November 17, 2002
A DAMAGING MYTH:
The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth (Serge Trifkovic, November 15, 2002, FrontPageMagazine.com)This "golden" period in question largely coincides with the second dynasty of the Caliphate or Islamic Empire, that of the Abbasids, named after Muhammad?s uncle Abbas, who succeeded the Umayyads and ascended to the Caliphate in 750 AD. They moved the capital city to Baghdad, absorbed much of the Syrian and Persian culture as well as Persian methods of government, and ushered in the "golden age."This age was marked by, among other things, intellectual achievement. A number of medieval thinkers and scientists living under Islamic rule, by no means all of them "Moslems" either nominally or substantially, played a useful role of transmitting Greek, Hindu, and other pre-Islamic fruits of knowledge to Westerners. They contributed to making Aristotle known in Christian Europe. But in doing this, they were but transmitting what they themselves had received from non-Moslem sources.
One of the many problems with this myth is that it has served as a retardant on subsequent Islamic progress, because it has made it possible for Muslims to believe that Islam was once an effective competitor with Western ideas and can be again. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 17, 2002 12:48 PM
It's worse than those paragraphs make it
appear.
Most of the redactors of Greek learning during
the "golden age" were Syrian Christians.
They were protected, for a few decades, by
despots. The new generation of despots not
only stopped sponsoring infidel learning,
most of the surviving Aristotelians were
murdered.
At the time Newton was publishing the "Opticks"
and Europeans were building telescopes, the
most advanced Moslem society of the time --
in Delhi -- was building the largest, most
expensive, finest naked-eye celestial
observatory the world had ever seen.
The future of the modern West and premodern
Islam is military, and it will be a slaughter,
just as it has already been intelletually.
One, two, many Omdurmans.