What went wrong in Arab culture?

Great Debates
1

Okay, this is a provocative way to phrase it but still.

Once upon a time Arab cuture was heads above the West in intellectualism and literacy. Back when Western physicians were bloodletting and more likely to make things worse than help, Arab culture was doing real science, saving lives, and advancing mathematics.

Now education is sparse in Arab lands. Intellectualism is the exception. Illiteracy is high and there is little available to read for those who can and desire to. The only education available to many is that provided by fundamentalist extremists.

How did this happen and how can it change? How did a long tradition of intellectual pursuit and excellence get so waylaid?

2

Well, the Crusades were a major contributing factor. They started off as a noble enough idea, reclaiming the Holy Land for Christendom. Trouble is, there had been Christians living in the area since, well, 33AD or so, and they seemed to have a pretty good handle on looking after such Christian holy sites as the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre…

The Crusades quickly degenerated into a land grab by second and third sons of European nobles who, due to the primogeniture laws, weren’t going to inherit much of anything from their fathers. So, hey, there’s a fair amount of land in the Middle East and North Africa, so they went off to carve out fiefdoms, duchies, even kingdoms for themselves.

Needless to say, the locals were pissed, and being that the vast majority of the locals were Muslims, they saw (partly correctly) the invasion as an invasion of a foriegn religion (infidels in their eyes, although the Koran does not regard Christians and Jews as infidels).

By the end of the thirteenth century, the Crusades were becoming a thing of the past, but the situation had rise to a lot of Islamic fundementalists who, understandably wanted to preserve their way of life from the foriegn Christian invaders. Like many of their modern fundementalist Christian counterparts, they came to regard scientific knowledge as leading people to deny faith (Jerry Falwell, anyone?), which, from the fourteenth century on, led to a major decline in the sciences and medicine.

Of course, European colonialism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn’t help the situation any…

Hope that helps.

3

One word: Fundamentalism

4

I’m not sure how much blame can be laid at the feet of the crusaders. The Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 and proceeded to worry the European powers up to the sieges of Vienna (1529 and 1681).

I’d say that the relative rates of development allowed for the western European powers to rise to and pass the Arab/Muslim world. The ability to exploit the new world and the feedback cycles of technology and attempts to maintain a balance of power within Europe provided sufficient stimulus to drive the progress of the European powers. The Muslim world fell relative to the Europeans.

MrTuffPaws, I believe that pan Arabism in the Middle East was primarily secular/socialist/Marxist. The fundamentalism may have always been there (it exists within the west as well), but it can’t exclusively be blamed either.

I wait with bated breath for the indignant replies from Aldebaran. :slight_smile:

5

As I recall, much of the current anti-intellectualism was spurred by the Persian branch of the Arab world declaring virtually all science and philosophy heretical. They pinned it on the crusades, but it ahd more to do with an enlightened public posing a threat to their pseudo-religious autocracy. Which is very akin to what went wrong in many parts of the West as well.

6

Virtually none. The crusaders conquered only a tiny part of the Arab world, and held it for less than a hundred years. Furthermore, the zenith of Arab scientific and intellectual achievement occurred after the Crusades.

Without question the Ottoman Turks were a much larger factor in Arab decline. The Ottoman Empire ruled over almost all Arabs for several hundred years, and left little positive behind. See the Balkans for another example of the sorry consequences of Ottoman misrule.

7

On preview, I see that jklann has already mentioned the Ottomans, but since I already typed this up, here it is.

No cites; this is my synthesis based on a long-ago B.S. in History and years of reading. Specialists in MENA or Islam may have a different POV.

First, not all Middle East/North African nations that participated in the flowering of Islamic culture are Arab. There are many other tribal/ethnic groups involved, such as Turks, Persians, etc.

I believe the Ottoman Empire had a lot to do with the decline of the Islamic world. The Ottomans most often had a European orientation, and it wasn’t in the interest of the Empire for any of their vassal states to be very powerful/educated/etc. For about 500 years, there was constant tension between the desire of the Turks who ruled the Empire to become more modern/western, and the fears of more conservative elements that to do so would dilute their religion. Hence, most modernization occurred in Turkey, while the remoter (mostly Arabic) parts of the empire tended to greater conservatism.

After World War I, the European colonial powers filled the vacuum left by the reduction of the Ottomans to the modern nation of Turkey. Popular resentment of the foreign powers was fuel for the rise of fundamentalist Islam, with a concomitant rejection of those things seen as Western. The alignment of most of the Arab nations with the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War further incensed fundamentalist Muslims, setting the stage for everything from the mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, to the Islamic revolution in Iran, to the rise of al Qaeda.

But, that’s just my $0.25.

8

You know, lots of cultures have faced threatening forces from outside.

Sometimes this threat has been a spur to greatness (say, Japan in the late 1800s), sometimes the opposite. Given that different cultures have reacted differently, I’d think we’d want to look at the reacting culture, not the threatening culture, as the primary explanation.

Why was Japanese culture spurred to greatness by an outside threat while (allegedly) Arab culture went into decline when threatened?

Grey writes:

Well, sure :slight_smile: But then what explains the differing relative rates of development? I’m not convinced that discovering the New World had a large quantitative impact on the power of Europe vis a vis the Arab/Muslim world. And even if it did, why did Europe discover/exploit the New World more effectively than the Arab/Muslim world did Africa, India, Indonesia, or Australia?

Oh, wait. I know this one. It’s cause the Europeans were eeeevul. :slight_smile:

9

Well the point was that the Arab/Muslim world didn’t just hit a peak and collapse, it continued until, relative to the progression of the western European powers, it looked like a decline. I don’t think I’ve phrased myself well this time either though. :slight_smile:

The new world was sparsely occupied, easily exploited and provided a sand box for European power plays. Power plays that required ever increasing maritime sophistication, armament and commercial developments to finance those power plays. I don’t know where a Muslim equivalent might be unless the Mughals in India count, which I doubt.

Maybe it comes down to exploitable lands. Japan had China to move into where as the Ottomans had no where to go, hemmed in by Austria and Russia. I think that’s a thread unto itself.

And the Europeans were about as evil as everyone else, and typically to themselves. Crofters and clearances come to mind.

10

All interesting but not mainly getting at my question. (Excepting laigle’s and Theda’s thought puting the blame on fundamentalists who saw secular scholarship as a threat to their power.) I’m not asking about the collapse of the empire, but the collapse of intellectualism as a highly prized cultural value. That could continue without an empire or a state even (see for example the history of the Jews, who may very well have developed intelllectualism and scholarship as a culturally prized trait more when without any land at all than during the height of the ancient Israeli Kingdom.)

I was expecting more of a blame to be laid on colonialism destroying native educational infrastructures which let the ground fertile for the rise of anti-intellectual fundamentalists who, when the colonialists left, percieved secular education as a colonialist left-over to be rallied against. I didn’t realize that the decline of intellectualism preceded that era.

11

Conservatism, religion and a fear of the outside… the same that happened to China formerly too.

12

Rather,

The two fundamental teachings of Christianity;

(1) The love of a God beyond the self.
(2) The love of others as the self.

were happily pre-adapted to the needs of todays world and imbues a spirit of co-operative conditions necessary to support the free exercise of the human will that allows unencumbered commerce in our world today.

On the other hand,

Without the addition of the Christian concept of "*** unconditional love and forgiveness witout retribution*** " the practice of Muslimism, as a supporting mechanism for culture and society is doomed by this oversight, and soon might only be followed only by a diminishing number of people who are, by mindset , seperated from the rest of the world, and thereby be seperated from the bountiful fruits and rewards that will be available for the larger group of cosmopolitan men in the new days to come.

And Lo,

The bird is on the wing.

13

Well, I don’t know, I think the University of Cairo is still one of the largest in the world. But maybe the curriculum is what changed. Learning seems to be defined, in many places, as being able to recite large portions of the Qu’ran from memory. Don’t get me wrong, that’s an impressive feat, but I don’t think anybody outside a madrassah would consider that alone to be a real education. Central to this seems to be that it’s a complete and perfect thing which doesn’t NEED to be challenged. Interpretation, reflection, and criticism of the book, like the competing schools of thought about the Bible in the West, don’t seem to exist and people who publish such books often have to fear for their very lives. Surely this attitude will rub off in other areas of life, like politics, etc.

I attended a few lectures by a Fordham professor of religion that said that the Arab world feels sort of adrift since the abolition of caliphate, the system set up by the early Muslims to govern their part of the world. They feel betrayed and feel they need another sort of structure, which is why so many of them go totalitarian. I don’t know.

Rashak, good call on China.

14

I was pretty shocked the first time I learned of how the Chinese burned their huge ships and basically isolated themselves… they were basically going towards becoming a world dominant power and suddenly thought the outside world was impure (simplification of course).

15

Bullpuckey, Milum. Christianity has seen more than its share of mindless anti-intellectualism as well. And if you really think Christian (i.e. Western) civilization has an underlying ethic of unconditional love and forgiveness, I have to ask what you’re smoking, where you got it, and how much it costs, because I sure could use some.

16

And stupidity on the Boards.

Mulim explain, please, the emergence of fascism and totalitarian regimes within “Christian” nations. Example such as Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Napoleonic France… None of which truly demonstrate

.

Actually open another thread.

17

In recent times, much of the blame can be placed on oil. Countries that find themselves resource-rich - especially a resource easily controlled by a central government - find it less important to develop indiginous industry, agriculture, technology, etc. Oil revenue also gives dictators the wealth required to build the machinery of the state without massive involvement of the average citizen. The revenue is also used to bribe and payoff the citizenry through monuments and social works and welfare.

18

But I wonder if it’s the potential for people within the society to move out, leave and setup shop elsewhere. The idea of a frontier as an incubator of ideas and social conventions far enough away from the centres of power to develop, yet close enough that outcomes flow back to the centre. The ossification that happens when everything is fine, nothing much happens; out there doesn’t matter would seem to be a perfect catalyst for intellectual decline.

19

While milum is letting his sprained arm rest from patting himself on the back for the accident of being born into the currently dominant culture, I will point out that his thesis falls apart with a simple examination of the Western Roman Empire which fell into ruin despite enjoying his advantages of belief along with an advanced culture of law and engineering.

What would seem to be a more likely explanation for any of the various cultures that have apparently suffered periods of decline is that there are general cycles of growth and retreat. Ancient Greece was in intellectual decline before Rome established its hegemony over the Mediterranean. Ancient Egypt went through several cycles of advancement and retrenchment. China and India have each seen periods of scientific and cultural growth followed by periods of stagnation and regression. The Maya were not destroyed by the succeeding Aztecs. Rather, their decline, already well under way, allowed the Aztecs to expand.

We can probably discuss the specific events that led to the general retrenchment of science and engineering in Southwestern Asia (and Tamerlane already provided a pretty clear presentation on the topic, although I have not yet found his earlier posts), but ascribing any rise or fall to inherent moral traits is silly.

20

Complementing:

Sam’s post: Another example Colonial Spain and their Inca and Aztec Gold.

Grey’s post: I suppose your talking about the New World ?