Shut up, you! 
- Tamerlane
Originally posted by Tamerlane
I merely stated that you frequently jump in and provide some lengthy thesis outlining your wonderful version of history, from an Islamic point of view.
In my opinion, your opinions are, as you have confessed them to be, a load of crap.
By the way. I have genuine question.
You have done the Hadj.
Was it an insult to your intelligenge, or not.
Tamerlane,
You may have promised to not laugh out loud, but I didn’t.
HA! HA!
HA! HA! HA!
Hee hee
whew.
BTW, Tamerlane, your new Pitting is here:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=231790
Tamerlane would, I am sure, have preferred you to lie low.
mmmm… AOB, seen the fact that you asked Tamerlane if he did the Hadj… I suppose you think of him as a Muslim.
Well… Seen his (interesting because well informed) posts I’m rather convinced that he is not. And - if I recall well- he even wrote that somewhere on this message board.
Oh, now that you are around I have a question for you since you are such an expert on Islam.
I did the hadj when I was 8 years old.
Can you tell me if that is good enough to be counted as furfillment of that particular point among the five pilars of Islam?
Thank you so much.
Salaam. A
Oh almost forgot…
AOB,
Since your attack also targets Tommdebb : What this member writes about Islam and related is as interesting - because showing to be informed - as when Tamerlane writes about it.
And no, they don’t write “from Islamic point of view” (permit me to smile when reading that remark, written with the goal to have some denigrating effect). They write from “good to extremely well informed point of view”.
So sorry. I do hope this desillusion doesn’t make you cry while tearing out your hair… and all those other weird things people tend to do when becoming desperate.
Salaam. A
Alan, we’ve all watched your pathetic attempts to smear Islam based on the selection of a few verses out of the Qu’ran, stripped of all their context and presented as if they demonstrated the “evils” of Islam (while you hide from doing the same thing to the Bible).
However, in this thread you simply posted the utterly ignorant (or absolutely dishonest) claim that no human advances have originated from Muslim countries and I have pointed out the error of your claim. When summarizing your contribution to this thread, I noted your distorted claim.
(By the way, while it is amusing to see you throwing "sic"s around (they should be enclosed in brackets, , not parentheses), you should probably not display further ignorance of the language by “correcting” old quotations–in this case a reference to Punch, vol X, no. 16, 1846–that are common expressions of colloquial speech.)
Thanks for responding, seriously – or remove the comma for a dual meaning. At least I get partial credit. I just thought I’d throw those out there. I agree that there is a historical foundation for everything. OTOH, getting angry about things that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago is unhealty. As a history buff, I’d go nuts even faster.
Back to topic
Looking at this in its historical perspective, I have some doubts on the supposed relation between female education and fertility rate in the region. But discussing that would lead us away from the OP’s intentions.
As for your question: There is of course increasing progress in women’s education as there is an overall progress made.
This automatically leads to progress in the awareness of women about their rights. Especially in Islamic states this is important because educated women - I mean: both educated in secular as in religious issues - can easily point out the flaws of the system when taking Al Qur’an at hand.
If I was a woman, I would most certainly use that source and slap Al Qur’an around the ears of all those hadith worshippers who abuse those texts to oppress women.
But of course the reality shows that you need to reform the way of thinking of a whole patriarchal based society, including the way of thinking of the women themselves.
As we have seen in Western societies, the “liberation” of women is only a very recent development. And we wouldn’t see “Women’s days” and “Feminism” if everything would be as kosher as it should be.
In Arabic/Berber/Bedouin societies as present in the MENA region and in Islamic societies in general, there are in addition to that also other barriers to be taken then was the case in for example the West.
Explaining this difference would lead me far beyond the questions asked in this topic, but it would be interesting to open one on the differences between the Western more or less Christian inspired societies and Islamic societies, especially when it comes to women and how sexuality in general is viewed.
If you have societies where fundamentalist groups are made able to fill the lack of social and educational facilities, the first they influence are the very poor. The same counts when you have in such societies Imams - having as only income what the community provides for them - made able to gain resources from those same fundamentalists and thus speak how they would like them to speak. In both cases it is very wrong to underestimate the - often low profile yet at the same time very present - influence of the fundamentalist propaganda. It most certainly works on the long term.
That is why there is such a risk for governments to take in account the growing pressure for more “democracy”.
I always tend to smile a bit cynical when I read and hear the criticizing voices in the West, because I would like to see them do it without creating situations where the whole society gets destabilized and the fundamentalists wave the flags. Miracles just don’t happen, how much you would like to witness it.
To motivate capital to invest, you need to be able to guarantee profit.
I don’t see much change unless a viable internal and export market can be provided and foreign capital encouraged to invest in this new development as well.
Since the interests of the foreign investments goes rather towards exploitation of non specialised and low cost labor (we see the same development when looking for example at the Eastern Europe states) there is at that front also an almost impossible change of mentality needed.
Comes to this the public debt of the MENA region in general and you get the situation that there is not much space left to invest themselves and thus encourage the local capital to stay within the borders.
Of course there are a lot of investments made in other sections of the economy, but not in the development of the high tech and the biotech sciences. It just doesn’t pay off for the moment.
And for this to ever happen a change of mentality within the region is also very much needed, and very urgently.
Outsiders surprisingly tend to see or think of it as representing some sort of miraculous unity while in reality there is none of the kind.
Salaam. A
I frequently ( actually, less frequently than I used to ) jump in, because I fell I have something relevant to share/add. Just like every other legitimate poster on this board. I frequently jump in with tidbits of natural history info on appropriate threads as well. We follow our interests - history ( not just Islamic ) and natural history happen to be among mine.
As for my views being “Islamic” - well, I dunno. My old professor on the topic of Islamic history was pretty secular and I daresay that at least a good percentage, probably a solid majority, of the books I’ve cracked on the subject were written by non-Muslims.
My, you have such an interesting take on the English language.
Nope. Never set foot in a mosque, either, that I recall. A few churches of assorted denominations, a synagogue once and even, in my very distant youth ( second grade, actually ) a Hindu temple somewhere in NYC ( or thereabouts - maybe Jersey ) - but no mosque.
Prayed a few times in second grade as well, when my Catholic babysitter, Tova, briefly convinced me I’d go to hell if I didn’t. Not since, though.
Was what an insult to my intelligence? Your question?
- Tamerlane
Alan Owes Bess, in case you have yet to receive a visit from the clue fairy, you are a minority of one. This is just too rich,
**
Around here, we call this providing “facts” and “analysis.” As entertaining as you may find mindless braying, this just isn’t the forum – or the board – for it. Your complaint that Tamerlane provides history from an “Islamic point of view” is also sublimely stupid. If there was ever anyone who tried to call his shots right down the middle, it’s Tamerlane – that’s one of the reasons his posts are so “lengthy” – or do you suppose that he’s been corrupted by the mullahs at Cambridge University Press?
As to the OP, I have my own theory. Someone suggested that the real question should be “What went right in Christian culture?” This is right on the money.
The last 500 years or so of Western culture have been a serious aberation in world history. With respect to technology, change has traditionally occurred at a glacial pace. Look at the history of Mesopotamia, for example. For 3000 years or so, the grandchildrens’ lives were almost indistinguishable from the grandparents’.
Now of course, technological change occurs at dizzying pace. But this trend actually began five or six hundred years ago. More to the point, it did not occur anywhere else. Why?
I think the point of divergence has got to be the “invention” and acceptance of the scientific method. But the question remains, why was Christian culture open to it while Islamic culture (which seems to have first invented the scientific method) was not?
My WAG is that Christian culture was more open to the scientific method because Christianity, unlike Islam, sets up an express demarcation between temporal and spirtual power (“Render unto Caesar, etc.”) Islam, by contrast, explicitly does not. On the contrary, temporal and spiritual power is theoretically one and the same thing. The Christian church was, therefore, limited to enforcing dogma only with respect to religious questions. It tried to extend religious dogma into practical and scientific areas but its efforts were a notorious flop.
Quite the reverse happened in the Islamic world. The religious establishment did succeed in beating back the rationalists and effectively terminating true scientific enquiry up to the present day.
Therefore, in answer to the OP, the defeat of the Mutazilites caused the “stagnation” of the Islamic world. Specifically, the seminal event was the publication of The Incoherence of the Philosophers at the beginning of the twelfth century.
TS: The last 500 years or so of Western culture have been a serious aberation in world history. With respect to technology, change has traditionally occurred at a glacial pace. Look at the history of Mesopotamia, for example. For 3000 years or so, the grandchildrens’ lives were almost indistinguishable from the grandparents’.
Whoa, I have to disagree with you on at least one significant era there. I have always felt that in the competition for most-important-half-millennium for technological change in human history, the West in, say, 1450–1950 loses out by a whisker to Mespotamia in 3500–3000 BCE. I mean, look at the incredible major societal changes during that time: sedentary agriculture, urbanization, bureaucratic centralization, wheeled transport, the emergence of numeracy and literacy. These are huge changes in the human way of life! (Of course, they came out of existing earlier trends, but so did the changes of the modern period.) You are right that such periods of rapid transformation seem to be pretty rare in the total of human history, but the modern period is not as exceptional as we sometimes think.
And as a historian of medieval/early modern science, particularly in Islam and India (who btw ought to be in a manuscript library right now instead of wasting time in a Trivandrum cybercafe :)), I don’t quite agree with your assessment of a uniquely Christian “receptiveness to scientific method” either. I think it’s dangerous to seek theoretical explanations for a sample space of size one. We cannot do any reproducible experiments with the course of world history, so we should be wary of assuming that things had to happen the way they did (because of determinative cultural factors, etc.) instead of just happening to happen the way they did.
My take on it, for what it’s worth, is that the Latin West (with a whole lot of input from other cultures) happened to develop certain crucial aspects of modern science earlier than other cultures, but that development was by no means inevitable or somehow inherent in Western civilization or Christian philosophy. Then within 200–300 years, thanks to commercial activity and the technological superiority that grew along with modern science, the West was politically dominant over the rest of the world, and culturally independent intellectual developments were no longer possible (not that they ever really were, imho). I think specific political and economic events and structures (the overthrow of the caliphate, the royal patronage system, the unrest in Central Asia, etc.) have a lot more to do with that than any vague “characteristics of Islamic culture”.
(Well, back to the beach, er, I mean the library.)
Kimstu,
Perhaps the grandparents/grandchildren remark slightly overstates the case. But many of the changes you cite as occuring between 3500 and 3000 BC are social rather than scientific or technological, e.g. sedentary agriculture, urbanization, bureacracy. Even numeracy and literacy aren’t really the kind of thing we’re talking about. Though critical “inventions,” they aren’t really scientific/technological innovations. In other words, they aren’t emperical discoveries about the physical world – and they certainly weren’t arrived at by via the scientific method.
I’d also draw a distinction between invention and adoption. Many cultures are good at adopting technology but they are less good at inventing it. Anyway, with respect to the wheel, IIRC, the chariot had been invented by 3500 BC so the wheel falls outside of the period we’re talking about. 
If I had to pick the next-most rapid period of technological change, I’d pick the Roman late republic/empire. Once again, however, the Romans were excellent engineers but not-so-great scientists. Nonetheless, they were, apparently, quite adept at applying technology to practical problems.
**
Agreed. But my point wasn’t so much that the development of science was inevitable in Western civilization or Christian philosophy. Rather, the inherent separation between church and state created a space where the scientific method had a better chance to take root and flourish.
There is a deep philosophical tension between the emperical investigation of the universe and most religious systems. Religion depends on received wisdom and appeal to authority. The scientific method creates an independent system – an alternate power base, if you will – capable of challenging that authority. When state authority is indistinguishable from religious authority, states have little incentive to rock the religious boat. However, in the West, states were often in conflict with the religious authority, especially over the last 500 or 600 years. This provided, say, the King of England with an incentive to develop science and technology that the Caliph of Baghdad didn’t have. More accurately, the Caliph had a disincentive to develop science and technology that the King didn’t have.
Well, I’m back. 
Tamerlane has been pitted for his crypto-Islamic agenda, I see - very amusing! [Or was that reverse-pitted?]
Anyway, as promised, I want to pick up where I left off - with some serious discussion … but if anyone wants to pit me for my “agenda”, I don’t mind.
As do I. Although often it is not the place assigned by advocates of the notion.
Actually, I would disagree with that. I think it was perfectly possible and, to a limited extent, actually happened.
Consider the role of women in the imperial hierarchy of Louis IVX, with its semi-legitimate series of “official” and unofficial mistresses, all wielding power to a greater or lesser degree … they may not have been secluded in a harem (although the French monarch did have its “official” house of prostitution, apparently), but the principle was similar.
I am not certain that this is the case, although it is often mentioned (without much consideration) as a reason.
For one thing, inhospitable terrain never stopped the Mongols before. When attacking Quazarim(sp?), the Mongols achieved strategic surprise by crossing, with their cavalry army, seemingly impassible desert. South China is hardly cavalry country, yet the Mongols famously campaigned there, too.
I can’t believe that the terrain of Europe past the Hungarian plain is more inhospitable for cavalry than the deserts of central Asia and the mountains and rice fields of South China.
So I am not a believer in this hypothesis. In fact, what seems to have saved Europe was the death of the Khan, causing the leaders of the invasion force to withdraw for the election of a new Khan - and the subsequent distrust between the leaders of the various regions, leading to the partitioning of the empire. Not geography.
If the Mongols had remained united, Europe would I think have gone the way of the other main centres of Eurasian civilization.
So, to be irredemably reductionist, why did European culture out-progress Arab culture? Because Odogai Khan had a drinking problem, leading to his early death.
Oh, I agree - geography plays its part in this.
My question was more unstated - that, had Japan played a similar role (or had been able to play a similar role) to England, the outcome for China would have been very different … and more like that of Europe.
Well, Europe was united by a single dominant culture, based on Christianity and the ideal of the Roman Empire (which took root even among the barbarians that destroyed it - shades of the barbarian/Chinese dynamic). The ideal of universal empire and culture existed in both areas - but Europe couldn’t pull it off.
Whether this is based on the fact that most of Europe was far more barbarous than China, the inextorable facts of geography, or pure chance is a subject quite worthy of debate.
Absolutely. Indeed, the South Chinese have been voyaging, trading and otherwise moving about south east asia for a very long time.
It was in part the traumatic experience of being invaded by Mongols which, over time, caused them to become increasingly isolationist.
Well, that is most interesting. My recollection must be at fault, or at least, very exaggerated. Clearly there was a decline, rather than a cession.
However, the article quoted above is I think off in its claims about the reason for the decline. As much is admitted up front, where the authour notes that the beginning of the decline predated the introduction of cheaper European material, and so must logically have another explaination.
Moreover, the author claims that the reason for the later decline is “dumping” by European producers, rather than some legitimate technological or other comparative advantage by European producers. Well, I don’t believe it. I am always skeptical about claims of “dumping”. As my old law and economics professor once quipped:
“if you are in business, you just can’t win. If you sell below the cost of some competitor, you are dumping; if you sell at the same price, you are colluding; and if sell for more, you are abusing a monopoly position”.
On this, I have a different take: the existence of the Mongol empire as an example of successful rutheless, autocratic rule certainly influenced the Muscovy Empire.
Oh yes.
Similar, but different :D. The circles around Louis XVI were social ones that were readily penetrable by folks with the right introduction and standing. The harem was pretty much impenetrable by anyone. The relative degree of institutional rigidity was higher.
Khwarizm is one standard attempt, but they’re others :). Single campaign with hospitable terrain avaliable on the other side - a one-time, unimposed crossing of inhospitable terrain or short-term campaigning isn’t the issue, long-term maintanence and distance from suitable bases are.
With much greater difficulty. It didn’t ultimately stop them, especially as they had the resources of northern China to back them. But it seriously impeded their advance, despite being in the figurative backyard of the Mongol powerbase.
Yes and no. The argument is that the Hungarian plain is the only place that would have been suitable for a steppe army to debauch from, as with the earlier Avars and Magyars. Such an army could conduct deep razzias, but extension and maintanence of centralized control into western Europe would have been very difficult long-term. I don’t think the lack of pasturage saved Europe from a Mongol conquest. It is unlikely any European power then extant would have been able to beat Subedei and his crack Imperial Army. So in that you’re right. Further if Ogedei hadn’t died the appanage of Hungary had already been promised to Shayban, a younger brother of Batu who had distinguished himself ( and from whom quite a few later dynasties, like that of the Uzbeks in central Asia, can claim descent ) - a few years and he could have established a powerbase there with Cuman manpower that may have seriously altered the future history of eastern Europe, particularly the Balkans, which were always subject to dominance from that region.
Instead the main point of the geographic argument is that no steppe power would ever well-positioned to project power into western Europe. In contrast Inner Mongolia, Transoxania, the Caspian and Pontic steppes, and ( once penetrated ) Azerbaijan presented long fronts and excellent campaigning bases for dominating the Middle East and northern China ( and Russia ).
Briefly, yes. But I bet it would be more submission and tribute a la Russia, than actual occupation and I also predict said tribute and submission would have lapsed much quicker than with Russia.
Hmmm…dunno.
Oh, a number of causes. One of the biggest issues was that Qing adminstration was over-centralized, over-burecratized, and as time went on, badly under-staffed. A pretty lousy combo.
No, no - he covers that. As below:
It is uncertain at what point Europe took over from China as the world’s leading region in their production. In Don’s judgement China had the world's largest and most efficient iron industry' until around 1700, but after that point an extraordinary sequence of technical improvements’ brought down the price of iron dramatically and was a leading factor in the British Industrial Revolution.
and
*…What is clear, however, is that the actual price of Chinese bar iron on the Chinese market in Guangzhou, which he must have known though he does not state it, was higher than these figures, which amount to [sterling]11 and [sterling]15 per ton respectively for the two grades…
…It is clear that foreign iron was already competitive with Chinese iron in Guangzhou. Liljevalch also states that the cost of shipping 10 tons of iron from England to Guangzhou, including freight, customs duties, etc., would be about [sterling]30. The price of bar iron in England in the 1840’s was about [sterling]7 per ton. A quick calculation shows that the import of English bar iron to Guangzhou could yield, as early as the 1840’s, a profit as high as 50 per cent…*
So it was European technological advances ( both in ever cheaper shipping and in iron-production ) that allowed them to eventually outcompete and undersell native ironworks. “Dumping” wouldn’t even be necessary, though it could be another strategy to solidify that economic advantage.
- Tamerlane
Indeed, this is correct. But the issue is not whether the two systems were identical, but whether (for example) the Bourbon system could, if the Bourbons ever have enjoyed hundreds of years of hegemonic power, have evolved (or ossified) into something similar to the Chinese/Turkish model.
Certainly, the notion of a semi-divine “Sun King” secluded in his harem would by no means be impossible to forsee, given sufficient development. The seeds were certainly there.
Consider this scenario: the Mongol conquest of Europe goes forward, destroying all local sources of power; the Mongol imperium breaks up, and a “Hapsburg” European dynasty emerges, whose power is supported by some sort of permanent military caste (hired from the steppes, a local gunpowder force, or likely some combination); the empire embraces all of the non-steppe accessable landmass of Europe; it exists in permanent competition with the steppe-dominated 'Rus and the Turks; it eventually evolves the notion of a “semi-divine” emperor - a Holy Roman successor state, with Christianity as its state religion; the emperor is secluded in a harem. There is no renaisannce, no reformation, no enlightenment … I don’t see anything inherently impossible about this scenario. It would simply mean that the same thing happened to Europe as happened to the other centres of civilization.
In such a scenario, one would expect that the same state of technology and progress would occur in all of the major centres of world civilization. None would of necessity achieve the upper hand. In such a world, the 21st century could well look very much like the 17th century … progress may me made, but very slowly and much more evenly.
I refuse to apologize for being unable to spell “Khwarizm”
My point is that a series of short-term campaigns would suffice for conquest - as it did for Attila. Long-term occupation is indeed another issue.
Yes, and the conquest of Europe would undoubtably be difficult - although the Mongols demonstrated considerable tenacity in campaigning in inhospitable terrain, including the (failed) campaigns as far away as Java and Japan.
I think that the short-term conquest of Europe was likely, but that the long-term retension of imperial power by the Mongols was extremely unlikely (with the possible exception of Hungary, as you note).
But the retension of power by the Mongols everywhere, except on the steppe itself or very close to it, was quite short. The Il-Khans and the Yuan were not lengthy dynasties.
My point is that it was the act of conquest - with its huge material damage, the exposure of locals to absolute autocratic rule, and importantly the destruction of local sources of autonomy - that allowed or encouraged successor-dynasts to adopt viciously conservative imperial structures. Long-term rule by Mongols was not necessary.
I don’t disagree. I would predict it would take the form of a crushing defeat of various European forces one by one by unstoppable Mongol armies (even as Hungary was being overrun, there was apparently no attempt by European powers to meet the menace, which does not bode well for their survival - and even a combined European army would have been no match for the Mongols in their prime).
Followed by the same pattern of extortion and imperial disintigration seen elsewhere.
This is the story for most imperial bureaucracies. It seems almost an inevitable set of symptoms.
I don’t think it is that clear cut. See below:
"Li Longqian lists four reasons for the decline of the Guangdong iron industry: intervention by the Qing state, domination by the guilds, a tendency to move capital out of industry into land, and the dumping of cheap commodities by foreign imperialists.[9] I shall not attempt to deal with the first two of these factors: a good deal of very detailed investigation would be necessary before I could speak with any confidence on the ways in which they affected the industry, and whether the net result was positive or negative. The third will be taken up briefly further below, but it is the fourth factor which I believe was the most important.
The terminology used by Li Longqian, dumping' by imperialists’, will seem to many readers tendentious, but let us remember that Britain was explicitly imperialist in this period, and that the implicit threat of armed intervention gave the English East India Company a distinct advantage in its trade with China.[10] `Dumping’ suggests the deliberate sale of commodities below cost with the intention of ruining competitors; this specific intention would seem to be difficult to prove, but we shall see that commodities often were sold below cost by European traders in China. Nevertheless the principal factor was simply that by the middle of the 19th century European ironworks were producing iron at a fraction of the cost of producing it in China. It is likely that China, up to about 1700, had the world’s largest and most efficient iron industry, but about that time the British iron industry began the extraordinary sequence of technical improvements which brought the price of iron dramatically down and was a leading factor in the Industrial Revolution."
To my mind, he seems to be saying that “dumping” was the initial reason, and that “by the middle of the 19th century” technology was the “principal” factor. Although this sequence is not stated, it appears to be implied by the author’s reluctance to discard dumping as a reason.
Logically, if iron could be sold at one point in time “at a fraction of the cost”, the question of dumping at that time never arises at all … the two are mutually exclusive.
Malthus: I’m feeling kinda bad about continuing this rather extreme hijack. Maybe e-mail or a new thread would be more appropriate :).
- Tamerlane