GZ- Unless I'm missing something, the Arabs
haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one. Chew this around and spit it out: Five hundred million Arabs; five million Jews.
I recognize that you are speaking informally here, but I think you are vastly overstating the case. I'm not too sure of my history here, but I think Arabs were the leaders, at least in the West, in mathematics for at least 500 years after the genesis of Islam. A little fact I keep in my head is that Fibonnaci spent some time in Arab lands and that it was an important part of his mathematical education.
Arabs were the great geographers of the world at a time when Europe slumbered. Arabs extended the wisdom of Ptolemy, and, I believe, lead Europe in the study of astronomy well into the 16th century, possibly even the 17th (it was a matter of importance that the local mosque truly face Mecca).
But Arab civilization failed to progress about the time that Europe started to kick into high gear, and that to me is one of history's great conundrums. I wonder to what extent constraints on natural resources may have limited it- but the Europeans succeeded in finding what they needed elsewhere and bringing it home (as just one example, a leading seafaring nation off the coast of Europe used trees from Russia to build its naval fleet that dominated the world). But the role of Islam as a constraining force on a people who towered over the Europeans for hundreds of years is one that should be explored (but anyone doing so risks a fatwa that could be hazardous to his or her health, which attitude of course is an important part of the Arab world's descent into the status of an also-ran). Of course, in the Arab imagination, their lost era of supremacy in the West could not have ended through any fault of their own- it was all the nefarious workings of the infidel. Just do not underestimate the importance of Arab learning to Western Civilization- I suspect it made all the difference in the world when Europe started to look outward.
Moreover, I think you rather overstate Arab demographics- isn't 200 million more like it? Regarding Arab attitude toward the sanctity of life, I use a comment by the glorious Egyptian leader Nasser as a touchstone. In the context of evaluating the prospects of annihilating Israel, he reportedly said something along the lines of, "We have sixty million, the Jews have two million. So what if we lose a million in the mission to exterminate them." That sentiment has been echoed more recently by the Iranian leader Rafsanjani (a "moderate") who stated he would be happy to sacrifice 10% of the world's Muslims if he could succeed in wiping out Israel (or perhaps he said Jews, I'm not sure). Truly the sentiments of an outstanding civilization.
Larry |
