A New Dark Age
Scientific America recently posted an interesting and informative article/slideshow on great Muslim scientists of the past. The article highlights some monumental achievements physics and mathematics. Some of these achievements were already known to me, while others were a surprise. According to the article, the oldest continuously operating university in the world was founded by a Muslim woman.
Strikingly, the most recent example provided by the author dates back to A.D. 1206. Are there no more recent examples? If so, why? Certainly, a belief in Islam did not impede the immensely influential scientific contributions of Muslims in Medieval times. Yet, it appears that such intellectual development has been stagnant in the modern Muslim world.
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Jul '10
Re: A New Dark Age
Um, that's what happens when you marry your cousins for 60 generations.
But seriously, folks...the Muslim world depended largely on slave labor for centuries, while leaving commerce to the Dhimmi's; there was little incentive for fresh thought and innovation.
Meanwhile, the path to social prominence for those not among the tribal elites was through Islamic scholarship, which meant that the most ambitious among them spent their time studying the Koran, the Hadiths and Sharia. Even today, over 75% of the college degrees awarded in the Islamic world are in the fields of religious study.
Imagine if Jonas Salk, Bill Gates or the Wright brothers had decided to study medieval Christian texts.
Edited on Mar 23, 2011 at 6:11pmMay '10
Re: A New Dark Age
There's a good book by Bernard Lewis on the topic: What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. It asserts that Middle Eastern culture developed an ethos of victimhood, but I don't recall it explaining why that sense emerged.
Jul '10
Re: A New Dark Age
Let's start with the basics, folks. I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough about world history to make claims of certainty here, but there are a few obvious things to consider.
1)The Islamic conquests were rapid.
2)Many of those conquests were of ancient, developed civilizations.
So, I have three questions:
1) Are we confident that the scientific/heuristic advances that took place in Islamic Persia, Anatolia, North Africa, Spain, Mesopotamia, Syria, Judea, Egypt, et al. from the 7th-13th centuries were in any meaningful sense Muslim accomplishments?
2) Isn't it possible that while Islamic imperialism obviously spread some good ideas, those ideas were developed in spite, rather than because of Islam?
3) Wouldn't a "yes" to #2 explain the relative stagnation of the post- medieval Islamic world?
I'd love to hear from Walsh (but not only Walsh) on this.
Edited on Mar 23, 2011 at 7:39pmDec '10
Re: A New Dark Age
Pace Palaeologus:
What Islam did in places like Alexandria, Cairo, Baghdad, Constantinople (eventually) & other (previous) centers of learning was provide stability. It was what many of us would consider horrid, if not downright evil, but stability non the less.
This stability lent itself to the possibility of the spread of information, and, to a small degree, the possibility of adaptation & improvement.
I agree with my new "Pal" above, though: this was, for the most part, in spite of Islam not because of it.
Feb '11
Re: A New Dark Age
This is one example of a phenomenon that recurs numerous times throughout world history; civilizations have golden ages of immense productivity not just scientifically but by every measure of human achievement.
A perfect example of this is ancient Athens. Try to name ten Greek men of genius and you will no doubt come up with a list of people almost exclusively from this one city in a span of a couple hundred years two and a half millennia ago.
Gupta India (320-570 AD) was a beacon of civilization in the world, and never before nor since has India been as nearly as creative and dynamic as a culture.
Ancient Rome, the Han and Tang Chinese dynasties, Britain in its imperial days, Renaissance Italy, and the whole of Western Civilization after c1500 AD are all examples of this.
Though it is hard to imagine after witnessing the backwardness of modern Islamic civilization, there was a time when it was the most fruitful, energetic, and productive civilization on earth.
Islam is often mocked today for being stuck in the seventh century, but sadly medieval Islam was far more tolerant, creative, and open to new ideas than fundamentalist Islam is now.
Jun '10
Re: A New Dark Age
I think the historians think of the Muslims as traders. They allowed the Indian and Chinese civilizations' many inventions to be spread. Eventually, even backwards old Europe started to be influenced by the great ideas.
Edited on Mar 24, 2011 at 7:31amFeb '11
Re: A New Dark Age
1) The rapid spread of Islam led to the introduction of new crops into the Middle Ease, North Africa and Spain. These included, if I remember correctly, sugarcane, cotton, and rice and some citrus trees. Extra calories and cheaper clothing caused increased wealth which may have encouraged increased learning and innovation. (Recent scholarship has contested this theory.)
2) The Abassyyd Caliphate originated in Persia, which suggests that some of its accomplishments may have come from Persian influences. Certainly the movement of the capital from Damascus to Baghdad suggests this possibility.
3) A recent book by Turin, “The Long Divergence” argues that differences in European and Islamic laws of inheritance, and the failure of Islam to adapt the Roman concept of corporations, eventually led to a shift in relative wealth between the Islamic world and Europe. According to the Koran, property belonging to an individual had to be divided among multiple heirs, preventing the accumulation of private capital. And nothing like a western corporation existed to keep non-state capital concentrated and able to survive the death of corporate founders.
Oct '10
Re: A New Dark Age
I have no doubt that human genius is fairly evenly distributed across space and time. It is culture which encourages or discourages the propagation of ideas and technology.
Thus it should not be surprising that ethnic Arabs/Persians have produced individuals of genius who made contributions to science. The difference, in terms of the propagation of those ideas and their translation into material "science" (technology) is that western Christian culture either developed or embraced modernity, with its improved communication relative political and economic stability, the availability of "venture" capital, and a legal system undergirded by a system of rights and obligations lending itself to reliable contracts. Whereas eastern Islamic culture has yet to adopt many of the central ideas and methodologies of modernity, and is in fact at war with much of modern western culture.
Oct '10
Re: A New Dark Age
Steven Zoraster: 1) The rapid spread of Islam led to the introduction of new crops into the Middle Ease, North Africa and Spain. These included, if I remember correctly, sugarcane, cotton, and rice and some citrus trees. Extra calories and cheaper clothing caused increased wealth which may have encouraged increased learning and innovation. (Recent scholarship has contested this theory.)
2) The Abassyyd Caliphate originated in Persia, which suggests that some of its accomplishments may have come from Persian influences. Certainly the movement of the capital from Damascus to Baghdad suggests this possibility.
3) A recent book by Turin, “The Long Divergence” argues that differences in European and Islamic laws of inheritance, and the failure of Islam to adapt the Roman concept of corporations, eventually led to a shift in relative wealth between the Islamic world and Europe. According to the Koran, property belonging to an individual had to be divided among multiple heirs, preventing the accumulation of private capital. And nothing like a western corporation existed to keep non-state capital concentrated and able to survive the death of corporate founders. · Mar 24 at 7:15am
All points valid and well taken, especially #3.
Jun '10
Re: A New Dark Age
One thought: Based on the other excellent posts, perhaps the title of the this post "A New Dark Age" would more accurately have been "The Old Dark Age Continued."
Oct '10
Re: A New Dark Age
Excellent insight: I like it!
May '10
Re: A New Dark Age
Culture of Carnage says it all to me. The West does things differently. China had big inventions too. They had movable type and gun powder. It was Western culture that took things to a different level. Even in the Middle ages the best Islam could do was to hold land in Spain.
Islam has been been in the shadow of Western Civilization for its whole life.
May '10
Re: A New Dark Age
Steven Zoraster: 1) The rapid spread of Islam led to the introduction of new crops into the Middle Ease, North Africa and Spain. These included, if I remember correctly, sugarcane, cotton, and rice and some citrus trees. Extra calories and cheaper clothing caused increased wealth which may have encouraged increased learning and innovation. (Recent scholarship has contested this theory.) [snip]
· Mar 24 at 7:15am
Yes, intriguing. . .and don't forget Islam received a competitive advantage thanks to European decline during the dark ages, which may have been caused (partly caused?) by a cold climate. If so, the Medieval Warm Period really saved our bacon. That, and lentils.
Oct '10
Re: A New Dark Age
I would expect that technological development is tied to the overall success of a country/region. Much of the early wealth in the Middle East derived from their control of the trade routes. When Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa into the Indian Ocean at the end of the 15th century, he opened up a new sea route between Europe and Asia. European ships, built to weather the Atlantic gales, enabled the West to overcome local resistance and establish naval supremacy in the Arabian and Indian Seas. By the 17th century this had allowed the Portuguese, Dutch and others to establish bases – and later colonies – in Asia, effectively outflanking the Middle East. If this is compared to the self-imposed isolation of China in the 15th century, which for them was the beginning of the end when it came to competing with other countries and remaining technologically equal, there may be a parallel: what went wrong in the Middle East is that it did not expand and diversify enough. A western European-based civilisation that expanded around the globe and accessed near unlimited natural resources became dominant, and took over the technological lead.
Jun '10
Re: A New Dark Age
Fredosphere: I don't think that European culture (before the modern era) was ever as great as Indian or Chinese high civilizations (or Egyptian civilization either).
The time of the geographic spread of Islam was only at the beginning and had huge repercussions. But, once they were stopped in their growth and after a couple centuries, they fell into a long term complacency. They considered Europe a backwater and failed to notice its rise. Once they did respond the Muslim countries were not unified or capable enough to mount a challenge. Their chauvinism forced them into a defensive crouch rather than to grow and compete. They have been insisting on respect ever since. Respect is code for "I get to kill you if you don't acknowledge my superiority."
Jun '10
Re: A New Dark Age
Oct '10
Re: A New Dark Age
Modernity seems to contain a synergy of factors, cultural, scientific, economic, political, etc, which have resulted in technological advancement; a symbiosis wherein the whole is not only greater than the sum of the parts, the whole is involved in a positive feedback loop such that individual positive developments rapidly result in further development of other parts of the system, increasing the potential of the whole. This product is grounded in the factors mentioned in previous posts.
Unfortunately, the system does have inequities within it which inhibit the diffusion of benefits to all members of the society; resulting in cries for social justice and attempts to use government as a tool for the redistribution of the material wealth produced by the system we are referring to. And, some societies without the cultural tools to sustain the positive feedback loop, fail to derive any prolonged or diffused benefit from the system itself, resulting in a loss of memory of those ideas and innovations which have had potential benefits to the society. Sometimes these ideas and innovations are rediscovered and transplanted into more fertile cultural soil in space and time, resulting in a blossoming of beneficial technology in those other places and times.
May '10
Re: A New Dark Age
Louis Manger: Certainly, a belief in Islam did not impede the immensely influential scientific contributions of Muslims in Medieval times. Yet, it appears that such intellectual development has been stagnant in the modern Muslim world. ·
I think that many Muslims eventually started taking their religion a little too seriously. The methods of deduction as seen in logic and mathematics and of induction as seen in physics and chemistry cannot co-exist with a rigid interpretation of the Koran.
Oct '10
Re: A New Dark Age
Michael Labeit
I think that many Muslims eventually started taking their religion a little too seriously. The methods of deduction as seen in logic and mathematics and of induction as seen in physics and chemistry cannot co-exist with a rigid interpretation of the Koran. · Mar 24 at 11:08am
I think rather that the religion of Islam is fundamentally authoritarian and does not foster a culture of freedom necessary for the development of the liberal ideas of the balance between the duties and responsibilites of the individual and society which result in the material wealth created by free markets and free societies. Nor does it provide enough of the necessary presuppositions for the growth of liberal democratic societies which are the creators of material wealth on a modern scale.
Feb '11
Re: A New Dark Age
"Strikingly, the most recent example provided by the author dates back to A.D. 1206. Are there no more recent examples? If so, why?"
It was the Mongols. They have never recovered from Mongol invasions, burnings, and sackings. As so often in such situations, they turned inwards. Just look at the time line.