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If you want to be a splitter rather than a lumper, that’s fine, but there’s no reasonable division that separate “Muslims” from “The West”. There just is no hi
by earthboundkid 7y ago
If you want to be a splitter rather than a lumper, that’s fine, but there’s no reasonable division that separate “Muslims” from “The West”.
There just is no historical separation between our societies for the obvious reason that they’re geographically adjacent and have been in continuous contact, unlike say “The West” and India or China or the Americas.
European philosophy was explicitly founded when medieval universities were set up like Islamic schools and teaching Averoes and Avicenna. Before that, Aristotle and Plato had been all but lost to the Latins. Chemistry is from “al-quemi” and algebra is “al-jebra”.
It’s really only post-fall of the Ottoman Empire that you see even a notional sense that our civilizations are disconnected. Splitting them now is just pro-war propaganda being laundered through bad history.
- krapp 7y agoI don't necessarily want to be either - I consider culture to be a continuum rather than a fixed state. And you're right, Islam shares a common heritage with Christianity and Judaism (despite being conspicuously absent from the "Judeo-Christian" moniker) so it makes no sense to consider the influence of only two.
- earthboundkid 7y agoIt’s not just that they’re Abrahamic. “Western civilization” if it means anything means “Abrahamic religion plus Greek philosophy” as the two main traditional schools of thought. India and China don’t have that. Islam does! They translated the Greeks and introduced it to the Latin speakers between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. It would be like cutting Augustine out of Western civilization because he lived in Tunisia.