Trifkovic and why the 'Golden Age' of Islam is a bloody myth.

The Islamic 'Golden Age' is a myth. I have posted why on many occasions [see here, here, here for example]. Serge Trifkovic is a Phd literate who understands Islam for what it is – a non-spiritual, political project intent on control and subjugation. Tolerance and gratitude would not be high on the Muslim list of desirable individual and social attributes. As a Serbian Trifkovic would know better than most, the illimitable damage that Islam inflicts on society's it conquers. Serbia was plundered, enslaved, and irreparably altered when the Turks crushed the Serb forces at Kosovo in 1389. Serbia has never recovered and Islam has never left the Balkans. One reason for the endless violence in the Balkans is the simple and retrograde expansion of Muslim pretensions throughout the peninsula – a fact which has caused much war and violence.

Trifkovic would agree that the 'Golden Age' of Islam mantra, is a Western-hating myth. There never was a Golden Age within the Muslim empires. How could there have been ? Islam has never produced capital; markets; machinery; invention; innovation; or any of the fundamentals which built the modern world. Islam has never outlawed and eradicated slavery. It has also never defended the individual, free-will, or freedom in its political-economic development. In fact Islam has never shown any development in any sphere whatsoever. In Trifkovic's book 'The Sword of the Prophet', the mythical era of Muslim 'greatness' is systematically explored and dismissed as nothing less than Western-loathing fantasy.

As Trifkovic assesses:

“The hatred of Western Civilization, and the corresponding urge to glorify anything outside it, especially if it can be depicted as a victim of the West, is a well-known phenomenon of the contemporary liberal mind.

One of the forms it has taken in recent years is the attempt to artificially inflate the historic achievements of other civilizations beyond what the facts support. The noble savage myth is a commonplace; what is more complex is the myth that has been bandied about concerning the supposed "golden age" of Islamic civilization during what we know as the Middle Ages.”

The 'Dark Ages' of Europe are a calumny of course. Islam is today mired in poverty, stupidity, ignorance, war, violence and oppression. Yet we are to believe that the 12^th century system of Koranic law, predicated on 7^th century Bedoiun rituals and moon idol worship had a 'Golden Age'? Please. Don't insult those who are sentient.

As Trifkovic comments, neo-Marxist mental bunk is not analysis but distortion:

“The myth of an Islamic Golden Age is needed by Islam’s apologists to save it from being damned by its present squalid condition; to prove, as it were, that there is more to Islam than the terrorism of Bin Laden and the decadence of the oil sheiks. It is, frankly, a confession that if the world judges it by what it is today, it comes up rather short, being a religion that has yet to produce a democratic or prosperous society, or social and cultural forms admired by neutral foreign observers the way anyone can admire American freedom, Japanese order, Israeli courage, or Italian style.

Some liberal academics openly admit that they twist the Moslem past to serve their present-day intellectual agendas. For example, some who propound the myth of an Islamic golden age of tolerance admit that their goal is to recover for postmodernity that lost medieval Judeo-Islamic trading, social and cultural world, its high point pre-1492 Moorish Spain, which permitted and relished a plurality, a convivencia, of religions and cultures, Christian, Jewish and Moslem; which prized an historic internationality of space along with the valuing of particular cities; which was inclusive and cosmopolitan, cosmopolitan here meaning an ease with different cultures: still so rare and threatened a value in the new millennium as in centuries past."

Liberals and Leftards are using Islam to forward their agenda of multiculturalism; anti-Westernism and by extension a dislike for the modern, Western-created world. Islam is in other words, a theology coveted by socialists and fascists [fascism is an outgrowth of Marxist-socialism]; as a contra-ideology, standing tall against the supposed ills and sins of Western civilization.

Twisting the Islamic history of Jihad, war, expansion, slave-trading, misogyny, intolerance and brutality, takes a very deranged mind.  In reality very few Muslim inventors or thinkers have existed, which have had any discernible impact whatsoever, on the development of man's journey. Ascribing to Islam the normative philosophical and intellectual energies which catalyzed the modern world, would be to ascribe to German Fascism the precedents of 14^th and 15^th Germanic manufacturing innovation; mining development and the creation of the movable print-press. It is beyond absurd.

“The "golden age" of Islamic art lasted from AD 750 to the mid-11th century, when ceramics, glass, metalwork, textiles, illuminated manuscripts, and woodwork flourished. Lustered glass became the greatest Islamic contribution to ceramics. Manuscript illumination became an important and greatly respected art, and miniature painting flourished in Iran. Calligraphy, an essential aspect of written Arabic, developed in manuscripts and architectural decoration....

The problem with turning this list of intellectual achievements into a convincing "Islamic" golden age is that whatever flourished, did so not by reason of Islam but in spite of Islam. Moslems overran societies (Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, Syrian, Jewish) that possessed intellectual sophistication in their own right and failed to completely destroy their cultures. To give it the credit for what the remnants of these cultures achieved is like crediting the Red Army for the survival of Chopin in Warsaw in 1970! Islam per se never encouraged science, in the sense of disinterested enquiry, because the only knowledge it accepts is religious knowledge.”

For the record 'lustered glass' was a plainer and simpler rendition of Christian plated stained glass which was used to decorate massive windows and allow light into buildings of worship, a concept which cannot be found anywhere in Islam.

In any event it is clear that Islam was a transmitter of ideas – not a generator. Islamic empires were squatting empires. They squatted, taxed, plundered and engaged in war, which any fascism must do, in order to placate domestic groups, rival gangs and those who want or demand a better life. Any achievements within the Muslim world were almost completely created by non-Muslims. And any creative urges were – as Oriana Fallaci pointed out – accomplished in spite of Islam, not because of it. As Trifkovic states, “There was a lot of speculation and very little application, be it in technology or politics.”

No Muslim invention of any note, originality or self-contained occurrence can be listed. Trifkovic's book is a good read on why this fact is plain, and why Islamophilia is little more than ignorant anti-Western loathing.