Jinn of Current Events

Smallpox has been one of the greatest scourges of mankind since probably 10,000 BC. Even illnesses as terrible as the plague, cholera, and yellow fever have not had such a universal and persistent impact. During the epidemic in Athens in 430 BC, Thucydides noted that those who survived the disease were later immune to it. These observations were reiterated by a Muslim, Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi, about 1300 years later.

In India and China, variolation was a known method of immunization that involved taking samples (vesicles, pus from pustules, or ground scabs) from patients in whom the disease had been benign and introducing this material into other persons through the nose or skin. Variolation was introduced to the Ottoman Empire around 1670; the practice was brought by already-innoculated Caucasian girls who were in great demand in the Turkish sultan's harem. European travellers brought the knowledge and practice of variolation from Istanbul to Europe in 1714-1716. But two to three percent of variolated persons died of smallpox; became the source of a new epidemic; or developed other illnesses from the lymph of the donor, such as tuberculosis or syphilis. In 17th century China, healthy persons took pills made from the fleas of cows to prevent smallpox; this is the first recorded example of oral vaccination. According to ancient folklore, milkmaids who suffered the mild disease of cowpox never contracted smallpox; this prompted Englishman Edward Jenner to test the theory in 1796, by inserting pus extracted from a cowpox pustule on the hand of a milkmaid, into an incision on the arm of an eight-year-old boy. The experiment was a success: a reliable and safe vaccine was born.

Arab-Muslim contribution: quasi-nothingness, apart from conquest, slavery, harems, and imitation. 

The first treatise on what we know as algebra was written by Diophantus of Alexandria in the 3rd century AD. Although the ancient Greeks worked out basic algebraic principles, integrating it with geometry had to wait until 16th- and 17th-century analytic geometry. Muslims copied the Indian system of numbers and place-valued decimal notation; Fibonacci introduced these, with Arab compilations of Greek equations ("algebra"), in Latin to the West in 1202. In the 16th century, long-neglected manuscripts of Diophantus's Arithmetica came to light. Great progress was made in Italy: for instance, Tartaglia and Ferro discovered general solutions for cubic equations; imaginary roots were treated by Bombelli. In the late 16th century Viète demonstrated the value of symbols by using plus (+) and minus (-) signs for operations, and letters to represent unknowns; in 1591, he expressed the desire to purge algebra of its Arabic corruptions and return to the more useful and correct Greek (Diophantine) foundations.

Arab-Muslim contribution: almost nada, apart from conquest, translation, compilation, and a word. 

The first work on trigonometric functions related to chords of a circle; we can thank Hipparchus, 140 BC in Ancient Greece. Another ancient Greek, Ptolemy, introduced in the Almagest a table of chords that was equivalent to a sine table; he provided formulas for what we recognize as the sines and cosines of the sums and differences of angles, as well as rudiments of spherical trigonometry. The first actual appearance of the sine of an angle appears in India, around 500 AD (Surya Siddhanta); the Indians developed their own sine tables, using the Greek half-angle formula; later, the cosine table was also constructed. Techniques of approximation to a relatively high accuracy were introduced. The Indian works were later translated and read by Islamic mathematicians. The tangent and cotangent were needed in calculating heights from the length of shadows; the ancient Greek Thales used the lengths of shadows to calculate the heights of pyramids. The term 'trigonometry' first appears as the title of a book by Pitiscus, published in Europe in 1595. In 15th-16th century Europe, trigonometry was further developed and put to practical use, for instance to determine map positions in relation to longitudes and latitudes.

Islamic contribution: close to zero, apart from conquest, translation, and faithfully prostrating themselves towards Mecca. 

Lewis is a good scholar, better than most experts on the Middle East. That doesn't mean he has no faults. For instance, he claims that we should thank Islamic culture for trigonometry, algebra, and the smallpox vaccine, but it's simply not true, as I've documented above. I'll be charitable and consider that his mistakenly attributing various inventions and discoveries to the Islamic world is due to a puzzling ignorance of the history of science. 

Den Beste: The majority of the world's Muslims, who are (or at least claim to be) more tolerant, will have to choose sides. They cannot remain silent; they must begin to speak and act forcefully one way or the other. I would hope they would choose our side, and speak out on behalf of the ideas of diversity and freedom and tolerance... This war can only end short of ultimate disaster through the internal reform of Islam, and the defeat of the extremists and elimination of their power and influence within Islam itself. Unfortunately, the Koran has anti-reformation clauses (in the form of explicit death threats) that preclude the emergence of a moderate, tolerant Islam. I'd be happy to be surprised. When will Muslims respecting individual rights and freedom of expression speak up against islamofascists? 

A certain theory has been fashionable for a while, namely that without Islam we would not have access to Aristotle and Plato. However, the writings of the Ancient Greeks were preserved in multiple locations and languages, quite apart from the Muslim world. The quintessential Muslim achievement was to conquer large tracts of land, kill vast numbers of people, enslave the rest, steal their knowledge, and persecute Muslim scholars if they dared to study (and respect) the writings of the infidels. The West actually saved the writings of the Ancient World from the primitive anti-intellectualism of Islam.

The study and preservation of ancient Greek works was highly encouraged and perpetuated for centuries in Byzantium/Constantinople. Even if the capital was lost to crusaders for a few decades in the 13th century, the scholars, works, and tradition survived. But two centuries later the Byzantine scholars had to flee, for the most part to Italy, when the city fell to the Muslims and was plundered in 1453. Further, one should note that the few Greek texts that were recovered through Arabic translations were mostly incomplete or of bad quality (such as the ones Averroes attempted to comment). A large number of original Greek texts came directly to the West thanks to the Byzantine scholars.

What is more, even if to some extent the Muslims unintentionally transmitted ancient, infidel Greek texts to the West, why should we respect them for that? they are the ones who destroyed most of the original texts and imposed their special brand of the Dark Ages over large parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. Maybe an analogy will help to shed some light: Would you thank a murderous criminal for giving you a car — after he's stolen it from your parents, killed them, crashed it, and abandoned it on the side of the road, because he believes it is of no value?

If there still are people who falsely claim that the West must be thankful to the Muslims for the transmission of Ancient Greek works, let them examine the events described below, which took place apart from Islam and before the 1453 Fall of Constantinople. The truth is that the writings of Aristotle and Plato were spreading to the West in Greek, without any Muslim participation! and the ones we should respect and thank are the Byzantine scholars — but their institutions were destroyed by the Muslims:

After the relocation of Aristotle's library to Alexandria around 300 BCE, the Platonic Academy in Athens and the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria operated in parallel for eight centuries, until the closing of the Athens Academy by Justinian in 529 CE. Meanwhile, a secondary center had developed in Byzantium. Following the disruption of the Mouseion by the conquering Persians in 616, and the burning of the Alexandrian library ordered by Caliph Omar I in 642, only Byzantium remained as a stronghold of Greek learning. The center in Byzantium was revived and strengthened around 1100 by Michael Psellus, and some satellite schools evolved from it. For example, George Gemistos (1355-1452) created a Platonic academy in Mistra (near the site of ancient Sparta) around 1410.

Byzantine scholars made an enormous contribution to the philosophical foundations of the Florentine Renaissance. First of all, they brought Greek texts with them and taught the Greek language. Manuel Chrysoloras was perhaps the first of these, arriving in 1397, with texts of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and other classics. The Byzantine scholars brought a new style of teaching. They translated texts from Greek to Latin and supervised translations by others. Finally, along with the texts of the philosophers, they brought texts of commentators, especially on Aristotle.
[condensed from George Gemistos Plethon: the Last of the Hellenes, by C.M. Woodhouse (1986)]

There are also (disputed) accounts of ancient Greek works popping up in Rome shortly after the 1204 crusaders' sack of Constantinople. Readers interested in the transmission of ancient Greek thought to the Renaissance should read The Aristotle Adventure.

Now that facts have been exposed, let us put an end to the lies and fabrications that seek to glorify Islam, because the so-called "Golden Age" of Islam was in reality a Dark Age, an orgy of mass-murders and slavery, a nightmare compared to what surrounding civilizations created.