(September 20, 2022 at 11:39 am)polymath257 Wrote:(September 19, 2022 at 2:11 pm)Jehanne Wrote: 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.
No one (including me) is doubting that Islam had amazing scholars; all that I am claiming is that Islam succeeded where Western Catholicism failed, namely, in suppressing the logical outcome of Greek science, which laid the foundations of the Italian Renaissance ultimately leading to the Enlightenment.
I do not know enough about Al Ghazali; if he led a "revolution", it was certainly a quiet one; even The Glorious Revolution centuries later in England was well remembered, even though it was bloodless, something quite atypical of the power struggles all throughout medieval Islam.
As for the Battle of Tours, such was not a raiding party. Two armies of 20 to 30K men each stared at each other for 8 days straight, with the Muslims having men on horseback with the Franks on foot. On the 8th day the former charged 3 times, each time being repelled, before the Franks got into gear before killing thousands. A decisive battle for Western Europe concluded shortly thereafter.
