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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (10932)	1/14/2002 3:10:44 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

Islam was indeed a great civilization, far more advanced than Europe in the Middle Ages, and what Europe learned of the classical world and the sciences came through Arabic sources. There's a good reason that "admiral" and "algebra" are Arabic words in origin, and that our system for writing numbers is called "Arabic numerals" (they were actually Indian in origin, but Europe got them via the Arabs). If your living room has a sofa, a rug on the floor, and sash windows, it has Turkish-influenced architecture and furnishings. But Islam stopped advancing just as Europe went through the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, very very important periods that set the basis for modern philosophy, the separation of church and state, the scientific revolution, and the later Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. These things never happened in Islamic world. Bernard Lewis recently wrote a book about the Islamic world, called What Went Wrong?. I have only read reviews so far. But one reviewer noted that Lewis' main point is that the Islamic world was very good at absorbing culture and technology from regions they conquered -- Byzantium, Persia, India -- but very bad at absorbing influences from neighboring regions they had failed to conquer, like most of Europe. Whereas Europe was very good at absorbing knowledge from the Islamic world. So the upshot was, the Islamic world's absorbtion of new knowledge stopped as soon as they stopped expanding geographically, which was in the seventeenth century, while Europe kept learning.