(May 9, 2015 at 2:19 pm)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote: Muslims seem to be generally super-conservative Southern Baptists but without the baptism part.
If observant, they show more self-discipline with respect to religion than conservative Christians do. After all, they have to abstain from food and water in daytime during Ramadan, a whole month. And pray 5 times a day.
(May 9, 2015 at 6:04 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote: Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Islam fairly enlightened during that time, comparatively speaking? It seems like a more moderate strain was prevalent at that time that at least allowed for scholarship and the preservation of Greco-Roman learning. The modern fundamentalist strain took hold somewhere around the 12th century.
Islamic scholarship had a high point around the 9th to 13th centuries, I think, having to do with their cultural contacts with Byzantium and India. This was during the caliphate of the Abbasids in Baghdad, ca. 750-1250. Achievements in mathematics and astronomy are noted here. But the initial period of conquest, the Umayyad period, ca. 630-750, was pretty chaotic and warlike. Kind of a simplistic summary, the best I can do in 50 words. I tend to associate fundamentalist resurgence more with the Wahhabi sect in 18th cent. Arabia than with the earlier Abbasids or Ottomans. You may want to consult the historians rather than take my word on these things, opinion varies.
However, with respect to government and social structure as opposed to science, I think Islam is still struggling to come to terms with the modern world, which was basically imposed on them after World War I. Christianity went through those struggles earlier, during the Reformation and 17th-18th century "Enlightenment" era. The Christians are unlikely to develop anything resembling Islamic State today, even in the event of a government's collapse. There are also relatively progressive Muslim lands, Tunisia, Lebanon, Turkey, and Bosnia among them. These countries are threatened by ultra-Islamist parties or insurgencies right now. We have the "lost opportunities" in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt which once had forward-looking governments that failed, often with help from Western meddling related to oil and shipping interests.
