| superchunk said: 1) Every society the ruling party has advantages over the others. However, I was referring directly to religious freedoms and in that Islamic empire was centuries ahead of anyone else at the time and FAR more advanced that today's Muslim nations. This supports my OP in that Islam is not the cause of this extremism, but its the extremists themselves and their made up Hadiths. 2) You're basically right. The basics of what became algebra do date to Indians. However, Arabs are the ones who finalized it as a distinct math discipline as well as much of its techniques. From Wikipedia: While the word algebra comes from the Arabic language (al-jabr, الجبر literally, restoration) and much of its methods from Arabic/Islamic mathematics, its roots can be traced to earlier traditions, most notably ancient Indian mathematics, which had a direct influence on Muhammad ibn MÅ«sÄ al-KhwÄÂrizmÄ« (c. 780–850). He learned Indian mathematics and introduced it to the Muslim world through his famous arithmetic text, Book on Addition and Subtraction after the Method of the Indians. He later wrote The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, which established algebra as a mathematical discipline that is independent of geometry and arithmetic. 3) I actually did not know this. I thought only the concept of zero came from Indians, but the use of a decimal based system stemmed from Arabic. 4) I wouldn't fully agree here. When the Roman Empire fell to barbarians, Greek literature was being tossed out. The Islamic Caliphs had already begun translating and hording great literature from the rest of the ancient world and among that was the Greek literature. This is specifically why a lot of astronomy uses Arabic words, which were simply translated from previous Greek names and works. Also, the Library of Alexandria's destruction is not actually known. There are some Arab sources that claim it was from Arab invaders, but many disagree with this for various reasons. Is it possible, yes, is it fact, no. http://www.bede.org.uk/library.htm 5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom This is the library I was referring to. I did not state it was the invention of all libraries, just the first that's specific intent was to house all the world's knowledge. Granted, that title of 'first' probably belongs to the Library of Alexandria, but none the less, this library shows the great lengths the Islamic empire went for in studying information and knowledge. Something its clearly not known for now, but was an essential part of early Islam where there was no distinction or confrontation between science and religion. 6) Again, I did not state they invented Astronomy. Just propelled the tools and knowledge base from what they gained in Greek literature. Many unique tools and the beginnings of the telescope all stem from this expansion of the study of astronomy. 7) You may be simply washing aside anything an Arab or Muslim has accomplished over time. I prefer to stick to actual history and historians view points. 8) What does slavery have to do with this? First of all, slavery in the Qur'an is heavily mitigated and based on those rules it is no where near the same as slavery in the US. There are more ways to get a person out of slavery in Islam than to be a slave. Fact is, slavery was simply a part of society then and isn't even discussed in other religious literature, so by that can we take it to mean it was also accepted in any form for others? |
It was just to put things in perspective, because I think that you are a little too enthusiast. For example, the Arabs call the "Arab numerals" "Hindu numerals", and the Latin numerals were decimal if you know what decimal actually means. When you say that the Islamic empire was century ahead of its time for religious freedom, you should study a bit more the history of the Roman empire, or even of the Kingdom of Sicily.
The slavery thing is on topic, because, you know, social and political knowledge is also important. In your OP you said you hope in an Islamic Renaissance, well a Renaissance doesn't happen all of a sudden, it needs a lot of social and political advancements and a lot of self-awareness from the masses: civil rights, constitutional laws, a political system are all advancements that happened in a time span of centuries in the western world.
