America- The Last Man Standing?

Excellent piece, thank you for posting. So much hinges on Israel's survival. But there are so few who see it that way because there are so few who have the stomach to face what that means.

"Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement

Internal causes led to the decline of Islam's scientific greatness long before the era of mercantile imperialism. To contribute once again, Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong.

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy August 2007, page 49

This article grew out of the Max von Laue Lecture that I delivered earlier this year to celebrate that eminent physicist and man of strong social conscience. When Adolf Hitler was on the ascendancy, Laue was one of the very few German physicists of stature who dared to defend Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity. It therefore seems appropriate that a matter concerning science and civilization should be my concern here.

The question I want to pose—perhaps as much to myself as to anyone else—is this: With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge? To be definite, I am here using the 57 countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) as a proxy for the Islamic world.

It was not always this way. Islam's magnificent Golden Age in the 9th–13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine. The Arabic language held sway in an age that created algebra, elucidated principles of optics, established the body's circulation of blood, named stars, and created universities. But with the end of that period, science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now. That arrested scientific development is one important element—although by no means the only one—that contributes to the present marginalization of Muslims and a growing sense of injustice and victimhood.

Such negative feelings must be checked before the gulf widens further. A bloody clash of civilizations, should it actually transpire, will surely rank along with the two other most dangerous challenges to life on our planet—climate change and nuclear proliferation.

First encounters

Islam's encounter with science has had happy and unhappy periods. There was no science in Arab culture in the initial period of Islam, around 610 AD. But as Islam established itself politically and militarily, its territory expanded. In the mid-eighth century, Muslim conquerors came upon the ancient treasures of Greek learning. Translations from Greek into Arabic were ordered by liberal and enlightened caliphs, who filled their courts in Baghdad with visiting scholars from near and far. Politics was dominated by the rationalist Mutazilites, who sought to combine faith and reason in opposition to their rivals, the dogmatic Asharites. A generally tolerant and pluralistic Islamic culture allowed Muslims, Christians, and Jews to create new works of art and science together. But over time, the theological tensions between liberal and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam—such as on the issue of free will versus predestination—became intense and turned bloody. A resurgent religious orthodoxy eventually inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mutazilites. Thereafter, the open-minded pursuits of philosophy, mathematics, and science were increasingly relegated to the margins of Islam.1"

I agree, but it will be a revised culture that allows the historically rationalist Mutazlites the opportunity to triumph over those Aharites.

I will have to find out about ibn Khaldun.

I had just got done writing a message to Rene.

In the book, The Ornament of the World, by Maria Menocal, she talks about teams of Spanish Arabs who translated Aristotle from Arabic into Hebrew so that Spanish Jews could translate it into the emerging Iberian dialect, which allowed Spanish Christians to translate it into Latin so it got published and sent off to Paris and other universities where it helped bring about the Renaissance.

The book was recommended to me by a rabbinical student.

This clash between fundamentalists and those who refuse to abandon reason is part of all great movements.

for a comparison of achievements down through the centuries: Euro-American vs Islamic.

And:

Yes, Islam has, as the 'story' above indirectly opines, 'bloody borders.'

Those borders are defined and policed by Israel, a nation sanctioning war crime, with the terrorizing massacre by Israel's IDF of over 420 young souls in Gaza, children, 1000s more maimed for life as well, and 50% malnourished, by the Israeli's professed campaign of ethnic cleansing, documented in tapes by Dov Weissglas February 2006 at the White House, and reported by Gideon Levy, a European Jew whose family emigrated to Israel, where he is on the editorial board of the newspaper Haaretz.

Yes, the borders are not the proper borders, the pre-1967 borders. The 'bloody borders' are those brutally and genocidally policed by Israel currently.

"'Who'll look after my little ones when I'm gone?'

In the second of five films, multimedia reporter Clancy Chassay hears from Karima, a 34-year-old mother of five, critically ill with Hodgkin's lymphoma, an aggressive but treatable form of cancer. Like all but immediate emergency patients, she has been refused permission to cross into Israel to receive vital treatment. Her doctors in Gaza say that without this treatment she will die"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/may/13/a.week.in.gaza