sonorakitch
Overseas hunter
But when religion is so instrumental....so critical to the everyday happenings in life in some corners of the globe, it surely will influence it, right? And sometimes negatively, don't you think?
Which Has Caused More Harm to the Middle-East?
- Thread starter Fifty
- Start date
But when religion is so instrumental....so critical to the everyday happenings in life in some corners of the globe, it surely will influence it, right? And sometimes negatively, don't you think?
Failure
Failure
Doncha know that the Middle East was basically just a giant desert full of nomads until the Europeans came along and civilized them. Yeahhhhhhhhhhhh
Failures.
sonorakitch
Overseas hunter
I'm not talking technological advancements here (from several hundred years ago). Not talking about the abacus. I'm talking about the historical evolution of a eurocentric world which resulted in three centuries + of darkness in the middle east. Why? Guess.
Read the OP. Read my post. It's all pretty simple for you.
Read the OP. Read my post. It's all pretty simple for you.
Europeans discovering how to build ships and stumbling on the Americas and building an empire on the ruins of native civilizations gaining immense riches and improving guns and cannons and using them to take over the spice routes and discovering coal which sparked the industrial revolution?
sonorakitch said:
Whut? That had nothing to do with religion and far more to do with Tamerlane ripping the heart out of the Islamic world. And, really, Europe was still quite happily killing each other in grand religious conflicts that would make the Crusaders and Al Qaida blush *hur hur* Thirty Years War.
Hulagu's invasion of Middle East was earlier and much, much more important than Tamerlan's. Tamerlan was a pius muslim anyway, and he treated muslims much nicer than christians in Armenia or Georgia. Not to mention his last, unfinished, expedition was aimed at forceful islamisation of China.
Thirty Years' War wasn't a purely religious war. Catholic France, ruled by a cardinal, was siding with protestants, protestant Denmark fought on the catholic side for some time, and it was largely a conflict between a central authority (the emperor) and the princes of the empire anyway.
Thirty Years' War wasn't a purely religious war. Catholic France, ruled by a cardinal, was siding with protestants, protestant Denmark fought on the catholic side for some time, and it was largely a conflict between a central authority (the emperor) and the princes of the empire anyway.
Squonk said:
Eh. From my perspective he substantial did damage all of his own. Whatever the case, I think we can agree that religion probably wasn't the cause of the relative decline of the Islamic world.
Squonk said:
Piety didn't spare Damascus. Which just goes to show religion doesn't trump political considerations.
Squonk said:
No war is (which is an important point to be made all of its own). But the conflict's venom was certainly enhanced by the religious views of the participants. The Swedes advance under Gustavus Adolphus was accompanied by large scale destruction of Catholic population centres. The Catholic French massacred Protestant Huguenots at Privas.
classical_hero
In whom I trust
Failure
Failure
You have to wonder why they went stagnant and yet Western Europe just grew.
dwaxe
is not a fanatic
The Thirty Years' War was started in the Holy Roman Empire for largely religious reasons (Peace of Augsburg just didn't cut it for the Calvinist Princes).
In the end, although countries like France eventually joined in for political reasons it was a war that was caused by and deeply rooted in religion.
In the end, although countries like France eventually joined in for political reasons it was a war that was caused by and deeply rooted in religion.
Love
Deity
Mixture of reasons, and religion is probably a factor, but not an overwhelmingly important one. Western Europe on the whole remained a religious society until very recently, and the Islamic world did achieve major scientific and technological advancements under what are nominally theocracies.
That probably had a comparable effect on the Muslim world as the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire.
classical_hero
In whom I trust
Under the Christian and Protestant Western Europe, things are where Science really grew and yet under the influence of Islamic world, it went backwards, when many Arabic scholars before Islam really got hold in those parts, where the very best at what they did.
He's trying to say that all the Islamic contributions to science are meaningless because they weren't Christians. Just stripping away the façade for you. You can't ignore the significant contributions that were made during the Golden Age of Islam! Nobody is denying that there wasn't regression when some fundamentalists took over--see the Dark Ages!
By the way, I voted for "oil & geography". I am a big believer in geopolitics.
But then, the princes' decision to adopt unholy protestantism was at least partly dictated by economical and political reasons.
Hulagu destroyed the very centre of islamic thought, Baghdad, cut of muslim thinkers from patronage in a half of the muslim world, that's why I find him more important.
What I'll say is historiosophy, not history, but I think that what made muslims advance in early abbasid period is that they were feeling, and were, safe and secure. They had a reason to believe the politics point towards their religion as the right one and themselves under God's protection. The byzantine reconquista, the crusades and mongol invasions might have changed that. It may have played a factor.
Especially since one of big myths of the islamic world alive today, but having long roots, is that they owed their success to the purety of faith and to ortopraxy, while saw later failures as results of straying from religious path. There is some true in it, but mostly it's misunderstanding. First because "muslim" armies of VII century were at least partly muslim in name only (not to mention partly christian arab, armenian etc when it comes to land forces, christian coptic and syrian when it comes to fleet, and supported by local non-muslim population), but because muslim culture in the beginnings and at the peak was less religious, less muslim than it is today, at least judging on the lives of umayyad, abbasid caliphs and the lives of arabic poets. Who were, notabene, ruling an empire whose population was mostly not islamic.
But the problem was that while arabic/islamic culture settled and institutionalised, it was becoming less and less open, less tolerant towards other religions, towards allien knowledge (esp. since at some point they were really at the peak), towards sin. One could argue it was doomed to happen that way, but I attribute that also to the trauma of foreign invasion, which was a shock for muslims, who were used to successes. My view is based on an analogy with history of my own nation I guess.
But I believe the main problems were institutionalisation and social internalisation, confesionalisation of islamic faith as well as political trauma of modern political failures as compared to previous success, which caused and still causes people to think that the key to the return to former glory must be found in stricter imposition of islamic law. That doesn't explain why OE didn't spark a new brilliant era for muslim science, though. Perhaps because the flame was already gone.
Mongols' influence shouldn't be exagerrated. Half of islamic world never experienced their conquest, so the damage inflicted there must have been psychical rather than physical.
Again, this doesn't mean islam per se was the reason of Middle Eastern troubles. In early islam, it were the coranic studies that made muslims study arabic language etc.
sorry for a bit chaotic opinion, but I have to go.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
Oil and Geography. The middle east was the pinnacle of civilization under the muslims just as much as they are the international hell hole today.
