Back when Europe was still struggling through what they call their dark ages, the Islamic culture still was a beacon for learning. Throughout the last thousand years, they have produced a lot of literature. Having some of it translated into English will benefit future generations of English speaking scholarly egghead-type readers. That in turn will keep them off the streets and out of harms way.
There was no “Islamic culture” to be proud of until the Arab armies, invaded, conquered, stole, borrowed and built upon the accomplishments of those cultures before them. Before that time the Islamic culture began as a band of pirates led by a fanatic thug, named Muhammed.
Scholars like Peterson like to romanticize about the so-called “golden age” of Islam, which for the most part is just myth. Many of the famous “Muslims” he relies upon to show how Islam produces cultural beauty, were really people who made accomplishments in spite of Islam, not because of it. Many of them rejected Muhammed and would be murdered today if expressing their views in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Within a couple of centuries the geographic expansion of the Islamic empire was larger than the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was in decline to say the least, and this created the dark ages; whereas the Islamic empire was growing at an unprecedented rate, the peoples were more upbeat and apt to ingenuity. But this only lasted for a few centuries. But yes, naturally, there would be accomplishments in various sciences within this huge geographic region that fell under Islamic rule, but there is absolutely no reason to believe it had anything to do with Islam the religion. In fact the evidence demonstrates that Islam the religion hindered many advances in science, especially medical science. For example, Islam is praised for building the first hospital, but doctors in Islam were extremely limited because the religion prohibited the drawing of the human body. Thus, diagrams of the human anatomy were permitted.
Individuals such as al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes just took greatness from other people and contributed absolutely nothing to philosophical ideals.
Pretty much. Can you name me just one thing each of these men contributed to human society that wasn’t already there?
“To be fair, the myth of the golden age of Islam does have a partially valid starting point: there were times in the past when Moslem societies attained higher levels of civilization and culture than they did at other times. There have been times, that is, when some Moslem lands were fit for a cultivated man to live in. Baghdad under Harun ar-Rashid (his well-documented Christian-slaying and Jew-hating proclivities notwithstanding), or Cordova very briefly under Abd ar-Rahman in the tenth century, come to mind. These isolated episodes, neither long nor typical, are endlessly invoked by Islam’s Western apologists and admirers... Three speculative thinkers, notably the three Persians al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna, combined Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism with other ideas introduced through Islam. Greatly influenced by Baghdad’s Greek heritage in philosophy that survived the Arab invasion, and especially the writings of Aristotle, Farabi adopted the view—utterly heretical from a Moslem viewpoint—that reason is superior to revelation. He saw religion as a symbolic rendering of truth, and, like Plato, saw it as the duty of the philosopher to provide guidance to the state. He engaged in rationalistic questioning of the authority of the Koran and rejected predestination... But these unorthodox works no more belong to Islam than Voltaire belongs to Christianity. He was in Moslem culture but not of it, indeed opposed to its orthodox core. He examples the pattern we see again and again: the best Moslems, whether judged by intellectual or political achievement, are usually the least Moslem.” -
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Re ... sp?ID=4626
Does anyone ever wonder why philosophy died in Islam many centuries ago? Because of the great philosophical battle between Avicenna and Al Ghazali. The sad thing is that the latter won the hearts and mind of Muslims while the former was considered a heretic and the idea that revelation trumps reason continued to prevail even to this day. Ïncoherence of the Philosophers”was the beginning of the end of “Islamic philosophy” which was merely Greek philosophy placed in an Islamic context.
And I also believe that this is a waste of taxpayer money. I mean who is really going to read this stuff and care?
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein
