"As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith"
The Nation of Islam?
"It was Islam – at places like al-Azhar University – that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment"
Rubbish.
"And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality"
Not "throughout history", no. Who has?
But this is the big one:
"So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed"
Revealed?
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To the Prophet. By the angel Gabriel.
ReplyDeleteJust as Buddhism was revealed to the Buddha, Judaism to the prophets and Christianity to Paul.
Have you ever read a word of any of them? They can't all be right, to say the very least.
ReplyDeleteAnd you are quite wrong about the nature and origins of both Judaism and Christianity.
Of course they're not all right. But just as you would want a Muslim talking to you to speak of your religion with respect, going to Cairo and using the phrase "when Islam was invented" is not going to build many bridges. Which is kind of the entire point of the speech.
ReplyDelete"Where Islam first emerged" would have done perfectly well.
ReplyDeleteOK. But why not "revealed"? What possible difference does it make? Especially given Obama's committed Christianity?
ReplyDeletePrecisely. He doesn't believe that it was revealed. And they know that he doesn't.
ReplyDelete"It was Islam – at places like al-Azhar University – that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment"
ReplyDeleteThis is a fact. When Europe was in what is still sometimes called "the Dark Ages", the Arabs had an advanced, intellectual civilization. Much classical learning was preserved and transmitted to Europe by the Arabs. They also made considerable advances on their own. There's a reason we use Arabic numerals (invented in India but brought to us by the Arabs) in our mathematics and many of the stars are known by Arabic names (e.g., Rigel and Betelgeuse).
Totally false. There were no "Dark Ages". I am typing this almost in the shadow of the tomb of Saint Bede The Venerable.
ReplyDeleteThe Classical learning was never lost in the West. It is only thanks to the Church that the Arabs ever got it. And it is only thanks to the Church that we have it, either.
As for science, although Arab science led the world between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries (above all in astronomy, mathematics and medicine), it then went into sharp decline as Christian Europe surged ahead at the start of the process that is still going on, and which has now spread throughout the world, including to the Arabs.
How and why did this happen?
In part, it was because the Catholic Church insisted on Her independence from the Sate, initially with regard to the appointment of bishops, but rapidly, once the principle had been established, in other areas as well. Under Her aegis, universities, cities and what we would now call professional bodies became legal entities in their own right, providing forums for free discussion. Islam simply did not, and does not, work like that.
But mostly, there was the impact of theological beliefs on the ability to do science. Many of the Arab scientists were in fact Christians, even if heterodox ones such as the translator ibn Masawagh of Baghdad, and his pupil Hunayan, who translated all the known Greek works into Arabic and Syriac, as well writing many medical treatises. The Christian physician ibn al-Quff of Damascus wrote one of the first treatises on surgery.
In Christianity, it is because God is both rational and free that His universe is both orderly and contingent. Since God is free, the universe is not necessary, and could have been otherwise: He need not have created it, and He might have created it any other way that He chose.
If God were rational but not free, then His universe would be necessary and could not be other than it is, so that there would be no need to conduct experiments in order to understand it. Or, if God were free but not rational, then His universe would be so chaotic that there would be no observable order within it, and so science would again be impossible.
In Islam, however, everything is directly dependent on the will of Allah, a view which weakens any expectation to observe rationality and order in the universe, even before considering how capricious that will is presented as being in several verses of the Qur’an.
Thus was science arrested in the Islamic world even as it soared away in Christendom. So much for "the Dark Ages".
Yes, the church did preserve a great deal of classical learning, but by no means all of it. The Arabs didn't get any of it from the church, unless you mean the Byzantines, who as the remnant of the Roman Empire preserved much of it. But the Arabs had direct access to many classical manuscripts, as they occupied much of the old Roman and Greek territories, including Egypt and Syria. They translated many Greek classics, whether obtained through the Byzantines or directly from conquered territories, and at least some of those were only obtained by the Western Europeans via the Arabic translations. As you yourself acknowledge, the Arabs were at the forefront of mathematics, astronomy and other sciences (the words "alchemy" and "chemistry" derive from Arabic) and as historian John Man said, formed "the cultural foundation that would fuel Europe's medieval revival in learning". Yes, some of the Arab scientists were Christian, and it is not entirely accurate to attribute Arab learning to the Islamic religion. But the civilization as a whole was Islamic, and so the statement is essentially correct. It is true that Islam as interpreted by conservative Muslims today does not encourage science, but then neither did the medieval Christian church, as Galileo and Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake for asserting that the stars were suns like ours) could tell you.
ReplyDeleteOn Galileo, see Dr William E Carroll of Oxford - http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/features_opinion/features_1.html
ReplyDeleteMore broadly, as my friend Professor John Milbank wrote in response to Boris Johnson's 'After Rome':
"After a good start and despite a fine presentational style and rebutting of certain myths, it perpetuated certain others about Islamic civilisation that the best recent continental research (see eg Sylvain Gounguinheim, 'Aristote au Mont St-Michel') has destroyed. The early Latin west was NOT uncivilised. Aristotle in Greek was knows at Gall and Mont St Michel before the arrival of the Arabic translations. The latter were done largely by oriental Christians anyway.
There would have been NO Islamic philosophy, science, medicine or libraries without oriental Christians and Jews (besides pre-Islamic Persian influence) whose contribution even after conquest continued to be vital. Also the role of Byzantium in transmitting ancient culture to the West has been downplayed. Moreover, Islam never integrated classical learning, whereas the West did this even in the darkest time of the dark ages and hence already pointed to the ‘Renaissance’.
To its credit the programme did gently knock the myth of Islamic tolerance, but surely it glossed over the rapaciousness of Arabic conquest. On the crusades it caricatured. Genuine concern for the holy places was not mentioned, nor the fact that this was in many ways a defensive war — Jerusalem being seen as an integral part of Christendom.
As for the theology of merit linked to the crusades — this was in part ironically borrowed from Islamic jihadist theology, and was refused by Byzantium. Of course the terrors of hell were a factor in the Latin west but to overstress them yet again is a cliché that ignores so much else — to say the least."