{"id":3237,"date":"2020-03-29T05:10:32","date_gmt":"2020-03-29T05:10:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/03\/29\/islam-and-civilization\/"},"modified":"2020-03-29T05:10:32","modified_gmt":"2020-03-29T05:10:32","slug":"islam-and-civilization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/03\/29\/islam-and-civilization\/","title":{"rendered":"Islam and Civilization"},"content":{"rendered":"
The following just over the transom. <\/span>I thought I was being appropriately critical of what is undoubtedly the worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism"<\/a> (Schopenhauer), but apparently I haven't gone far enough for one of my  readers.   Balanced and reasonable positions don't have much of a chance in this age of polarization and extremism.  There are people to my Right who think that women should not have the right to vote, and there are people to my Left who think that children and illegal aliens should have the right to vote.  I am tempted by the self-serving thought that I am one of the few sane people left.<\/span><\/div>\n
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You write<\/a>: "Has Islam played any role in the civilizing of the peoples in the lands where it has held sway? Yes, of course."<\/span><\/div>\n
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This strikes me as extremely doubtful. About a year ago, I read "Mohamed & Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy" by Emmett Scott, and it was eye-opening. Islam conquered a peaceful, highly civilized Christian civilization in Asia, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, and absolutely destroyed them, to the point where there is virtually no history of those lands from 650 to 950 AD–no writing, no archaeological signs of building or commerce. The devastation is so complete that some historians argue that the years did not exist at all–that it is a mistake in the calendar (I get the impression this is largely considered a crank theory, but the fact that it has any currency at all gives evidence to the devastation of the Muslim conquests). There are stories of the great Muslim cities built during that time, but archaeology has not been able to find evidence of them.<\/span><\/div>\n
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As to civilized behavior: In Roman times, the harshest punishment Christians usually doled out to heretics was banishment. Then they interacted with the Muslims for several centuries, and the Spanish Inquisition was born to copy Muslim practices. There is strong evidence that the Viking raids which ravaged the coasts of Europe for nearly a century were inspired by Muslims who were paying a premium for blonde-haired blue-eyed girls (and probably boys). There were a tiny number of Muslim scholars worth reading, but primarily by Muslim converts, non-Muslims living in Muslim lands, or Muslims copying the work of non-Muslims in other non-Muslim lands.<\/span><\/div>\n
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The legacy of Islam is war, devastation, piracy, cruelty, totalitarianism, and slavery. Every large-scale culture must have a few innovations, but as far as I can see, all the evidence says there is nothing like a systematic improvement of the human condition that comes out of Islam.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Regards,<\/span><\/div>\n
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David Gudeman<\/span><\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.unobtainabol.com<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following just over the transom. I thought I was being appropriately critical of what is undoubtedly the worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism" (Schopenhauer), but apparently I haven't gone far enough for one of my  readers.   Balanced and reasonable positions don't have much of a chance in this age … Continue reading “Islam and Civilization”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[147,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civilization-and-its-discontents","category-islamism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}