upside down..

@Zuperkrunch If you dial that clock back another 1000 years, Africa was the height of civilization, and everyone else was in mud huts. If you can't understand why they are where they are today, I suggest picking up a history book on European colonialism.

@TuxedoCartman hmm.. I didn't notice the african part in that pics.. Just europe and middle east.. Yeah we all know that spinx and pyramid are the masterpiece until now ☺☺☺ and colonialism destroy the original culture not only in africa

@Zuperkrunch There was a lot more than the Sphinx. The Library of Alexandria, The pyramids, the temple at Abu Simbel, The kingdoms of Sumeria and Kush, the huge stone city in present-day Zimbabwe. Europeans changed that. Both Greece and Rome took Egypt. Mongols took Bagdad. Europe took over, sometimes through force. Africa never recovered.

@EclipseMaster459 ow.. Nice info, thanx

@Zuperkrunch No Problem. I'm a self-appointed historian

@TuxedoCartman AD 15: Rome and China are the heights of civilization. Nice try, though.
Back ANOTHER 1000 years.... 985 BC: (North) Africa (and China) are the heights of civilization. North Africa has been the big boy for a good while, sees the Iron Age and decides it's cool if they only put in token effort this time around.
1985 BC: Africa is goofing off, Middle East is still going strong. China is, as usual, doing extremely well.

European colonialism was pretty terrible. Don't forget the thousands of years of African piracy and enslavement that predated it, though. Everyone has something to feel bad about.

@Tzenker Ya know, call it a hunch, but something tells me you really don't feel all that awful about how Africans were treated by Europeans. How did you put it? "Nice try, though."

@TuxedoCartman I feel pretty terrible about how people treat each other, which includes colonialism, slavery, piracy, genocide, holy war, and many other atrocities.

I do take exception to any one group that wants to present themselves as being exceptional. This includes the whole White Guilt movement that's just a flipside to the White Man's Burden.
Regardless of who you are, there's a nigh guarantee that your culture is not uniquely morally/physically/intellectually superior OR cruel. Your culture is not a beacon of civilization. Your culture is not a scourge on the Earth. You are not that special.

We should accept history. All of history. Not just cherry-pick. Then we should look at how we can improve the present and future. For everyone.

@TuxedoCartman How Africans were treated by Europeans? Have you checked how Europeans were treated by Europeans? It would be quite strange if Europeans had suddenly treated Africans well when they at the same time were busy killing each other in Europe. It's useless to dream of justice and good treatment in this world if you are too weak to ensure it for yourself. That's, of course, something you Americans have realised very well with your strongest military in the world. The Africans were just too weak. In fact many of the African nations are still too weak.

@Louhikaarme Generally was a pretty poor time, though the aftermath of colonialism would of wrecked any nation. In order to ensure properly loyal local governments minorities who were particularly good at ass kissing were put in charge of arbitrarily designated colonial states that had no respect for local natural social and culturally boundaries, which inherently puts a strain on any. These minorities were heavily reliant on foriegn support to keep power and had ingrained themselves not only as an upstart minority but one who had abused their power over a long period of time becoming a de facto opponent.

Once pressure caused western powers to pull their military support out and leave them with only a majority population with ingrained hate for them and highly unstable politically boundaries the powder keg was the obvious solution. Basically you carved up the multiculturalism of the former late eraa austrian empire and put the czechs in charge in an absolutism situation then withdrew all support and expected the hungarians, austrians, poles, serbians, bosnians, croatians, italians(All 3 groups of them or so), romanians, slovaks, etc to be like "This is perfectly OK. We all pretty much outnumber them in both population and economic strength, we remember that we have brothers abroad and old borders and nations despite centuries of occupation, and they no longer have a foriegn teet to suck on. We're perfectly fine being loyal."

It's really sad. How much did humanity lose when places like House of Wisdom, Library at Alexandria, and other others, were destroyed. Certainly some great literature that will never come back. I'm sure most scientific things were "discovered" again, but it may have delayed us further into some great discoveries.

https://vimeo.com/102210952

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom

It not only preserved the old greco-roman and persian texts of the classical era, but even improved upon them. If you were a scholar in those days, then the House of Wisdom was the place to be. Even Jews and Christians were allowed to study there.

Sadly the Mongols sacked the city and threw all the books into the river; so many in fact that the river was said to have run black with ink for a week.

@PaxRomana "Even Jews and Christians were allowed to study there." Which is good, when you consider they did most of the work... ;) https://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/07/the-myth-of-islamic-science

@Ferrari27 Jihadwatch is not a reliable source. It's an anti-muslim website which exists to spread intolerance.

'@PaxRomana' Don't waste your breath with these apes. Not worth talking to. Especially not some moron who puts "ferrari" as his username. :XD:

@dino-soar94 Yeah, you're right. I know people like that don't listen to reason.

'@PaxRomana' They don't. They just don't like islam and want to act like they care about what muslims do. They don't. They just want someone to hate.

@dino-soar94 What's really annoying is that they claim Islam is Un-American or that it's a threat to America ... even though the Founding Fathers (the people who founded America's Government and whose ideas form the basis of American Ideals even today) actually thought highly of Muslims and made a point of extending freedom of religion to them.

https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0205/tolerance.html

But then again, there's a reason intolerance is synonymous with ignorance.

'@PaxRomana' As a Muslim-American, my parents always taught me to love this country due to the fact of its opportunity and fairness (most of the time). People just talk out of their asses.

'@dino'-soar94 Its sad, A few rotten eggs, and they make the rest look awful. Damn Extremists and Jihadists make the majority of muslims look bad when they are not.

@SnideOyster Every religion has its crazies. The Islamic extremists are getting more opportunity to indulge in high-profile craziness due to the instabilities of North Africa and the Middle East, but it's not the fault of the locals that their region has been used as a proxy battlefield by foreign powers for over a century.

(Don't get me wrong, I don't subscribe to the 'America is to blame for everything' line that's fashionable in some quarters. There are plenty of others that have been equally guilty, if not more so.)

@PaxRomana agreeably a bad source, but fortunately, facts are independent from their source. See this section in the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom#Translation , or, better yet, one of its sources: "The Classical Heritage in Islam" by Franz Rosenthal.

@Natifftoff If you read the section just below the one you cited, you'd see that "Besides translation and commentary of earlier works, scholars at the Bayt al-Hikma produced important original research".

@PaxRomana They definitely did important original research, and I do not endorse the OP's position of "Muslims did not contribute to science".
But, as the OP remarked (and this is the part I wanted to emphasize), for most of the time, that school included a significant amount of Jewish and Christian Scholars. And if you look at what is known of the beliefs of the muslim scholars, most weren't very pious and orthodox. Science and religious orthodoxy don't mix particularly well. Rasis, one of the greatest physicians of all time, had to change cities several times to avoid persecution for his secular views.

@Natifftoff They sure are cherry picking though. True. A LOT of translation was done by christian and jewish scholars, because the appropriate language competence was common in those groups.
However, considering the strides made in Mathematics, Chemistry, physics, environmental science, medicine and scientific method it's dishonest to say that all the work was done by non-muslims.

Adding the fact that while Europeans were too busy denouncing each others as heretics, whacking each other over the head with various blunt and sharp instruments or killing jews the Abbasids created a haven for science that wouldn't see its likeness until the Renaissance and not surpassed until the 19th century.
That in the 7-9th century there was a place where jews, christians and muslims could work side by side in a relatively prestigious environment is an achievement by itself.

@fiendishrabbit True, creating a place where this kind of collaboration is possible is an achievment itself, and the scholars used their access to Greek, Persian and Hindu wisdom well. This is how multiculturality can create value: Well-educated people (who will, by their qualities, always be a minority) exchanging ideas in a civilized manner.

Unfortunately, those tolerant times were largely over after the end of the dynasty and the mongol conquest, and since the days of Amin al-Husseini in the mid-1900s, Jews, Christians and Atheists are persecuted throughout the Muslim world.

@PaxRomana I heard that in some other places that had important libraries during the Caliphate a part of the texts were rescued by the locals, and at least in one place they are passed down as heirlooms they bury in the desert so that they are not stolen, with the amount of books a family has being some kind of status symbol...


I really hope that something similar happened there.

@Kemm

Would be neat if they started finding books buried and forget in the desert.

There are many things that have been long forgotten, especially in the realm of doing things without power tools. We look at some things they made, like the pyramids, and try to figure out how they made them. A single book could help solve many mysteries.

@Steeeve That only could happen if a family has died out. However, trying would cause an uprising because you could accidentally find the hidden assets of still living families.

@Kemm Families keep them hidden? That's... horrible. Every day they go unstudied is another chance their information may be lost to us forever. :-(

@Steeeve they are their assets, their wealth. And they at least keep them well preserved. From their point of view, if they are discovered, they will be taken from them and they could be destroyed.

I think that there are some people who, if asked the right way, would allow for some of theirs to be studied (with conditions) if it's on a personal title (i.e. just a single trusted researcher, not a group or corporation).

@Steeeve In Egypt, something like this happened. Look up the "Oxyrhynchos papyri". Short version: Oxyrhynchos was a bustling city in antiquity, the canals supplying the water fell into disrepair after the muslim conquest, and the combination of dry desert climate and low population kept a lot of the papyri (which were just dumped in the desert) in good state. British archaeologists re-discovered the papyrus dumps over 100 years ago, and they proved to be a goldmine of ancient texts (from administrative paperwork to poems and philosophy), still being analyzed and yielding new results until today.

Looks like Sweden is sending Greenland's booze spirit to the Baghdad House of Wisdom for some much needed rehab.

Now that is a Place I would have Loved to go to.

Now the damn city is full of crazies, and nutheads, and ruins, ya know? It aint gonna get any better an' time soon

@SnideOyster You can thank Hulagu Khan for that. When he captured the city he pretty much killed everything inside, burned down all the buildings, and threw all the books from the House of Wisdom into the river. It's estimated that between 200,000 - 2,000,000 civilians died during the massacre.

The state of Baghdad is bad in modern times, and it's even worse when you consider how impressive it was in it's hayday. It would be like if someone dropped a nuclear warhead on New York City.

'@PaxRomana' it is pretty sad, i cant seem to think of city to compare it with actually, i guess after things settle down over there, that is if they ever will, maybe, just maybe, rebuilding can begin, but im pretty sure its a pretty poor city now isn't it? Just wondering

@SnideOyster If things calm down in that region then hopefully they can rebuild and make it into a great city again. But for now it's less than a shadow of what it once was.

'@PaxRomana' I see it sorta like Constantinople, Once Great, Ruined, And Came Back to be a great city again, maybe the same thing will happen with baghdad. Just Ya know, Without Ottomans this time xD

@SnideOyster That's actually a pretty good comparison, as Constantinople's fall also happened because of a massacre (this time by Venetians instead of Mongols).

Muslims often get blamed for burning the Library of Alexandria, though it was burned multiple times, by Muslims, Christians and Romans.

@Dan No the mongols get blamed for burning the library of Bagdad, the largest library in the world after the romans burned the library in Alexandria. They are different libraries and neither of them burned by Muslims.

@Carewolf

I wasn't talking about the one in Baghdad. And the Alexandria one WAS burned by Muslims in the 5th Century, long after the previous, more infamous attacks on the place.

My point being that Muslims have an unfair reputation for (non-Koran) book burning, as this Card points out.

@Dan Muhammad did not start Islam until the 9th century, So it was some other group that burned the Library of Alexandria in the 5th Century.

@FluffyRose Given Muhammad was born in the 6th century and died in the 7th, I'm going to guess you're both wrong. ;)

@nygma
Looks like there is some nuance to this:

"In AD 642, Alexandria was captured by the Muslim army of 'Amr ibn al-'As. Several later Arabic sources describe the library's destruction by the order of Caliph Omar. Bar-Hebraeus, writing in the thirteenth century, quotes Omar as saying to Yaḥyā al-Naḥwī: "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them." Later scholars, including Father Eusèbe Renaudot in 1793, are skeptical of these stories, given the range of time that had passed before they were written down and the political motivations of the various writers"

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

At this time also quite some new libraries got build, so a bit vague whether it was the same one the Julius damaged and does that matter...

What the hell happened?

@Eboreg As per Wikipedia: On February 13, 1258, the Mongols entered the city of the caliphs, starting a full week of pillage and destruction.

With all other libraries in Baghdad, the House of Wisdom was destroyed by the army of Hulagu during the Siege of Baghdad. The books from Baghdad’s libraries were thrown into the Tigris River in such quantities that the river ran black with the ink from the books. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi rescued about 400,000 manuscripts which he took to Maragheh before the siege.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom#Destruction_by_the_Mongols

@amypisces Blame the Mongols, especially Genghis Khan

@Eboreg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age#Decline

The mongols, the declining economy and rising mysticism introduced by religious philosopher al-Ghazali, according to wiki anyway.

Never knew that.