Incidentally, Dan is responding to my comments without indicating who I am for some reason or another.
Another critic over on the home message board of one of the numerous anti-Mormon "Mister Scratches" continues to suggest that the books that my project translates are insignificant.
Whatever.
All anybody has to do to test his suggestion, I think, is to look up such names as Ibn Sina [= Avicenna], Ibn Rushd [= Averroës], al-Ghazali, Moses Maimonides, and the like, in a decent encyclopedia.
For that matter, even the great medieval poet Dante Alighieri, a devout Christian during a period when political correctness toward Islam carried no weight at all, put such folks as Avicenna and Averroës in the very highest circle of the Inferno (along with Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and Homer) -- the most positive compliment, given his theology, that he was capable of paying to them.
Of course, perhaps Dante's Divina Commedia is an insignificant work, too . . .
Dan still hasn’t addressed the point. Why is it that the works of Plato, Homer, Aristotle and Socrates have been long since translated into English, yet these medieval Islamic philosophers have not? If nothing from Plato was translated until the early 21st century, then I would question his significance just the same. Dan also makes a ridiculous comparison to Dante’s
Divine Comedy, which has been translated into English many times over and is widely considered the greatest achievement in the history of literature. In nearly a century of Orientalist studies, nobody in the West has taken it upon themselves to bother translating these Islamic works for the general public. My question is simple: why not if these works represent such a major contribution to world literature as Dan suggests? Dan responds by addressing peripheral comments from the post instead of the main question.
This, in and of itself speaks volumes about how unimportant these works are for modern readers. They appear to be of interest only to those who choose expertise in ancient Islamic philosophy, and again, these are generally those who already know Arabic.
Dan once assured me that thanks to Islam’s past achievements my life is “much richer” because of them. A rather arrogant assertion to be sure (I’ll be the one who decides what makes my life “richer”). But it seems Dan puts more stock into this assumption than most others are willing to do, except of course, other Muslim scholars who naturally think Islamic contributions are of the utmost importance, no matter how trivial they were then and now.
As far as Dante not tossing Avicenna into the pits of hell… so what? Maybe this is because Avicenna was a heretical Muslim who rejected basic Islamic principles such as the resurrection. According to Arberry, “Even during his lifetime Avicenna was suspected of infidelity to Islam; after his death accusations of heresy, free thought and atheism were repeatedly leveled against him.” Al Ghazali, drilled him along with Al Farabi, for heresy in his
Incoherence of the Philosophers. This was far more successful and resonated well in the Muslim world because it replaced free thought and philosophical ponderings with dogmatic literalism from the Quran. Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyya distrusted rationalism and logic, expressing certainty that the study of philosophy results in a loss of faith. These are products of Islam the religion, and they put an effective end to any meaningful, subsequent Islamic philosophical tradition. And we’re supposed to be thankful to them for…? They killed Aristotelianism in Islamic philosophy, which was its only saving grace to begin with.
Yet, Dan often throws up Avicenna as some kind of product of Islam for which we should all be grateful. Whatever greatness Avicenna gave to the world, apparently it was in spite of Islam, not because of it. As far as the latter goes, the most important contribution by Averroes was his translations of Aristotle. Dante placed them both in limbo, "the place that favor owes to fame," but again, so what? This doesn’t explain why nobody up until now, felt their works were important enough to translate for the rest of the English speaking world.