prospect of Islam coming to benefit from principles it badly needs in order to prosper, such as sexual equality, the rule of law, and free civil life. But the predominant posture among many Muslims today is that the good life is best approximated by returning to a pristine and pious past and this posture has proven poisonous to coping with modernity.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science
Brainstormy
(2,381 posts)best part is still the "desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction" bit.
trotsky
(49,533 posts)THAT'S RACIST!!!!1!!11eleventies!
onager
(9,356 posts)And what filthy bunch of bigots is disseminating such racist trash?
Oh...the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Well, WTF would they know? Certainly not much, compared to our awesome faculty of Wiki-warriors and Google-meisters.
Islam isn't a race either. It's just a religion. But wouldn't it be great - for Some People - if we could get Catholics and Baptists declared races, so they could try (however ineptly) to play the race card against their critics?
And I'm a complete fail as an anti-Arab anti-Muslim bigot. As I've said too many times, I spent 6 years living in the Middle East. So I literally put my life into the hands of Arabs and Muslims on countless occasions.
Just FTR, Ramadan starts this week (June 28). So we can expect the usual round of Kumbaya Krap from the apologists for all religions, great and small.
Usual Irrelevant Trivia, long as I'm here - I very rarely saw camels where I lived, in Northern Egypt/Nile Delta. The end of Ramadan was the only time I saw those critters and the occasion wasn't a happy one, at least for the camels. They were tied up outside butcher shops, waiting to be sacrificed in the Eid al-Fitr feasts at the end of Ramadan. Camels are prized sacrifices but are very expensive, so generally only available to the Muslim 1%. And these were young (small) camels, not considered very useful since they can't carry heavy loads at their age.
/irrelevant trivia
JNelson6563
(28,151 posts)skepticscott
(13,029 posts)is that there really is not a monolithic "Arabic" language that is spoken over a wide area. Different versions of Arabic are spoken in different countries, and they may be only partially, or barely intelligible to one another.
onager
(9,356 posts)When working in Egypt, once we had to call the "EGYPTIAN" Tech Service line for Hewlett-Packard. My Egyptian co-worker had a funny look on his face while talking.
When he hung up, he said: "That guy wasn't Egyptian. He was a Gulf Arab." He knew the accent instantly.
I've also read about some major heartburn from those millions of Muslims in Indonesia who don't know Arabic. They often feel condescended to by visiting clerics from the Middle East. Especially when those clerics insist that all REAL Muslims will learn Classical Arabic, so they can read the Koran as it was written.
You can also learn to speak Classical Arabic. But as I understand it, that's roughly the equivalent of walking around speaking in Shakespearean English, since Classical Arabic hasn't been updated since the 9th century or so. People might understand you, but they will look at you funny.
I learned a few Arabic words when I was in Saudi Arabia. But when I tried out those words on Egyptians, they looked at me funny. They could usually figure out what I was saying, but it took a few minutes. Then they would tell me the Egyptian way to pronounce whatever word I was mangling.
One of those words was "kwaji," which can mean either "foreigner" or "enemy." Or both at once!
Something that always cracks me up in Tom Clancy-type crap novels. At least since 2001, there's usually a line where Our Hero is described as speaking "perfect street Arabic."
Uh-huh. But if he's speaking Beirut street Arabic on the streets of Riyadh, he's going to blow his cover real quick.
A HERETIC I AM
(24,381 posts)"I don' hate arab people. I like to eat food late at night!"
Jokerman
(3,523 posts)If not for the protestant reformation and to a lesser extent, Henry VIII wanting to get into a little strange, the pope may have kept his grip on most of Europe. Even then it took a couple of centuries of carnage and a bunch of refugees to the new world before we had it in writing.
Anyone who studies that time period must understand how dangerous it is to have government and religion intertwined. It wasn't just an obscure, ancient history lesson for the founding fathers, it was the primary reason many of them were here.
The western "tradition or separating politics and religion" is less a tradition and more an ongoing battle.
onager
(9,356 posts)Anthony Pagden's "Worlds At War."
Pagden spends a lot of time discussing the evolution of Roman law and its modern Western descendants, like British common law.
The Romans learned one lesson early: keep the priests out of the law courts. Law had to be based on observable facts, logic and human reason.
Western law generally evolved from that Roman lesson, with a few setbacks along the way, as you noted. And Pagden notes some of the same in his book.
But sha'ria law never went thru a similar evolution, despite periodic attempts to make the law more secular in some Muslim societies. The source of sha'ria law is the Koran, period.
What I often heard when I lived in Egypt was a wish for a society with all the benefits of modern Western technology, but still based in traditional Islamic law. e.g. I heard more than one well-educated Egyptian hope for a return to the death penalty for adultery. For both parties.
The thing that scares me - that's exactly what Iranians thought they were getting back in 1979. All the benefits of modern Western society, just a little more religious than the Shah. What they got was a govt. of armed Fundamentalist cranks who dragged the society back to the 7th century.
Egypt had some of the same fights as Iran, over women wearing the veil etc., when I was living there from 2005-09. At one point, Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni banned all women on TV from wearing the hijab (head covering). That caused a huge uproar.
You might think Hosni was a Good Liberal for rules like that. Until you saw his threat to search Egyptian libraries and burn any books he found written by Jews.
The Middle East...usually a lot more complicated than it looks...
Vincardog
(20,234 posts)story is just as true. The RW NutZ can not reconcile Reality with their economic fantasies,
and Reality has to somehow bend to make their "Beliefs" true.
theHandpuppet
(19,964 posts)Last edited Wed Jun 25, 2014, 11:46 PM - Edit history (1)
Many thanks for posting this.
Downwinder
(12,869 posts)when religion trumps science, science dies.
Why did science die in the West leading to the dark Ages?
Words of warning about the teaparty?
Lordquinton
(7,886 posts)It's another canard of the church to make them look better. It was initially a time of strife, Rome had faltered, and the church had splintered, but things were still chugging along like they always had. The complaint was that barbarians were moving in, not learning the language, and people weren't going to church (sound familiar?) This whole thing about science stopping, and forgetting knowledge while the churches preserved what they could was made up in the renaissance. During that time dark meant unknown: they didn't know much about that time (like darkest Africa, they just didn't know what was there)
Constantinople was the capitol of the Roman empire for a long time, people just didn't think of it as the same beast, so they treat it as a separate entity, and the schism feeds into that idea.
KatyMan
(4,216 posts)DetlefK
(16,423 posts)"In its place arose the anti-rationalist Ashari school whose increasing dominance is linked to the decline of Arabic science. With the rise of the Asharites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life. While the Mutazilites had contended that the Koran was created and so Gods purpose for man must be interpreted through reason, the Asharites believed the Koran to be coeval with God and therefore unchallengeable. At the heart of Ashari metaphysics is the idea of occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural causality. Put simply, it suggests natural necessity cannot exist because Gods will is completely free. Asharites believed that God is the only cause, so that the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God."
They basically denied that correlation and causation exist and replaced it with "God's ways are mysterious."
AlbertCat
(17,505 posts)"God did it" is the lamest non-excuse excuse ever! It adds nothing, solves nothing, IS nothing.
theHandpuppet
(19,964 posts)"Sound crazy to Western ears"? Hell, we've got plenty of people right here that believe in this bullshit. We all know that GLBTs are responsible for hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, terrorist attacks, etc etc etc. You'd be amazed at our power!
Manifestor_of_Light
(21,046 posts)The Keeper:The Legend of Omar Khayyam
Omar Khayyam was a mathematician and astronomer who lived in Persia, in Naishapur, about 1000 A.D. This movie traces his story and the story of his modern descendants in Houston, pursuing their roots.
More info: www.greatomar.com
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0294806/
http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTMyMjU5Mjg0OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDY4MTkyMQ@@._V1_SX214_AL_.jpg
There was a sultan after Khayyam lived who decided to shut down scientific research. I don't know his name but I heard it in a speech by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Omar's buddy Hassan grows up and becomes a religious fanatic, the founder of the Hashashin, which is where the words "hashish" and "assassin" come from. Hassan tells Omar he must join his religious revolution. Omar asks him, "And just WHO has ultimate....religious...authority?" Hassan is silent.