(September 19, 2022 at 1:51 pm)polymath257 Wrote:(September 18, 2022 at 9:48 pm)Jehanne Wrote: Intellectuals flourished in Islam not because of it, but, in spite of it. Early on the caliphs were too busy fighting and consolidating power to worry about the intellectuals in Islam, whom they did not understand anyways. When political and religious consolidation began to solidify under the caliphates, it became time for these people to go, as they were clearly a threat to the religious order.
Again, not completely true. For example, spherical trigonometry was pushed forward by the problem of trying to find the qibla (direction to Mecca). Computation was enhanced by the legal aspects of inheritance. The earliest work on polynomials was done in Islamic lands.
The point is that the Islamic expansion brought together many different cultures and, for a while, those cultures mixed and generated great intellectual works, often because of questions inspired by religion.
I'm not an expert, but, I am not going to accept anything & everything that experts say; sometimes, the minority position turns out to be the correct one.
For instance, a number of historians have claimed that the Battle of Tours was just a "raiding party", which you can read about in Wikipedia. I find such a viewpoint, even among experts, to be absurd in the highest degree. I have found no good arguments to support it, and, as a layperson, I reject it.
Likewise, early Islam no doubt used mathematics & science, when such suited them, to further their own ends, but, when the Islamic empire reached its apex, the intellectuals in Islam became more of a threat than an asset; it was at this time that they began to be persecuted more and more, due to the intrinsic teachings of Islam, and not due to some "takeover" from "the fundamentalists", who, rather, were present from Day One.
