In Islam and in Arab culture in general it is the task of the man to provide for his family.
The fact that the acces to education is influenced by the reasons I explained only reinforces this cultural preference. People who need to make a choice will prefer to send a son to school, which is usually the eldest son.
So one can say that the aftermath of this colonialism indeed has an influence on the illiteracy rate men/women as it does - for the reasons I explained - for illiteracy rates young/older generations.
Salaam. A
Well,
either this is true in the sense that no Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or Confucian or Mayan or Germanic culture anywhere has ever been able to produce anything admirable in and of itself,
or this is the single most ignorant statement posted on these boards in years.
I suspect that the response will either be to claim that everything “Muslim” was “borrowed” (as if no other culture borrowed anything) or an ignornat dismissal of all the actual Muslim contributions to medicine, mathematics, shipbuilding, astronomy, navigation, etc.
Usually, I find some trivial detail to nitpick in your posts, but not this time. You’re definitely on the upswing.
You use the word “praetorianization” a lot. My dictionary doesn’t have this word, but I can take a stab at guessing what you mean: when the palace military guard of the ruler begins to dictate policy, making the de jure ruler more of a figurehead. The analogy would be if the Marine Corps White House detail began telling the president what to do. The only example in U.S. history that could be remotely analogous is when one of the White House Marine guards entered politics: that being Chuck Robb, who was a WH Marine when he married Lynda Bird (Or was it Luci Bird? memory of the 1960s grows fainter), then was elected governor of Virginia and then U.S. senator. However, he was a civilian when he entered government; obviously, this is a very poor analogy with “praetorianization.” Wasn’t it Robb, in his term as governor of Virginia, who established the Center for Innovative Technology near Dulles Airport? So even a praetorian guard can be open to new scientific and tech thought when he works within a democratic system.
As I recall my limited studies, Europe suffered a similar decline after the Roman Church took over because of the same view that was mentioned in another post. Learning is dangerous because if can cause a person to doubt the authority of the Church and was thus discouraged.
The same attitude is not unheard of today. I saw Pastor John Hagee, on TBN TV, castigate those who “question the Word of The Lord.” Holding up a Bible he thundered, “Everything you need to know is in the Book!”
Islaam seems to me to be in that same situation only about 800 years later.
To blame the Ottoman Turks is OK but as I read several of the posts here, it would seem they acted as they did partly to protect their religion from doubters.
I’m not entirely sure that is accurate. First because prince-bishops and Papal States aside, the Roman Church was usually not in actual control, powerful though it may have been. And further because many orders did foster an education of sorts. An argument could be made that at times the church did narrow the scope of education to fit their own agenda, but I’m not sure you can say they sought to stifle it altogether.
tomndeb could better address that point, I imagine.
No, I wouldn’t say so. Aldeberan’s point on intellectual arrogance is more on point here. It’s not really that the Ottomans feared contact with Christians - really, they had plenty of it ( and had many Christians already internal to the state as subjects ) - but more that they were more often just uninterested in adopting European innovations ( some of which were probably only innovative in retrospect, like the demise of guilds ). And really some of those innovations were just not applicable to the Ottoman state. To quote:
The Ottomans in particular faced many obstacles in the process of modernization, democratization, constitutional self-governance, centralization, and industrialization that characterized the rise of the European nation states and produced in them feelings of societal commonality and citizenship. France, for example, learned to construct an identity for many ( but not all ) of its people based upon a shared language, shared religion, shared government, shared history, and shared borders. By 1800, most inhabitants of France saw their Frenchness as the essence of their identities. The peoples of the Ottoman Empire, however, never developed a comparable Ottoman identity. They spoke a plethora of languages; they espoused several religions; their sense of governance was diffused not only by patriarchal and rabbinic authority and power but also by French, Russian, and British determination to regulate Ottoman treatment of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Ottoman subjects; their sense of past was utterly diverse; and their borders were more and more blurred and malleable because of the insistence of foreign powers on commercial, political, and military access. Such manifold barriers to the creation of national identity proved too many to overcome. The empire in the eighteenth century became a second-tier power. By the nineteenth century, many statesmen considered it no power at all, but merely a potential problem.
From The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe by Daniel Goffman ( 2002, Cambridge University Press ).
Oh, I think progress is being made as the world becomes a smaller place. But institutionalized corruption and associated lack of resources and oversight are quite the millstone. That’s one of the reasons private religious schools, charitable or otherwise, are so significant in parts of the MENA - they fill a gap and are the tradition anyway ( and I understand some a pretty decent, really - it’s just the awful ones that get the press ) . Steps like Pakistan’s recent declaration of curriculum oversight and central scrutiny for madrassas might help a bit to standardize edcucation at a more reasonable, slightly less ideological level ( loathsome as such ideas no doubt are to philosophical libertarians ).
But I expect it is going to be a slow process, outside of the already extant circle of the elites ( who can get a decent education in the MENA right now - I saw a recent curricula of graduate biology research at the University of Tehran and it looked pretty reasonable and impressively modern ).
It is a slow process and not in the least because of traditions and customs that are for Westerners maybe impossible to get a good idea off.
Among which “clientelism” (do I have a new word here, I wouldn’t know) is one of the most stubborn and undermining, able to slow down everything and everyone. (Westerners would name this “corruption” but is in fact quite different then what you would normally understand as such).
Of course this is only one factor and everything is intertwined with everything else.
Maybe one should invent a magician who is able to wipe out people’s memory in a whole region at the same moment and replace it with idea’s the West would like to see there being implanted… But I fear that can only happens in fairy tales and in Hollywood.
I’m far from an expert but my impression is that while the church fostered education it only did so for those who were already committed to the position of the church. And that investigation was mostly aimed at perfecting the church knowledge about their own dictrine and “proof” that it was true.
I don’t think that independent investigation leading to questions about church doctrine was incouraged and in fact was actively discouraged. And the ordinary people were even discouraged from reading the Bible because lacking the proper background they could easily fall into errors of interpretation.
One cherry-picked factoid based on the ignorance of many Europeans and North Americans that the zero originated in India while ignoring the use that Muslims made of it in expanding the knowledge and theory of algebra, (quadratics, binomial theorem, spherical trigonometry, tangent, etc.), and other developments is placed against several pages of material that refute the ignorant claims that Islam has produced “nothing.”
I don’t mind the bigotry, Alan, because it is blatant and can be dismissed easily. However, your perpetuation of willful ignorance in a forum dedicated to eliminating it is puzzling.
Among the people and events that your zero cherry picking deliberately ignores are
[ul][li]Ibn al-Haytham, an 11th century mathematician who examined Ptolemy’s works on optics and replied by writing a treatise that produced the correct view that vision is the result of light striking the eye, not emanating from it, as well as producing accurate descriptions of reflection and refraction (Ptolemy had notably gotten the latter wrong) and advancing the mathematics of optics based on observation, experimentation, and analysis.[/li][li] Kamal al-Din Abu’l Hasan Muhammadibn al-Hasan al-Farisi who, in the early fourteenth century expanded upon the works of Ibn al-Haytham and went further, placing diopters at each end of a tube to produce the first telescope.[/li][li] Development of the suction pump is described by al-Jazari 250 years before it appears in Europe.[/li][li] Invention of the crank-and-rod method of converting rotating motion to reciprocating motion is described by al-Jazari 300 years before it appears in Europe.[/li][li] The experimentation with metals that came into Europe under the name Alchemy began with the Arab Islamic philosophers and medical doctors. Even in their errors, such men as Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber), al-Razi (Rhases), moved knowledge away from the “four elements” of the ancient Greeks and demonstrated through analysis and experimentation the ways in which metals and minerals could be classified, including the concepts of acids and salts.[/li] While European references frequently point to Roger Bacon as the source of European gunpowder (with vague references to earlier Chinese use), his 1276 recipe will not actually explode with the force necessary to propel a rocket or cannonball. The earliest references to guns in Europe is found in the writings of the chaplain of Edward II of England in 1326. On the other hand, there are multiple Arabic works describing the use of cannons against invading Mongols in the battle of Ayn Jalut in 1260 and substantial references to recipes for Arab exploding powders and rockets extending back to the twelfth century.[/ul]In addition, plausible claims (that I admit are contentious) can be made that such items as the first practical marine compass, the fore-and-aft rigged sail, and the windmill may have been developed by Muslim Arabs, as well.
Getting into the issues of European Christianity is a bit of a hijack, but since it is here, (again):
It is true that the Church was not an active agent to promote much science until the late 16th century, however, it was also not an active opponent of scientific investigation. The principal reason that science made little headway after the fall of Rome (and I will stick with “ruin” over “decline”*) had much more to do with the need for people to simply survive from day to day. To the extent that some sciences (notably agriculture and architecture, to a lesser extent marine architecture) began to advance, they tended to go forth under the protection of the Church.
The ruin of the Roman empire was not merely a movement of authority from centralized Rome to decentralized Frankish princes. Lost in the rubble were traditions and knowledge to provide safe water and sewage removal from cities, roads maintained to permit rapid and effective communication and trade, bureaucratic infrastructure in constant communication so that people in one region could learn from people in other regions, consistent laws encoded and commented upon in ways that provided generally fair treatment of all peoples, law enforcement that permitted people to build up libraries of knowledge without the fear that an insulted war chief would destroy it because he could.
I would be interested in hearing your responses to the newest UN Arab Development Report. (October '03) http://www.undp.org/rbas/ahdr/
I had found it while searching for documetation of the current state of education … 65 million adults are illiterate, 10 million children out of school, falling farther behind other regions in terms of advanced education … all from the 2002 report, specifically this page - http://www.undp.org/rbas/ahdr/ahdr1/presskit1/PR5.pdf
This report states that many children throughout Arab lands do not have access to even a basic education, that there is a brain drain out of Arab lands, and major structural impediments block Arab societies from developing the knowledge and intellectual rebirth needed for their future growth. Interestingly, many of the same points made in these posts are made there. For example:
They do make specific recommendations: Guaranteeing basic freedoms; improving basic education; promoting basic science research through coordinated regional centers; shifting rapidly to a new economy where knowledge production is rewarded; reclaiming Islam from consertive fundamentalists who have hijacked it along anti-intellectual paths; opening society up to foreign cultures with greater translation of foreign materials and greater access. In short reclaiming the intellectual legacy of Islam.
This report was written by Arabs from the POV of Arab self-interest. But those of us in the rest of the world would be well served if they were able to meet these goals.
AOB, the exact point of Arab science was that it was open to ideas from other cultures and to improving and advancing upon them. That is how science and intellectual progress work best.
I agree and my original point was that the stifling effect of a religion that is also for all practical purposes the government which enforces a “correct” doctrine and determines what is or is not a matter for unprejudiced investigation, leads to decline.
Islaam is a younger religion than either Judaism or Christianity and seems now to be at a high point of fundamentalism with its most extreme practioners having great political power. And those in power seem determined that all study either support their interpretation of the official line or it will be suppressed.
Christianity went through such a period and even now some would return to it if they could. And in Israel, the conservatives seem to have a lot of political clout although, so far at least, unimpeded study seems to be the rule there.
Alan Owes Bess, you are wrong to accuse the Arabs of taking credit for the use of Hindu numberals. The Arabs themselves give full credit to India for having invented the numberal system. In the Arabic language, the numerals are not called “Arabic numerals.” That phrase is only used by the Europeans who learned the numerals from the Arabs. In Arabic, the numberals are called al-arqâm al-hindîyah, which means ‘the Indian numerals.’ So your entire accusation falls flat on its face. Eat crow, buddy. Eat crow, or be disgraced from ever posting in this forum again.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood something but no doubt someone can put me straight if that’s the case. It’s just something that seemed fairly obvious to me but no one has picked up on it. Kinda jumped out at me.
There was talk of the big university in Cairo and Aldebaran cited the following list of faculties to show how broad it’s curriculum was. I have some doubts as to it’s breadth.
Maybe it’s just me but couldn’t they just merge all the ones I’ve put in bold into one faculty and call it the Religious Studies faculty:
I mean, how many Faculties of Arabic and Islamic studies do we need in one University? Compare that list to a list from an average western University and I think we can maybe start to understand where the problem lies.
Seems like they could afford to maybe lose a few faculties from that university and replace them with ones that might actually help someone get a job in the real world (rather than in the next world).
).