Friday, May 09, 2008

Europe's Islamic Legacy: Bloodshed, Tyranny, Disaster

There is a fabricated and stunningly mindless push within academic circles to white-wash the predatory role of Islam against Europe over the centuries, to transmute the numerous wars of Muslim nations against Europeans, the millions of European slaves taken by Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean, the gigantic wars of conquest and enslavement launched into Spain and France, and into the Balkans up into Austria, to make all of that something benign and actually helpful, as if it was responsible for uplifting primitive barbarian Europeans into the Enlightenment and Renaissance.   This is like saying Hitler liberated the Jews, and that the high numbers of Jewish people winning Nobel Prizes today is due to the influence of Nazism on Jewish culture.  It is the most foul and dirty lie, promulgated by clever propagandists with very clear political agendas for facilitating an Islamification of Europe in the modern time. The aim appears directed to making Western people think "gosh, those smart Muslims, we really owe them a lot" and hence to increase immigration from those "smart" Muslim lands, and not to worry when groups of punkish Muslim youths, who dropped out of school before they could get to the advanced mathematics or physics classes, much less to speak the language of their adopted homelands, are caught trying to plant terror-bombs.  People should use their own eyes to see for themselves how Islam works to block the intellect, to render its believers incapable of critical thinking, and how its rules against artistic expressions -- for example, forbidding images of people or animals -- permitting only a brain-numbing calligraphy, a thousand ways to write "God Is Great" on a mosque wall, but nothing else.

"Islamic science" to the extent that it existed, was the product of conquest and acquisition, with scientifically-thinking people of other religions and cultures being the real inventors and scholars within Muslim-dominated regions -- peoples of Greek, Christian, Jewish, Assyrian, and other multiple non-Muslim backgrounds, were always the ones who made the discoveries and contributions to which Muslims are today grabbing onto psychologically, to prop up their current sorry social conditions.  And in those cases where Muslims did make discoveries, in the majority of cases these were forced converts to Islam, having a sword put to their neck.  The Greek Christian scholars then became "Muslim scholars", with the writings of Aristotle and so many others, giving a foundation to "Islamic science", which did not persist due to its dependence upon captured infidels, who invariably died, without any larger group of students to whom they could pass along their knowledge, given how that knowledge almost invariably undermined Islamic totalitarianism.

The whole sorry business is like the al-Qaeda bombers using cell-phones as detonators for their murderous bomb-making, and then claiming they invented the cell-phone and dynamite.  Well, I suppose we can grant to them the "novel use" of a cell-phone in this case, and give them a patent on that idea.  Or the "invention of the concept of zero" -- which actually came from India -- "Islamic science" is also something of a Big Zero, an oxymoron, with little more than the term itself being an invention.

The article below speaks to a new book by a Prof. Gouguenheim, breaking with this foul tradition of distortions, throwing off the "New History" being funded by Saudi petro-dollars globally, or as enthusiastically written by people who have no problems with totalitarian Islamic culture.  Note the "sarcastic" statement by one of the Islam-friendly critics of Gouguenheim -- his sarcasm is the truth, but he does not appreciate it.  The article also exposes some connection between the old Nazis and Islam as well -- we know this in the context of Hitler's friendly embrace of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, in their shared plans to exterminate the Jews and other non-Muslims of the Middle East.  Also such historical tid-bits as the nation of Persia changing its name to "Iran" -- what we in the West would call "Aryan" -- as a quite voluntary supplication to Nazism and Hitlerism by yet another big chunk of the Islamic world.  Or the various SS officers fled to Islamic nations after the war, to escape the hangman's noose, whereupon they converted to Islam, took Muslim names, and were absorbed into the armies of the Arab League for the multiple wars launched against the young state of Israel.   Gouguenheim adds more to this history, pointing out how one old Nazi wrote an influential text about "Europe's Debt to Islam" in the post-war period.   Oh, the problem is, the book is not out in English.  Only in French, but if you speak French there is a copy on Amazon.com for over $100.  The truth may set you free, but is rarely free by itself.
http://www.amazon.com/fausses-terreurs-lan-mil-approfondissement/dp/2708405667

Much of this has been covered previously by other scholars, such as Bat-Yeor, Andrew Bostom and Robert Spencer, and we have a long list of such books (at a more reasonable price) in the "Saharasia Today" section of our on-line bookstore: http://www.naturalenergyworks.net  But it is an historical episode about which not enough has yet penetrated into the public mind.  The multi-culturalist ideologues who are promoting Islam into the West do not have our best interests at heart.

J.D.

PS.  Hat-tip to Acharya-S for the heads-up on this item.

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/28/europe/politicus.php

Europe's debt to Islam given a skeptical look

By John Vinocur
Published: April 28, 2008

When Sylvain Gouguenheim looks at today's historical vision of the history of the West and Islam, he sees a notion, accepted as fact, that the Muslim world was at the source of the Christian Europe's reawakening from the Middle Ages.

He sees a portrayal of an enlightened Islam, transmitting westward the knowledge of the ancient Greeks through Arab translators and opening the path in Europe to mathematics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy - a gift the West regards with insufficient esteem.

"This thesis has basically nothing scandalous about it, if it were true," Gouguenheim writes. "In spite of the appearances, it has more to do with taking ideological sides than scientific analysis."

For a controversy, here's a real one. Gouguenheim, a professor of medieval history at a prestigious university, l'École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, is saying "Whoa!" to the idea there was an Islamic bridge of civilization to the West. Supposedly, it "would be at the origin of the Middle Ages' cultural and scientific reawakening, and (eventually) the Renaissance."

In a new book, he is basically canceling, or largely writing off, a debt to "the Arabo-Muslim world" dating from the year 750 - a concept built up by other historians over the past 50 years - that has Europe owing Islam for an essential part of its identity.

"Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel" (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world's initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of "Islam" but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs, and that a wave of translations of Aristotle began at the Mont Saint-Michel monastery in France 50 years before Arab versions of the same texts appeared in Moorish Spain.

When I talked to Gouguenheim about his book a couple of weeks ago, he said he had no interest in polemics, just some concern that his research could be misused by extremists.

At the same time, he acknowledged that his subject was intensely political. Gouguenheim said it was in light of a 2002 recommendation from the European Union that schoolbooks give a more positive rendering of Islam's part in European heritage "that an attempt at a clarification becomes necessary." Reading Gouguenheim without a background in the history of the Byzantine Empire or the Abassid caliphate is a bit of a challenge. It justifies distance and reserving judgment.

But Le Figaro and Le Monde, in considering the book in prominent reviews, drank its content in a single gulp. No suspended endorsements or anything that read like a caution.

"Congratulations," Le Figaro wrote. "Mr. Gouguenheim wasn't afraid to remind us that there was a medieval Christian crucible, a fruit of the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem," while "Islam hardly proposed its knowledge to Westerners."

Le Monde was even more receptive: "All in all, and contrary to what's been repeated in a crescendo since the 1960s, European culture in its history and development shouldn't be owing a whole lot to Islam. In any case, nothing essential.

"Precise and well-argued, this book, which sets history straight, is also a strongly courageous one."
But is it right?

Gouguenheim attacks the "thesis of the West's debt" as advanced by the historians Edward Said, Alain de Libera and Mohammed Arkoun. He says it replaces formerly dominant notions of cultural superiority advanced by Western orientalists, with "a new ethnocentrism, oriental this time" that sets off an "enlightened, refined and spiritual Islam" against a brutal West.

Nuggets: Gouguenheim argues that Bayt al-Hikma, or the House of Wisdom, said to be created by the Abassids in the ninth century, was limited to the study of Koranic science, rather than philosophy, physics or mathematics, as understood in the speculative context of Greek thought.

He says that Aristotle's works on ethics, metaphysics and politics were disregarded or unknown to the Muslim world, being basically incompatible with the Koran. Europe, he said, "became aware of the Greek texts because it went hunting for them, not because they were brought to them."

Gouguenheim calls the Mont Saint-Michel monastery, where the texts were translated into Latin, "the missing link in the passage from the Greek to the Latin world of Aristotelian philosophy." Outside of a few thinkers - he lists Al-Farabi, Avicenne, Abu Ma'shar and Averroes - Gougenheim considers that the "masters of the Middle East" retained from Greek teaching only what didn't contradict Koranic doctrine.
Published less than a month ago, the book is just beginning to encounter learned criticism.

Sarcastically, Gabriel Martinez-Gros, a professor of medieval history, and Julien Loiseau, a lecturer, described Gouguenheim as "re-establishing the real hierarchy of civilizations."

They said that he disregarded the mathematics and astronomy produced by the Islamic world between the 9th and 13th centuries and painted the period's Islamic civilization exactly what it was not: obscurantist, legalistic, fatalistic and fanatic.

Indeed, Gouguenheim's thesis, they suggest, has "intellectual associations that are questionable at their very heart" - which I take to mean nastily right-wing.

If you read Gougenheim's appendix, he's preemptively headed off that kind of accusation. He offers his book as an antidote to an approach to Islam's medieval relations to the West exemplified by the late Sigrid Hunke, a German writer, described as a former Nazi and friend of Heinrich Himmler.

Hunke describes a pioneering, civilizing Islam to which "the West owes everything." Gouguenheim replies that, in deforming reality, her work from the 1960s continues as a reference point that unfortunately still "shapes the spirit of the moment."

He says he means to rectify that.

His book is interesting and bold. At the very least, it is kindling for arguments on a touchy subject where most people don't have more than inklings and instincts to sort out even shards of truth from angry and conflictual expertise.


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