[ExI] Islamic culture (current) was Religions and violence

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2010, Keith Henson wrote:

> As you point out, Islamic culture was more advanced than western
> culture at one time.  The question is not so much about Muslims being
> held back but why western culture (Jews included) shot ahead.  Clark
> calls this the great divergence and it is the major characteristic of
> the world since the industrial revolution.

Funny, I ask myself this question from time to time. Maybe I will find the 
answer in "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared 
Diamond (when I find some time for it). What he seems to suggest, is that 
both China and Islamic states underwent stagnation at some point.

Myself, I was trying to understand this. Islamic golden age seemingly ends 
with Mongol Invasions (13th century). In China, well, I have a problem to 
say. They had been very advanced already before Christ and were doing 
quite well for a thousand years (gas pipelines, naval rockets, maybe 
even pregnancy tests, wow). They continued to invent as long as to 17th 
century, gradually slowing down and I think somewhere after that they 
stagnated. Coincidentally, this was the time of the Qing Dynasty, the last 
before the establishment of the Republic in 1912. Last years of Qing were 
marked by extreme corruption, which I think must have started long before. 
During Qing, those were also the times of growing pressure from quickly
developing world powers (England, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, USA).

I guess (since I have yet to read it) Jared Diamond suggests that 
geographic expansion and strong rivalisation between European states came 
at the right time and coincided with development of strong governments, 
supported with trade and growing industry. It also helped a lot, that 
first discoverers served as biological weapons, wiping out native social 
structures (in Americas) before they could try to adapt to technology and 
new ideas. I was quite surprised when I have learned about advanced social 
organisms of North American Indians and Amazonians. They had cities too, 
but abandonded them when their cultures disintegrated after massive deaths 
caused by diseases.

Obviously, nobody could have stopped us. And so we succeeded...

> >> I could not agree with you more, although the same ideas could be
> >> expressed more concisely as "Islamic culture sucks".
> 
> > As has been already stated, Islamic culture saved a lot of ancient (in a
> > sense of ancient Greece and Rome) wisdom for us. True, there was also
[...]
> > flying apparatus on occassion. In their finest years, Islamic scientists
> > and thinkers did whatever one would expect from any other enlightened
> > people.
> 
> So what caused the divergence that left them in the dust?
> 
> I don't know if it was a cause or an effect, but the Islamic world was
> very slow to accept printing.
> 
> "In the Islamic community--seat of scientific progress from 750 to
> 1100 AD--great Islamic empires arose about the time of the printing
> press and effectively suppressed that technology until the nineteenth
> century, when it did transform the culture. Robinson speculates that
> printing threatened the fundamental oral transmission of the Quran,
> delaying introduction of the printing press into Islamic culture for
> four centuries.[79]
> 
> [79] Francis Robinson, "Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the
> Impact of Print," Modern Asian Studies (1993), Vol. 27, No. 1, pp.
> 229-251.
> 
> http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/j_dewar_1.html
> 
> And even when they did, the number of books printed was a very small
> fraction of the massive output of western culture.

Wow, fascinating.

I have found this:

"The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of martyrs"

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age ]

and this:

"The oldest surviving Qur'an printed with movable type was produced in 
Venice in 1537/1538. It seems to have been prepared for sale in the 
Ottoman empire, where all movable type printing using Arabic characters 
had been forbidden in 1485. This decree was reversed in 1588, but there 
remained strong resistance to adopting movable type printing for any 
subjects, let alone the Qur'an, until the late 19th century. This seems to 
have been partly from opposition by the large profession of copyists, and 
for aesthetic reasons, and fear of mistakes in the text.[97]Catherine the 
Great of Russia sponsored a printing of the Qur'an in 1787. This was 
followed by editions from Kazan (1828), Persia (1833) and Istanbul 
(1877).[98]"

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qur'an ]

So, it seems they would rather copy a book than print it. But it should be 
noted that their reaction to printing took place long after the fall of 
Baghdad [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258) ] which 
marks the fall of the whole culture. The Gutenberg Revolution started 
around 1450. I think it was easier for us, because our fonts only had 26 
or so pieces, while Chinese had thousands... Perhaps Arabs could adapt the 
movable type technique, but by the time it started to get out of China, 
their cultural centres were wiped out. In such situation, they were more 
interested in traditional way, perhaps not really for traditions sake but 
more because of economic interests of some groups.

On this page [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age ], they 
state:

"By the 10th century, Cordoba had 700 mosques, 60,000 palaces, and 70 
libraries, the largest of which had 600,000 books. In the whole 
al-Andalus, 60,000 treatises, poems, polemics and compilations were 
published each year.[20] The library of Cairo had two million books,[21] 
while the library of Tripoli is said to have had as many as three million 
books before it was destroyed by Crusaders."

So the number of printed books may have something to do with this overall 
demise of theirs. They had a lot of titles that had been lost (read: 
destroyed by Mongols and other such cultural bandits). Seems like they 
were unable to recover. Ottomans, who took over from Arabs, well they had 
been different folk. I think the climate for cultural and scientific 
growth slowly worsened as Turks engaged in more and more lost wars (like, 
rivalry with growing Russia) and their elites lost interest of external 
world. They could have sent few ships to Labrador once, but after that - 
not guts and no glory. Ironically, I think their best period was just 
around conquest of Byzantium.

But I am no expert at all (and I have lots to learn). So this is just what 
seems plausible to me (in this particular moment).

> Gregory Clark would (I think) make a case that the
> Malthusian/Darwinian selection process with downward social mobility
> caused the psychological traits behind literacy/numeracy to become the
> population norms in large areas of Europe where they did not in the
> huge swath of Islamic culture (or any other culture in the world I
> should add).  Why I don't know.  It would be worth while (if there are
> records) to do a study similar to the one Dr. Clark did with English
> records to see if some segments of the Arab/Islamic population did
> better genetically.

I think some clues can be gained from abovementioned page on Golden Age. 
It says:

"The early Islamic Empire also had the highest literacy rates among 
pre-modern societies, alongside the city of classical Athens in the 4th 
century BC,[76] and later, China after the introduction of printing from 
the 10th century."

It also says, that Islamic scholars as a group had life expectancy as 
high as 75 years while the mean was somewhere above 35 years. If you are 
interested, you can read about their educational system of maktab and 
madrasah schools. Impressing. I am somehow prone to believe that every 
Muslim is expected to at least know how to read his Qur'an book, so this 
affects literacy rate if I am right.

Putting Muslims aside, I've heard once that in former Tibet every male 
child was to go to monastery for some period of time. During this time, as 
a monk novice, boy was learning prayers and also reading and writing. I am 
not sure about girls.

I don't know what are Dr Clark's claims, but I would be far from 
suggesting that Western Europe was the first place that experienced the 
phenomenons of increased literacy...

> Of course it is even more of a question why the Chinese did so poorly
> for so long after being considerably ahead of western culture.  And
> why are they doing so well now?

Why, it seems to me they did ok for remarkably long time:

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_inventions ]

However, I am a bit reluctant to accept their current success as such. 
While economically it is looking great, I have the impression of their 
looming internal problems of many kinds. Once again, I'm no expert.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
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**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **