It's sometimes peculiar how quick we are to aim to repeat history, blisteringly awful history, seemingly with no concern or regard for what we are doing. The Ar

It's sometimes peculiar how quick we are to aim to repeat history, blisteringly awful history, seemingly with no concern or regard for what we are doing. The Arab world was once near the top of the world in scholarship and academic pursuit. Algebra, for instance, being a reference to Ilm al-jabr wa'l-muḳābala, by Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Or there was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where scholars were consigned with the responsibility of translating cultural and scientific works from across the world into Arabic. But then in a shockingly short period of time that same Arab world started to place their selected social values above that of the truth, in and of itself. Perhaps one of the major catalysts for this was Al-Ghazali, and his very well received ideology laid out in "The Incoherence of the Philosophers." [1] Formerly a philosopher himself, that work is where Al-Ghazali began to deny all science and reality and replace it with religion. He declared that there was no such thing as causality. When a leaf catches fire it is not because it was exposed to fire - rather god chose to transit the fire from the torch to the leaf at that very moment. And again when it deteriorates into ash - that is once again not a natural process, but rather the explicit and active will of god acting at that very moment. The implication of this is that there is no truth to be sought, there is no connection in nature, there is nothing except for god. The reason for this is because it answered any sort of inconvenient questions for religion, by attacking the questions (and those that pose them) directly. And in a short period of time the Arabic world was set on the path that sent it away from academic pursuit and knowledge and onto the path that's brought it to where it is today. Imagine what a different place the world would be today had they instead remained focused on the truth, and the golden age of Islam persisted indefinitely. Social values must never take precedent over truth, no matter how undesirable the truth may be to hear, or how undesirable the speakers of said truth may be. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philosophers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philoso...