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Here is the third and final part of Fjordman's essay on Islam and the Greek heritage. Part two is here, and part one is here. Says Fjordman: "Anybody who wants to can republish any of my essays on his own website as much as he wants to, as long as I am credited as the author. It would be nice, though, if a link was provided to the website where it was first published."
The great British expert on Chinese science history Joseph Needham has written about how the "four great inventions of China," the compass, printing, papermaking and gunpowder, were exported to the rest of the world. Although Needham is good at writing about technology, he doesn't always provide sufficient evidence of transmission for these inventions. Only one of them, paper, can be said with absolute certainty to have reached the West as a fully developed product. According to Professor T.F. Carter, "Back of the invention of printing lies the use of paper, which is the most certain and the most complete of China's inventions."As Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin write in The Coming of the Book, "It would have been impossible to invent printing had it not been for the impetus given by paper, which had arrived in Europe from China via the Arabs two centuries earlier and came into general use by the late 14th century." In the period from 1450 to 1550, Europe was becoming covered with paper mills. The traditional parchment was expensive and not well suited for mass production.
During the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, the reformers wanted the Bible to be available in the common language, not in Latin. Martin Luther thus helped shape the modern German language. As scholar Irving Fang states in the book A History of Mass Communication, "Vernacular printing also led French readers to think of themselves as being part of France, and English readers to regard themselves as part of England."
In some ways, we are witnessing a reversal of this trend towards nationalization now with global communications and the rise of English as an international lingua franca. Febvre and Martin believe, though, that about 77% of the books printed before 1500 were still in Latin, with religious books still predominant. This gradually gave way to secular books and other languages, but "it was not until the late 17th century that Latin was finally overthrown and replaced by the other national languages and by French as the natural language of philosophy, science and diplomacy. Every educated European then had to know French." They estimate that about 20 million books were printed in Europe before the year 1500, and that "between 150-200 million copies were published in the 16th century. This is a conservative estimate and probably well below the actual figure." This is even more impressive if we remember that Europe of that day was far less populous than it is now and that only a minority could read. There was obviously a change then, and a swift one, compared to the slow, expensive and sometimes inaccurate process of copying each individual book by hand.
Printing did have a major impact in East Asia, but it didn't trigger quite the same revolution as it did in the West. Buddhism came to Japan via China and Korea, and Buddhist monks also brought with them, in addition to tea and thus the basis for the elaborate Japanese tea ceremonies, other aspects of Chinese civilization, among them printing in the eight century. Yet until the late sixteenth century the Japanese printed only Buddhist scriptures. Europe also benefited from having a more diverse book trade than China and from having more competition in general.
As Irving Fang states, "Printing had not disturbed the monolithic Chinese empire. The introduction of printing in mid-fifteenth century Europe might also have made little headway if Europe were not ripe for change." According to him, the "establishment of European universities from the twelfth century onward marked the end of the 700-year-old Monastic Age. The more secular age that followed saw the emergence of a literate middle class and a rising demand for books of all kinds."
Movable type printing had been invented in China by Bi Sheng around 1040, but it never gained widespread popularity. The nature of the Chinese language with its nonalphabetic script presumably didn't help. To solve this dilemma, in the first half of the 1400s the Korean King Sejong the Great encouraged book production and ordered his scholars to create an alphabet for the common people as opposed to the complicated Chinese script with its thousands of characters. They produced hangul, "Korean letters," a phonetic system inspired by other alphabetic scripts, among them Sanskrit.
Movable type printing with metal types and an alphabetic script was thus in use in Korea before Gutenberg began printing Bibles in Germany, but there are no indications of a connection between what happened in Korea and what happened in Europe. The geographical distance is too big and the time difference too small to make such a connection likely. The Chinese used baked clay for their characters, and only started employing metal types after their use in Europe. Gutenberg was a goldsmith and naturally created his letters out of metal.
According to Fang, "What Gutenberg produced that did not exist in Asia was a printing system. Most obvious among its elements were controlled, exact dimensions of alphabet type cast from metal punches made of hardened steel. These were not unlike the dies, stamps, and punches that were well known to European leather workers, metalsmiths, and pewter makers."
Although possible, no link between the Eastern and the Western printing traditions has ever been conclusively proven. The different nature of the systems involved has caused many historians to believe that printing was developed in Europe independently of Asia. In contrast, we know with 100% certainty that Muslims were familiar with East Asian printing. The Mongols left a trail of devastation across much of Eurasia in the 1200s, but their vast empire did open up unprecedented opportunities for cultural exchange. As scholar Thomas T. Allsen shows, however, being exposed to foreign ideas doesn't necessarily mean that you will adopt them. Local scholars often clung to the inherited tradition. He uses Russia at the time of Peter the Great as an example where some elements of that society were fanatically opposed to all innovation while others enthusiastically embraced all things foreign. Allsen has described how the authorities in Iran under Mongolian rule in 1294 attempted to introduce Chinese-style printed banknotes, but failed, despite severe threats, due to massive popular resistance:
"Certainly the Muslim world exhibited an active and sustained opposition to movable type technologies emanating from Europe in the fifteenth century and later. This opposition, based on social, religious, and political considerations, lasted well into the eighteenth century. Only then were presses of European origin introduced into the Ottoman Empire and only in the next century did printing become widespread in the Arab world and Iran. This long-term reluctance, the disinterest in European typography, and the failure to exploit the indigenous printing traditions of Egypt certainly argue for some kind of fundamental structural or ideological antipathy to this particular technology."I am definitely not a believer in technological determinism, but some technologies do have a greater impact than others. One of the most important inventions ever made has to be printing. Surely it is no coincidence that the Scientific Revolution decisively took off in Europe after the introduction of printing, just as it is not a coincidence that the one civilization that came closest to a similar breakthrough, China, was the one where printing had first been invented. It is likely that the rejection of printing alone set the Islamic world back centuries vis-à-vis non-Muslims.
As David Crowley and Paul Heyer write in Communication in History: Technology, Culture, and Society, "Traditionally, the view has been that printing, along with numerous other developments, marked the transition between the end of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the modern era. However, the more we study this remarkable invention, the more we realize that it was not just one factor among many. Although we hesitate to argue for historical 'prime-movers,' certainly the printing press comes close to what is meant by this term. It was a technology that influenced other technologies - a prototype for mass production - and one that impacted directly on the world of ideas by making knowledge widely available, thereby creating a space in which new forms of expression could flourish. The repercussions of the printing press in early modern Europe did not come about in an inherently deterministic manner. Rather, they resulted from the existence of conditions whereby print could enhance a context receptive to its potential."
The spread of printing in East Asia was intimately connected to the Buddhist religion, just as it was used in Europe to print Bibles. Yet while Buddhists, Christians and Jews eagerly embraced this new technology, Muslims stubbornly rejected it. The contrast is striking if we compare this to how eagerly Muslims embraced another Chinese invention: gunpowder. Gunpowder wasn't the first chemical substance used in warfare.
According to legend, "Greek fire," a feared weapon in its time, was invented in the seventh century by Callinicus, a refugee from the Arab conquest of Syria. It was successfully used to defeat sieges by Arab Muslims of Constantinople in 674 and in 718, and helped the Byzantine Empire to survive for as long as it did. Its qualities appear to be somewhat similar to modern napalm. James R. Partington suggests in his book A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder that it consisted of a mixture of "sulphur, pitch, dissolved nitre, and petroleum." The term "Greek fire" is a misnomer as the Byzantines called themselves Romans. The greatest revolution in the history of warfare, however, came with the introduction of gunpowder. According to Dr James B. Calvert, professor of engineering, "The fundamental inventions of gunpowder and cannon had been made by 1300, but the sources are rare, difficult to interpret, hard to date, and often contradictory. The best guess is that gunpowder followed quickly after saltpetre was discovered (that is, a process for its purification was developed) by Chinese alchemists around AD 900 and introduced to Europe via trade routes and travellers around AD 1225, and that cannon were invented in southern Europe just before AD 1300."
One of the problems in determining this accurately is that Chinese writers can be just as ethnocentric as Western ones, sometimes more so. There is some debate whether gunpowder was invented independently in several regions, but most historians have settled for the explanation that it was first manufactured in China. Gunpowder (black powder) consists of charcoal, sulphur and potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, and was impossible to create until you could manufacture saltpeter with a high degree of purity. This was a specialty of Chinese alchemists quite early. The discovery reached the Middle East and Europe, probably via the Silk Road, and became known as "Chinese snow." Black powder remained the principle explosive until the nineteenth century, when the invention of unstable nitroglycerine made it possible for Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel to patent the more stable version of dynamite in 1867, and accumulate the great wealth which was later used to fund the various Nobel Prizes.
In the thirteenth century, the English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, as well as the German Dominican friar Albertus Magnus, both theologians and scientists with an interest in alchemy, mention a recipe for gunpowder. The Mongol conquests spread the knowledge of the fire-lance, a gunpowder-filled tube made of bamboo which could fire various projectiles, across Eurasia. The development of this weapon stagnated in China proper. According to James B. Calvert, "The place and time of the invention of the cannon is unknown, but its evolution from the fire lance among the Turks, Arabs and Europeans can hardly be doubted. (…) The earliest use of cannon is not definitely known, but occurred sometime between 1300 and 1350. The use of cannon spread rapidly between 1350 and 1400."
Cannon were used during the Hundred Years' War between France and England, and Turkish Muslims successfully employed prolonged bombardment by massive Hungarian-made cannon during the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 to breach the walls of the city. Joel Mokyr, professor at the Department of Economics at Northwestern University and author of The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, writes about innovation and economic history. According to him (pdf), glass, although known in China, was not in wide use as tea was drunk in porcelain cups and the Chinese examined themselves in polished bronze mirrors. Islamic countries had a significant glass industry, yet they never came up with spectacles: "Tokugawa Japan had a flourishing industry making glass trinkets and ornaments, but no optical instruments emerged there either until the Meiji restoration [from 1867]. Not having access to the Hellenistic geometry that served not only Ptolemy and Alhazen, but also sixteenth century Italians such as Francesco Maurolico (1494-1575) who studied the characteristics of lenses, made the development of optics in the Orient difficult." The earliest known lenses were made of rock crystal, quartz, and other minerals, and have been used in Eastern and Western lands since ancient times. There is evidence that lenses were known in the Greco-Roman world. They have been used as burning glasses and magnifying glasses for centuries, and so-called reading stones were in common use during the Middle Ages, for instance the Visby lenses, lens-shaped rock crystals of high quality from in a Viking grave in Gotland, Sweden. The oldest one we know of is the Nimrud lens, found in modern Iraq. Estimated to be almost three thousand years old, it indicates that the ancient Assyrians did have some basic understanding of optics. Iraq, seat of the Sumerian, Akkadian and Assyrian kingdoms, is home to one of the world's oldest astronomical traditions. Babylonian astronomy greatly influenced many subsequent cultures, Middle Eastern, Greek and Indian, and the sexagesimal (based on the number sixty) numeral system of the Sumerians is still with us today, in the form of sixty minutes to the hour and 360 degrees in a circle.The Iraqi-born scientist Ibn al-Haitham, known in the West as Alhacen or Alhazen, had a powerful influence on several Western scientists. Alhazen was a pioneer in the scientific method by basing hypothesis upon systematic observation. He is most commonly remembered for his great contributions in the field of optics, where he pondered the nature of light, speculated on the colors of the sunset and described the qualities of magnifying lenses. His eleventh century Book of Optics was translated into Latin during the late twelfth century, and left a significant impact on Roger Bacon and others in the thirteenth century.
Bacon was educated at Oxford and lectured on Aristotle at the University of Paris, the intellectual center among the small, but growing number of European universities. His teacher, the English bishop and scholar Robert Grosseteste, was a proponent of validating theory through experimentation. Roger Bacon wrote about many subjects, including optics, and was among the first persons to argue that lenses could be used for the correction of eyesight. He asserted that "philosophy is the special province of the unbelievers," and urged scholars to learn Arabic.
The Chinese experimented with lenses and mirrors, too, and produced a type of sunglasses, or eyeglasses with colored lenses. However, these appear to have been mainly for decorative purposes and possessed no corrective properties. The science of optics stagnated in China after initial advances. The first fully developed spectacles were made in Europe, in Northern Italy from the late thirteenth century onwards. The American scientist and inventor Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals in the eighteenth century, during the early years of the United States.
In 1572 Freidrich Risner printed some of Alhazen's work on optics, as well as a work by the thirteenth century Polish friar Witelo which was similar to it, and thus made Alhazen widely known to new generations of scholars. Notable among them was the German astronomer Johannes Kepler. Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who died in 1601, was perhaps the most meticulous astronomer of the pre-telescopic era. During the final year of his life, Brahe passed on his observations of Mars to Kepler. These precise notes were important for Kepler's work on planetary motion, but another breakthrough that could verify his thesis was soon to come.
As corrective lenses for near-sightedness became more sophisticated, the demand for high quality glass lenses grew. In the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza could make a decent living as a skilled lens grinder while working on his philosophical theories. This was during the Dutch Golden Age when the country was a refuge for many groups suffering from religious persecution, for instance Huguenots (Protestants) from France. Spinoza descended from Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal following the Reconquista. The production of spectacles opened up new arenas for optics. A Dutch eyeglass maker, Hans Lippershey, is said to have created the first practical telescope and made it publicly available in 1608.
Within a few months of the news, Italian scientist Galileo Galilei had made his own telescope, and became the first person to turn the new invention towards the sky, discovering the four major moons of Jupiter in 1610. Kepler developed the Galilean telescope further by 1611 and described the theoretical basis for telescopic optics, in part inspired by Alhazen's work. The telescope had traveled from the Netherlands via Italy to Kepler in Prague within three years of its invention and had been improved along the way, a remarkable pace of innovation and diffusion of knowledge. Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica from 1687 and his laws of motion and gravity were derived from, among other things, Galileo's telescopic observations and Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion.
Dutch eyeglass maker Zacharias Janssen and his father Hans are usually credited with inventing the first microscope in the late 1500s. The microscope was improved in the seventeenth century by their countryman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who was the first to spot bacteria and thus opened up an entirely new field of microbiology. This in turn led to great advances in the natural sciences. The German physician Robert Koch and the French chemist Louis Pasteur founded the science of bacteriology in the nineteenth century. The understanding that disease is caused by bacteria and microscopic germs produced the greatest strides in medicine in history.
According to the free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, reading stone lenses were invented by polymath Armen Firman (Abbas Ibn Firnas) in Córdoba in Islamic-occupied Spain in the ninth century, and later spread throughout Europe. Wikipedia embodies both the good and some of the problematic aspects of the Internet. I have found useful information there more than once, but it can also be notoriously unreliable on certain subjects due to its numerous editors and lack of professional oversight. Let's assume for a moment that this information is correct. If so, how come lenses weren't developed further by Muslims? The telescope and the microscope were by-products of advances in the production of glass lenses. They made possible, for the first time ever, the study of what is not visible to the naked human eye and radically altered our understanding of the universe, both in the realms of the very small and the very big. All of this could have happened in the Islamic world. So why didn't it, despite the fact that lenses were know there at least as early as in Europe, and despite the fact that the region produced a gifted optical scientist, Alhazen?
Alhazen personally should be credited with being one of the greatest scientists of his age in any discipline, Eastern or Western, yet his inquisitive attitude and scientific mindset wasn't always appreciated by his contemporaries. Here is how his writings were received by fellow Muslims, as quoted in Ibn Warraq's book Why I Am Not a Muslim: "A disciple of Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher, relates that he was in Baghdad on business, when the library of a certain philosopher (who died in 1214) was burned there. The preacher, who conducted the execution of the sentence, threw into the flames, with his own hands, an astronomical work of Ibn al-Haitham [Alhazen], after he had pointed to a delineation therein given of the sphere of the earth, as an unhappy symbol of impious Atheism."
Alhazen made numerous books, many of which are lost today. His groundbreaking Book of Optics survives to us in Latin translation. Muslims thus had access to ideas, but they failed to appreciate them and exploit their potential. This pattern was repeated on several occasions. The first windmills were probably made in Persia prior to the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. Windmills were introduced in Europe during the High Middle Ages, at least from the twelfth century onwards, and spread rapidly across Western Europe during a prolonged period of great improvements. Persian-style windmills spread from Central Asia to China following the Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century, yet in 1206 the leading Arab engineer of the day observed to his readers that the notion of driving mills by the wind was nonsense.
Sundials have been used in Egypt and other civilizations since prehistoric times. Water clocks, too, date from ancient times and had reached a certain level of complexity in the Greco-Roman world. The ancient Greeks created devices resembling clock-work, for instance the Antikythera mechanism (second century B.C.) which has been called a mechanical computer. Early clocks (though not fully developed) were made in Asia, especially China, and could have been known in the Middle East. Around the year 800, Caliph Harun al-Rashid from Baghdad presented Charlemagne with the gift of a complex water clock which struck the hours. In 850 the three Persians Banu Musa, as part of the translation efforts undertaken at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, published The Book of Ingenious Devices describing many mechanical inventions developed by earlier cultures. They were interested in the work of Greek engineer Hero of Alexandria who made the first known steam-powered device. Again, there is plenty of evidence that Muslims had at their disposal both the theoretical knowledge and the practical examples necessary to create mechanical clocks.
Despite having access to much of the same knowledge as did Christian Europeans, Muslims didn't develop fully mechanical clocks. This happened in Europe in the thirteenth century. The invention spread rapidly throughout Italy, France and England. One was installed in the Old St Paul's Cathedral in London in 1286. The fourteenth century English author Geoffrey Chaucer mentioned a clock, apparently meaning one with a bell which struck the hour. Salisbury cathedral is thought to have the oldest functioning clock in existence, dating back to the year 1386. Clocks were initially large and were used to decorate public buildings. By the year 1500, the coiled spring had been invented, paving the way for smaller clocks. The first portable timepiece was created in Nuremberg, Germany by locksmith Peter Henlein in 1505 in the shape of a sphere worn as a jewel. Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, by employing Galileo's law of the pendulum, in 1656 made the first pendulum clock, which was much more accurate than previous models. He also invented the balance wheel and spring assembly underlying many modern watches. French mathematician Blaise Pascal is said to have made a wristwatch by attaching his portable clock to his wrist with a string.
I'm not suggesting that no scientific achievements were made in the Islamic world. Avicenna's Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin in the twelfth century, and as late as the sixteenth century, Vesalius wrote a thesis commenting on Rhazes. It is impossible to write the medical history of the West during this age without mentioning Middle Eastern physicians such as Avicenna and Rhazes. What I am suggesting is that the number of achievements steadily declined, and I'm not sure how much Islam should be credited with those achievements that were actually made.
Muslims failed to develop clocks and eyeglasses and were actively hostile to printing, yet immediately embraced gunpowder and firearms (though the development of the latter soon stagnated, too). I think this highly selective view of technology tells us something about their mentality: They didn't see the value in printing, but they liked gunpowder since it could be used to terrorize and intimidate non-Muslims. Infidel technology is primarily interesting if it can be used to blow up other infidels. Sadly, I'm not so sure Islamic mentality has changed significantly in the 800 years since then. During the past few decades, globalization, Muslim immigration to the West and the massive influx of petrodollars to Muslim nations with huge reserves of petroleum have enabled Muslims to acquire or buy technology they are unable to develop themselves. The result, along with a huge demographic increase in Muslims which is again caused by infidel advances in medicine, has been a tidal wave of Jihad sweeping across the world. The lesson for non-Muslims should be: If you provide Muslims with technology and know-how, this will not be used to create peaceful and prosperous societies; it will be used to kill or subjugate you.
As writer Bassam Tibi notes, Muslims today tend to view science as something that is separated from society, and believe they can adopt or appropriate modern science and technology but not the wider framework that goes with them.
I agree with Tibi. Muslims have no understanding of science as the basis of technological progress, and free speech and rational criticism of everything, including religious doctrines, as the basis of science. They talk about science as if it were a commodity, a television or a personal computer, something which Muslims "had" earlier, then "lost" or handed over to Westerners who "took" it from them. Hence, Muslims shouldn't feel grateful for anything infidel science provides them with, since science was really "theirs" in the first place and they're just taking back something which rightfully belongs to them. But science isn't a commodity; it is a method, a way of looking critically and rationally at the world.
In my view, this failure to see the connection between cause, science and a free society, and effect, technological progress, stems from a fundamental flaw in the Islamic way of looking at the universe: They see no connection between cause and effect because their entire religious world view is based on the notion that everything is subject to the whims of Allah, and that there is no predictable logic behind anything. As Hugh Fitzgerald frequently says, this resigned Inshallah-fatalism ("If Allah wills it, it will happen") greatly inhibits progress of any kind. The ultimate irony and tragedy is that Muslims move to infidel societies in order to enjoy the commodities and consumer goods produced there, yet immediately set out to destroy the conditions which created these advances in the first place, political freedom and manmade laws.
At least two conditions are necessary for the creation of a successful nation: The ability to produce talented individuals with great ideas, and the cultural and structural ability of society to recognize the full potential of these ideas and utilize them. The Islamic world, for a while, performed reasonably well at the former task, but failed miserably and consistently at the latter. Even if it could occasionally give birth to gifted individuals they tended to be unorthodox Muslims or, in the case of Rhazes, outright hostile to Islam. The frequency of thinkers of Avicenna's and certainly Alhazen's stature also steadily declined. This strongly indicates that "Islamic science" had little to do with Islam, but was the amalgam of pre-Islamic knowledge, Greek, Indian, Persian, Jewish, Assyrian Christian and other. As Muslims gradually became numerically dominant and Islamic orthodoxy more firmly established, this pre-Islamic heritage was slowly extinguished, hence science declined and never recovered. This failure was intimately linked to the Islam's hostility towards innovation and freethinking. In contrast, the Christian and Jewish religions proved more receptive towards new ideas. At the very least they were not as aggressively hostile to logic as was Islam, and in certain situations even facilitated it.
Europe did produce many talented individuals, yet what ultimately set it apart from the Islamic world, and even from non-Muslim Asians at this age, was the remarkable pace of diffusion of new ideas, home-grown or imported, and the speed with which further improvements were made once an idea had been introduced. This was due to a combination of factors: A successful marriage between Christian doctrines and the Greco-Roman heritage during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the ability to continuously generate new knowledge and put it into practical application through the accumulation of capital and a dynamic merchant class, an institutionalized framework for scholarly debate through universities with a significant degree of free enquiry, the adoption of printing, which made communication easier and facilitated the accumulation of ever-more accurate knowledge, and last, but not least, a higher degree of individualism and political liberty, which encouraged freethinking, a non-traditionalist outlook and by extension innovation.
Upon saying this, I must confess that I cannot say with a straight face that these are hallmarks of Europe today. We have always been told that there is a basic conflict between religion and reason, which would presumably mean that the less religious we become, the more rational we should become. Western Europe is currently less religious than we have ever been, yet I see no indication that we have become more reasonable because of this. We may not have a formal index of forbidden books, as did the Catholic Church for centuries, but we do have an informal index of forbidden topics which can be equally effective in suppressing free enquiry and stifling debate. This is now done in the name of tolerance and Multicultural diversity, not God, but the result is much the same. The end of religion, thus, didn't herald an age of reason; it led to a new age of secular superstition and new forms of witch-hunts. Bad things can be said about medieval Europeans, but at least they didn't import Muslims in large numbers and congratulate themselves for their tolerance. Secular Europeans do.
Andrew G. Bostom keeps referring to Julien Benda and his 1928 book The Treason of the Intellectuals, about how the abandonment of objective truths abetted totalitarian ideologies, which led to World War II. Bostom identifies a similar failure of Western intellectuals to acknowledge the history of Jihad today. From what I gather, Benda was a bit too anti-religious and anti-nationalist for my taste, but otherwise I agree: The problems faced by the West now in confronting Jihad have been facilitated by a failure of our education system, our media and indeed our entire society to uphold the ideal of critical thinking. If the rise of the West was linked to political liberty, rational thinking, free speech and universities championing free enquiry, the decline of the West can be linked to the decline of the same factors.
Author V.S. Naipaul thinks Islam is parasitical by nature and preys upon the pre-Islamic culture in the conquered lands. I will add that it is also the kind of parasite which kills its host. I have no doubt that if Muslims should succeed in conquering Europe, this will in the future be hailed as a Golden Age of Islam. But it wouldn't be a Golden Age of Islam, it would be the twilight of Europe, just as the previous Golden Age was the twilight of the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Zoroastrian and Buddhist cultures from North Africa to Central Asia, and the much vaunted accomplishments of "Islamic medieval science" were echoes of the heritage of Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Syrians and Greeks.
Yes, I know Mughal emperors could create magnificent architecture such as the Taj Mahal in India, but this was still a slave-state based upon the exploitation and persecution of non-Muslims. And yes, there can be rulers such as Akbar the Great, with his religious tolerance and imperial garden with thousands of cheetahs, but he was tolerant precisely because he was a Muslim in name only. Any such ruler will be succeeded by more pious Muslims, as was the case with Aurangzeb who reinstated the Jizya tax for infidels and destroyed Hindu temples. Anything good that happens in countries under Islamic rule generally happens in spite of Islam, not because of Islam, and the good parts will soon be reversed in the name of sharia. There will always be at least a dozen Aurangzebs to every Akbar.
We are currently witnessing major global shifts in power. In a macrohistorical perspective, China was the leading civilization a millennium ago but was surpassed by Europe. I firmly believe free speech and political liberty have long-term effects, and I'm not convinced China can keep up her economic progress unless she undertakes reforms. I'm also not convinced Europe's Islamization is inevitable, yet, but if present trends continue, maybe we will see a reversal of roles in the twenty-first century: China will prosper and Europe will disintegrate. In the meantime, however, when Muslims get their hands on Western technology and Europe's accumulated wealth, the world from Britain to Thailand could be plunged into a new age of Jihad.
Posted by Robert at October 4, 2007 2:50 PM
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Incredible essay!
In our PC world, it will no doubt be dismissed as 'western chauvinism'.
Posted by: tanstaafl at October 4, 2007 4:32 PMExcellent analysis. I will refer to this work often. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Posted by: justamomof4 at October 4, 2007 5:32 PM(PLEASE POST THIS ANNOUNCEMENT AT OTHER WEBSITES)
The Jihad Awareness Project (to wake up the U.S. Senate and Congress) currently has 104 volunteers in 43 states.
WE ARE STILL SEEKING ADDITIONAL CITIZEN VOLUNTEERS
FROM ALL 50 STATES, ESPECIALLY THE FOLLOWING 7:
Connecticut
Delaware
Mississippi
North Dakota
South Dakota
Vermont
West Virginia
THE PROJECT: We're looking for people in every state of the Union who would be willing to purchase, from Amazon or any other source, a copy of Robert Spencer's new book Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is And Islam Isn't and mail it, on an agreed upon date, to one of the senators in your state. We want to get the book simultaneously to all 100 senators, in order to send a strong message. If we get more than two people per state, books can also be sent to the U.S. House of Representatives.
If you'd like to participate (or you just have questions), please write to me at traehnam@yahoo.com under the subject heading "Senate," and tell me the state your senator represents, and a nickname. No need for your real name. And I will never share your email address with anyone, not even with other volunteers for this project.
And visit jihadawareness.blogspot.com to get more info on this project and to leave comments other volunteers can read. You can also see there the growing list of participants in this project, and the states their senators represent. I've also designed a graphic that might amuse. Scroll down when you get to the site.
Once we have at least two people from every state, we can agree on a mailing date and then each of us can mail a copy of the book on that date.
Right before each of us mails the book, we’ll issue a press release to media outlets in as many states as possible, and in that way announce and explain the mailing. And perhaps we can come up with some other ways of maximizing the effectiveness of this project and gaining as much positive attention as possible.
One of the project's volunteers suggested contacting Rep. Sue Myrick, who started the Anti-Jihad Caucus in Congress. When we reach the goal of having all 100 senators covered, I'll call Rep. Myrick's office and see if she can help. I've called several congressional offices to get advice on how best to proceed.
Brilliant!
We have witnessed history and been priviledged to peer into the future.
God help Western Civilization.
Posted by: LoneRanger at October 4, 2007 5:56 PMIslam has more in common with a Cargo Cult than a vibrant and developing system.
Islam's leading medieval scholars' decision to dogmatically oppose the concept of "free will" for humans and to deny "rationality" to Allah (which they took to be a limitation of his protean potency), doomed their deity to Irrationalism and chained them to their petrified -but paradoxially mercurial- Idol.
Fjordman, as far as I have read, has not yet mentioned another eschatological divide between the West and Islam: Psychology.
The Art of-.
Born with physicians and philosophers, from Benjamin Rush (a pioneering reformer of the ancient "madhouse" model of incarcerating the mentally ill) to Charcot, Freud, Jung, Adler, Reich, Stekel, Frankl, Szasz, Maslow and Julian Jaynes, to note only a few of the intellectual peaks in this new range of inquiry into human consciousness, motivation and potential, it liberated humanity from the "given" (unconsciousness).
Islam's fatalistic incuriosity- and its reduction of all human motives to the mysterious and inscrutable "will of Allah"- has made such a method of self-exploration essentially impossible for Mohammedans to undertake.
But, without such an honest examination of the human mind, and its drives, any of its "products", including "Religion", remain unnecessarily darkened (occluded/occult) and pre-aware.
Freud's skeptical assessment of the human drive for the "divine" in his work "The Future of an Illusion" would have gained him a death sentence in Islam, since the first line of the Koran is: "This book is not to be doubted.".
But, without a study of Psychology, humanity itself remains pre-sane.
"Know thyself", the primary advice of the pre-Socratics (and the motto of the Oracle at Delphi) is fundamental to understanding all other epiphenomenal sciences and arts.
Islam forbids the knowledge of the self as a usurpation of a power that belongs only to Allah, and as a revolt against his command that forbids skeptical and critical inquiry.
As he also forbade representational Art (according to the arch-iconoclast Mohammad) because it intrudes into the realm of "Creativity", which is Allah's alone.
Allah is the obstacle to Muslim self-discovery.
And, by forbidding themselves these pathways (Art, Psychology, etc.) to ever-increasing insight, everything else in their cultural construct collapses into superstition, nescience and paralysis.
Islam's blindness, like Oedipus's, is self-inflicted.
But, unlike the myth, it's eyes will grow back if Muslims just stops plucking them dogmatically and sanctimoniously out.
And stop killing all those among them who speak out for more understanding. More tolerance. More humanity. And more decency.
Posted by: profitsbeard at October 4, 2007 8:48 PMFjordman's fine gallop through the history of science and technology makes it abundantly clear once more that, far from claiming a proud record of contributions to science and technology, Islam should hang its head in shame at the stifling more often than not of these early developments.
One might add the name of renowned Muslim philosopher and polymath Averroes/Ibn Rushd, whose clashes with Islamic orthodoxy further support the point.
Your Average Mo Soccer-Dad (sorry, Hugh) would do better to start examining how the Islamic religious elite brought about this sorry state of affairs, and even now perpetuates it, than continuing to swallow the apologetics of 'Islamic Science' spokesmen like S.H. Nasr and Ziauddin Sardar.
Posted by: MBR at October 5, 2007 12:35 AMAll three parts were brillian essays. Congratulations, Fjordman!
Islam, like China, had access to the same knowledge and technology adopted by western Europe, but it did not sprout real fruit there. Why? It is because we courted freedom at the same time, and developed in open ended ways those stuck in ancient traditions could not. We progressed and they stayed. Today's China economic miracle will bump up against this, and I do not know who they will handle it. But I know how Islam handles it, with regressive Jihad.
Dogmatic ideas stifle the mind, while open ended inquiry opens minds. Europe, and later America, progressed because we broke the chains of dogma. If the Catholic Church had not been challenged successfully by the Reformation, and the Renaissance and later Enligthenment, we in Europe and America would still be living in the Dark Ages, just like Islam is today. Bravo Europe! Nice work America. You brought us from serfdom and slavery to freedom, and with it came the great scientific, technological, and social progress which is envy of all the world still stuck in the past. No medical breakthroughs, no mass food production, no ecological and nature awareness, no equal rights for men and women, no 'innocent until proven guilty', none of that. We surpassed Islam by leaques. Even the Vatican had to adapt, and now studies the heavens. :)
No wonder Islamists hate us so much. We are better then them. It's in their face, and it is because we are the Free. This is worth fighting for -- Freedom. They can never catch up, because Islam is 'slavery' to Allah. We the Free are better.
Posted by: Battle_of_Tours at October 5, 2007 1:48 AMIslam's fatalistic incuriosity- and its reduction of all human motives to the mysterious and inscrutable "will of Allah"- has made such a method of self-exploration essentially impossible for Mohammedans to undertake.- Posted by profitsbeard
Excellent point, that the psychology mandated by Allah stunts the Islamist’s mental development, so they remain perpetually trapped in a world of incuriosity, and mental fatalism of “inshallah”. To be rebellious, like we in the west are often encouraged, to think for ourselves, and to question authority, as those of us who grew up in the 60s remember, is not allowed by Mohammed’s Allah. His goal was to make everyone conform to the militaristic demands of spreading his religion, which also involves keeping everyone within militaristic disciplines of never questioning authority, namely Mohammed’s and later the Caliph's. So a totally different psychological development evolved in us, who court freedom and encourage it, and them who forbid freedom to keep everyone well disciplined with total submission to Allah’s army. Jihad, though Islamists cannot see it within their psychological frame of mind, is actually keeping them back from ever maturing mentally. They cannot adapt to modernity, nor mix with the societies to which they had emigrated, because their minds are frozen psychologically in total submission to Allah’s militaristic repression of normal human thought.
The most graphic evidence of this is their five times daily prayers, where at the mosque they are lined up in formation, elbow to elbow, and made to bow down low in unison at the same time. This does not encourage individual free will or thinking on your own, when you are part of that bowing army to Mecca. Mohammed knew how to control his troops well, and his (conjured up) Allah became the perfect vehicle for conquest, and booty, but at the expense of his soldiers of Allah turning into non-thinking, and unfeeling-rapine automaton. This is a harsh legacy to be passed on to young children whose natural inclination is to question and wonder, as well as seeking love. In that world, once you are past early childhood, these things become strictly forbidden, because “you’re in the army now”, so even laughter is forbidden. When you see it this way, it truly is a ghastly ‘religion’, and certainly not designed for ‘peace’ but for conquest and total obedience to the master, Mohammed. ... Wow!
I think they have a major problem to overcome if they want to coexist with the West. Could this be the reason, since they see the futility of such coexistence given their psychological fatalism, that they must seek to dominate (and not be dominated), because they can never coexist peacefully with the rest of the world, nor even with themselves? Mohammed created a psychological army of non-thinking, non-maturing, psychopathically driven warriors, even suicide killers, to feed his glory of conquest for his (conjured up) god Allah. But if they cannot adapt to a changing world, where does it leave them? The last major human group which could not adapt were the Neanderthals, and we know what happened to them. Islam’s 1.3 billion people of the planet, nearly one sixth of humanity, may be heading down the same dismal path. Their jihadi need to ‘dominate and not be dominated’ is a product of Mohammed’s totally repressive psychological war against his own people, to master over them and make them his ‘slaves’ to Allah, in pure submission. The end result, as Fjordman so brilliantly points out, is that every society conquered by Islam stops dead in its societal and intellectual developments. They become the new ‘Neanderthals’, and psychologically frozen in time.
Outstanding piece; I found it rather, and refreshingly, paradigm-shattering. I felt it decayed a bit at the end as you went a bit into polemic analysis of contemporary trends and away from documentable historical material, but the only part I thought should have been reconsidered was the sentence:
Bad things can be said about medieval Europeans, but at least they didn't import Muslims in large numbers and congratulate themselves for their tolerance. Secular Europeans do.
The problem with this is not that it is false, but that it is preaching to the choir: most of us here at JihadWatch will accept this simplification as an encoding of a more extensive statement. In our PC society an unexpanded statement like this will be dismissed as intolerant and the whole essay may be branded negatively. For a different audience I would replace the passage with something that says in more explicit terms what is surely meant, such as:
...but at least they didn't encourage a massive influx of people adhering to a hostile ideology while actively suppressing those elements of their own civilization capable of answering and providing an antidote to that hostile ideology -- which is what Secular Europeans do.
Just a suggestion.
Also, I wish some investigative historian/antiquities person would make some progress toward resolving the puzzle of the destruction of the library of Alexandria. As outlined on the Wikipedia page on the subject there are four main hypotheses, all of which are problematic in terms of direct evidence. The one which lives in the popular mind as "the true history" -- that it was destroyed by antischolastic christians who dismissed most works there as heretical -- is mythological, and the closest of the four main hypotheses to this version is lacking any significant historical evidence.
The strongest of the four possible scenarios is that the library was destroyed by the hordes conquering for Caliph Umar when the city was sacked in 645. But even this hypothesis lacks compelling historical evidence. If it did this would have made a dandy addition to the first installment of the essay.
I believe what can be established is that up to about the 6th century, Rome was referring to elements of the library, and some record of efforts by the church and empire to repair infrastructure there that was crumbling or damaged in the numerous fires is in evidence. Further, by the 8th century, the library at Alexandria was no more. I believe these facts alone lead to the conclusion that the destruction occurred during the occupation by the Caliphate, either during the sack of the city or within a generation or two of that event.
Posted by: Archimedes2 at October 5, 2007 2:11 PMSplendid Essay! I'm printing it for myself.
It's true we have been betrayed by our governments - and "churches." Along with my pet peeve the cell phones - which are thoroughly distracting the populace. In fact, the constant usage of cell phones do NOT allow anyone to think and analyze events as they are happening. One is never alone with one's thoughts.
HOWEVER! However, do you seriously think the world, and in the immediate future, Europe, will be islamized?
I - frankly - believe, there will be no time for that:
The Earth Changes as they are happening right now - will not allow it. In fact, scientists have raised the alarm in Newsweek mag., etc, that the icebergs will be completely melted by 2012. The films I've seen in the Discover Channel confirm this - our hosts stand in from of lovely, blue bergs, which are dripping water on them. The bergs in Tierra Del Fuego have shrunk terribly.
Coastal areas are being flooded - water levels rising - large cities are sinking - New Orleans is a joke ( rebuilding - INDEED !)- Rome is sinking - London as well, and other European cities. Never mind about Venice.
Forget about the Mayan Calendars of 2012 - anyone can be skeptic, but the actual evidence is right there with the instances of quakes, volcanic activities, etc. - increasing!
Droughts in the Midwest, and terrible fires in Calif, and Fla.
This is all being documented. Yet, swept under the rug by the main news media, or ignored by the populace.
No, I'm not one of those "End of the World " prophets. Yet, one still has to see the Writing On the Wall" of world - geological trends. Non?
I KNOW that somehow, in the near future, it won't be islam ( spit spit) that will be our problem, but Mother Earth, Herself. We'll be joining hands then, struggling for survival.
And then, all of us that have had those lovely hobbies of carpentry, repairs, mechanics, plumbing, metalworks, pottery, gardening (save your seeds), dowsing ( I had to put that one in), and other cottage industries, will be hard put to keep up.
Does anyone hear, think I'm talking throungh my hat?
Allat
Posted by: allat at October 5, 2007 3:42 PMCorrection: Does anyone here, think I'm talking through my hat?
God bless us all.
Allat
Posted by: allat at October 5, 2007 3:43 PM“Even if it could occasionally give birth to gifted individuals they tended to be unorthodox Muslims or, in the case of Rhazes, outright hostile to Islam. The frequency of thinkers of Avicenna's and certainly Alhazen's stature also steadily declined. This strongly indicates that "Islamic science" had little to do with Islam, but was the amalgam of pre-Islamic knowledge, Greek, Indian, Persian, Jewish, Assyrian Christian and other. As Muslims gradually became numerically dominant and Islamic orthodoxy more firmly established, this pre-Islamic heritage was slowly extinguished, hence science declined and never recovered.”
For the mathematically inclined, statistical measurements of the decline in the achievements of Islamic lands with increasing Islamization over time is given toward the end of the following paper: http://islamicexpansionanddecline.blogspot.com/2007/04/chapter-11-parasitic-civilization.html
Gunpowder was an important invention but its impact was not realized without the metal cannon. The cannon made thick fortifications obsolete in just a few years. It became unnecessary to scale a fortress wall; a battery of cannons could breach a wall at a convenient waist high elevation. Loading a large cannon was cumbersome in the 1300s and was not made easy unitil the invention of practical breach loading guns. The American Civil War was fought mostly with muzzle loading cannon that were loaded and fired just as they were 300 years previously.
Gunpowder's potential was not fully realized until Euorpeans discovered that when wetted and then dried, gunpowder burns faster and thus produces higher pressure.
It was advancements in metallurgy that allowed gunpowder to reach its full potential.
Give the Chinese credit for gunpowder, but give Europeans credit for finishing the product.
Posted by: Pelayo at October 5, 2007 8:00 PMAllat, just think of all the wonderful frozen northern land that will soon be open for cultivation. Just think how much smaller Saudi Arabia will become.
My home is 1000 ft above current sea level; this means the beach will be closer, but I'm a diehard landlubber anyway.
Does anyone think that they are the first generation of humans to face climate change or an uncertain future?
Posted by: Pelayo at October 5, 2007 8:15 PMI am just read Essay 2 and I noticed
"The Mongols were notorious for their brutality, but they had a particular dislike for Muslims."
Where is Genghis Khan when you need him?
Posted by: UK Infidel Lover at October 6, 2007 10:33 AMFjordman - Brilliant! The historical decisions made by Islam that placed gunpowder over the printing press have had tragic social ramifications. Illiteracy is a seriously deep - and maybe intractable - problem for Muslims. As Muslims continue to choose gunpowder over literacy, they threaten the entire world.
Pelayo - "Does anyone think that they are the first generation of humans to face climate change or an uncertain future?"
Not I.
Posted by: Daisytoo at October 7, 2007 9:12 PMBrilliant article!
From above:
"Certainly the Muslim world exhibited an active and sustained opposition to movable type technologies emanating from Europe in the fifteenth century and later. This opposition, based on social, religious, and political considerations . . ."
This is still a factor today. I'm sure many here have read the oft cited statistic that more books have been translated into Spanish in just one year than have been translated into Arabic in a thousand..
From above:
"Muslims stubbornly rejected it (printing). The contrast is striking if we compare this to how eagerly Muslims embraced another Chinese invention: gunpowder."
This also is still the case today. It has often been noted that hard line Muslims reject all sorts of useful, pleasant and benign inventions as "un-Islamic", while eagerly embracing any and all high-tech weaponry. I can think of two articles in JW recently which refer to this mindset--the case of the Iraqi falafel seller who was threatened for vending something not available in Mohammed's day. He wanted to point out to those threatening him that Kalashnikovs didn't exist in Mohammed's day either, but, as he put it, "I wanted to keep my life".
The other case is the British Jihadi who enjoyed watching beheading videos on his cell phone--he declared that this was the "best use" for a cell phone. Certainly this is something that most Westerners, using cell phones to keep in touch with loved ones, make business contacts, and find out what time the new Harry Potter movie is playing down at the cineplex, would find bizarre and repulsive.
The most chilling lines in your essay come near the end, "I have no doubt that if Muslims should succeed in conquering Europe, this will in the future be hailed as a Golden Age of Islam. But it wouldn't be a Golden Age of Islam, it would be the twilight of Europe . . "
We must not let this come to pass.
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