Results 1 to 40 of 42

Thread: Transhumanism (h+)

Threaded View

  1. #28
    Moderator xerx's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2007
    Location
    Miniluv
    Posts
    7,792
    Mentioned
    205 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Whoobie77 View Post
    Ok, so, I went and looked up who I was thinking of, and Al-Ghazali was the name. After Rome fell, the West was in the Dark Ages, There was no power in Europe to carry the torch which began with Hellenistic Greece's pluralism. The Muslim world picked up the torch, essentially. But after the Mongols had sacked the Abbasids and the Crusades happened, the torch had effectively been passed. The Mongols were bringing together disparate talents to advance their military conquests, and the Crusades "brought home" the lost information of the Dark Ages, setting the stage for Britain, France, Spain, and like to begin grasping for the throne. Combine this with Al-Ghazali's undermining of pluralistic thought, and you had the beginnings of a diminishing in importance. I think you misrepresent the Ottomans as a superpower; to be a superpower means you are ruling the world. By the time WWI had rolled around, the once proud seat of Constantinople was almost an afterthought in the conflict of Britain, France, Germany and Russia. The Mongols were ruling the world after the Abbasids, and then the power center shifted back to Europe, The Qing is an apt comparison-a brittle country which had long past its heyday. The apex of premodern Chinese civilization was probably sometime in the Song, the apex of premodern Muslim civilization was during the Abbasids. The span of time from the height of the Song to the end of Qing, and the time from the end of Abbasids to the end of the Ottomans, was the decline towards death (irrelevance or dismantlement) not the death itself. Analogous to middle and old age in humans; not without good times, but certainly nothing like what was achieved in one's prime.
    The argument that a philosophy is singularly responsible for Islam's decay is convenient, but silly. Muslim culture didn't suddenly decide to become backwards in the 13th century. It took war and economics to whittle it down.


    The Mongols probably had the biggest hand in destroying the Islamic golden age. Their level of destruction would be classified as genocide by any metric:

    * The Abbasid capital Baghdad, the largest city in Islam ( if not the world** ) was virtually erased on the orders of Hulegu Khan. It's great library was burned to the ground and Mesopotamia's three thousand+ year old irrigation system was completely destroyed. Its population was deported or massacred; the dead numbered between 800,000 to 2,000,000.

    * Cities in Iran and Afghanistan, major population basins and centers of learning, were decimated. You can walk into the Iranian countryside today and visit ghost towns that haven't been repopulated since the Mongol period.

    * Tamerlane, the Mongol ruler of Persia, single-handedly slaughtered like ~5% of the world's population, many Muslims among them.


    Islam's intellectual conservatism was a result, not the cause of the end of their Golden age.


    ** Chang'an being another contender.
    Last edited by xerx; 09-14-2014 at 05:14 PM.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •