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Lao Tse wasn't a prophet (as a corollary, shafique has never read 'his' writings)

The afterlife was never a teaching of Moses/Abraham as recorded in various Jewish writings

The "Hellenization" of Christianity theory is hardly well received and has been heavily criticized for the past forty years

Frequentflier wrote: But the fact still remains that it was the Greeks that have remained with us and indeed had the greatest effect on the course of world history, and continue to do so today.

himself wrote:As I recollect, the inhibiting factors were different in different civilizations. Huff credits the importance of "conscience" in Western Religion and then Western Law. This derived from Plato's Timaeus and Paul's Romans 2, and posited a human mind capable of drawing correct conclusions from moral reasoning and thence from reasoning about nature. This led, too, to the idea of jurisdiction and self-governance and hence to the corporate "person" exemplified by the University where science found a home base.

In Islam, the concept of "conscience" did not take root. The nearest equivalent was niyya meaning "intention." (Damir for "conscience" came into use following Napoleon's invasion of Egypt.) The fiqh of the ash'ari aqida was that men were simply to submit and follow a set of rules laid out in Holy Qur'an and the hadith. One could reason from these via qiyas (or "analogy"), but human reason could not be relied upon in general for correct conclusions. Significantly, the Timaeus seems never to have been translated into Arabic. Even so, there was a layer of Hellenism a thousand years thick on the ground in the lands the Arabs conquered, with a Christian layer of icing about half as thick. So the Arabs had a huge pool to tap and Islam came closer to inventing and institutionalizing science than any but the Latin West.

In ancient Greece, trees had dryads, springs had nymphs, and the stars were alive, divine, and influential in human affairs. It is hard to develop a natural science when Nature is self-willed and Hera could overrule Zeus at any moment. That a corporal's guard of Greek philosophers apparently did so was a great achievement.

China's stumbling block was that they never conceived of natural philosophy as a coherent, well-defined body of learning. They never came up with either Euclidean geometry or logic. Their astronomy remained purely arithmetical. And concatenation (and coincidence) remained for them as significant as cause-and-effect.

There were minority strains in China (the Moists) and in Islam (the mu'tazilites) that credited the ability of human reason to reach correct conclusions. History might have been very different had they triumphed over the Confucians and the ash'arites.

Schools. The Western University was an independently chartered, self-governing corporation with jurisdiction. It possessed its own courts and militias. It set curricula, courses of study, degrees of achievement, and the wearing of funny hats. No one else came up with that.

The Islamic madrassa was also independently chartered via an endowment, usually by a prominent scholar or his patron, but with one exception they did not teach natural philosophy. A master scholar taught his book and when the student had memorized the book and could explain it to the master's satisfaction, he was given an ijaza, which entitled him to teach that particular book. A student could wander from madrassa to madrassa collecting ijaza, but there was no course of study, no set of ijaza that added up to a "master's degree" or "doctorate." Nor was there the equivalent of the Western ius ubique docendi, the "right to teach anywhere." Further, while madrassas had libraries with a wide range of books, only Islamic studies were officially taught. Books in "Greek Studies" [as it was called] were in the library, and no one objected too much if someone wanted to read or teach such things privately; but there was no institutionalization of the study of natural philosophy and it was often suppressed. Only one madrassa, Marâgha, was chartered to teach something we would call science; viz., astronomy. It lasted about 75 years. Astronomers came under the authority of the muwaqqit, the time-keepers of the mosques, just as doctors were controlled by the inspector of the market-place, the muhtasib.

In China, the Imperial College was a department of the government. It was a training academy for mandarins and taught the Confucian classics, poetry, and so forth. Briefly, in Shen Kua's time, some questions on astronomy were included, but the examiners themselves were so ignorant and the essays so confused that, as Shen Kua wrote, all were passed with distinction. The important thing was not to know astronomy, but to be able to write an essay in the classical style. The cram schools were, as they sound, merely to prep candidates for the examinations.

shafique wrote: Some 20th century revisionists (of which eh likes to quote sometimes) even question the role Islam played in the transmission of the Greek knowledge.

The truth I think is something like this. There was undeniably a decline in scientific knowledge in the Western Roman Empire as it declined and collapsed but the roots of this can be traced to the pagan Romans. After 200 BC there was a fruitful cultural contact between Greeks and the bilingual Roman upper classes. This introduced a version of the classical tradition into the Roman Empire but it was a thin popularised version which was translated into Latin. Bilingualism and the conditions which favoured scholarship then declined rapidly after AD180 as the empire entered the 3rd century crisis. Roman citizens who were gradually becoming Christian were therefore limited to pieces of the classical tradition which had been explained and summarised by Latin authors.

Meanwhile the richer, more complete version of the classical tradition fell into the hands of the Muslims as they rapidly expanded across Asia and the Mediterranean.

It was then translated into Arabic, further developed and moved across north Africa to Spain.

As soon as Western Europe had recovered sufficiently it's intellectuals travelled to Spain to translate the materials and bring them into medieval culture.

Actually, studying Greek thinkers was suppressed in the Islamic world and individuals could (usually) only study Greek thinkers in private. The translation and transmission of Greek in the middle east was done before as much as during the Islamic period by non-Muslim translators. These works often went Greek->Aramaic->Arabic and were accompanied with translation errors. In the West, the transmission was smoother as it was Greek->Latin.

Red Chief wrote:Do you have any ref. where this very dubious inf. came from?

himself wrote:The West did not "recover" the learning of the Greeks from anywhere. For the most part, they never had it. The Romans had not bothered to translate it, and knowledge of Greek in the West decayed when the muslims conquered the Med and cut off Greek from Latin Europe. However, an effort was begun in Ostrogothic Italy by Boethius, and his translations of Aristotle, which became known as the Old Logic, formed the basis of learning in the cathedral schools. Similarly, Jaques of Venice brought Aristotle to Mt. St.-Michel directly from Byzantium; and William of Moerbeke from Byzantine Sicily. Sylvain Gougenheim has written a book, the precis of which is that the Cordoban connection, while important, was not all-important, as the same books were available in Byzantium in the original Greek and without the translation errors accumulated on the journey from Greek to Syriac to Arabic. His book is available in French and German, but I am still waiting for an English edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Aristote-au-Mont-S....9 349953&sr=1-1

An irony: the works of the faylasuf enjoyed greater reputation and circulation in the Latin West than in the House of Submission, where they were always viewed with grave suspicion. Edward Grant writes that all the faylasuf fell at one time or another under official censure. (Al-Kindi, for example, was publicly caned and his library confiscated.) Toby Huff notes the important difference between a study of nature that is institutionally embedded in a society and one that is pursued by solitary individuals.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Early-Mo ... 404&sr=1-1

There was a brief period of revival, when the Anglo-Saxon monk Alcuin and others reintroduced some Greek ideas during the Carolingian Renaissance.[33] After Charlemagne's death, however, intellectual life again fell into decline.[34] Excepting a few persons promoting Boethius, such as Gerbert of Aurillac, philosophical thought was developed little in Europe for about two centuries.[34] By the 12th century, however, scholastic thought was beginning to develop, leading to the rise of universities throughout Europe.[35] These universities gathered what little Greek thought had been preserved over the centuries, including Boethius' commentaries on Aristotle. They also served as places of discussion for new ideas coming from new translations from Arabic throughout Europe.[35]

The big-thing-point is that these translations were taking place under Islamic rule and for benefit of the Muslim scholars

rayznack wrote:The translations to Aramaic were taking place before and after the Arab invasions of the region.

In the Abbasid era, a new interest in extending the study of Greek science had arisen. At that time, there was a vast amount of untranslated ancient Greek literature pertaining to philosophy, mathematics, natural science, and medicine.[3][4] This valuable information was only accessible to a very small minority of Middle Eastern scholars who knew the Greek language; the need for an organized translation movement was urgent. In time, Hunayn ibn Ishaq became arguably the chief translator of the era, and laid the foundations of Islamic medicine.[3]

In his lifetime, ibn Ishaq translated 116 works, including Plato's Timaeus, Aristotle's Metaphysics, and the Old Testament, into Syriac and Arabic.[4][5] Ibn Ishaq also produced 36 of his own books, 21 of which covered the field of medicine.[5] His son Ishaq, and his nephew Hubaysh, worked together with him at times to help translate. Hunayn ibn Ishaq is known for his translations, his method of translation, and his contributions to medicine.[4]
[edit]

Early life

Hunayn ibn Ishaq was a Nestorian Christian born in 809, during the Abbasid period, in al-Hira, Iraq..

in the highlighted portion of Hamman's summary in my post above, as well as the Wiki entry which all talk about how Arabic works in Spain were imported to the rest of Europe.

In the 13th century a second phase of the translation movement began and the attention turned eastwards towards the Byzantine Empire. By now the Latins had a taste for classical literature and thought it would be better to get the original sources. In some sense this was right. Translation was not the high art it could have been. The greatest translator here was William of Moerbeke, a Flemish Dominican who lived most of his life in Greece. He was the bishop of Corinth and was encouraged by his friend St Thomas Aquinas to find better translations of Aristotle (Aquinas was unhappy with the quality of those that were in Europe at the time – many sentences were incomprehensible). William translated 50 books, including everything we have now of Aristotle. He also translated everything he could find of Archimedes.

rayznack wrote:thank you for agreeing that Hunayn Ishaq - a Christian - was a major translator of Greek studies to Arabic.

shafique wrote: I'll just file that away with your other bizare historical arguments such as your argument that the Crusades were NOT holy wars.

• All Greek translations were available from the Byzantines - Europeans translated Greek studies via this route
• Christians performed the heavy lifting of translating Greek studies beginning before the Muslim invasions under the Persian empire
• Greek->Aramaic->Arab->Latin translations were error prone
• Muslims hindered European discovery of Greek works
• Europeans acquired translations of Greek studies from Muslims, Byzantines, etc in spite not because of Muslims

rayznack wrote:The translation of Greek->Latin is well known and attested. That many works only became translated after the fall of Constantinople

The sacking and looting of Constantinople was the Fourth Crusade, the first left Constantinope intact.

that it was under Muslim rule that many previously untranslated words were translated into Arabic, and then these were transmitted to Western Europe via Spain.

Frequentflier wrote:He is arguably considered by many Muslim scholars to be second in importance after the founder of Islam, Mohammed. Al-Ghazali single handedly closed off Islam to all outside influences and tried and scucceeded in ending Hellenism in Islam, which was liberally encouraged by earlier Muslim scholars and leaders from Mohammed and Omar to the likes of Abu Cenna (Avicenna) and Al Farabi. This brought scientific thinking in Islam to a screeching halt.

I find it odd how Imam al-Ghazali's weaking the grip of Aristolean philosophy is identified as the begin of the decline of science in Islam, and in the same breath, Thomas of Aquinas doing the same is praised. Especially when you consider that much of the Christian defense of their faith against philosophy borrowed heavily from the Ghazalian tradition - including direction adoption by none other than Thomas Aquinas. What Imam al-Ghazali said was that Philosophy was not a means to reach the ultimate Truth. And the author of this article acknowledge that Aristotelian philosophy is ill-suited to base physics upon.

A Muslim scholar exposing the flaws of the Aristotelian system is the reason that Pakistani scientists only seem able to master practical application of scientific discovery. But his European pupil doing the same is the reason why people like Richard Dawkins exist. It of course has absolutely nothing to do with the billions upon billions of dollars that Harvard, Yale, Princeton are given yearly and the billions upon billions of dollars Muslim governments keep mostly to themselves. Something is awry... and it isn't Ghazali's genius.

.... What exactly was the error of Imam al-Ghazali? He did not attack science, he did not attack rationalism. And I find it odd that the same man who we had such a lively debate about the religious utility of logic is accused of these sorts of things. Rather, what Imam al-Ghazali did was make a scholarly defense for the supremacy of revelation and scholarly (usuli) interpretation over pure rationalism. The Ash'aris are usually the ones blamed for distorting the interpretation of the texts of the Qur'an and Sunna. So this whole discussion to be seems to be completely contradictory in the larger scheme of things.

.... What happened is that the oppression and suppression of the Church as a governing body was counteracted by the new knowledges that had come from the Muslim world. The intellectual state of Europe as a whole was far below that of the Muslim world. The introduction of their former wisdom brought about a scholastic revolution. This coincided with the re-formulation of Europe as a cohesive culture and military threat to mostly Ottoman dominance. As scholasticism begin breaking the grip of the Church, colleges and the like where funded by the wealth that Europe was acquiring, while the Ottomans were placing large amounts of resources into their military complex....

http://forums.understanding-islam.com/s ... ithout-God

The argument isn't about rationalism, because the Greeks were very 'rational'. It is essentially rationalism versus empiricism. The Muslim philosophical world-view was primarily rooted in empiricism, while European thought, particular that of Greece was primarily rational. It was the Muslim world that developed a systematic view of this philosophy which ultimately impacted European thought.
In Greek thought, such as that of Plato, the idea was that reality is the world of perfect form and symmetry, which only exists in pure reason, not experience. What this essentially meant over time, stripped of all the gibberish, is that what we perceive us as the objective world, is not real but an allusion. This thought heavily influenced approaches towards understanding reality. Much of the Muslim attacks on Greek philosophy was aimed at this type of rationalism.

Avicenna developed a systematic approach to the idea of mind, i.e. it is essentially a blank slate upon which knowledge is attained through sensual perception. Abstract concepts are formulated from observation. ibn Tufail, the Spaniard, is famous for his story of Hayy ibn Yaqdhan. A man, stranded on an island, outside of civilization, can, through observation round him, come to the conclusion that God exists. Imam Ghazali attacked this rationalism as well and was pretty successful. But in doing so, he somewhat killed the idea that God can be realized through reason. This is why he ultimately ended up a mystic, i.e. he drew a line between intuition and reason. As Iqbal points out, Ghazali failed to see that intuition and thought stem from the same source and there differences are a result of how the self approaches the issue of time. Iqbal always points out that the Muslim world was always essentially anti-classical and the responses of people like Ashaari, Ghazali, ibn Taymiyya and ibn Hazm are systematic developments of this progression. The Muslim world was essentially ridding itself of these influences through time.

http://forums.understanding-islam.com/s ... post119540

By the 12th century, however, scholastic thought was beginning to develop, leading to the rise of universities throughout Europe.[35] These universities gathered what little Greek thought had been preserved over the centuries, including Boethius' commentaries on Aristotle. They also served as places of discussion for new ideas coming from new translations from Arabic throughout Europe.[35]

And the reason given in history books for the Crusader's attack on Constantinople in the 4th crusade is not 'starvation and double crossing'

but rather an attack to try and depose the then emperor in favour of prince Alexios Angelos (who offered to bankroll the Crusaders when he met them in Venice).

As for your revisionist blogger-only view of history, I refer you to the quote I gave from Hannam, and also the one from wiki:

By the 12th century, however, scholastic thought was beginning to develop, leading to the rise of universities throughout Europe.[35] These universities gathered what little Greek thought had been preserved over the centuries, including Boethius' commentaries on Aristotle. They also served as places of discussion for new ideas coming from new translations from Arabic throughout Europe.[35]

I wrote:What a critical omission you've just left out. Your supposed fact (not really) ignores that Greek works did not reach the West for centuries precisely because of Muslim invasion.

By the 12th century, however, scholastic thought was beginning to develop, leading to the rise of universities throughout Europe.[35] These universities gathered what little Greek thought had been preserved over the centuries, including Boethius' commentaries on Aristotle. They also served as places of discussion for new ideas coming from new translations from Arabic throughout Europe.

The truth I think is something like this. There was undeniably a decline in scientific knowledge in the Western Roman Empire as it declined and collapsed but the roots of this can be traced to the pagan Romans. After 200 BC there was a fruitful cultural contact between Greeks and the bilingual Roman upper classes. This introduced a version of the classical tradition into the Roman Empire but it was a thin popularised version which was translated into Latin. Bilingualism and the conditions which favoured scholarship then declined rapidly after AD180 as the empire entered the 3rd century crisis. Roman citizens who were gradually becoming Christian were therefore limited to pieces of the classical tradition which had been explained and summarised by Latin authors.

Meanwhile the richer, more complete version of the classical tradition fell into the hands of the Muslims as they rapidly expanded across Asia and the Mediterranean.

It was then translated into Arabic, further developed and moved across north Africa to Spain.

As soon as Western Europe had recovered sufficiently it's intellectuals travelled to Spain to translate the materials and bring them into medieval culture.