The Arab civilisation then and now

[Desert Fox]

Most of this thread is filled with historical inaccuracies. Furthermore, there is an issue of definition here what is meant by "the Arab civilization". According to many scholars, such as Ibn Khaldun, Arabs did not have a sedentary culture.

Most of the "arab" scholars listed here (and elsewhere for that matter) are usually not arabs. The vast majority of islamic (from all sects) and secular scholars during the "muslim era" are Iranian or Persianate.

Furthermore, the notion that Egyptians, Sumerians or Babylonians were "arabs" is ludicrous.

"Arabs" defined by the language as suggested here by some actually contradicts that since Arabic was not defined formally until Iranians formalized the grammar (with the Qur'an being the standard).

So please clear the definitions up and stop being bigots and there might be a good discussion.

Sensible post my friend, i wanted to point that out but realized it would be of no use.

 

[Wright]

Quran 19:49









So I made a mistake by pluralizing the word "specie", no big deal. It seems you have run out of points to argue on. I am definitely not racist & nor do I believe in castes. Just because I believe that different races do exist does not make me a racist, most of the world still believes in the existence of human races. As I said earlier, denying that differences exist isn't necessary to promote tolerance. Mankind must learn to live peacefully by respecting each others' differences. The term "human race" is generic rather than scientific.





The origin of the "barbers"? All you are doing here is throwing around insults. As I recall, I remember that you made up the word "Arabyan" & tried to relate it to the word "Aryan". That clearly tells us that you don't know anything either. In any case, our discussion is over.

Races are actually subspecies. Organisms adapt to their respective environment and eventually branch off. Europeans tend to have shorter limbs, a trait found in all snow dwelling mammals. It conserves body heat.
Africans have longer limbs, which is why they make good boxers. Again a trait found mostly in the animals of that environment.

In fact if you observe closely you will notice diffferent races tend to excel in different areas of sport.

 

[p(-)0ENiX]

Races are actually subspecies. Organisms adapt to their respective environment and eventually branch off. Europeans tend to have shorter limbs, a trait found in all snow dwelling mammals. It conserves body heat.
Africans have longer limbs, which is why they make good boxers. Again a trait found mostly in the animals of that environment.

In fact if you observe closely you will notice diffferent races tend to excel in different areas of sport.

Thanks for the information. I already knew some of the stuff you mentioned, especially the part about organisms' adaptation to an environment. What about the difference between "homo sapiens neanderthalensis" & "homo sapiens sapiens"? I thought the two of them were subspecies of "homo sapiens".

 

[BLACKEAGLE]

Most of this thread is filled with historical inaccuracies. Furthermore, there is an issue of definition here what is meant by "the Arab civilization". According to many scholars, such as Ibn Khaldun, Arabs did not have a sedentary culture.

They had and still have a very distinctive and genuine culture.

War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan - Francis Mading Deng -
Most of the "arab" scholars listed here (and elsewhere for that matter) are usually not arabs. The vast majority of islamic (from all sects) and secular scholars during the "muslim era" are Iranian or Persianate.

They are Arabs. And prove they are not Arabs. And why Persians didn't have any known scientific breakthrough or a known scientist but in Arab civilization and rule?

Furthermore, the notion that Egyptians, Sumerians or Babylonians were "arabs" is ludicrous.

No one said they were Arabs at the time, but they are Arabs nowadays, which means those are their ancestors.

"Arabs" defined by the language as suggested here by some actually contradicts that since Arabic was not defined formally until Iranians formalized the grammar (with the Qur'an being the standard).

A lie:
The identity of the oldest Arabic grammarian is disputed: some sources state that it was ʻAbd Allāh ibn ʼAbī ʼIsḥāq (died AD 735/6, AH 117), while medieval sources say Abu-Aswad al-Du'ali established diacritical marks and vowels for Arabic in the mid-600s. The schools of Basra and Kufa further developed grammatical rules in the late 700s with the rapid rise of Islam.[1][2]

So please clear the definitions up and stop being bigots and there might be a good discussion.

Your input here is just to underestimate Arab great history which you yourself is heavily influenced by it and all others who debate here.

 

[Wright]

Thanks for the information. What about the difference between "homo sapiens neanderthalensis" & "homo sapiens sapiens"? I thought the two of them were subspecies of "homo sapiens".

The info on that is too murky, some believe they were seperate species altogether. All we have to work with are bone fragments and skulls. It's hard to identify which differences are due to in-group variation and which ones are the result of being part of a different species/subspecies. So we keep seeing back and forth changes in classifications.

Subspecies are normally identified as having the ability to reproduce with one another, and differences in attributes due to adaptation to a different environment. Some may look very much alike such as the Bengal and Siberian tiger, and some may look very different depending on the degree of adaptation.

Just by having different levels of melanin in response to the differing amounts of sunlight in different parts of the world certainly qualifies human races as subspecies.

It just means we humans are also subject to the same principles as other animals.


Anyway enough of derailing the thread. Back to Arabs.

 

[ChineseTiger1986]

From genetic testing apparently King tut is related to more western Europeans than present day Egyptians.

This is not true, they were in fact just some pre-Arabic Middle Easterners/North Africans, nothing really White Caucasian/Indo-European in them.

 

[BLACKEAGLE]

List of Arab scientists and scholars

Averroes

ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd (Arabic: أبو الوليد محمد بن احمد بن رشد&#8206, better known just as Ibn Rushd (Arabic: ابن رشد&#8206, and in European literature as Averroes ( /əˈvɛroʊ.iːz/; April 14, 1126 – December 10, 1198), was an Andalusian Muslim polymath; a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics. He was born in Córdoba, Al Andalus, modern-day Spain, and died in Marrakesh, Morocco. His school of philosophy is known as Averroism.
Ibn Rushd was a defender of Aristotelian philosophy against claims from the influential Islamic theologian Ghazali who attacked philosophy so it would not become an affront to the teachings of Islam.
Cultural influences

Reflecting the respect which medieval European scholars paid to him, Averroes is named by Dante in The Divine Comedy with the great pagan philosophers whose spirits dwell in "the place that favor owes to fame" in Limbo.
Averroes appears in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, entitled "Averroes's Search", in which he is portrayed trying to find the meanings of the words tragedy and comedy. He is briefly mentioned in the novel Ulysses by James Joyce alongside Maimonides. He appears to be waiting outside the walls of the ancient city of Cordoba in Alamgir Hashmi's poem In Cordoba. He is also the main character in Destiny, a Youssef Chahine film.
Averroes is also the title of a play called "The Gladius and The Rose", written by Tunisian writer Mohamed Ghozzi, and which had the first price in the theater festival in Charjah in 1999.
The asteroid 8318 Averroes was named in his honor. Plant genus Averrhoa was named after him.
The Muslim pop musician Kareem Salama composed and performed a song in 2007 titled Aristotle and Averroes.


Avempace

Abū-Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn al-Sāyigh (Arabic أبو بكر محمد بن يحيى بن الصائ&#1594, known as Ibn Bājjah (Arabic: ابن باجة&#8206, was an Andalusian polymath: an astronomer, logician, musician, philosopher, physician, physicist, psychologist, botanist, poet and scientist.[1] He was known in the West by his Latinized name, Avempace. He was born in Zaragoza in what is today Spain and died in Fes, Morocco in 1138. Avempace worked as vizir for Abu Bakr ibn Ibrahim Ibn Tîfilwît, the Almoravid governor of Zaragoza. Avempace also wrote poems (panegyrics and 'muwasshahat') for him, and they both enjoyed music and wine. Avempace joined in poetic competitions with the poet al-Tutili. He later worked, for some twenty years, as the vizir of Yahyà ibn Yûsuf Ibn Tashufin, another brother of the Almoravid Sultan Yusuf Ibn Tashufin (died 1143) in Morocco.[2] He was the famous author of the Kitab al-Nabat (The Book of Plants), a popular work on Botany, which defined the sex of Plants. Among his many teachers was Abu Jafar ibn Harun of Trujillo a physician in Seville, Al-Andalus.
His philosophic ideas had a clear effect on Ibn Rushd and Albertus Magnus. Most of his writings and book were not completed (or well organized) because of his early death. He had a vast knowledge of Medicine, Mathematics and Astronomy. His main contribution to Islamic Philosophy is his idea on Soul Phenomenology, but unfortunately not completed.
His beloved expressions were Gharib غريب and Mutawahhid متوحد, two approved and popular expressions of Islamic Gnostics.
Ibn Bajjah was, in his time, not only a prominent figure of philosophy, but also of music and poetry.[3] His diwan (Arabic: collection of poetry) was rediscovered in 1951.
Though many of his works have not survived, his theories on astronomy and physics were preserved by Maimonides and Averroes respectively, which had a subsequent influence on later astronomers and physicists in the Islamic civilization and Renaissance Europe, including Galileo Galilei.

Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi


Abu al-Qasim Khalaf ibn al-Abbas Al-Zahrawi (936–1013), (Arabic: أبو القاسم بن خلف بن العباس الزهراوي&#8206 also known in the West as Abulcasis, was an Arab physician who lived in Al-Andalus. He is considered the greatest medieval surgeon to have appeared from the Islamic World, and has been described by many as the father of modern surgery. His greatest contribution to medicine is the Kitab al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume encyclopedia of medical practices. His pioneering contributions to the field of surgical procedures and instruments had an enormous impact in the East and West well into the modern period, where some of his discoveries are still applied in medicine to this day.
He was the first physician to describe an ectopic pregnancy, and the first physician to identify the hereditary nature of haemophilia.

In the 14th century, the French surgeon Guy de Chauliac quoted al-Tasrif over 200 times. Pietro Argallata (d. 1453) described Abū al-Qāsim as "without doubt the chief of all surgeons". Abū al-Qāsim's influence continued for at least five centuries, extending into the Renaissance, evidenced by al-Tasrif's frequent reference by French surgeon Jacques Delechamps (1513–1588).
The street in Córdoba where he lived is named in his honor as "Calle Albucasis". On this street he lived in house no. 6, which is preserved today by the Spanish Tourist Board with a bronze plaque (awarded in January 1977) which reads: "This was the house where Abul-Qasim lived.

Ahmad ibn Fadlan

Ahmad ibn Fadlān ibn al-Abbās ibn Rāšid ibn Hammād (Arabic: أحمد بن فضلان بن العباس بن راشد بن حماد&#8206 was a 10th century Arab traveler, famous for his account of his travels as a member of an embassy of the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad to the king of the Volga Bulgars. His account is most known for providing a description of the Volga Vikings, including an eye-witness account of a ship burial.


Ahmad ibn Mājid

Ahmad ibn Mājid (Arabic: أحمد بن ماجد&#8206, was an Arab navigator and cartographer born in 1421 in Julphar, which is now known as Ras Al Khaimah. This city makes up one of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates, but at that time it was classified as the coast of Oman. He was raised with a family famous for seafaring; at the age of 17 he was able to navigate ships. He was so famous that he was known as the first Arab seaman. The exact date is not known, but ibn Majid probably died in 1500. He became famous in the West as the navigator who has been associated with helping Vasco da Gama find his way from Africa to India. He was the author of nearly forty works of poetry and prose.

Works

His most important work was Kitab al-Fawa’id fi Usul ‘Ilm al-Bahr wa ’l-Qawa’id (Book of Useful Information on the Principles and Rules of Navigation), written in 1490. It is a navigation encyclopedia, describing the history and basic principles of navigation, lunar mansions, rhumb lines, the difference between coastal and open-sea sailing, the locations of ports from East Africa to Indonesia, star positions, accounts of the monsoon and other seasonal winds, typhoons and other topics for professional navigators. He drew from his own experience and that of his father, also a famous navigator, and the lore of generations of Indian Ocean sailors.
Bin Majid wrote several books on marine science and the movements of ships, which helped people of the Persian Gulf to reach the coasts of India, East Africa and other destinations. Among his many books on oceanography, the Fawa'dh fi-Usl Ilm al-Bahrwa-al-Qawaidah (The Book of the Benefits of the Principles of Seamanship) is considered as one of his best.
He grew very famous and was fondly called Shihab Al Dein (The Shooting Star) for his fearlessness, strength and experience as a sailor who excelled in the art of navigation.

Legacy

Ahmed bin Majid's efforts in the mid-15th century helped the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama in completing the first all water trade route between Europe and India by using an Arab map then unknown to European sailors.
Two of his famous hand-written books are now prominent exhibits in the National Library in Paris.

Ahmad ibn Yusuf

Abu Ja'far Ahmad ibn Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Tammam al-Siddiq Al-Baghdadi (835–912), known in the West by his Latinized name Hametus, was an Arab mathematician, like his father Yusuf ibn Ibrahim (Arabic: يوسف بن ابراهيم الصدَيق البغدادي &#8206.

He worked on a book on ratio and proportion. This was translated to Latin by Gherard of Cremona and was a commentary of Euclid's Elements. This book influenced early European mathematicians such as Fibonacci. Further, in On similar arcs, he commented on Ptolemy's Karpos (or Centiloquium); many scholars believe that ibn Yusuf was in fact the true author of that work. He also wrote a book on the astrolabe. He invented methods to solve tax problems that were later presented in Fibonacci's Liber Abaci. He was also quoted by mathematicians such as Thomas Bradwardine, Jordanus de Nemore and Luca Pacioli.

Alī ibn ʿĪsā al-Kahhal

ʿAlī ibn ʿĪsā al-Kahhal (fl. 1010 CE), surnamed "the oculist" (al-kahhal) was one of Islam's most famous ophthalmologists. He was known in medieval Europe as Jesu Occulist.
He was the author of the influential Memorandum of the Oculists, where for the first time in the literature a surgical aesthetic is prescribed.
He wrote the landmark textbook on ophthalmology in medieval Islam, Notebook of the Oculists, for which he was known in medieval Europe as Jesu Occulist, with "Jesu" being a Latin translation of "Isa", the Arabic name for Jesus.
Ibn 'Isa is considered one of the most famous physicians of the tenth century. His famous Notebook of the Oculists combined information obtained from both Greco-Roman and Arab sources. The book encompassed information on treatment and classification of over one hundred different eye diseases. In the book, eye diseases were sorted by their anatomical location. The Notebook of the Oculists was widely used by European physicians for hundreds of years. Ibn Isa’s book was one of the first, along with Hunayn ibn Ishaq’s Ten Treatises on the Eye, to illustrate anatomy of the eye. Specifically, Ibn Isa illustrated the optic chiasm and brain. Ibn Isa was the first to describe and suggest treatment for an array of diseases. For example, he was the first to discover the symptoms of Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada syndrome (VKH) - ocular inflammation associated with a distinct whitening of the hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. Ibn Isa was also the first to classify epiphora as being a result a result of overzealous cautery of pterygium. In addition to this pioneering description, Ibn Isa also suggested treatments for epiphora based on the stage of the disease – namely treatment in the early stages with astringent materials, for example ammonia salt, burned copper, or lid past and a hook dissection with a feathered quill for chronic stages of epiphora. Ibn Isa is also thought to be the first to describe temporal arteritis, although Sir Jonathan Hutchinson (1828–1913) is erroneously credited with this.


I need allot of time to post all Arab scientists' biographies and works. Plz, feel free to check them yourself.


List of Arab scientists and scholars - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[LaBong]

How did this thread reduce to another long sermon about how islamophobic rest of the world is and everyone is out there itching to take credit of Islamic golden age.

 

[Developereo]

How did this thread reduce to another long sermon about how islamophobic rest of the world is and everyone is out there itching to take credit of Islamic golden age.

Because every thread about Arab, or Muslim achievements, attracts the usual trolls who deny, deny, deny...

If they present specific rebuttals backed by evidence, that's fine. But if people ignore the evidence presented and continue with generic statements about Arabs as a race, then that's not acceptable.

 

[LaBong]

Because every thread about Arab, or Muslim achievements, attracts the usual trolls who deny, deny, deny...

I don't whom you are talking about, but it's the Persians who are most vocal against the Arab invention which they claim to be invented by ethnic Persian.

Europeans and Indians do admit Arab/Persian inventions, however I'd not like them to take credit of what was discovered by Indians, should I?

 

[AUz]

I don't whom you are talking about, but it's the Persians who are most vocal against the Arab invention which they claim to be invented by ethnic Persian.

Europeans and Indians do admit Arab/Persian inventions, however I'd not like them to take credit of what was discovered by Indians, should I?

And they don't. Like numbers 'originated' in India and Arabs admit that..but the development of our numeral system , making these numbers known worldwide , and using these numbers to develop great Mathematics in their lands is what Arabs achieved. That is why people call it "Arab-Numerals" ...Indians unfortunately seem to think that ALL credit of "numbers" should be given to them and that our present numeral system is 'Indian numeral system' and not Arabic numeral system...which is factually wrong. Our present numeral system is rightly known as "Arabic Numeral System" ...

So the problem here lies with uneducated/not very well read trolls , not us...International posters on this forum.

 

[LaBong]

[/B]

And they don't. Like numbers 'originated' in India and Arabs admit that..but the development of our numeral system , making these numbers known worldwide , and using these numbers to develop great Mathematics in their lands is what Arabs achieved. That is why people call it "Arab-Numerals" ...Indians unfortunately seem to think that ALL credit of "numbers" should be given to them and that our present numeral system is 'Indian numeral system' and not Arabic numeral system...which is factually wrong. Our present numeral system is rightly known as "Arabic Numeral System" ...

So the problem here lies with uneducated/not very well read trolls , not us...International posters on this forum.

Read the previous posts in the thread, should be educational for you.

 

[Mosamania]

The Scientific community is buzzing with the Higgs Boson while the PDF community is Buzzing with "Who made numbers?"...

Ask yourself this. Does it really matter anyways??

 

[alighor]

They had and still have a very distinctive and genuine culture.

Who said that they did NOT have culture? Please go and study Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah before coming here and spewing alot of nonsense that you have been brainwashed with.

They are Arabs. And prove they are not Arabs.

Who are "they"? We can go through each and everyone and determine whether you are right or wrong. I'm saying that the vast majority of Islamic and secular scholars of the Middle East during the era of 600-1500 are non-Arabs, mostly Iranic.

Andalus had some arabic-speaking scholars (mostly berbers, moors and others).

And why Persians didn't have any known scientific breakthrough or a known scientist but in Arab civilization and rule?

Is your ignorance the deciding factor here? Iranians (which are broader than just Persians) have had many scientific achievements prior to the arrival of the Prophet Muhammad.

This is such a vast subject that I cannot possibly cover here, you are welcome to open a separate thread for this and we can go through the scientific achivements of pre-Muhammedan era. I can give you a starting point which is the academy of Gondishapoor which was the center of Science in the Middle East, basically an ancient university (Gundeshapur - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

Iranians were not under Arab rule for long. The only two eras is firstly Ummayad era which lasted around 70 years in Iran, most of which had little effect on Iran. The Bani Ummayah adopted Persian as the language of the Diwan in Iraq for a long time, and by the time of Yazid III the Ummayan caliphs were writing poetry praising their ancestry as partially Persian.

The second era is around 90-100 years of Abbasid rule but it's doubtful if this can be called "Arab". The Abbasids introduced Iranian holidays as official holidays, and spread the Persian language far and wide. By the time of Mamun (whose wife and mother were Persian), the capital of Abbasid caliphate was changed to the center of Greater Iran (i.e. today's Khorasan region).

His father Haroon established the House of Wisdom that was designed, administered and executed by Persians.

Even during these two eras, as mentioned, the rulers (caliphs) were largely nominal overheads and the actual administration was left to the existing administrative infrastructure, i.e. Iranians.

You are trying to establish a link between Arab rule and Iranian science which is non-sensical. These rulers had for the most part no interest in such things (with the exception of a few) and the average ruler did not stay in power for more than ten years. Infact, much less than so.

No one said they were Arabs at the time, but they are Arabs nowadays, which means those are their ancestors.

This is meaningless drivel. Ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Babylonians and others did not have, nor do they have, any relationship with "Arabs". They were not Arabs then and they are not Arabs today.

A lie:
The identity of the oldest Arabic grammarian is disputed: some sources state that it was ʻAbd Allāh ibn ʼAbī ʼIsḥāq (died AD 735/6, AH 117), while medieval sources say Abu-Aswad al-Du'ali established diacritical marks and vowels for Arabic in the mid-600s. The schools of Basra and Kufa further developed grammatical rules in the late 700s with the rapid rise of Islam.[1][2]

Please read what I read properly before jumping your horses. Where are the grammar books that precede what I quoted? Please provide them for me, I want to read them.

Your input here is just to underestimate Arab great history which you yourself is heavily influenced by it and all others who debate here.

My input here is to clarify to people interested in history that what you posted is mostly inaccurate.

 

[p(-)0ENiX]

You seem to have this habit of editing your old posts days afterwards, so I am forced to respond:

Absolutely nothing out of context. The discussion was about Western distortion of history and the reasons for it. You specifically denied the existence of anti-Muslim prejudice in the West and then tried to backtrack all over the place.

Here are your posts to that effect...

and...

and...

and...

Anyway, ...

Nothing alleged about it. I posted one research study which surveyed Western literature and demonstrated a clear bias. Other studies abound and are just a google search away.

Just what do you suppose 'giving credit' means? If there is reduced or no awareness of such contributions in the general public then, by definition, credit is not being given.

Do try to keep up.

I thought you said our discussion was over because it wasn't contributing positively to the topic? Anyway, know that as long as you reply, I will reply back too. This may go on for a few more days, or for a few more years, I don't care. I did not edit my posts days after liar, I edited them on the same day, sometimes just a few minutes after posting the original text. I see you modified this post too, what were you trying to remove? It's sad that I didn't get to read what were most likely insults & accusations thrown at me, I would have responded in a similar manner.

When you quote people, make sure that you quote the full sentences, do not skip a couple of sentences, link the quotes to the original posts effectively, don't modify them in the slightest. My view on the subject is clear, there was hatred for Muslims during the Medieval ages or the Crusades, but that doesn't exist anymore. As for you consistently crying, complaining, whining, & screaming about credit not being given to civilizations, that was not true, most civilizations do get credit for all of their accomplishments. My view was & still is that in modern times no one can distort history easily, there are way too many historians from all over the world, someone is bound to detect any distortion sooner or later.

Once those points had been discussed, you started crying, complaining, & whining about Western textbooks not teaching the contributions of Arabs. That isn't entirely true either, since I showed you certain books in the West dealing with Arab civilization. When a person learns mathematical concepts, for the most part, it isn't common to learn about the inventor of those concepts. Even when I studied the Pythagoras theorem a really long time back, I wasn't told to learn about who he was or what he ate, when he slept, & when he died either. All we were taught was that he was from Greece & he developed this concept & introduced it to the world. Do note one thing, the Arab civilization is not yours, & I haven't seen any Arab complain here the way you did.

Later on you brought Islamophobia into the discussion even after you told me to not bring Islamophobia in to our arguments. Now by posting these out of context posts of mine, some of which seem to be tampered with, you intend to misrepresent my views. I am certainly against Islamophobia, & I advise anyone reading this to read my full posts exactly as I posted them to know my real views.

As I said earlier, the West can teach its students whatever it wants, & we can teach our students whatever we want, as long as neither side teaches something potentially dangerous or harmful to society. Our discussion is over now, & if you respond, I will ensure it carries on till the end of time.