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1001 Islamic Inventions
pev writes "There's a new traveling exhibition in the UK entitled 1001 inventions. It contains some of the most interesting inventions from the past few thousand years. The common theme, however, is that they all came from the Islamic world and not the west. In some cases [the list is] quite surprising. For the lazy, the Independent newspaper in the UK printed their top 20 from the exhibition."
Remember we owe the "Algorithm" to a dude who was writing 'programs' 800 years before Ada Loveleace and Alan Turing were about.
This letter that was sent in response to HPs CEO in late September of 2001 would disagree with this, and it has a lot of sources to back it up. Check it out here http://www.ninevehsoft.com/fiorina.htm
Arab/Muslim societies produced some fantastic engineering in their day, much of which is described in the dry but quite informative A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times.
For reasons that I don't understand, the Christian and Muslim worlds seem to have flip-flopped regarding the dominance of religion vs. rational thought somewhere in the past 200-500 years. Of course this is a great over-simplification, but it's worth remembering that there was a time when the Arab world was the center of learning and enlightenment in the non-eastern-Asian world (I phrase it like that b/c I don't want to flamebait the Indians or Chinese).
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
No, chess was developed by the Persians. Don't call Persians Arabs if you want to make any friends in Iran.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
The crusades did nothing to the islamic civilization, it was minor compared to other things. The crusades are highly exaggerated nowadays in their impact, back then they were even considered
so minor that a german/roman emperor could lease the holy land for a lifetime (and having a clash with the pope over this back then)
The main problem for the downfall of the arabic civilization might be the in islamic wars, which mainly was triggered by the turkish people slowly but surely taking over the islamic empire and in islamic wars between various countries.
The impact on the eastern roman empire was severe however, they sped up its downfall which was more or less unavoidable anyway.
In the end the islamic civilisation basically was fruitful due to knowledge inheritance of the occupied eastern roman empire parts, and being hilghly tolerant to christians and jews in the occupied areas. Culture could only thrive in this tolerant area.
Whoops, I overstated this.
... but we're a long way from that right now.
Yes, you did, and even in your latest post, you're still overstating it -- and providing the answer to the question in your original post. The reason that people who aren't straight, white, Christian males feel the need to celebrate the accomplishements of $DEMOGRAPHIC_GROUP is because although straight, white, Christian males have accomplished a hell of a lot, they haven't accomplished as large a proportion of everything as a lot of people (like you) seem to think they have; and those who are not swCm's feel justifiably aggrieved at having their accomplishments downplayed (or, in many cases, having the credit stolen outright.) Really, it's a matter of a pendulum swing; give it some time, and things will settle down. In a perfect world, we'd give everyone credit for their accomplishments without even noting their sexual preference, race, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, age, veteran status, height, weight, hair color, absence or presence of hair, musical tastes, et bloody cetera
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Not only is it possible that those statements you made are true, we have direct evidence, through DNA testing (voluntary of course) that showed common ancestery across vast swaths of populations. It does teeter on the edge of "dangerous" discussion, but it's true that if you go far back enough we're all related to each other somehow. Isaac and the rest of the people you mentioned have lived long enough ago for them to be true ancestors, so to speak.
What does it mean in the long run? In my opinion, not a whole lot. Other people's opinions may differ from mine.
Here's an example for the curious.
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
The truth, of course, is that the vast majority of all historical accomplishments were achieved by straight, white, Christian males.
You can't overlook the reasons behind this. Being straight, white, Christian, and male has nothing to do with inventions. The reason for this is that "straight" (I'd question the validity of this), white, Christians were the financial/military leaders over the past 200 years. Do you expect a black man to have been able to invent the ligthbulb from his slave quarters? Do you think a Pagan could have gotten funding from a catholic society to do medical research without being burned at stake? Do you think women had the educational opportunities to go forth in a male dominated society and been accepted as credible scientists? Do you think Leonardo DaVinci could have really come out of the closet?The truth is that African-Americans were enslaved and oppressed, Africans themselves were plagued with civil wars and apartheid, the jews were being eradicated in a hollocaust, the Japanese were getting a-bombed, the middle-east was still being bombarded with countless "cruisaides", women were raped, beaten and sent to the kitchen, and the straight, white, aryan, Christian males were sitting on top of their pile of money with guns drawn reaping all the benefits of being the "master race".
Now I know you're not a bigot, I just think you're disreguarding the fact that you are indeed a majority in every way. You might ask why there's black history classes, but no white history classes... because the "history" that you had in school is white history.
If you wanna be proud of anything, be proud of the fact that you are part of a race, sexuality, gender, and religion that has not been publicly ridiculed, tortured, eradicated, and had their ass kicked six ways from sunday for the past x-hundred years.
And not that I think its relevant, but I'm also a straight, white, Christian male.
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
I note a trend: the Arabs, perhaps because of their geographic location at the crossroads of the East and West, are bound to discover many new and exciting ideas and teaching from their neighbors. They were in pretty good company (Greco-Roman thoughts to the West, Indian thoughts to the East) so they are bound to pick up something.
Jesus's teachings went beyond the messiah prophesied by Isiah, and he did start a new religion
I find it just as likely that Christianity as we know it was created by Saul of Tarsus, who morphed Jesus's teachings into something useful to the Romans.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
No, exactly not like that.
Islam, as its holy tracts, includes (some subset of*) the Hebrew and the Christian testaments. Mohammed added very little, volume-wise, to the corpus. Bugger all, in reality, as it was people 100-200 years after Mohammed who were the creative ones** in their compilation of FoaF-attested Suras.
FP.
[* Likewise, Judaism only accepts a subset of the books into its current version of the official list; and Christianity only accepts a _tiny_ subset - there are several dozen Gospels that have bubbled into and out of popularity over the last 2 millennia, not just 4, for example.]
[** Just like Christianity.]
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
It's fairly note worthy historically to remind us that while the West was in it's period lovingly referred to as the dark ages, where where we'd lost most of our Greek heritage (such as the works of Aristotle) and religion was maintaining a stranglehold on free thought; Islam was fostering a period of intellectual thinking, and scientific progress. Of course it's also worth mentioning that as the dark ages broke into the Renaissance, Islam entered a sort of decline leading to their own dark ages with the exact same problem of religion dominating free thought.