In fairness, Christianity killed
it off first but did not change the language and the structural forms of
governance. This put preservation under
attack simply because manuscripts become lost if not recopied. However, Islam tore up the language and general
literacy except in terms of their narrow neobarbarism.
Scholarship was reduced to paying
homage to the local Islamic warlord and enough got through to preserve a lot of
the transmitted texts. At least
scholarship survived which was hardly the case in the Western empire. Islamic pride in this is very misplaced.
The ancient reality is that they
destroyed populations in quite the same manner as the Romans before them and
the Mongols after them. This was
possible because of the impact of the horse nomad as a weapon of war and was
not overcome until heavy armor was available and the long bow. War became very difficult with light cavalry
deployed. In fact it was decisive if the
opposing army failed to counter it. Just
raiding alone would reduce an army to immobility.
Classical Islam failed to build
also. Populations stagnated. Part of this was due to the depredations of
the Mongols but the recovery was weak.
It was a world strangled by Islamic feudalism and constant warfare. The Roman world engaged in war at its edges
while the Islamic world engaged in war both internally and at the edges in a
continuous pattern that runs through the centuries.
I do think that in the end, they
will follow the example of the West and strangle the dream of barbarism and
adopt the ideals of the West after trying every other option.
How Islam Killed
Greco-Roman Civilization
Posted
by Fjordman Bio ↓ on May 18th, 2012
A number of books published in
recent years have demolished the myth of an allegedly tolerant Islamic culture
that preserved the Greco-Roman heritage. Ibn Warraq’s book Why the West Is
Best is among the better and more accessible titles in this field. As I
concluded in one of my earlier essays, the only part of the ancient Greek
heritage that proved to be more compatible with Muslim than with Christian
European culture was slavery, and possibly anal sex with young boys in certain
parts of the Islamic world.
In early 2012 the historian
Emmet Scott published Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a
Controversy. If you have any interest in the subject of the Greco-Roman legacy
and Islam as they relate to medieval Europe, I strongly recommend that you buy
this book. For those who are interested, Scott has published some excerpts from
this work online at the New English Review.
Many books claim to be
groundbreaking, but rather few of them actually are. Emmet
Scott’s Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited falls into the latter
category.
He shows convincingly that
archaeological excavations paint a very clear picture of devastation brought by
the Arab conquests throughout the entire Mediterranean region, from Syria to
Spain, in the seventh century AD.
The Belgian historian Henri
Pirenne in his work Mohammed and Charlemagne, published posthumously in
1937, suggested that Islam and the Arab conquests constituted the
real dividing line between the civilization of Greco-Roman Antiquity and that
of medieval Europe. Moreover, Islamic raids in the Mediterranean partially cut
Europeans off from their Classical roots. Scott supports this hypothesis but
goes even further than Pirenne — who focused on Europe — by showing that the
Arab conquests and Islamic repression largely destroyed Greco-Roman Classical
civilization in North Africa and parts of the Middle East, which were more
urbanized than Europe.
In short, rather than
preserving the Classical heritage, as their apologists like to claim, Arabs
and Muslims did more than anybody else to wipe out Greco-Roman civilization.
The modest contributions they made by preserving certain Greek texts through
Arabic translations cannot in any way make up for this massive wave of
destruction.
Scott demonstrates that by
cutting off the normal trade of Egyptian papyrus to Europe, leaving Europeans
only with expensive parchment made from animal skins as a viable alternative,
the Arabs essentially doomed much of the Classical literature to oblivion due
to a chronic shortage of good writing materials. Sadly, the heroic efforts made
by medieval Christian monks in Europe for centuries could only partly make up
for this loss.
The author also describes how
certain ideas such as an early version of the Inquisition, the concept of Holy
War and other often negative innovations were spread due to Islam. The first
massacres of Jews in Europe were carried out in Spain by Muslim mobs early in
the eleventh century; in 1011 (in Cordoba) and 1066 (in Granada).
He rejects the distorted and
romanticized view of Muslim tolerance. On the contrary, with the Arab conquest
of North Africa and Spain, “a reign of terror was to commence that was to last
for centuries.” After the appearance of Islam, “the Mediterranean was no longer
a highway, but a frontier, and a frontier of the most dangerous kind. Piracy,
rapine, and slaughter became the norm – for a thousand years!” Yet this fact
has been almost completely overlooked by historians, especially those of
northern European extraction. As Scott concludes in his book:
With the arrival of
Islam, Mediterranean Europe was never again at peace – not until the early part
of the nineteenth century, anyway. Muslim privateers based in North Africa, the
Barbary Pirates, terrorized the Mediterranean until after the end of the
Napoleonic Wars. In the centuries preceding that, Muslim armies, first in the
form of the Almoravids and later the Ottomans, launched periodic large-scale
invasions of territories in southern Europe; and even when they were not doing
so, Muslim pirates and slave-traders were involved in incessant raids against
coastal settlements in Spain, southern France, Italy, Dalmatia, Albania,
Greece, and all the Mediterranean islands. This activity continued unabated for
centuries, and the only analogy that springs to mind is to imagine, in northern
Europe, what it would have been like if the Viking raids had lasted a thousand
years. It has been estimated that between the sixteenth and nineteenth
centuries Muslim pirates based in North Africa captured and enslaved between a
million and a million-and-a-quarter Europeans. Although their attacks ranged as
far north as Iceland and Norway, the impact was most severe along the
Mediterranean coasts of Spain, France and Italy, with large areas of coastline
eventually being made uninhabitable by the threat.
Because of this constant
Islamic threat for more than a thousand years, the Mediterranean coastal lands
of southern Europe from Spain to the Balkans had to live in a state of constant
alert, with fear of pirates and Jihadist slave raids never far removed. A similar
pattern can be detected in the Black Sea region, from Romania to Russia.
Scott’s book does have a few
weaknesses. Among the minor ones, Scott occasionally gives too much space to
describe fringe hypotheses such as the one positing three missing centuries
during the Early Middle Ages that supposedly never happened.
My most serious objection to
Scott’s book is that, with some minor exceptions he seems to take traditional
Islamic history at face value, and accepts that the Islamic expansions took
place the way Muslims claim that they did. Robert Spencer’s recent
book Did Muhammad Exist? presents a very different view on this matter.
It must be treated as a
serious possibility that when the Arab conquests began, Islam as we think of it
today simply did not exist. If that is the case, this creates some gaping holes
in the apologia about the allegedly “tolerant” nature of the Arab conquests. We
know both from archaeological evidence and from comments by conquered peoples
that the Arabs were quite brutal conquerors. Furthermore, if Islam did not
exist in recognizable form then it was not possible for the Arabs to forcibly
convert the conquered peoples to Islam at this date.
Nonetheless, the single most
positive thing to be said about Emmet Scott’s book is thatMohammed and
Charlemagne Revisited is truly groundbreaking. This is especially so when
Scott explains how the archaeological evidence clearly indicates a sudden wave
of massive destruction throughout the entire Mediterranean region in the
seventh century of our era that can hardly be attributed to anything other than
the Arab conquests.
While there are a few minor
flaws in this work, the central thesis of the book is convincingly
demonstrated: The decline of Greco-Roman civilization seems to coincide with
the rise of Islam. That is hardly coincidental. The historical pattern is very
clear: Where Islam enters, civilization soon exits.
3 comments:
bull shit
I believe the first comment is very accurate. And I am not a robot.cte Anonymous 2
Always trying to ridicule muslims, but not everyone who says that he's a muslim is a muslim, you try to ridicule us but you're just showing the people (who know what islam is) how stupid you are and all the other once who try to post misleading messages :)
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