Decline of Islamic Science

[Diggy]

@doppelganger, look at the quality of the post. @Irfan Baloch, doesn't this post warrant an infarction.

frustrated hai bechara , roney de...he got owned by indian members many times here.

 

[FaujHistorian]

Scientific method didn't exist before the Islamic Civilization. Greeks and Romans took too many things for granted without question...like rays of light coming out of people's eyes until Muslims like Alhazen questioned it and found a better explanation of how we see....this idea then helped discover most of the named stars today...from Acamar to Zubeneshamali.

List of Arabic star names - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Meray piaray bhai Riaz Huq sahib

Kaisy door ki chortay hain aap.

First you say "Islamic civilzation". if it was so Islamic, how many scientists and modern writers came from Makkah and Madina?

In fact Makkah Madina has been the place of scientific darkness for 100s if not 1000s of years. thus clearly proving no link between Islam as religion and even medieval scientific methods..

Then closer to home, please tell us how many of these stars were named by Muslims from Indian subcontinent?

I fail to understand why would a good person like you will do this lose talk?

If you want to talk about Arab astronomers, they too were dominated scientifically by the Ptolemaic system. This is why the Muslim astronomers accepted unanimously the geocentric model.
Heliocentrism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


So please wake up and try not to accept everything "Islamic" as somehow divine revelation (Nauzbillah).

With peace unto you and unto your family.

p.s. there is a debate Alhazen may have tried to question geocentric model. but that is just rumor.

In addition to physical sciences, Muslims also made a huge contribution to social sciences.

Ibn Khaldun is considered the father of modern social sciences. Let's heed his advice

Haq's Musings: Can the Taliban Defeat and Destroy Pakistan?

Beyond the stars in the Cosmos, Muslims also discovered Alchemy, Alcohol, Algebra, Arabic numerals, Algorithms, etc.

From Ijtihad to Taqlid: Decline of Islamic Science - PakAlumni Worldwide: The Global Social Network

Islam as a regligion has always been anti-Science. Hence Makkah and Madina the center of Islam were scientifically dark regions for 100s if not 1000s of years.

 

[pak-marine]

@RiazHaq sahab move on .. Even if there were any discoveries Umat e Muslima hasn't done any thing in the last few hundred years also there is a question mark on the existing claim so why don't we instead work on future generations .. No point getting stuck in the past high time to move on in life and accept failures

 

[FaujHistorian]

@RiazHaq sahab move on .. Even if there were any discoveries Umat e Muslima hasn't done any thing in the last few hundred years also there is a question mark on the existing claim so why don't we instead work on future generations .. No point getting stuck in the past high time to move on in life and accept failures

nothing new for 1000 years.

 

[Skull and Bones]

If Muslim world keeps treating their scientists as Pakistan treated Abdus Salam, there won't be much scientists left in the Muslim worlds, but there will be Muslim scientists.

 

[pak-marine]

nothing new for 1000 years.

It's got to the ummats EGO from last few 100 years they have already wasted a good chunk of those 1000 years you mentioned here ..its Up to people like our gung-ho keys board warriors like haq Sahab and a billion more from pakistani talk shows and our society that they don't drag least Pakistan in their crap like they always had in the past instead let us move the fck on with our lives and let the umaat claim Pakistani invention I

 

[jamahir]

He is right, but there was one more factor, a final blow - the Mongol invasions, and the complete destruction of Baghdad. Science, arts, literature, almost every constructive human activity declined due to that.

the mongols actually did a great service to islam by killing off the hashisheen who were the ones hindering muslims... the hashisheen were the taliban of those times.

muslims generally fell from knowledge because they grew too fond of the mosque and the half-wit mullah.

 

[Cherokee]

Scientific method didn't exist before the Islamic Civilization. Greeks and Romans took too many things for granted without question...like rays of light coming out of people's eyes until Muslims like Alhazen questioned it and found a better explanation of how we see....this idea then helped discover most of the named stars today...from Acamar to Zubeneshamali.

List of Arabic star names - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yeah Nothing existed before it . Thanks for saving humans oh great golden shiny Islamic civilization .

 

[jamahir]

Islam as a regligion has always been anti-Science.

i disagree... and i am much too sleepy to argue that now.

 

[FaujHistorian]

i disagree... and i am much too sleepy to argue that now.

Bhai jaan,

PDF will be here, and this thread will be open too. So please go get some sleep.

And we'll resume.

 

[doppelganger]

@doppelganger, look at the quality of the post. @Irfan Baloch, doesn't this post warrant an infarction.

Its your fault.

Do you drive through Mumbra looking for intellectual titillation or just hold your breath and pray Ghodbunder traffic is light that day?

On topic, the myth of Islamic science and achievements has long since been debunked by historians and scholars alike.

These were by people and cultures that were not Islamic but recent converts. Cultures and people who would have made those jumps with or without Islam.

Some might even say a lot faster and easier without Islam, due to the fundamental challenges thrown up by its edicts and concepts.

Islam appropriating those advances for itself under its own banner seeks to somehow indicate a contributory role. Such is not universally accepted, not without a great deal of healthy debated skepticism.

Be that as it may, the so called Golden Era is a thousand years past. Islam today, of its followers and the lands they inhabit, is pretty much at the bottom of the pile in the world order of faiths and peoples and their status in the current world order. And I do not see where a change to that equation would come from to be frank and brutally honest. Or even when.

 

[Maira La]

Islamic science.. haha. It's like Indians talking about Vedic Science and "discovery of 0 (btw, )". Guys it's 2015! Muslims and Indians need some IQ boost to see the reality!

 

[RiazHaq]

Islam as a regligion has always been anti-Science. Hence Makkah and Madina the center of Islam were scientifically dark regions for 100s if not 1000s of years.

Your statement shows your ignorance of Islam and the Holy Quran.

Please read the Holy Quran.

First, Islam is not limited a place or ethnicity or race; it's universal.

Second, the Holy Quran exhorts its readers/listeners to think, ponder, reason over and over again.

Afala Ta'qilun, Afala Yatadabbarun, Afala Tatafakkarun, Afala Tubsirun and similar verses appear over 700 times in the Holy Book of Muslims, far more often than exhortation to salat (prayer), zakat (charity) and saum (fasting).

 

[Kambojaric]

@RiazHaq , do you have any links to Ghazalis work's? Ive recently been reading Ibn Khaldun's Al Muqaddimah (https://asadullahali.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/ibn_khaldun-al_muqaddimah.pdf). Wouldnt mind reading up on what Ghazali specifically has to say on Ijtihad.

With regards to the decline of the sciences in the Islamic world there are a multitude of reasons in my opinion. I am open to corrections.

1) One of the biggest reasons is the geopolitical change in the Muslim world which saw the decline of Ummayad Spain into Taifa's which the Christians gobbled up one by one. Roughly simultaneously the Mongols emerged in the East and ransacked C. Asia, Persia and finally Baghdad. Cordoba and Baghdad were the intellectual hubs of the Islamic world within which were stored the intellectual wealth of not only Islamic scholars but also the works of the ancient Greeks, Persians etc. To emphasize this point it is said that when Hulagu Khan captured Baghdad whereas usually the rivers were said to turn red after the Mongols ransacked a city, in the case of Baghdad the Tigris is said to have turned black because so much paper and parchments were thrown into the river that the ink from them turned the river black. Baghdad was of course home to the Bayt al Hikma (House of Wisdom), House of Wisdom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The loss of major intellectual hubs such as Cordoba and Baghdad deprived future Muslims of the knowledge of their predecessors.

2) Building upon the first point, during the end of the Golden Age also began the Crusade for Palestine which saw the emergence of a Frankish Christian state right at the heart of the Muslim world. The resources of all Muslim states in the region were thus geared towards regaining Jerusalem and religious dogmatism will surely have entered the mindset of Muslims of that time i.e. we are loosing lands and wars because we are Bad Muslims, therefore we need to become more orthodox Muslims to regain our former political glory.

3) Up to the latter Middle Ages, the Middle East had been dominated ethnically by Arabs, Persians and pre Turkish Anatolians (Armenians, Assyrians etc). However gradually nomadicTurkic tribes started migrating into the Mid East bringing their warlike culture to the use of the Islamic cause in Palestine and Anatolia. A general rule is that nomads due to scarcity of resources and lack of a sedentary lifestyle will not attach that much importance to the sciences. The earliest humans for example were primitive but as we urbanized so did our ability to maximize our intellectual capacity. The migrations of the Turkic tribes thus changed the demographic makeup of large parts of the Mid East and being nomads who only gradually adopted a sedentary lifestyle they would have placed little value on patronizing scientists and men of arts as compared to the Abbasid Caliphs of Baghdad who had a vast amount of resources to allocate to such purposes.

4) With the eventual failure of the Crusades, the Islamic world was for centuries roguhly divided up into three major Empires, the Ottomans from Algeria to Iraq, the Safavids from Checnya/Azerbaijan to W. Afghanistan and the Mughals from E Afghanistan to Bengal. These three empires were largely secure in their borders and only occasionally had any major territorial disputes. Further they benefitted greatly form the tariffs they imposed on silk route traders carrying goods from E Asia to Europe.

If one thus juxtaposes late Medieval, early Renaissance Middle East/South Asia with Europe the situation is totally different. Europe which is roughly the same size of the three Islamic Empires previously mentioned was divided up into dozens of small states all vying and competing with each other for dominance. There was serious competition amongst these states thus and this prompted European rulers to invest heavily in the sciences especially in relation to warfare. The heavy taxes that the Europeans had to pay the Muslims for E. Asia goods also prompted them to look for alternative routes to the East which resulted in their discovery of the Americas (which they subsequently plundered and looted). Europe thus gained a major advantage over the Islamic Empires but only so because the Europeans due to tough competition at home had a greater incentive to invest in the sciences so as to stay ahead of their rivals. All this time however the Osmanlis, Safavids and Mughals were comparatively safe and secure in their borders and thus had no real incentives to invest in arms and naval technology, gradually thus falling behind.

 

[FaujHistorian]

Your statement shows your ignorance of Islam and the Holy Quran.

Please read the Holy Quran.

First, Islam is not limited a place or ethnicity or race; it's universal.

Second, the Holy Quran exhorts its readers/listeners to think, ponder, reason over and over again.

Afala Ta'qilun, Afala Yatadabbarun, Afala Tatafakkarun, Afala Tubsirun and similar verses appear over 700 times in the Holy Book of Muslims, far more often than exhortation to salat (prayer), zakat (charity) and saum (fasting).

hahahaha

Please do not confuse Holy Quran as a book to be presented as a scientific paper to be published in 2015 AD journal of Astronomy.

Because if you do, people will laugh at you, even if you have 10 PhDs.

Thank you