I’m going to ask again. HOWMANY PLANTENS ARE THERE??? Some have a great command of the English language as in this post…and some seem to speak English as though it is a third language. What gives???
If any cultural borrowing is theft then we owe the English quite a lot.
If you’re talking about Islamic Spain, that was (to the Muslims) an outpost on the edge of the civilized world, founded by a renegade dynasty. It didn’t mean that the Muslim heartland had much interest in or knowledge of life in Europe.
No, I think he’s right, because he acknowledges the existence of a rich and vibrant Islamic civilization that came to an end because of a deliberate closing of its own mind. That’s an accurate description of what happened, I think.
History is both of course. You need a point of view to make sense out of actual events. Otherwise history is “just one damned thing after another.”
History needs to be analysed too. Did the Islamic Golden Age Really Existed?History is both of course. You need a point of view to make sense out of actual events. Otherwise history is “just one damned thing after another.”
That is partially true. If we take the matters physically, the above may be true. But we always take matters spiritually. So Muslims have great affection for Jerusalem. WE consider it as our first Qiblah (The center of worship). It is like our Ka’abah.
Haile Selassie was an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, and not a Jew. His name means “Power of the Trinity”, and you have said Muslims don’t believe in the Trinity.
And of course, all points of view are equal.History is both of course. You need a point of view to make sense out of actual events. Otherwise history is “just one damned thing after another.”
This is a bad comparison because you are forgetting your own dualism: there is dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb. The Americans, British, Russians, Germans, etc. are all part of dar al-Harb; so we stole from ourselves.
You are forgetting that he was quoting Palmer and Colton, A History of the Modern World. Perhaps they are not serious scholars either.
Indeed they are–scholars of modern European history (all three authors–Lloyd Kramer as well–of that textbook appear to be experts in French history, for some reason), not medieval Islam. But certainly serious scholars. Since I don’t know how important Rizzi’s point about Islam was to his broader argument, I won’t fault him for going to an intro modern history textbook instead of a scholarly source dealing specifically with Islam. But I do want to make two points:
This is a bogus argument on your part. It’s equivalent to pointing to places where the Catholic Church fails to live up to its own ideals in order to argue that those ideals are false. Yes, the academy fails to uphold intellectual freedom at times, and often falls prey to ideological agendas. But what’s the alternative? To abandon the idea of intellectual freedom and open inquiry altogether and accept a world in which all we can do is shriek hatred at each other from our rival blogs and radio stations? I don’t want to live in that world. All I claimed for the academy is that it is *relatively *less likely to engage in propagandistic nonsense than other potential sources of information. And I stand by that. The disciplines of the academy help people look at the evidence more fairly, and the guild structure (although it can be overly limiting in many ways) provides some degree of accountability and mutual trust. It’s not perfect. But no human institution is.
Is this based on your own knowledge of the academy, or are you getting it from right-wing propaganda sources? There’s certainly some truth to it. Indeed, I have personal reasons to agree. I and a friend from grad school were the two finalists for a job at a seminary/grad school, and the search committee decided to close the search rather than hiring either of us because, as someone told my wife (who worked at this institution herself), they found it “hard to get us out of the sixteenth century.” In other words, we were both old-fashioned church historians–ironically, we had studied with the same advisor–and were not able to speak the fashionable jargon of “postcolonial theory,” etc.
I didn’t say that there was a “requirement.” I said that there was a relatively greater chance of doing so. And I stand by this, until you can show me what institution or method of inquiry is generally fairer and more reasonable than academic scholarship.
No. The Turks did not become rulers of parts of the Islamic world until the 10th century. The Turkish warlords replaced the Caliphate (in terms of effective power–they continued to pay lip service to it) rather than creating it. However, cultural creativity did continue throughout the period after the collapse of the Caliphate’s effective power.
It is not just remotely possible. There’s nothing even unlikely about it. However, the more important point is that you don’t do history by sitting back in your armchair and speculating (without any knowledge of the period and cultures in question) as to what is possible or likely. You look at the evidence of what actually *did *happen. In fact, that’s how you acquire the ability to speculate reasonably about what is likely when you don’t have clear evidence.
The period of the Abbasid Caliphate (750-c.900 in terms of its effective power) was actually quite peaceful–and was, unsurprisingly, a period of cultural flourishing. However, intellectual life continued to flourish even after that. War in the Middle Ages was not total and didn’t go on all the time, and all the warring parties respected scholars, so they were able to move quite freely across the ever-shifting political boundaries. I refer you to Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam, especially volume 2, for more detail.
sedonaman, thanks for this information. Even then I admired that righteous person.
No, it isn’t. If the Catholic Church fails to live up to its own ideals, it is because of the failure of human nature to do so. The academy holds itself up to the ideal of “serious scholarship” but consciously … consciously … rejects it in a number of cases. The Larry Summers affair was just one example. This “failure to uphold intellectual freedom at times” is a serious problem because the academy is where ideas come from … ideas that get codified, such as diversity über alles, affirmative action, and intolerance for the “incorrect” dispositions. It were as though human knowledge is complete in the social studies.
Read this paragraph very carefully:
Translation: You are living in that world already. This was aptly illustrated by the fictional character, Willie Stark, in All the King’s Men. He got very few votes by campaigning on, “What this state needs is a balanced tax policy.” Next election, he got elected by becoming an ideologue. The point here is that people listen to ideologues, be they Right or Left. You condemn Right-wing ideologues but you cavalierly dismiss Left-wing ones as though they don’t matter. You might ask what this has to do with the academy. If you don’t win elections, you don’t get to govern, and therefore your ideas don’t get implemented. And if Left-wing ideology is the only thing emanating from the academy, that’s what gets implemented when Left-wing ideologues get into office.
I am not asking for perfection in the academy, but seeking error is not an inadvertent “imperfection”; it is deliberate and therefore criminal since the academy is accepting money on false premises.
This is getting off onto a tangent, but I think it has to be said. Your mistake here is you have equated Churchill’s screed with serious academic research. Here are some comments by academicians themselves:
Why is truth so important? If it weren’t we could not rely on what teachers taught; we would have to verify everything for ourselves, even the most trivial things. So if a professor got up and said the earth is flat and we believed him, we live in error, or we would have to verify it ourselves because he couldn’t be trusted.
Now I ask you why you think Churchill deserves the same consideration as Summers.
But they defended Churchill’s.
I agree, but they should at least try to follow them.
Professors are supposed to be highly intelligent, smarter than the rest of us unwashed masses. As such, it should be easier for them not to introduce politics into the academy and masquerade it serious scholarship.
Interestingly, though, that Emperor is seen as having been an incarnation of Jesus Christ by the Rastafarians in the West Indies(particularily Jamaica). I believe that the Emperors of Ethiopia call themselves Lions of Judah because their claim of descent from Solomon through his alleged son Menelik by Queen Bilqees of Sheba(though I will never accept that she was Abyssinian- she was a “Gulf” Arab from today’s Yemen!).