Fjordman turns the pro-Islam, anti-Medieval Europe propaganda on its head

In an article at Brussels Journal entitled “The Truth about Islam in Europe, Fjordman writes:

Jihad piracy and slavery remained a serious threat to Europeans for more than a thousand years. As historian Ibn Khaldun proudly proclaimed about the early Middle Ages: “The Christian could no longer float a plank upon the sea.” The reason why the West for centuries didn’t have easy access to the Classical learning of the Byzantine Empire was because endemic Muslim raids made the Mediterranean unsafe for regular travel. It has to be the height of absurdity to block access to something and then take credit for transmitting it, yet that is precisely what Muslims do. As stronger states slowly grew up in the West, regular contact with their Christian cousins in Byzantium was gradually re-established, especially with the city-states of northern Italy where during the Renaissance the printing press—an invention aggressively rejected by Muslims—made Greco-Roman texts, with translations aided by Greek-speaking Byzantine refugees from Islamic Jihad, available to future generations. Westerners eventually gained access to the Greco-Roman manuscripts preserved in Constantinople, the Second Rome. Consequently, they no longer needed to rely on limited translations in Arabic, which had often been made from Byzantine manuscripts in the first place, and frequently by Christian or Jewish translators.

The Middle East had for thousands of years been more advanced than most of Europe. This situation didn’t begin with the introduction of Islam. On the contrary: it ended with Islamization. The region we today call the Greater Middle East, which includes Egypt, Palestine, Syria, south-eastern Anatolia, Iraq, Iran and parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, is the seat of the oldest known civilizations on the planet and the source of many of the most important inventions in human history, including writing and the alphabet.

It is surely no coincidence that the first major civilization on the Indian subcontinent, the Harappan Civilization, arose in the Indus Valley in the northwest, i.e. closest to Sumerian Mesopotamia. A little understood culture at the Mediterranean island of Malta has left us with megalithic temples that may be the oldest freestanding stone structures in the world. Dating back to 3600 BC, they predate the pyramids of Egypt with a thousand years. Still, it is not a coincidence that literate European civilizations took root in lands that were geographically close to Egypt, the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia: The Minoan civilization at the island of Crete, later mainland Greece and the Balkans, then Rome. Even in the Roman Empire, the Eastern part was more urbanized than its Northern and Western regions, which is one of the reasons why the Eastern half proved more durable.

Contrast this with modern times, when southeast Europe (the Balkans) is Europe’s number one trouble spot. So is the original seat of the first Indian civilization, in Pakistan and Kashmir. The Greater Middle East thus went from being a global center of civilization to being a global center of anti-civilization. This change largely coincided with the Islamization of the region.

Muslim reformist Irshad Manji has asked in her book The Trouble with Islam what caused the earlier “golden age” of Islam, and concludes, with a few reservations, that “tolerance served as the best way to build and maintain the Islamic empire.” In light of the evidence quoted above I disagree with her, and even more so with David Levering Lewis. Islam’s much-vaunted “golden age” was in reality the twilight of the conquered pre-Islamic cultures, an echo of times passed. The brief cultural blossoming during the first centuries of Islamic rule owed its existence almost entirely to the pre-Islamic heritage in a region that was still, for a while, majority non-Muslim.

I’ve recently been re-reading some of the books of American evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond, including Guns, Germs, and Steel. What strikes me is how Diamond, with his emphasis on historical materialism, fails to explain the rise of the West and especially why English, not Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit or Mayan, became the global lingua franca. His most important flaw is his complete failure to explain how the Greater Middle East went from being a center of civilization to being a center of anti-civilization. This was not caused by smallpox or because zebras are more difficult to domesticate than water buffaloes. It was caused by Islam. Yet is striking to notice how Diamond totally ignores the influence of Islam. This demonstrates clearly that any historical explanation that places too much emphasis on material issues and too little on the impact of human ideas is bound to end up with false or misleading conclusions.

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LA writes to Fjordman:

This is very, very good. “The Middle-East became a center of anti-civilization.” Wonderful.

One thing that always gets me is the smug slogan (not coming from people’s intellect, but from a tape planted in their heads) that when Islam was at its glorious, tolerant, richly diverse, classically learned, scientifically inventive, aesthetically creative, and morally enlightened height, Europe was a backward mess. It is always said in a tone of superiority and contempt toward Europe. None of the people who say it ever adds the simple fact that Europe was a backward mess because its civilization had been destroyed by barbarians.

And among the people who constantly indulge themselves in this mindless, anti-Western slogan about European backwardness and Islamic greatness are the “conservatives.”

It’s one thing not to feel love or loyalty toward your own civilization. It’s another not even to show minimal fairness toward it.

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Alan Levine writes:

I have to disagree with Fjordman on this one. That Latin Christians recovered ancient writings from the Arabs in Spain and Sicily was not due to their inability to travel to Constantinople. The translation movement, from Arabic to Latin, took place in Toledo and Sicily AFTER those areas had been recaptured from the Muslims in the 11th century, which was partly due to the fact that the Italians had by then regained domination at sea and at a time when it had become relatively easy to reach Constantinople. I have never seen a satisfactory explanation of why Greek knowledge came via Arabic intermediary instead of directly.

I would speculate that it might be because the Latins in the translation movement were interested in the same things the Arabs had been, i.e. science and philosophy rather than literature in the usual sense, and because they knew the only advances since ancient times in such matters had been made in the Muslim lands, rather than Byzantium. Later, of course, with humanism, their interests changed. I offer this explanation with some reluctance, as it may well be wrong.

I am also afraid that Fjordman, and perhaps you, slightly deprecate the creative element in the early Islamic world, and also the extent to which Islam was associated with a cultural revival in the Middle East. Such creativity as there was may well have been linked to heterodox currents in Islam and so doomed in the long run, as von Grunebaum argued. It is also a noticeable point that the creative areas of the Muslim world were in Spain and Iran, that is, on the frontiers, which were only partly Arabized, rather than in the Arabized center of Islam.

Jonathan L. writes:

Thank you for posting the last part of Fjordman’s insightful essay. Turning the Mediterranean into a cauldron of jihad piracy, and thus isolating Western Christendom from East, was only one of the ways Islam retarded the development of Western, and thus world, civilization. There were also the seasonal jihad-razzias that destroyed the remnants of Greco-Roman urban civilization in Anatolia, leading to the abandonment of the open cities of late antiquity in favor of clusters of villages near centrally-located fortresses so that refuge could be taken when the Muslim raiders returned.

In many of the accounts of that time we also hear of churches and monasteries being looted, and since these were repositories not just of great art but of great learning, it is pretty much a certainty that the Muslims destroyed many irreplaceable manuscripts. PBS’s “Nova” had a recent show on the recovery of Archimedes’s long-lost work, “The Method,” from a palimpsest that scholars have only recently become capable of deciphering. Had a copy of “The Method” (which describes a sophisticated precursor to calculus) been available in the Middle Ages or early Renaissance, Western science today would be at least 100 years more advanced. The probability that other copies were among the thousands of ecclesiastic library collections the Muslims looted and burned, and thus that Islam retarded mathematics by at least a century, is thus excellent.

Charles T. writes:

Excellent information.

LA writes: “And among the people who constantly indulge themselves in this mindless, anti-Western slogan about European backwardness and Islamic greatness are the ‘conservatives.’”

Yes. Conservatives have become lazy in the study of history; their own history. As a result, there are not many people who can challenge the elitist lie about Islam and the cultures of Europe. Even worse, it seems that there are not many conservatives who want to challenge these historical lies.

The more I study the past, the more I realize I have been lied to.

Bravo to Fjordman.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 24, 2008 08:40 PM | Send