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Technology of water in ancient Iran from prehistory to the Islamic Golden Age

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Re: Technology of water in ancient Iran from prehistory to the Islamic Golden Age

#81

Maybe a bit off topic but it's always strange when someone says "Islamic Golden Age" when talking about Iran. Nothing against a specific religion. It's like saying Newton's work came during Christian Golden Age in Europe. The religion had nothing to do with it. In fact, there is a book [1] (in Persian) title "Two Centuries of Silence" that talks about the significant blow to Iran's culture, literature and science aft…

Iran isn’t Persian only and that distinction needs to be always made. Persian as a language has been used by various people to do science and literature in, and same goes for Arabic, but they were majority neither Arabs nor Persian by ethnicity.

Re: Technology of water in ancient Iran from prehistory to the Islamic Golden Age

#82

Maybe a bit off topic but it's always strange when someone says "Islamic Golden Age" when talking about Iran. Nothing against a specific religion. It's like saying Newton's work came during Christian Golden Age in Europe. The religion had nothing to do with it. In fact, there is a book [1] (in Persian) title "Two Centuries of Silence" that talks about the significant blow to Iran's culture, literature and science aft…

True. During the Golden Age, most Persian scholars and scientists had to write their books in Arabic to preserve them in libraries. Most Persians had to choose Arabic names. That's why when people see a Persian mathematician like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi , they might think he was Arab. Fun fact: The word "Algorithm" comes from this guy's name!

He wasn’t Persian. This is a daylight robbery from the people of Central Asia. Look at his last name. Khwarazm is in Central Asia and it has no ethnic Persians(ethnic Tajiks don’t count).

Re: Technology of water in ancient Iran from prehistory to the Islamic Golden Age

#83
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way around the awkwardness with "Islamic world" is to use "Near East", which is used to cover the core geographic area in pre-modern times. If you try thinking of when was a "golden age" of the Near East, it becomes evidently a less sound idea.

"Near east" suffers from the issue that it's a geographic classification rather than one encompassing both a region and a period. It's also, of course, a relative description in that it is "near" relative to a specific presumptive geographic centre, that is, Europe. That's not to say that the term isn't viable. But again, nuance and compromise.

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Re: Technology of water in ancient Iran from prehistory to the Islamic Golden Age

#84

Glad to see ancient Iranian culture featured here. People in the west have a lot of misconceptions about Iran. Persian culture is thousands of years old.

Iranian or Persian? One is a subset of the other and the other encompasses other people who has equally contributed, if not more, to the Iranian culture. Check out Iranic people.

Re: Technology of water in ancient Iran from prehistory to the Islamic Golden Age

#86
post #78
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if, Islam was opposing to the idea of science, as the largest religion of that area (which not only included Iran, but many others), what would happen? We don't have to imagine. A shunning of empiricism and natural philosophy is one of the reasons the Islamic Golden Age came to an end. Islam as a religion was never a monolith, and like in Christianity some movements embrace science more than others, and the…

Is it actually causational though? Or did the golden age come to an end, and the academics were ousted from power as a result?

Traditionally the age is considered to have come to an end with the Mongol Siege of Baghdad, wherein the invaders sacked the city. Baghdad was the center of learning, and the fact that scholars from all around the empire (including non-Arab, and even non-Muslim) were able to travel to and, more importantly, find institutional support in Baghdad was one of the main drivers behind the age.

But institutional support had already begun to wane as a consequence of a theological shift in Arabic Islam from Mu'tazilism to Ash'arism. Ash'arism is often described as pro-rationalism, but compared to Mu'tazilism it was a significant regression, especially in terms of the motivation for official, institutional support for the study of natural philosophy. Despite the sacking, Baghdad recovered relatively quickly, but institutional support for natural philosophy never did recover.

Work in mathematics, medicine, and natural philosophy in the Islamic world didn't end. But it found much less support, and often came from the periphery, further away from the now more theologically conservative Arab world, and fragmented. Proximity is everything, especially before the age of telecommunications. There were no fewer geniuses in the Islamic world, but now they were cut off from each other. It's much like the Dark Ages in Europe--there was no shortage of smart people doing smart things, but they lost networking benefits and enjoyed less patronage.

Re: Technology of water in ancient Iran from prehistory to the Islamic Golden Age

#87
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applying labels is always fraught and involves compromises. "Islamic World" is well-established and generally recognised. It's also more nuanced than hot takes suggest. Peter Adamson, host of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast and author of the book series from the same project, devotes roughlythe first 20 minutes of his Google Talk about Islamic Philosophy to the matter of why "Islamic World" is in f…

> "dominant influence" does not mean "exlusive" or even "majority", but "that which has the greatest overall impact in a specific area" The burden of proof for "high impact" is heavy. I recommend reading some of the articles by the Inarah Institute http://inarah.net/publications > on how shaky the dominant Islamic history narrative is. To clarify: It is unclear what the direction of the influence is. Was it Islam tha…

Indeed and that's what makes labels difficult.

You can make the same argument about Middle Ages Western Christian philosophy for what it's worth. While it originated in the erstwhile Roman Empire, the cultural and religious norms at the time were very much attuned to the various Germanic norms of the peoples that dominated the formerly Western Roman Empire rather than the joint Roman and Greek culture that constituted the Roman Empire during the founding of Christianity. Eastern Roman Empire viz Byzantine norms were codified in the Orthodox Church canon and philosophy in the region had a much larger overlap with "Islamic" and Greek cultures of the time.

Re: Technology of water in ancient Iran from prehistory to the Islamic Golden Age

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason behind drawing such a distinction may be more telling, as there is a larger push in some groups to draw this distinction for the sake of harkening back to pre-Islamic Persia. But of course, modern Persia and Islam are intertwined, so usually those who wish to draw a distinction do so for political or religious bias reasons.

That's a pretty big assumption. It's natural to like your heritage and it's fine doing so while being respectful of other people's culture and heritage. I like other people to know about my culture for what it really was, what it went through and what it is right now. This is in contrast with how western media has tried to depict Iran as their political foe. Interestingly, Modern Persia and Islam (more with Islamic r…

Right so you have a bit of an agenda here.

You want to separate the scholarship. The problem is there really isn't enough historiographical work done here to meaningfully tease out the differences. Surviving primary sources often ended up in the hands of colonial governments which are loathe to open up access today or in the hands of estates of former colonial figures where they rot in a dark room somewhere.

Another large historiographic gap in the Islamic world around this time was the lifestyle of peasants. We have records of kings and lords because of the widespread practice of autobiographies. We also know the thoughts of philosophers based on their texts. But we lack a lot of knowledge about how peasants and other commoners lived around the time. If you think about it, that's the majority of the people living at any time.

Re: Technology of water in ancient Iran from prehistory to the Islamic Golden Age

#89
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applying labels is always fraught and involves compromises. "Islamic World" is well-established and generally recognised. It's also more nuanced than hot takes suggest. Peter Adamson, host of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast and author of the book series from the same project, devotes roughlythe first 20 minutes of his Google Talk about Islamic Philosophy to the matter of why "Islamic World" is in f…

> "dominant influence" does not mean "exlusive" or even "majority", but "that which has the greatest overall impact in a specific area" The burden of proof for "high impact" is heavy. I recommend reading some of the articles by the Inarah Institute http://inarah.net/publications > on how shaky the dominant Islamic history narrative is. To clarify: It is unclear what the direction of the influence is. Was it Islam tha…

The discovery and dating of Sana’a manuscripts to 630-650AD have debunked much of the “historical critical “ theories of Islam wrt origins of the Quran. It turns out the the traditional narratives seem to be lining up with historical evidence.

Re: Technology of water in ancient Iran from prehistory to the Islamic Golden Age

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The religion had nothing to do with it. I would disagree with it. Imagine if, Islam was opposing to the idea of science, as the largest religion of that area (which not only included Iran, but many others), what would happen? Science would have been abolished, stopped immediately. Instead, Islam encouraged people to learn more science, even greek philosophers work was translated by hiring Christian people. On the o…

> Science would have been abolished, stopped immediately Most invaders in history did not violently impose their own philosphies and idealogies on day 1. Generally you let the conquered people keep their philosophy and religions to a big extent until the population has adopted it naturally through softer means, Islam specifically has a few verses around tolerance for "people of the book". Islam for example puts highe…

The tax on non-Muslims was not always higher, sometimes it was lower as well.
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