How did Europe get so advanced

[Mott1]

They did. In fact the very fundamentals of Islam are influenced by Greeks and Christians... During the hey-days of their empires, scholars openly discussed Greek philosophies, sciences, and so on, advancing them immensly as well as preserving them.

I believe that deserves a big ---- , sorry every time someone attributes science and freethinking to Islam, I laugh.

When you attribute science and the preservation of greek philosophy to fundamental Islam you actually do a terrible injustice to the brilliant Arab and Persian minds of that time. Such as:

The Persian Poet Abu Nuwas, al-Mutanabbi, the Turkish heterodox Nesimi and Persian epic poet Hakim Abu al-Qasim Mansur Firdowsi. Most of these men were open Islamic heretics. They left behind many great works and contributions, but most of these are notable not for their Islamic character but for their lack of it.

Muslims once led the rest of the world in mathematics and science, what caused the decline? There is scarcely any trace left.
For example in the medical sciences, Muslims established the first pharmacies and were the first to require standards of knowledge from doctors. In the late 8th century the first hospital was established in Baghdad, many followed After. Yet it was European physicians who paved the way for modern medical advances, not Muslims.
Is it because Europeans all of a sudden became intellectual geniuses? Hardly.
A more likely scenerio is that strict Islamic jurisprudence prohibited the advancement of medical science in the Islamic world.
While Europeans were able to dissect human bodies, that practice was forbidden in Islam. Europeans documented detailed anatomical drawings, but also forbidden in Islam were artistic representations of the human body.

Quite simply, Allah killed science in the Muslim world. Aristotle, along with great Arab commentators Averroes and Avicenna were studied in European universities in the 12th century and after, while in the Islamic world their work was largely ignored and certainly not taught in schools. Schools which concentrated mostly on memorization and study of the Quran.
Why were Avicenna and Averroes read in the West along with other Arab and Persian philosophers, but considered anomalies in their own traditions? Philosophy was not even studied in Islamic schools at the time.

The same could be said of the Church in Europe. Although the Church served many purposes and contributed greatly to Europes emergance from the dark ages, it certainly did not contribute to science.
Both the Church and Islam set repressive limitations to their societies freethinkers. It just so happens that the Church was more flexible.

 

[willemvanoranje]

For those of you who know Imannuel Wallerstein and his World-system theory, this must sound familiar. According to Wallerstein, Europe not only closed the gap it had for centuries with other parts of the world, but also by far surpassed them, because of political diaspora. Big economical unities as China, the Aztec and Inca empire, etc. were also politically unified. This did not necessarily make them lazy, but it eliminated a certain thrive the Europeans had. Europe formed one economic unity, yet politically it was divided in many many small parts that had to keep developping and inventing in order to not be killed. In other words: competition. This also explains why mainly in military perspective, the Europeans were so superior. Of course the other conditions were ideal as well, like good farming land, a good climate and not so many inaccessible areas.. but that was not exclusive to Europe.

I recommend this book (World System Theory) to everyone. It's brilliant in my opinion, and has not that many flaws.

 

[Plotinus]

[Brighteye] I haven't read Southern. But I wouldn't trust Russell on this matter. His "History of Western Philosophy" is absolutely crammed with historical bias or plain error, particularly when discussing anything Christian; his brusque handling of Augustine and Aquinas is a case in point. He's great fun to read, but massively outdated now.

[naziassbandit] It's not remotely true that the "very fundamentals of Islam" were influenced by Greeks, at least to any significant degree. The flowering of Muslim philosophy - which *was* enormously influenced by Greek philosophy - came well after the establishment of Islam itself. It was only after the Muslims had conquered most of the Middle East and discovered the scholarship of mostly Christian Middle Eastern philosophers that they developed their medieval systems of thought. Christianity *may* have influenced the emergence of Islam itself - there are intriguing parallels between early Muslim theology and certain Christian groups of the time - but that's not so relevant.

 

[jonatas]

Why limit it to the Middle East? What about Iberia? I know you propose Iraq and Christian Missionaries as an earlier Christian/Islamic cultural transfer, but don't forget the later Islamic/Christian tranfser in Iberia.

 

[jonatas]

I believe that deserves a big ---- , sorry every time someone attributes science and freethinking to Islam, I laugh.

Fundamentalism of any religion is a joke, I agree. As are reactionaries (I say this to you specifically.) Two sides of the same coin.

There was a definitive transfer of knowledge from Islam to Christianity during the Middle Ages, whether you fully acknowledge it or not. Especially in the Iberian peninsula (earlier than the 12th C, unfortunately everyone seems to want to focus on the High Medieval Era and no earlier, which is detrimental to many areas of history, not just Islamic) and not only in Philosophical domains, but Technical, Linguistic and Agricultural.

 

[Plotinus]

[jonatas] Yes, of course you're right. I always forget about Spain.

[Mott1] There were plenty of hospitals around centuries before Baghdad was even founded. But I'm puzzled by your claim that Averroes and Avicenna were not studied in the Islamic world. There were an awful lot of other Muslim philosophers apart from them, who were more or less influenced by them. They are just the most famous (in the west) representatives of a huge tradition of Muslim philosophy and theology. One of the most notable things about medieval Islamic scholarship is how ecumenical (as it were) it was. Al-Farabi, for example, the great influence on Avicenna, and who seems to have been a perfectly devout Muslim, worked not only with other Muslim scholars but with Nestorians, Monophysites, and Jews. Avicenna was no anomaly but part of the Farabian tradition.

 

[Mott1]

Why limit it to the Middle East? What about Iberia? I know you propose Iraq and Christian Missionaries as an earlier Christian/Islamic cultural transfer, but don't forget the later Islamic/Christian tranfser in Iberia.

I know I will recieve a verbal lashing from you, maybe thats an understatment, however the idea of the Inquisition and African slavery were the results of Islamic/Christian transfer in Iberia.

 

[Plotinus]

What's the inquisition got to do with that? It developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a means to combat heresy in general (notably the Cathars and Waldenses, mostly). Of course it was later institutionalised in
Spain to a greater degree than elsewhere - primarily to deal with Jewish converts to Christianity who were suspected of insincerity - but that didn't have much to do with Islam, and the idea of the inquisition was certainly much earlier.

 

[jonatas]

I know I will recieve a verbal lashing from you, maybe thats an understatment, however the idea of the Inquisition and African slavery were the results of Islamic/Christian transfer in Iberia.

Understatement? You made my day. It's not simply verbal slave lashing however, you stopped answering to certain threads as I recall. There is truth in what I say. You'll have a fun time arguing with me that Jews were were better off with Christians than Muslims in Iberia, I promise you (it will be tedious and obvious). Blacks were generally viewed as inferior by "white looking" Arabs, (yes I'm not stupid enough to infer otherwise, though they were often extensively used in later Berber armies emanating from North Africa). Now do you want to comment more specifically on the transfers of technical, philosophical and agricultural knowledge, and how they did not occur in Iberia?

 

[Mott1]

Understatement? You made my day. It's not simply verbal slave lashing however, you stopped answering to certain threads as I recall. There is truth in what I say. You'll have a fun time arguing with me that Jews were were better off with Christians than Muslims in Iberia, I promise you (it will be tedious and obvious). Blacks were generally viewed as inferior by "white looking" Arabs, (yes I'm not stupid enough to infer otherwise, though they were often extensively used in later Berber armies emanating from North Africa). Now do you want to comment more specifically on the transfers of technical, philosophical and agricultural knowledge, and how they did not occur in Iberia?

I forgot to add the little scared face after "understatement" so as to fully express my fear.
Actually I agree with you, there is no doubt that exchanges took place and knowledge circulated between Islam and Christianity via Iberian Andalusia.
However knowledge seems to have circulated in only one direction, coming from Islam and the Arab world to the west.
We know perfectly well that Aristotle's philosophy came into Europe thanks to the translations and commentaries of Arab philosophers such as Averroes and Avicenna. And as you have mentioned knowledge in the science of mathematics, medicine, astronomy, irrigation and even architecture to certain extent.
It would however, be foolish to attribute these scientific contributions to Islam; it would be foolish to claim that Islam was the ideological vessal which secured and nurtured these technological advancements. Equally absurd is to credit the Catholic church in the same manner.
Somehow I just can't picture an arrogant Muslim cleric with his trademark beard sharing knowledge of the Archimedes screw or Plato's "allegory of the cave" with a defiant Catholic bishop dressed in pompous regalia. Science and theology is an oxymoron.

Now, if we admit that exchanges took place in the intellectual, commercial, and scientific fields, we must also recognize that exchanges in law and theology also took place. These are areas which Islam can take full credit.
In my humble opinion, I am inclined to believe that serfdom is a western imitation of Muslim dhimmi. I would not be surprised if some parts of canon law have their origin in Muslim law. How can we be certain that Islamic influence did not have theological repercussions? As Plotinus pointed out the problem solved by Thomas Aquinas was that of the confrontation between classical theology and Aristotle's philosophy. But the gap is bridged by Islamic theologians.

The point I am making is that we know scientific knowledge filtered in the west through Iberia. We must admit knowledge in the form of Islamic theology and law also influenced the west and Christianity to a certain degree.
When I said that Islam introduced African slavery to the west, I did not exactly mean it in the way you have decribed (i.e. black Berbers treated as inferior to fair skinned Arabs).
Without delving into Islamic theology, historically wherever Muslims went, mostly as conquerors but also as traders, there developed a system of slavery. For example, simultaneously with the invasion of Sindh in the early 8th century, expansion of Arab Islam had gone from as far as Egypt, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula in the west, as well as in Syria, Asia Minor all the way to Transoxiana. In all these countries Muslim slave systems grew and developed in their own way.
I can expound on this and go into great detail if you feel it necessary to challenge the above assessment.
Nevertheless, in the 15th century, with the developement of knowledge of Africa, and then through 17th and 18th century, we see the horrible history of African slavery, people who were torn from there native land and transported to America. Accusations made against Western civilization still echo today, and rightly so! But history is incomplete or parts are simply ignored when it comes to this dark period in history. For centuries the Muslims had regularly cropped the African continent for slaves. Seizing Africans as slaves was a Muslim practice from at least the 10th century. African tribes were attacked by large Muslim armies, in various invasions. Slaves were the main item in Muslim trade from the 10th century to the 15th. Muslims used political methods by which they played off the African tribal leaders against one another so effectively that tribes would take prisoners from neighboring tribes and sell them to Arab merchants. These methods where then adopted by western slave merchants. Again, we see here an exchange in knowledge that is not dependant on science but rather theology.
This not an attempt to exonerate the west or to shift blame. Not at all.
I am demonstrating that it is very plausable that African slave trading was a model of Islam that was introduced to the west.

 

[Plotinus]

Somehow I just can't picture an arrogant Muslim cleric with his trademark beard sharing knowledge of the Archimedes screw or Plato's "allegory of the cave" with a defiant Catholic bishop dressed in pompous regalia. Science and theology is an oxymoron.

But this is daft. Not all Muslims are arrogant imams with beards, and not all Christians are pompous bishops. You seem to be making the common mistake of identifying "the church" with the clerics. Yet in reality, for both Christians and Muslims and indeed most other religions, the vast bulk of the members of the religion are the laity. Besides which, even the clerics don't necessarily conform to these caricatures. Thomas Aquinas was a priest but he was perfectly happy to cite "the Commentator" and "the Rabbi" in addition to "the Philosopher" and "the Apostle" (that is, Averroes, Maimonides, Aristotle, and Paul). "Science and theology" needn't be an oxymoron at all.

All this seems to me something of a red herring, because none of this is "science" in the modern sense at all. Still, it would be wrong to characterise the Muslim philosophers simply as passive bearers of ancient philosophy. They blazed the trail of using Aristotle (and the others) as the basis for a religious philosophy; in many ways the Christian philosophers simply took over their ideas, rather than the original ancient Greek ideas. Sometimes this caused problems, as when Siger of Brabant became more of an Averroist than Averroes himself ever had been. But even with the more mainstream thinkers, the influence of the Muslims themselves was immense. In many ways, Thomas Aquinas is simply a follower of al-Farabi. Bonaventure repeated al-Ghazali's "kalam" cosmological argument virtually verbatim. And so on.

 

[Mott1]

[jonatas] Yes, of course you're right. I always forget about Spain.

[Mott1] There were plenty of hospitals around centuries before Baghdad was even founded. But I'm puzzled by your claim that Averroes and Avicenna were not studied in the Islamic world. There were an awful lot of other Muslim philosophers apart from them, who were more or less influenced by them. They are just the most famous (in the west) representatives of a huge tradition of Muslim philosophy and theology. One of the most notable things about medieval Islamic scholarship is how ecumenical (as it were) it was. Al-Farabi, for example, the great influence on Avicenna, and who seems to have been a perfectly devout Muslim, worked not only with other Muslim scholars but with Nestorians, Monophysites, and Jews. Avicenna was no anomaly but part of the Farabian tradition.

I understand that there were other Arab philosophers, I believe I mentioned that in my post, however by the 12 century their work was largely ignored. I may be wrong on the time period, but I'm pretty confidant it was around the 12th century. I'll have to go digging through my history "tomes" and double check.
In my opinion, the Islamic scholar al-Ghazali is responsible for popularizing strict Islamic jurisprudence. Although he was a great Islamic thinker (not to be confused with freethinker), he set in motion a streak of anti-intellectualism that stifled alot of philosophical and scientific thought. He was angry that many Islamic philosophers were to "hesitant" to embrace the revealed "truths" of the Quran.
He ridiculed the work of Islamic philosopher al-Sabbah al-Kinidi who suggested that religion and philosophy were two separate but equal paths to truth. In other words, philosophers need not pay attention to the Quran.
Ar-Razi or better known as Rhazes, went as far as to say that only philosophy leads to the highest truth. Many other Muslim philosophers persued similar dangerous paths of knowledge. I am sorry but these Muslim philosophers were not too Islamic much less devout practitioners.

Al-Ghazali wrote a book which he audaciously titled "Incoherence of the philosophers" in it he accused Muslim philosophers of denying the revealed laws and religious confessions. He also accused your "devout" Muslim philosopher al-farabi and Avicenna of challenging the very principles of Islam.
Al-Ghazali's attack on the philosophers were sophisticated but zealous, all he needed was the Quran to prove them wrong. I am convinced he irrivocably hindered intellectual developement in the Islamic world.
There were other Muslim philosophers the came after the "philosopher" al-Ghazali, but they never achieved any significant stature.
However one philosopher comes to mind whom I admire. Abul-Waleed Ibn Rushd answered al-Ghazali in a book title "Incoherence of the Incoherent", he insisted that philosophers need not kowtow to theologians. I thought that was courageous of him , too bad the damage had already been done.

 

[Princeps]

It's not remotely true that the "very fundamentals of Islam" were influenced by Greeks, at least to any significant degree.

I think it is. Well, at least to degree.

Well, I'm not sure, but I think Christianity was greatly influenced by Greek philosophies, and I believe the same is true for Islam.

Mott1 - go away. If you cannot discuss like civilized people then don't. I won't comment on your post.

 

[Verbose]

There was a reaction, a kind of religious scholarly back-lash, in the Muslims world with people like al-Ghazali.

But they wouldn't seem to begin affecting things politically until the 13th c. With Muslims in Spain coming under preassure from the north, and calling in the Berbers from North Africa, and the slave and Turkish dynasties generally taking over political leadership in the Middle East. Not the best of times for open-minded scholarship, at least when patronage is a necessary factor for it.

And besides, for any kind of reaction to make sense, it must have something to react against. They found an objectionable amount of non-Muslim Greek philosophy had crept in? Well, then it probably had.

There was a very considerable saturation of the Arab-literate (all denominations) scholarly elite with Greek philosophy in the Muslim world.

Otherwise it wouldn't work for Emperor Frederick II to have his court astrologer Michael Scotus (one of these translator of Aristotle from Arabic who had been to Spain) draw up a set of Greek-inspired cosmological questions for the Egyptian Sultan al-Kamil as part of the negotiations over Jerusalem in the 1220's. There was a common ground in the form of Greek philosophy between them.

Because al-Kamil did respond. And he did so after submitting the questions to the scholars of the al-Ahzar (presumably so he wouldn't make a fool of himself). So it's reasonable to say that both sides shared an implicit framework for discussion based on Greek philosophy, Aristotle in particular.

The questions made sense to the Muslims. Their response were in accordance with Christian expectations.

(I've also always wondered what it might have meant personally for Thomas Aquinas, the future saint, that his uncle was Thomas Aquinas, count of Acerra, and for years Frederick's Arab speaking senior diplomat in charge of negotiations with the Egyptian Sultan?)

I know this is all a bit anecdotal, but one can even pick up "Arabian Nights" and find references to this kind of combined Greek-Muslim scholarship.

There's a story about an uncommonly wise slave-girl. Haroun al-Rashid and his Vizir, Jafar the Barmaqid, visit the slave market in disguise, and there's this young girl on sale who's just a fount of wisdom.
So they ask her questions about medicine, and she goes off in a long rant which historians of medicine have in fact identified as a very nice summary of Galen and various Muslim commentators and successors on some medical condition. And all the crowd marvels at her erudition.

Now, what's funny about it is of course that here's this slip of a slave-girl, and she's spewing scholarly discourse like a grizzled old whitebeard. But for it to work, it presupposes that the narrator and his audience both are aware of the fact that this is roughly how a high-learned doctor of medicine would sound.
And when you can set about taking the micky out of something like this, it's very likely to be something well established and fairly main-stream.

 

[Plotinus]

In my opinion, the Islamic scholar al-Ghazali is responsible for popularizing strict Islamic jurisprudence. Although he was a great Islamic thinker (not to be confused with freethinker), he set in motion a streak of anti-intellectualism that stifled alot of philosophical and scientific thought. He was angry that many Islamic philosophers were to "hesitant" to embrace the revealed "truths" of the Quran.
He ridiculed the work of Islamic philosopher al-Sabbah al-Kinidi who suggested that religion and philosophy were two separate but equal paths to truth. In other words, philosophers need not pay attention to the Quran.
Ar-Razi or better known as Rhazes, went as far as to say that only philosophy leads to the highest truth. Many other Muslim philosophers persued similar dangerous paths of knowledge. I am sorry but these Muslim philosophers were not too Islamic much less devout practitioners.

I think you're making unwarranted assumptions again. In particular, you're assuming that someone who insists that the Quran is the ultimate authority and must not be gainsaid is "anti-intellectual". I don't see that at all. Someone who says this is clearly opposed to free-thinking, but not to intellectualism. Once again, Aquinas would have said the same thing about the Bible. In fact he did say that. Does that make Aquinas anti-intellectual? Of course not. It just makes him one particular kind of intellectual.

Now, you're quite right that al-Ghazali attacked the various philosophical schools for supposed incoherence. But if you infer from that that he was some kind of anti-intellectual, you're making another common mistake, which is to confuse criticism of philosophical doctrines with criticism of philosophical methods. People always make this mistake with Tertullian, too. But of course, both Tertullian and al-Ghazali used philosophical methods constantly in their work. In particular, al-Ghazali's method of trying to debunk the philosophers is entirely philosophical: he uses sceptical philosophical arguments of a calibre not seen since Carneades and which would not become widespread again until the sixteenth century. His beef with the philosophers is not that they are philosophers, for he is one himself, without a doubt. He criticises them because they say things that he thinks are untrue. I don't see how that makes him anti-intellectual or any less a philosopher.

You're basically saying that some Muslim philosophers thought the Quran was not all-sufficient, and others did. That's true. But you're also saying that the former count as "proper" philosophers and the latter do not. I think that's just prejudice. Being an intellectual is not the same thing as being heterodox, or a free-thinker, or anti-religious, or any of the other currently fashionable things.

 

[Princeps]

What's philosophy for? The common peasant did not give a damn. Some shy skeptic in Greece comes up with a way to think... bah.

Philosophy, poetry, litetature, these were merely discussion subjects of the spoiled youth of the rich, corrupt nobles.

 

[Plotinus]

Hmm. Tell that to Cleanthes or Epictetus.

 

[Mott1]

But this is daft. Not all Muslims are arrogant imams with beards, and not all Christians are pompous bishops. You seem to be making the common mistake of identifying "the church" with the clerics. Yet in reality, for both Christians and Muslims and indeed most other religions, the vast bulk of the members of the religion are the laity. Besides which, even the clerics don't necessarily conform to these caricatures.

Come on Plotinus, give me a little more credit than that. I was simply trying to add a bit of levity to the post. The nature of the quote was meant to be taken satirically. The point being that theological fundamentalism does not promote philosophical freethinking or science. Chalk that up to another poor attempt at humor on my part.:suicide:
I know you see me as someone who opposes mainstream history, or a reactionary as jonatas so kindly labels me. Are my views truly influenced by todays political events when I can support my opinions on a historical platform?

Thomas Aquinas was a priest but he was perfectly happy to cite "the Commentator" and "the Rabbi" in addition to "the Philosopher" and "the Apostle" (that is, Averroes, Maimonides, Aristotle, and Paul). "Science and theology" needn't be an oxymoron at all.

From a person who is a proponent of theology and adheres to a theological perspective, science and theology can be percieved to coincide, sure.
However from someone who adheres to a logical perspective the opposite is true. But we can not deny that theology, especially the Abrahamic theologies, restricted freethinking. It simply discouraged alternate philosophical schools of thought and certainly repressed philosophies that contradicted dogmatic principles. The later Abrahamic religion being the most repressive.

All this seems to me something of a red herring, because none of this is "science" in the modern sense at all. Still, it would be wrong to characterise the Muslim philosophers simply as passive bearers of ancient philosophy. They blazed the trail of using Aristotle (and the others) as the basis for a religious philosophy; in many ways the Christian philosophers simply took over their ideas, rather than the original ancient Greek ideas.

Actually, I am in no way characterizing Muslim philosophers as passive bearers of Greek philosophy which Christians then apllied and benefitted.
My point is simple, these Muslim philosophers contributed greatly to Greek philosophy. However it was not enlight of Islamic philosophy, but despite Islamic philosophy. Elementary logic dictates that if Islamic philosophy coincided with Greek philosophy we would see the application of some form of Greek philosophy in the Islamic world today.

What part of my post do you see as red herring? If you are refering to the original topic of the thread, yes it is a bit of a divertion. However I was replying to a post that inadvertantly created an alternate discussion.
My apologies.

 

[Kosez]

They did. In fact the very fundamentals of Islam are influenced by Greeks and Christians... During the hey-days of their empires, scholars openly discussed Greek philosophies, sciences, and so on, advancing them immensly as well as preserving them.

We all know that. But Brighteye suggested that Europe has got so advanced because of Greek philosophy. Arabian world also knew this philosophy, even before than medieval Europe in some cases, but they didn't get so advanced as Europe did. But they were pretty close I must say. Only in 19th century Europeans managed to make some invasions and occupy some land ( if we don't count areas in northern Morocco).

 

[Princeps]

We all know that. But Brighteye suggested that Europe has got so advanced because of Greek philosophy.

As I said, realistically speaking, philosophy was nothing but the discussion subject of richer youths. The real reasons for Europe's rise lay on more concrete causes.