Accomplishments of Islam

rebornFixer

farfromglorified wrote:

Typically, it is. But of course there is much racism in this world and to call it out is not, by default, a "defense mechanism".

Racism is just faulty logic. It is rarely useful to call a racist a racist. It makes more sense to simply correct their premises. When you simply scream out "RACIST", it typically means you can't back it up.

Yes, I mean overuse of the term, not its use in all cases. One thing that irks me a bit is the one-sided use of the term. It is more commonly applied to members of the majority (read: White) group, be it justified or not.

farfromglorified

reborncareerist wrote:

Yes, I mean overuse of the term, not its use in all cases. One thing that irks me a bit is the one-sided use of the term. It is more commonly applied to members of the majority (read: White) group, be it justified or not.

Well it's sort of a wierd issue. Systematic racism acted out by whites tends to damage two parties (whites and Other) whereas systematic racism acted out by "minorities" damages a single party (Other). In other words, minority racism just tends to be self-defeating whereas majority racism tends to be wholly defeating.

This has led to a foolish element of society to believe that racism is tied to systematic power. This means somehow that a disadvantaged group can't be "racist" while an advantaged can be. What they fail to understand is that racism and power are not mutually dependent, particularly considering the irony that such viewpoints have allowed minorities to gain power at the cost of the established majorities regardless of that majority's propensity for racism.

Racism is a failure of logic...a systematic ideology that ties race to unrelated characteristics. And logic (along with such failures) is irrespective to power or to color.

rebornFixer

farfromglorified wrote:

Well it's sort of a wierd issue. Systematic racism acted out by whites tends to damage two parties (whites and Other) whereas systematic racism acted out by "minorities" damages a single party (Other). In other words, minority racism just tends to be self-defeating whereas majority racism tends to be wholly defeating.

This has led to a foolish element of society to believe that racism is tied to systematic power. This means somehow that a disadvantaged group can't be "racist" while an advantaged can be. What they fail to understand is that racism and power are not mutually dependent, particularly considering the irony that such viewpoints have allowed minorities to gain power at the cost of the established majorities regardless of that majority's propensity for racism.

Racism is a failure of logic...a systematic ideology that ties race to unrelated characteristics. And logic (along with such failures) is irrespective to power or to color.

Well, I think the formulation of racism as a logical error is brilliant, and I agree with the second paragraph as it is ... Wondering, though ... How do you figure that racism by minorities only damages themselves? I am not sure that I can agree with that, based on both personal experiences and things I have observed. In fact, Islamic extremism is a very racist ideology, and provides a stirling example of when racism by minorities (in North America, at least) can have bad consequences for all of society.

miller8966

MrBrian wrote:

They were known to be very progressive, they had huge libraries, were great in science. So it's not accurate to say that islam took anything away, the height infact was during the times of islam.

Muslim mathematicians were the best in the world at one point, so were muslim doctors. geology, art medicine. the list is huge.

How they live now should not take away from the many many amazing things they've done, It's accurate to say that without them, we'd still be in the dark.

The muslims were also great at taking older works (by the greeks and such) and preserving them and adding to them, that's when everyone else wanted to burn these books cause they were "the devils work"

Yes, they did partake in these achievements and should be applauded for them...the sad part is that these accomplishments were done Centuries ago....

farfromglorified

reborncareerist wrote:

Well, I think the formulation of racism as a logical error is brilliant, and I agree with the second paragraph as it is ... Wondering, though ... How do you figure that racism by minorities only damages themselves?

The same way any logical error damages the person in error. If you assume 2+2 = 5, you'll have a really tough time in life. Similarly, if you assume that all black people are stupid, all white people are racist or all Arabs are terrorists, you'll have a tough time marrying the real world to the fantasy land you've built in your head.

I am not sure that I can agree with that, based on both personal experiences and things I have observed. In fact, Islamic extremism is a very racist ideology, and provides a stirling example of when racism by minorities (in North America, at least) can have bad consequences for all of society.

Islamic extremism is quite racist. And would you not agree that they're damaging themselves far more than they're damaging others? Certainly 2,000 dead in New York is horrible, but it pales in comparison to the damage done to millions of resident Arab peoples.

I'm not making the claim that minority racism cannot hurt a majority target. It certainly can! But rare is the case where minority racism harms the majority more than that minority.

rebornFixer

farfromglorified wrote:

Islamic extremism is quite racist. And would you not agree that they're damaging themselves far more than they're damaging others? Certainly 2,000 dead in New York is horrible, but it pales in comparison to the damage done to millions of resident Arab peoples.

I'm not making the claim that minority racism cannot hurt a majority target. It certainly can! But rare is the case where minority racism harms the majority more than that minority.

I will concede that point, yes.

MrBrian

farfromglorified wrote:

Of course not!! Rather, the many amazing things they've done should make them ashamed of where they are today. And the terrible things they're doing today are certainly a reason for us to reject their prescriptions and demands and to examine our own societies and way of life to ensure we're not adopting their standards and modus operandi.

Yes they should be ashamed of themselves, It's sad to see them these days, I mean from the very highs to now the very lows, of course the west helped bring them down historically speaking, but one can not ignore them doing it to themselves as well, greed and power helped play a roll in the current state they are in along with outside influences.

Like saudi arabia,iran and iraq for example these days, iran was doing fairly well until 1953 when the cia started to mess around with them, arabia became saudi arabia and we all know the history of iraq.

But I hope to see them regardless break away from this circle they are going in, it would also help if america stopped spinning it and if my short education in latin is correct, america has it's own standards of modus operandi that they need to look for and change themselves.

Open

miller8966 wrote:

Yes, they did partake in these achievements and should be applauded for them...the sad part is that these accomplishments were done Centuries ago....

Explain to me the point that you're trying to make; in your own words not an article.

farfromglorified

MrBrian wrote:

Yes they should be ashamed of themselves, It's sad to see them these days, I mean from the very highs to now the very lows, of course the west helped bring them down historically speaking, but one can not ignore them doing it to themselves as well, greed and power helped play a roll in the current state they are in along with outside influences.

Like saudi arabia,iran and iraq for example these days, iran was doing fairly well until 1953 when the cia started to mess around with them, arabia became saudi arabia and we all know the history of iraq.

But I hope to see them regardless break away from this circle they are going in, it would also help if america stopped spinning it and if my short education in latin is correct, america has it's own standards of modus operandi that they need to look for and change themselves.

I completely agree!

MrBrian

alright cool bro, always nice to see people find common ground.
---

Now I gotta run, I got a date.

VivaPalestina

The accomplishments Muslims have made in science, mathematics, political science, medicine, sociology, philosopy, etc. at their height and apex pale in comparison to the accomplishments made by the Jewish scholars you have listed, who along with others in the West owe a great amount of debt to the strides and the pathways Muslim scholars have created. The list of scholars and there accomplishments is exhaustive.

Of course what is pointed out to is the present, because Islam and its followers are now under the microscope for all the wrong reasons and detractors cling at anything to paint Islam and Muslims in a bad light. Which miller has attempted in his comparitive list. While yes the Golden Age of Islam is in the past, again the present could not be without the accoplishments of Muslim scholars.

Scholars have cited many reasons as to the decline of scholarship by Muslims.
A portion of an article by Michael Woods lists clearly the many events in history and present that caused this:

"Universities were an Islamic invention later adopted in Europe, but Muslim universities did not shelter and preserve scientific knowledge during wars and other upheavals. Christian warriors carved up the Islamic empire and cut off contact between great scientific centers. Here in Spain, the Catholic reconquest of Ferdinand and Isabella deprived Islamic science of the great libraries and schools in Cordoba, Seville and Toledo.

Conflicts also cut off science's lifeblood -- cash for research and education. And the Ottomans, who took over much of the Islamic world in the early 1500s, used their resources to make war, not science.

In the 1700s, a puritanical form of Islam took root in Saudi Arabia, with a doctrine that rejected knowledge acquired after the first 300 years of Islam's existence.

Several scholars said one problem is the lack of awareness among Arabs and Muslims about their own scientific heritage.

"Muslims generally are unaware that their civilization had a high point of superiority in nearly every aspect," Cooper said. "Their current challenge is to face the fact that the Islamic edge has been completely lost.

"It would be a hard thing, I think, to be part of a religion and culture with such a glorious history as that of Islam, when that glory is all in the distant past, and an essentially godless civilization -- from their perspective -- enjoys the lead in power and science."

Eventually, in the United States and Europe, science began paying some of its own bills. Inventions like the telephone, radio, plastics and antibiotics led industry to pour billions into scientific research. In much of the Arab world, science remained dependent on handouts from sultans, kings or caliphs.

"Science and scientific research can flourish only when a country is affluent and has a sound and balanced economy," said Ahmad Y. al-Hassan, also a faculty member of the Arabic science institute at the University of Aleppo. "But when agriculture is the dominant sector, then a country will remain poor, and when petroleum is the only source of income, then this economy in the long run also is doomed."

Others also cited Arab oil wealth, and how rulers spend and invest their billions.

"They probably would have been better off without their mineral resources," said J. J. Witkam of Leiden University in The Netherlands. "It is a corrupting element in any society. But when societies are so unbalanced as most Islamic countries are, then it gets cancerous proportions."

The United Nations Development Program called oil wealth "a mixed blessing" in a 2003 report that called on Arab countries to reclaim their scientific heritage. It focused on the 22 members of the League of Arab States and their 280 million people.

UNDP pointed out that Arab rulers invest much of their oil money in the United States and other foreign countries, rather than using it to develop their own nations, and import technical know-how instead of educating ample numbers of their own citizens to be scientists and engineers. The report also cited "the pursuit of personal gain, the preference for the private over the public good, social and moral corruption, the absence of honesty and accountability and many other illnesses."


And the article rightly ends with the following quote, which I am sure many can agree with and hope for (save for detractors and those who have other agendas behind lists, etc.)

"The pendulum can swing back," wrote Ibrahim B. Syed of the University of Louisville in an article about Islamic medicine:

"One thousand years ago the Muslims were the great torchbearers of international scientific research. Every student and professional from each country outside the Islamic Empire aspired, yearned, and dreamed to go to Islamic universities to learn, to work, to live and to lead a comfortable life in an affluent and most advanced and civilized society.

"Islamic countries have the opportunity and resources to make Islamic science and medicine number one in their world once again."

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04102/299292.stm

even flow?

miller8966 wrote:

[No idea the original source of this, but found it interesting comparison]
The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000, or 20% of the world population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Peace: 1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat 1994 - Yaser Arafat

Physics: 1990 - Elias James Corey 1999 - Ahmed Zewail

Medicine: 1960 - Peter Brian Medawar 1998 - Ferid Mourad

The Present Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000, or about 0.02% of the world population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature: 1910 - Paul Heyse 1927 - Henri Bergson 1958 - Boris Pasternak 1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon 1966 - Nelly Sachs 1976 - Saul Bellow 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer 1981 - Elias Canetti 1987 - Joseph Brodsky 1991 - Nadine Gordimer World

Peace: 1911 - Alfred Fried 1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser 1968 - Rene Cassin 1973 - Henry Kissinger 1978 - Menachem Begin 1986 - Elie Wiesel 1994 - Shimon Peres 1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Physics: 1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer 1906 - Henri Moissan 1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson 1908 - Gabriel Lippmann 1910 - Otto Wallach 1915 - Richard Willstaetter 1918 - Fritz Haber 1921 - Albert Einstein 1922 - Niels Bohr 1925 - James Franck 1925 - Gustav Hertz 1943 - Gustav Stern 1943 - George Charles de Hevesy 1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi 1952 - Felix Bloch 1954 - Max Born 1958 - Igor Tamm 1959 - Emilio Segre 1960 - Donald A. Glaser 1961 - Robert Hofstadter 1961 - Melvin Calvin 1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau 1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz 1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman 1965 - Julian Schwinger 1969 - Murray Gell-Mann 1971 - Dennis Gabor 1972 - William Howard Stein 1973 - Brian David Josephson 1975 - Benjamin Mottleson 1976 - Burton Richter 1977 - Ilya Prigogine 1978 - Arno Allan Penzias 1978 - Peter L Kapitza 1979 - Stephen Weinberg and 1979 - Sheldon Glashow 1979 - Herbert Charles Brown 1980 - Paul Berg 1980 - Walter Gilbert 1981 - Roald Hoffmann 1982 - Aaron Klug 1985 - Albert A. Hauptman 1985 - Jerome Karle 1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach 1988 - Robert Huber 1988 - Leon Lederman 1988 - Melvin Schwartz 1988 - Jack Steinberger 1989 - Sidney Altman 1990 - Jerome Friedman 1992 - Rudolph Marcus 1995 - Martin Perl 2000 - Alan J. Heeger

Economics: 1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson 1971 - Simon Kuznets 1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow 1975 - Leonid Kantorovich 1976 - Milton Friedman 1978 - Herbert A. Simon 1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein 1985 - Franco Modigliani 1987 - Robert M. Solow 1990 - Harry Markowitz 1990 - Merton Miller 1992 - Gary Becker 1993 - Robert Fogel

Medicine: 1908 - Elie Metchnikoff 1908 - Paul Erlich 1914 - Robert Barany 1922 - Otto Meyerhof 1930 - Karl Landsteiner 1931 - Otto Warburg 1936 - Otto Loewi 1944 - Joseph Erlanger 1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser 1945 - Ernst Boris Chain 1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller 1950 - Tadeus Reichstein 1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman 1953 - Hans Krebs 1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann 1958 - Joshua Lederberg 1959 - Arthur Kornberg 1964 - Konrad Bloch 1965 - Francois Jacob 1965 - Andre Lwoff 1967 - George Wald 1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg 1969 - Salvador Luria 1970 - Julius Axelrod 1970 - Sir Bernard Katz 1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman 1975 - Howard Martin Temin 1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg 1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow 1978 - Daniel Nathans 1980 - Baruj Benacerraf 1984 - Cesar Milstein 1985 - Michael Stuart Brown 1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein 1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini] 1988 - Gertrude Elion 1989 - Harold Varmus 1991 - Erwin Neher 1991 - Bert Sakmann 1993 - Richard J. Roberts 1993 - Phillip Sharp 1994 - Alfred Gilman 1995 - Edward B. Lewis

I can't believe YOU forgot, highjacking some airplanes and bitch slapping America!

Puck78

I think we should simply ignore miller

VivaPalestina

Puck78 wrote:

I think we should simply ignore miller

I totally agree.

Just the total bs line of his:

miller8966 wrote:

[No idea the original source of this, but found it interesting comparison]

I just found it, under my bed, no, it slipped behind a drawer, no idea where it came from. Okay, sure.

lalalalaaaaaaaa

Using these people as examples of typical Muslims and Jews is pretty silly. People like Yaser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Henry Kissinger are hardly men of peace. They're all, in fact, mass murderers and terrorists. They in no way represent the populations of their respective countries. If anything, that comparrisson makes the point that the leadership any sort of people can win peace prizes for being corrupt, violent, and disgusting.

If the point of that was to show how much better Jews are than Arabs, I could do the same thing just by comparing the prize winners in my own country, USA. That comparrisson would show that white men are better and smarter than black people, women, etc. etc. It's a weak method of comparisson.

miller8966

purrmo wrote:

The accomplishments Muslims have made in science, mathematics, political science, medicine, sociology, philosopy, etc. at their height and apex pale in comparison to the accomplishments made by the Jewish scholars you have listed, who along with others in the West owe a great amount of debt to the strides and the pathways Muslim scholars have created. The list of scholars and there accomplishments is exhaustive.


http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04102/299292.stm

1 accomplishment every 12000 years is nothing to brag about...

farfromglorified

miller8966 wrote:

1 accomplishment every 12000 years is nothing to brag about...

Neither is a lack of knowledge of history.

RockinInCanada

Saturnal wrote:

Using these people as examples of typical Muslims and Jews is pretty silly. People like Yaser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Henry Kissinger are hardly men of peace. They're all, in fact, mass murderers and terrorists. They in no way represent the populations of their respective countries. If anything, that comparrisson makes the point that the leadership any sort of people can win peace prizes for being corrupt, violent, and disgusting.

If the point of that was to show how much better Jews are than Arabs, I could do the same thing just by comparing the prize winners in my own country, USA. That comparrisson would show that white men are better and smarter than black people, women, etc. etc. It's a weak method of comparisson.

Great last point...this thread makes a very weak comparison......

OutOfBreath

Well, I dont think islam has accomplished much apart from it's spiritual elements for it's followers. Like most religions really. Religions dont invent stuff or get nobel prizes, people do. And few people from that region has been dominating the world, since that region has not dominated the world for a long while. Like most other regions that were colonial playgrounds until WW2, they are fucked up in so many ways.

But I doubt people of muslim faith are any less bright than people of other faiths.

Peace
Dan

MrBrian

OutOfBreath wrote:

Well, I dont think islam has accomplished much apart from it's spiritual elements for it's followers. Like most religions really. Religions dont invent stuff or get nobel prizes, people do. And few people from that region has been dominating the world, since that region has not dominated the world for a long while. Like most other regions that were colonial playgrounds until WW2, they are fucked up in so many ways.

But I doubt people of muslim faith are any less bright than people of other faiths.

Peace
Dan

The point is, many of those things were invented,discovered and secured by muslims, true islam is very progressive.

Education,science,medicine,health and such are very important in islam. If a large part of it's so called followers these days fail to understand that, well that's another story.