Okay, first question. Muslims used to be the best when it came to science and technology, academia in general. How was it that these specific Muslims came to be so good at what they did? Please keep in mind that Muslims are not the only ones who have ever done this sort of thing, so let's try to describe things that could be done by non-Muslims just as easily as Muslims. As an example- the closest thing to an answer that I've heard so far describes how key Muslim cities were very well-connected to the rest of the world, all sorts of people from all over the place descended on these places, and everyone was able to learn from everyone. Stable government and a relative lack of corruption would probably be worth mentioning as well. But this is just an example, and these are general ideas without specific citations to anybody's research or published work, which is more like the kind of thing I'm generally looking for.
Now the second question. After spending several centuries being ascendant and awesome, Muslims stopped being any good at these sorts of things. It was almost like a prolonged dark ages. There are a couple of different things I'm curious about, like just how sudden was it, and were the effects immediately felt by all Muslims? Were there some who soldiered on fairly well while others fell to the margins of academia more quickly? Were there specific schools, research facilities, or places of higher learning that shut down, failed, or were destroyed in any discernible pattern? But mostly, I'm looking for this. Why did this part of the story happen, in general? An example of an answer might be that Islam became withdrawn from the rest of the world (why? when?), and was no longer open to ideas and innovations from abroad. (Innovation is not always a bad word). Of course, this explanation is only about as good as the initial explanation, if it is any good, and I would still be curious to know about citation, references, and more specific details. Once again, this is an example, and once again, I won't be able to do very much with answers like "Well, the Muslims were faithful to Islam, and then they must not have been." I'm going to go ahead and assume that the general fidelity of Muslims to Islam is an entirely independent matter that has little to no bearing on what a society is able to achieve in the sciences, and I will continue to try and find out what was being done right and then done wrong by these vastly different people from different eras of Islam's history.
Thanks for the thread cooterhein. I believe the best answer to the above concern about Muslim world is in the words of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf (Born Mark Hanson accepted Islam and is the leading Islamic Scholar in North America). He touches on the key points that can explain why Muslim world's conceptual thinking has been lost, the cause of deterioration...
Sheikh Hamza Yusuf in one of his lectures on the topic
'Converying Islam at Oxford' says the following:
Now, the Muslim world (and this is another aspect) - is that I think there's an immense amount the Muslim world can learn from the West-I really believe there are things we can learn from Islam-but I also believe there's an immense amount that Muslims today can learn from the West. One of the great tragedies in the Muslim world is the tragedy of failed states. And many of us have no idea what it is like to live in a country where you do not have redress to the basic wrongs that occur in society, when court systems do not function, when there is no judicial review. These are immense problems in the Muslim world. Currently, the problem is not democracy because democracy cannot be established in the Muslim world.
I do not believe democracy can be established currently in the Muslim world because the social institutions that are necessary for democracy to come about simply do not exist. And I'll give you one example because I'm an adherent to the congruence theory in sociology and one of the basic principles of that theory is that governments are only effective to the degree in which the governing model is congruent with the other social institutions of society. So, government is effective to the degree in which the model of governance permeates the other social institutions of society. So, if you have a despotic government, it is effective when you have despotic schools, when you have despotic families, when you have despotic unions, when you have despotic trade unions and when you have despotic political parties.
Like or contrary-wise, democracy is only effective to the degree with which you have democratic institutions. I'll give you one example that many people in the West have no idea of. In much of the Muslim world, in the schools today there is not the idea of asking questions, or questioning the authority of the teacher. The teacher's authority is almost absolute. And this is still widespread, and it [is] absolutely hard to believe. You have very despotic educational institutions and therefore people who grow up in that despotic environment naturally-if they ever get into positions of power, whether it's at the most basic governmental level-they begin to express those despotic models that were imbibed in their schools, often in their families, where the father has an absolute word. And these models, which were quite common in the West not that long ago-but an immense amount of work went into eradicating many of these models.
One of the things that my Arab friends are very surprised about when they come to America, and I've seen this on many occasions, is the idea of offering your child a choice for what it's going to eat for dinner-"What would you like to have for dinner tonight?" I've seen Arab friends of mine that said, "That's so crazy to ask a child what it wants for dinner!" But that question is part of enfranchisement. It's part of having a democratic household where children actually have a say, where children can choose. It's learning how to choose which is a process. And this unfortunately does not exist in many parts of the Muslim world-the idea of an elective system. I've had people who have come from the Muslim world to study in America and went into shock when they were asked to choose their classes because it was the first time in their life when they were not told what to study. And some of them were at a loss because they had never really thought about that. What Ericson calls "identity foreclosure" is very common in the Muslim world-where you do what your father tells you to do. You study what your6father tells you to study. You do not follow your passion which is actually very alien tithe Islamic tradition, but unfortunately quite common in the Muslim world.
One of the things that one of the early educational theorists of Islam, Qadi AbuBakr ibn al-Arabi, who is a great Andalusian scholar, said was, "It was very important to observe a child's natural intellectual inclinations and then to encourage them to pursue those intellectual inclinations because the natural genius of that child would emerge. If a child was forced to study what it did not have natural propensities towards, it would thwart its intellectual development." This was in a text that was written in the sixth Islamic century. Imam al-Ghazali, for instance, in his book on pedagogy, talks about never humiliating a child in front of other children, quite a common occurrence in much of the Muslim world in classrooms where children are humiliated. I mean these are very serious problems that result in many of the social conditions that we find very troubling in the Muslim world.
Now, just as the West has gone through an immense amount of transformation-not always positive by the way, but we have gone through an immense amount of transformation-we tend to forget that much of what we have inherited is a result of extraordinarily stupid (and there's no other word, really - asinine, perhaps)-extraordinarily stupid religious wars that occurred in the sixteenth, the seventeenth and even the eighteenth century. Wars that really led intellectuals in some ways to really question this whole idea of a religious intolerance. It led to people like Thomas Hobbes, somebody who was also influenced by Henry Stubb, an extraordinary man who was very impressed with the Ottoman tradition of religious tolerance and wrote a book during that time, in the mid-seventeenth century, called The Rise and Progress of Mohammedanism and had an immense amount of praise.
Another extraordinary seventeenth century character here at Oxford, EdwardPococke-there's actually a picture of him on the wall. Edward Pococke was a man who went to Aleppo to study Islam and this is in 1630. And you can imagine this is an extraordinary time to go to the Muslim world. One of the things that struck him about the Muslim world was the tolerance. He became very well-acquainted with the Muslim scholars of Aleppo and writes very lovingly about these scholars. He also became acquainted with the Jewish scholars. He sat in circles where the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims discussed their religious texts in ways much more enlightened than the current dialogue going on today.
And when he came back to Oxford, he collected over four hundred Arabic manuscripts that are still here in the Bodleian Library. The Chair of Arabic studies was founded and he was its first Chair. I believe this an extraordinary event in Western history. He had an immense respect for the Muslim world. He was a teacher, but also a friend of John Locke-and John Locke was very influenced by his ideas. The extraordinary fairness of Edward Gibbon, given the limited resources that he had, in The Decline and the Fall of the Roman Empire towards Islam. If you look at his sources, many of his quotes are taken directly from Edward Pococke's works in which he recognized some of the really beautiful qualities of Islam. It's also very interesting that Gibbon mentions in his history that "Had the Muslims conquered-that is, in 732, defeated Charles Martel-perhaps the students of Oxford today would be circumcised and be studying the truths of the Qur'an and the teachings of Muhammad." So, he actually envisaged that possibility because it was a real possibility-but it did not happen.
http://shaykhhamza.com/transcript/Conveying-Islam-at-Oxford
so you just wanna ... talk loosely, got it. Not into wasting time man - when you are serious, we can talk properly, with research to hand, ok?
eace: