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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: Shafik Habal who wrote (120030)	7/11/2000 6:39:13 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) of 1577586

Shafik, You totally misread my comments. Read back and see what I said. I said that arab science was at the lead when europe was in the dark ages and as islam spread it did indeed provide for a flowering of arabic science. What happened then? arab science went into a decline that has lasted to this day. Look at all the great work done from 650 onwards. Look at the decline after 1000 until the present day, and it continues. I can see that islam was a great unifying force among the arabs and other social groups and as it spread it provided a milieu in which scientists and their patrons were able to thrive. What happened then to choke off science in the areas influenced by islam?? I speculated that it was religious pressures that decried science as treading too closely on the religous orders toes by making discoveries that were contradictory to what was written. The same happened with christianity. Islam is a far more closely supervised religion than christianity is and that was true from the beginnings to the present. Christianity was more supervised in the middle ages with church twice a week or so, but it was never so closely and publicly supervised as islam. In islam it is immediately known if you do not appear at the 5 times daily prayers and a person is dispatched to find out why? Social pressure is focussed on outgroups and they are not welcome, and in time are forced to move. At the beginning islams was able to accept others as part of the growth and absorption phase, but as time went by the religion became more and more closed off from other religions, to the point of warring with them for religious reasons alone. these religious wars continue here and there to this day. Christianity too tried to shut down the scientists, but they slowly gained an ascendency and now religion has been beaten back to the point where less than 5% worship these days. (it varies from under 1-2% in many places in Europe, to local higher % in other areas in Europe and the USA) So I ask you whay did science decline as the militant religious groups gained control of islam and shut down science in islamic areas? Even now the highest dream of many families is to have their male children become part of the religiour order and thus the smartest are streamed into these areas? As for the female children...drudge labor is their lot. There is variance in assorted islamic countries viv-a-vis the treatment of women. Some are enlightened and they can actually show their faces. Some like lebanon are very free and women wear dresses and bikinis. In others they must be totally robed and can never appear in any place with a man other than their husband who can dress anyway he pleases. How do you explain this degree of repression which seems to be spreading as militant fundamentalists seems to be gradually growing the ares of very close supervision? Perhaps now you see that I was never decrying the arab contribution to science at all, but lamenting that it had gone away? Bill

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