Fjordman: To President Obama: Regarding Islam and Science

Fjordman sets the historical record and Obama straight on Islam and science …. well, the little that's there, anyway. This islamic revisionism and stealing the work of others is despicable. Obama furthering the lie is taqiya (deception to advance Islam). Islamic 'expertise' — and what it is best known for …..lies elsewhere. And yet we have to constantly repeat this utter nonsense — why? Do we have to reassure the Chinese on their contributions? The Americans? The Jews? Just sayin ….

Here's an excerpt. Read the whole thing over at Jihadwatch.

I
wouldn't say that absolutely no scholarly achievements were made in the medieval
Islamic world, only that they are greatly
exaggerated
for political reasons today. Let us divide scholars into three
categories: Category 1 consists of those who make minor contributions, category
2 medium-level ones. Category 3 consists of scholars who make major, fundamental
contributions to an important branch of science or found an entirely new
scholarly discipline. Examples of the latter would include Isaac Newton, Albert
Einstein, Nicolaus Copernicus, Aristotle, René Descartes or Galileo Galilei. Not
a single scholar of this stature has ever been produced in the Islamic world
even at the best of times. Finding some medieval Muslim scholars who made minor
contributions to mathematics or alchemy is not very difficult, and I can
probably name half a dozen to a dozen individuals who might qualify under
category 2.

The highest-ranking contribution of any Muslim scholar in my view came from
Alhazen
(Ibn al-Haytham) in optics. The mathematician Muhammad al-Khwarizmi did not
“invent” algebra; the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Indians, Chinese and
others had early forms of algebra; the most important pre-modern scholar was
arguably Diophantus of Alexandria in the third century AD, and modern algebra
was created in Europe. Nevertheless, just like you cannot write a history of
optics without mentioning Alhazen, you cannot properly write a history of
algebra without mentioning al-Khwarizmi. In historiography, Ibn Khaldun could be
mentioned, although he shared the contempt for all non-Muslim cultures which
hampered the growth of history, archaeology and comparative linguistics in the
Islamic world. Muslim scholars did not seriously study other cultures with
curiosity and describe them with fairness, al-Biruni’s writings about India
being one of very major few exceptions to this rule.

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Geber (Jabir ibn Hayyan) did good work in alchemy for his time and may have
been the first person to create some acids, but he falls far short of Antoine
Lavoisier and those who developed modern chemistry in late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century Europe. The Persian Omar Khayyam was a creative
mathematician, and fellow Persians Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and well as Rhazes
(al-Razi) were capable physicians for their time, but Khayyam was at best a
highly unorthodox Muslim and al-Razi didn't believe a single word of the Islamic
religion. Whatever contributions they made were more in spite of than because of
Islam. Moreover, while I do consider al-Razi to have been a competent physician,
the greatest revolution in the world history of medicine was the germ theory of
disease, championed by the Frenchman Louis Pasteur and the German Robert Koch in
late nineteenth century Europe. They were aided in this by the microscope, which
was an exclusively European invention.

It is true that some texts were reintroduced to Europe via Arabic
translations, at least initially before they were supplemented by translations
directly from Byzantine Greek originals, and that these have left traces in
certain words. For instance, quite a few stars in modern European languages have
Arabic names or Arabized versions of older Greek names. However, it is important
to remember that astronomy in the Islamic world, with certain exceptions due to
influences from India, was based on a Ptolemaic Greek theoretical framework,
just as it was in Europe. After the translation movement, it is striking to
notice how fast Europeans surpassed whatever scholarly achievements had been
made in the Middle East.

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Thanks for sharing!