7 ms·

The Islamic Golden Age is pretty fantastic, not the first time I heard about it and usually a cause of pride among my muslim friends (and for good reason). Too

• rodgerd 12y ago
  One would like to think, along with the slow disintegration of Western Rome, that it might serve as an object lesson to people who naively assume that progress is inevitable and will solve all our problems.
• frozenport 12y ago
  Seems like they have been going for the last 700 years. Which makes me feel that the feelings of pride my Muslim friends feel are unjustified as they have very little in common with the world that made al-Jazari. Or perhaps more importantly, the rest of the world has advanced in 700 years, but they have staid behind.
  • lotsofpulp 12y ago
    Generally, I don't completely get why do humans feel pride for things they didn't have anything to do with? Probably has something to do with ego.
    • knodi123 12y ago
      more about tribalism. "I share in the glory of every member of my tribe".
      • chetanahuja 12y ago
        Also known as "Teamwork". The basic mechanisms of tribalism are the same whether the scale is a world religion, a country, a ship's crew, a basketball team or whatever.
        • ramblerman 12y ago
          Being part of the team that achieved something versus vicariously enjoying a victory of ancestors you never knew is not really the same thing.
      • ekianjo 12y ago
        That's what we call "Halo Effect", as well.
    • MisterBastahrd 12y ago
      I once had a friend who was routinely incorrect in his football predictions tell me that I, who won about 85% of the office pools during my time there, didn't know anything about the sport because my team had never won a Super Bowl. I then informed him that he must know five times less than everyone else in the room, given that he was a Bucs fan and virtually all of our coworkers were Cowboys fans. We'll talk over the phone periodically about football, and my predictions about his team are usually spot on for the season. When he asks me how I'm so good at predicting what will happen with his team given that I really don't follow them all that closely, I just tell him that the Saints finally won a Super Bowl, and hence my knowledge was greatly enhanced.
    • ehamberg 12y ago
      “Nationalism teaches you take pride in shit you haven’t done and hate people you’ve never met.” You can probably substitute any us-and-them term for “nationalism”.
• otakucode 12y ago
  To use strokes so broad that any historian would like to harm me... what happened was basically that the Islamic world came up against the Crusades, and with Catholics murdering them with terrible savagery, they decided to seal themselves off from the world. And in that seclusion they missed out on the most important development in human history - The Enlightenment. Possible the greatest achievement of The Enlightenment was driving a wedge between religion belief and beliefs about the material world. Prior to The Enlightenment, these two things were the same thing - a concept which is VERY difficult for people from post-Enlightenment cultures to understand. Seeing gravity as an expression of a gods will? Thinking it sensible to look for religious explanations to solve mechanical problems? No belief in an afterlife, but belief that the material world was a thing skin over the supernatural world which actually controlled everything? These things just don't make sense to post-Enlightenment folks. Those ideas are absolutely and totally required to support the idea of coexistence of peoples of different faiths. Otherwise, religious ideas about eternity and salvation trump any concerns. There is nothing which can outweigh the importance of eternity. And in their isolation, concerns for eternity (and self preservation) consumed the Islamic world. The division between modern 'moderate' Islamists and 'fundamentalist' Islamists is this exact divide solved by The Enlightenment. And the outcome is by no means a foregone conclusion. People are going to have to choose to believe that their religious beliefs are "just religious" and have no serious relevance to the material world (the exact notion their religion decries as the ultimate heresy) and join the modern world... or cling to their pre-Enlightenment system and be exterminated through violence by the rest of the world. Coexistence with pre-Enlightenment people in a world where technology gives individuals so much power of different kinds simply is not possible.
  • Scriptor 12y ago
    > Catholics murdering them with terrible savagery I see what you're trying to get at, but you make it sound as though the Islamic world was brutally traumatized by the Crusades. The savagery was no more terrible than any war of that time. And they didn't really "seal themselves off from the world". They did, however, seal themselves off from Europe culturally and intellectually. Politically and economically there was still plenty of engagement. What the Crusades did do was to further hamper the adoption of European ideas in the Islamic World. While the Crusaders were happy to adopt both goods and knowledge from the Middle East, Arabs and Turks saw little reason to embrace any European customs and ways of thought. The Crusaders were invaders in their own lands and for that reason alone a typical Arab's perception of Europeans would've been much worse than a typical Frank's perception of "Saracens". Amin Maalouf gives an example towards the end of "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes" (decent book, by the way, though I liked "Arab Historians of the Crusades" better). As the Crusades progressed and Europe entered the high middle ages peasants in the West started to gain more rights and privileges as the feudal system continued to weaken. However, none of this was seen in the Middle East, where local lords ruled their holdings with an iron grip and peasant rights barely improved.