Until the advent of materialism and 19th c. dogma, Western Civilisation was superior to anything Islam had developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam. Proof of this resides in the 'modern' world and the unending political-economic and spiritual poverty of Muslim states and regions. Squatting on richer civilisations is not 'progress'. Islam is pagan, totalitarian, and irrational.
Critics of Islam usually demand a Western style reformation to drag the Arab creation out of the 7th century pre modern pagan mind-set, into the modern world. There is little chance of that happening. Islam is an ideology – a political project first and foremost. A reformation is impossible when you are dealing with ideas which are closed to discussion; repetitive; ritualised; and inherently imperialist. The myth of an Islamic reformation is one of many which abound about this so-called 'religion'. [Perhaps Hitlerism is also a religion].
Some general myths held about Islam by the media and the general public within the Western world:
1. Islam is open to a reformation
No it isn't. Islam is a total project. 'Total' meaning that the social, civil, spiritual, and intellectual life are governed by pre-set rules and rituals. Total mandates that all things in a Muslim's life belong to Islam. Individual Muslims will opt out of many or even most of Islam's demands. But the ideology does not opt out of its totality. Any system of thought which is total in nature is by political extension totalitarian. And as anyone who has read the history of such concepts, these systems of living are not open to change.
It should be noted that the Western 'Reformation' was no such thing. The nationalist movements usurped Church authority and established national churches. The 'Reformation' was based on only scripture, or 'sola scriptura'. The entire edifice of Christian history, including miracles, traditions and even art and architecture was attacked, debased, and in many locales destroyed. Books were also committed to the fire. What the Protesting movement did was to remove eccelsiastical power from Rome and situate it in the local. Hence, the massive transfers of wealth in England under Henry VIII, from the Church to the State, which was replicated across Europe and an important factor in the upper middle class revolt against the 'system' called the French Revolution.
2. Islam's violence can be reformed
No it can't be. Islam is based on 2 ideas: 1. the word of the Quran and 2. Mohammed as the last prophet of 'God'. Both ideas are supremacist meaning that the Quran is the superior book and path of living because it comes from Islam's perfect man – Mohammed. Neither idea is going to be jettisoned. This supremacism justifies violence and aggression.
3. Muhammed was just like Jesus
Christianity has little in common with Islam, if one looks at what Christ actually taught and what the apostles attempted to teach to others or 'Gentiles'. Christ is a good example of how men might wish to live and what moral values they might wish to hold. Mohammed was the opposite of Christ of course. Christ enacted the second covenant around love and forgiveness. Christ deployed an endless array of miracles and healing. The Resurrection is the greatest miracle in history and has only been replicated by Catholic saints such as Saint Francis of Assissi or Saint Vincent de Ferrer.
Mohammed was a political – military leader who lead 80 odd military campaigns; slaughtered caravans; stole gold and property; adjudicated violence; broke agreements; killed with his own hands; was an anti-semite; had sex with a 9 year old girl; was a voracious womanizer; an owner of sex-slaves; an accomplished liar; and a role model only for a violent, pagan, war like and immoral society. Much of Islam wants to emulate Mohammed – or so Islamic writings and teachings profess. It does not take a great deal of imagination to fear the type of society which would be created through the production of little Mohammeds.
4. Islam is only fighting back against Western oppression
The great imperialist project is of course Islam. The Arab 'wave' took over the Near East, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, parts of India, North Africa, and Spain. The Turkish wave invaded the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Russia, central Asia, and even parts of China. The Crusades were simply a very feeble, and rather dilatory response to 400 years of Muslim aggression against Europe.
As stated by Gregory M. Davis author of Religion of Peace? Islam's War Against the World:
“Following the defeat of the Ottoman army outside Vienna on September 11, 1683 by Polish forces, Islam went into a period of strategic decline in which it was overwhelmingly dominated by the European powers. Much of dar al-Islam was colonized by the European powers who employed their superior technology and exploited the rivalries within the Muslim world to establish colonial rule.
While many of the practices of the Western imperial powers in the governance of their colonies were clearly unjust, it is utterly unwarranted to regard Western imperialism -- as it often is -- as an endemic criminal enterprise that is the basis of modern resentment against the West. It was only due to the assertive role of the Western powers that modern nation-states such as India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, Zimbabwe, etc. came to exist in the first place. Without Western organization, these areas would have likely remained chaotic and tribal as they had existed for centuries.
When one looks at the post-colonial world, it is apparent that the most successful post-colonial nations have a common attribute: they are not Muslim. The United States, Australia, Hong Kong, Israel, India, and the South American nations clearly outshine their Muslim-majority post-colonial counterparts -- Iraq, Algeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, etc. -- by just about any standard.”
Davis is of course right. Islam has been a failure - a complete one - on any standard one cares to use to measure life, freedom, free speech, and individual worth - not to mention material comforts. But for many in the revisionist, self-loathing, multi-cult loving West, reality is too hard to face.
5. Islam 'invented' civilisation!
This is my personal favorite. The Arabs and Muslims have invented everything – according to Western Islamo-apologists – from ice cream, to flying, to math, to science, to medicine, to architecture and pretty flowers. Wow. Who would have guessed that the Muslim world which is mired in poverty, violence, hate, anti-Semiticism, anti-Americanism, corruption, failed economies, and totalitarian systems of civil organisation, is the heir to this resplendent and wonderful cultural civilisation ?! Islam's complete modern failure, makes it obvious that it was Islam and cultured, advanced, peaceful, and smiling Muslims who had created the modern world !
As Gregory Davis so rightly wrote in his great book referenced above, “The achievements of Islamic civilization are pretty modest given its 1300 year history when compared to Western, Hindu, or Confucian civilizations. Many Islamic achievements were in fact the result of non-Muslims living within the Islamic Empire or of recent converts to Islam. One of the greatest Islamic thinkers, Averroes, ran afoul of Islamic orthodoxy through his study of non-Islamic (Greek) philosophy and his preference for Western modes of thought. Once the dhimmi populations of the Empire dwindled toward the middle of the second millennium AD, Islam began its social and cultural "decline."
Muslims invented very little. They squatted for centuries on richer, more advanced and intelligent societies, starting with the Byzantine lands, Persia, northern India and then across what was once Romanised North Africa and Spain.
6. Most Muslims are peaceful !
My second favorite. How do you know ? Do you know what goes on in the minds of Muslims ? Ever been to a mosque ? Ever been exposed to Arab culture and its shrill demands to kill Jews ? How do you explain recent surveys of university educated Muslims – 40% of whom want Sharia Law in England for instance. Is that peaceful ? How do you explain the 18.000 Muslim attacks across the world since 2001 and the 1400 years of war, jihad and Islam's bloody borders ?
It is the ideology which counts and who controls that ideology. Someone's wish or demand that all Muslims are peaceful and happy, is simply not supported and is refuted by 1400 years of history and recent Islamo-fascism which is a global phenomenon, predicated on the idea - first espoused by Mohammed - that Islam will dominate the world. There is no proof that all Muslims are moderates and that all Muslims want co-existence.
These are some of the core myths which pervade Western society and education. They are utterly wrong. Islam is a direct threat to civilisation and even to Muslim's themselves. There is no chance of an internal reformation. It has been stated many times and needs repeating – Islam will only be reformed from without through exogenous change, initiated by military intervention. That is the reality, sad as it might appear to the legions of multi-cultural devotees and their cultural Marxist friends.
Another hoary and persistent myth issued by Muslims, academics, 'experts' and chattering media talking-heads, is that Islam and the Greater Arabian empire had 'golden' epochs of multi-cult, inter-faith harmony. All was light and wonderment apparently, during this Arab golden age. 9th century Abbasid Spain is usually cited as the epitome of multi-cultural grandeur with pious, peaceful, tolerant Muslims, Berbers and Arabs enjoined in improving civilization, side by side with Jews, Christians and assorted infidels. This lie is perniciously amusing – and entirely untrue.
The Muslim-Arab conquest of Spain during the 8h century was not one of genial courtesy, imparted with civilized countenance. It was a jihad with all the blood, destruction, and enslavement that a Muslim jihad demands.
It is an absurd fantasy that a large-scale Muslim-Arab invasion of a rich Christian state, during the 8th century AD, would not have ended up as a conquest, replete with massacres, deportations, coerced conversions and extraordinary bloodletting. It is equally insane to suppose that a society built around the intolerant fascism of the Koran would suddenly and quite magically become a multi-cult potpourri of goodwill, hope, faith and brotherly love. Al Andalus was never recognised until recently as the medieval name for Spain. It was always Hispania, but academics, 'experts' and 'those who know' are keen to destroy the Christian legacy which created European civilisation and the modern world. They therefore Arabicise the Romano-Christian civilisation of the Visigoths and Hispania.
Spain represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews.
Occupied Spain was hardly a peaceful, academically-inclined society. War and violence were endemic. Slave trading prominent. The rape of women common. Jews and Christians along with other slaves were tolerated only for their usefulness. The Muslims regarded them as little better than trained monkeys who might improve either the profits or the efficacy of the Arab controlled state. They certainly were not considered the equals of Arabs and would therefore have had little real contact in any area of importance. As in all Islamic societies, the dhimmis would have been shunned by their masters. Glorious cooperation between the 'faiths' in Al-Andalus is a bold faced lie.
Two writers amongst many who know that real historical legacy of the Arab subjugation and eradication of Christian Spain are Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom. Both are respected experts on Islamic history, including the destruction which ensues once a state such as Christian Spain becomes Islamicized:
“We believe that reiterating these ahistorical, roseate claims about Muslim Spain abets the contemporary Islamist agenda, and retards the evolution of a liberal, reformed ‘Euro-Islam’ fully compatible with post-Enlightenment Western values. Iberia [Spain] was conquered in 710-716 AD by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a strong faction of royal Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings.”
“In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians were tolerated as dhimmis – like elsewhere in other Islamic lands – and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings.... The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797), Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828), and yet again in Toledo (811-819). The insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in the Koran 5:33.”
Arab controlled Spain was thus not an example of shining, benign multiculturalism. Jews and Christians were hunted, killed, forced into Islam, or perhaps deported. Jews and Christians who accepted Muslim overlordship and their dhimmitude were allowed to work, pay taxes, invent, conduct trade and generally engage in activities which benefited their Muslim masters. This is true of any slave society. Saying that Jews were at times 'tolerated' in Muslim Spain and than extrapolating their tolerated slave status to create a mythical world of heroic inter-faith cooperation is to put it mildly, insane. It would be as if the slave society of the Roman empire, where Gallic, Greek, Berber, Jewish and other assorted slave nationalities worked for the profit and the power of their Roman masters, was for some reason declared the great exemplar of multiculturalism.
Absurd.
When Muslims take over a state they eviscerate any non-Islamic culture and heritage. This is a historical rule. Muslims need the conquered population to be subservient to the Meccan moon deity ali-ilah. Those who don't accord themselves to the Islamic cult are either killed, deported or reduced to 'dhimmi' or slave status. As Bat Yeor writes:
“The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only. Political and social disabilities must be imposed on him, and bribes offered to him from the public funds, to hasten the day of his spiritual enlightenment and the addition of his name to the roll of true believers. A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He lives under a contract (zimma, or ‘dhimma’) with the State: for the life and property grudgingly spared to him by the commander of the faithful he must undergo political and social disabilities, and pay a commutation money. In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam.”
Islam demands the creation of the communal and the castration of the individual. All resources are directed and commanded by the Islamic state. The Muslim state has the power and the means to appropriate any and everything for the glory of Allah. The individual matters not. The communal world of Allah and Islamic doctrine is the ideal condition for a Muslim state.
But in the la-la land of today's political correctness fantasy replaces reality. Islamic barbarism in Spain which over 700 years murdered tens if not hundreds of thousands of Christians and Jews; and which extinguished what was once an advanced and precocious state; is now recreated as a multi-cult version of a John Lennon song. All matter of nonsense about inventions, art and public architecture are put forward to support the rather insidious notion that Islamic jihad can suddenly become a reincarnation of Augustinian Rome. Arab jihad and Muslim conquest always leads to the eradication of culture, civilization, rights, life and hope. That is the barren reality of the Islamic program and ideology - a set of facts supported by 1400 years of blood-letting. Ignoring it, or worse, celebrating such a travesty of violence, hate and racism, is a sure method to kill your own civilization.
Henri Pirenne aptly describes the contraction of Western Mediterranean trade with the Christian Byzantium empire and beyond, due the Muhammandan invasions of the 7th century. Ports were emptied, urban life was circumscribed, raw materials began to vanish, gold circulation dropped, papyrus disappeared, and Western Europe become a collection of localities and long-distance trade almost vanished. This is simply common sense, when one views the Roman empire, as one centred around and dominated by the Mediterranean, now sliced in half and largely controlled by Muhammadan ships, pirates and armies. Rome sacked in 840, Genoa in 945, all the major islands and coast lines in the Tyrrhenian sea controlled by Muhammad’s cult.
The only part Islam had to play in helping establish modernity was as a trading zone stretching from Morocco to the borders of China – but one controlled by Muslims and one which discriminated against trade with Western Europe. Venice, an outpost of Byzantium grew wealthy from trade with the Christian and Muslim states to its east and south. But in the rest of Europe, until Genoa and Pisa, along with the Spanish Christian Reconquista during the 10th century, rolled back the Muhammadans, everywhere was contraction. There is no evidence that in any other realm be it in medicine, the arts, sciences, math, philosophy, economy or politics, Islam invented anything of value. All was known and developed by non-Muslims who simply squatted on far richer civilisations – ones weakened by a century of plague and war.
The oft-repeated lie – that Islam was a vital part of creating the modern world – is ridiculous. Islam's modern poverty in all matters secular and ecclesiastical has been apparent since the beginning of Arab imperialism. Arab culture created and spread Islamic doctrine. The Koran is the uber-tool of Arab imperialism. Is it not curious that Muslims must chant in Arabic when 80% don't speak the language? If that is not a bizarre form of imperialism than what is it? [or do you really believe that the moon cult deity spoke a minor language to an illiterate pagan Arab circa 615 A.D.?].
Islamic apologists including respected academics like Bernard Lewis who is portrayed as a crank and critic of Islam, always trot out the 'golden age' of Islamic brilliance between 900 A.D. and 1100 A.D. when Europe was in the 'dark' ages and European civilisation apparently lagged so far behind that of the conquering Arabs and Muslims. In this bizarre view, only the Arab-Muslim world was rich, wealthy, educated and on the path to 'inventing' modern medicine [wrong] and implementing the creation of the zero [a Hindu invention], as well engaging in rapturous and learned enterprises of literature, philosophy, astronomy, and resurrecting ancient Greek texts of all varieties on all subjects.
It sounds so romantic and just – handsome Bedouins in flowing robes with papyrus texts earnestly discussing Aristotle over mocha coffee in a Baghdad madrassa. Honest, caring Muslims, so accepting of all cultures, religions and ideas, intent on furthering the powers of civilisation. Peaceful Arabs striving to create modern science, modern economy, modern politics and the theorems that underpin the modern world. How sweet and how ridiculous.
Islam was created by the Arabs as a tool of imperialism. The Arabs conquered the Near East, North Africa, parts of Europe, the Sudan, southern Russia, Persia, and parts of India and beyond. The Arabs by design and luck conquered far richer empires and this wealth allowed the Muslim empire to survive and thrive. It was not something that the Arabs invented or did that created civilisation or wealth. It was what they took that made them rich, and it was how they used Infidels, Dhimmis (second class citizens) to further develop some areas of Spain (eg. Cordoba in a limited way), or the former Persian metropolis at Baghdad.
Byzantium, weakened by almost 100 years of plague (‘Justinian' plagues) which killed maybe 1/3 of its total population and the constant wars with Persia and 'barbarians' to the north, was still the richest and most cosmopolitan centre of civilisation in the world when the Arabs quickly defeated the emasculated and poorly led empire in Israel and Syria. Though the city of Constantinople held out until 1453, the richest areas of the Eastern Roman empire inexorably fell to the Arabs – including all the loot, assets and trade of the key region straddling modern day Anatolia, Lebanon, Syria and northern Iraq. Once shorn of its rich provinces the end for Byzantium was a matter of time and only staved off through great tenacity, military prowess and invention [including the use of Greek fire, a pre-modern flame thrower], and control over the Black sea trade routes.
The same is true of Persia, a much more advanced civilisation than anything the Arabs could imagine and a main conduit of east-west trade and commerce. Vast irrigation, canal works, engineering feats and imposing cities with running water dominated the Zoroastrian-Farsi culture. For 1500 years the Persians had believed in the teachings of Zoroaster a man with similar views to that of Christ, until the Arabs forcibly converted – on pain of death or higher taxes – the Farsi elite to Islam. It must have been bitter indeed for the Persians, once the conquerors of the Arabs and the world's super-power, to submit to Islamic imperialism.
The Jewish and Christian states were likewise far more civilised and modern than anything that the Arabs had ever seen. Straddling key trade routes these states showing precocious urban and engineering development, but were however, quite weak militarily and easy conquests for the Arabs. As with Persia, Jewish-Christian wealth flowed to the new Arab leadership and the Jews and Christians were either killed, taxed or deported [with their assets stolen by Arabs]. In any event by 900 A.D. the richest areas of the Near East and North Africa were in Arab hands. Such was the basis of the 'Islamic Golden Age'. In modern parlance we call it 'squatting'.
The Islamic and Muslim empire was of course hardly monolithic. It stretched across a wide area of the world. Arabs, Turks, Persians and others took leadership turns or established regional empires or sub-empires. Yet just because these states squatted on, and took advantage of pre-existing trade routes, urban centres, engineering development, and all manners of learning, does not make them 'enlightened' or advanced. Once the Arabs and their successors took over these lands what happened? What was developed and improved? What was invented? These are the key questions which are never answered.
The short answer is not much.
Science in the Muhammadan ‘Golden Age’ was premised only on translated texts of ancient Greek thinkers – translated it should be said by Nestorian Christians and Jews. No independent empirical deduction existed in Islam. Roger Bacon and others, during the supposed 'Dark Ages' of Europe in the 13th century, invented the scientific method, much of it premised on socio-cultural developments starting in the 11th century. No improvement was thus made on the ideas and 'laws' of the ancient Greeks by the Muslims, nor did they advance rational inquiry which is the premise of scientific discovery. Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes and others who existed 1300 years before the Golden Age of Islam, were I do recall, Greek mathematicians and experimenters. Christian scientists - not Muslim - embarked on the investigations which led to the rational revolution and modern science.
The Muslims were inferior to the Greeks in geometry, calculus, the basic sciences, engineering [the Greeks were building domes and advanced arches that the Arabs could never replicate], philosophy, history [see Herodotus], and agriculture. They were also inferior to the Hindus in algebra where the zero became a revolutionary and entirely Hindu creation. As well the Muslims were far less advanced less the Zoroastrian Persians in matters of urban and irrigation technology including the building of canals, irrigation systems and even roads.
So, in essence what was this mythical Muslim golden age? It appears likely that the main Muslim commitment to helping develop the modern world was three-fold. First, they incorporated the learning, techniques and advances of the more sophisticated empires which they conquered. This amalgam of various influences can be seen in the development of Islamic society over the period 800-1400 A.D. Second, they helped spread knowledge, abetted by the Greek and Jewish translations of once forgotten Greek inventions and ideas. Lastly, they provided the means of trade between east and west which facilitated the exchange of everything from products to new military technology.
This then is about the sum of the Arabic-Islamic 'Golden Age'. One should also note this. The 'Dark Ages' in Europe were not that dark. They are called the dark ages because of the lack of information and description about society at that time. Yet inventions aplenty populated Europe during the rise of the Islamic empire. Agricultural techniques, harnesses, new military technologies, medicine, urbanisation and the rise of the burgess or merchant bourgeois, the building of roads and canals, all this and more dominated the so-called 'Middle Ages'.
The Europeans took a thickly forested, difficult, and rough land and turned it, over a painfully long period, into the centre of world civilisation. They were also able to equip and send out vast expeditions of men to the Holy Land, in a series of crusades designed to reclaim historical Christendom from the Turk, as well as roll back the Islamic invasion of Europe. Such a feat of logistics resulting in a 200-year occupation of the Holy Land would not characterise a poor and muddled civilisation. The Europeans learnt a lot from the Crusades about commerce, trade, building and military techniques. The Muslims, never interested in kaffirs, learnt a lot less. The decline of Islam was thus assured.
The Muslims and Arabs never advanced civilisation. They were content to squat and let the 'dhimmis' in their midst engage in building modern commerce; conduct inquiries and invent and create. The Koran as tool of power might be effective in making people submit and stay submissive. It is a tool of fascist-pagan oppression, designed to keep the masses ignorant and the wealthy powerful. Melding church and state, not allowing inquiry or risk [for instance disallowing biopsy or commercial interest], disavowing individuality, not creating institutions of law, politics and free expression – these defects and more reflect the anti-modern program of Arab imperialism.
Since these factors were in play 1000 years ago, how could there ever have been a Muslim 'Golden Age'? How does one explain this beautiful time of 300 million dead, due to racist and supremacist ideals? Even the divided and far less populated Christian states of Europe, never united against Islam, and in fact at times allied with it in their various internal wars, were in the case of France, England or Northern Italy more than a match for the entire Islamic world by 1300 A.D. Why was this?
The reasons should be obvious. Never forget that Islam was spread by the sword. Conversions were forced or taken by people to avoid the dhimmi [apartheid] tax and social repercussions and oppression of being a 'kaffir' [Arab word originally denoting a black slave]. In this vein Islam for many centuries was concerned with power and with military force. The men involved were originally pagan, and much preoccupied with original lusts – money, land, and women. Higher culture was an afterthought. Creating the modern world was a non-issue since the Koran ruled.
Islam is the ultimate pagan cult. Submission, rituals, chanting, and non-thinking obedience, encased in an apartheid society, is the goal of Islam.
There was no 'Golden Age' of Islam. If you think there was, then try this exercise – list all the Islamic inventions that created the modern world. The paper will be blank.