The hatred of Western Civilization, and the corresponding
urge to glorify anything outside it, especially if it can be depicted as a
victim of the West, is a well-known phenomenon of the contemporary liberal mind.
One of the forms it has taken in recent years is the attempt to artificially
inflate the historic achievements of other civilizations beyond what the facts
support. The noble savage myth is a commonplace; what is more complex is the
myth that has been bandied about concerning the supposed “golden age” of Islamic
civilization during what we know as the Middle Ages.
….In the exact
sciences the contribution of Al-Khwarzimi, mathematician and astronomer, was
considerable. Like Euclid, he wrote mathematical books that collected and
arranged the discoveries of earlier mathematicians. His “Book of Integration and
Equation” is a compilation of rules for solving linear and quadratic equations,
as well as problems of geometry and proportion. Its translation into Latin in
the 12thcentury provided the link between the great Hindu mathematicians and
European scholars. A corruption of the book�s title resulted in the word
algebra; a corruption of the author�s own name resulted in the term
algorithm.
The problem with turning this list of intellectual
achievements into a convincing “Islamic” golden age is that whatever flourished,
did so not by reason of Islam but in spite of Islam. Moslems overran societies
(Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, Syrian, Jewish) that possessed
intellectual sophistication in their own right and failed to completely destroy
their cultures. To give it the credit for what the remnants of these cultures
achieved is like crediting the Red Army for the survival of Chopin in Warsaw in
1970! Islam per se never encouraged science, in the sense of disinterested
enquiry, because the only knowledgeit accepts is religious
knowledge.
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