(September 19, 2022 at 2:11 pm)Jehanne Wrote:(September 19, 2022 at 1:51 pm)polymath257 Wrote: 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.
Well, there is no doubt about the Islamic aspects of the qibla and spherical trigonometry. There is no doubt that the development of the 'arabic' number system, especially how computations were done, was an Islamic achievement. For a while, there was a very active Islamic philosophical tradition.
This came crashing down when Al Ghazali started to argue against philosophical discussion in general and anything 'non-Islamic' more generally. Whether you want to label Al Ghazali as a fundamentalist, his position became dominant and shut down the investigations that had been done up to that point, severely restricting what could and what could not be discussed. Fortunately, the centers at Cordoba were not as swayed by his arguments and continued to engage in intellectual activity long enough for the translation movement in Europe to copy the most important texts into Latin so they could be discussed in European universities.
As for the battle of Tours, I am not familiar enough with the details to say whether it was a 'raiding party' or not. But it is clear that the Islamic advances in territory stopped rather soon after that battle.
