great
Al-Jazari
61–70 of 127 posts
Re: Al-Jazari
#62The Islamic Golden Age is pretty fantastic, not the first time I heard about it and usually a cause of pride among my muslim friends (and for good reason). Too bad we're witnessing the Islamic Dark Ages right now.
Seems like they have been going for the last 700 years. Which makes me feel that the feelings of pride my Muslim friends feel are unjustified as they have very little in common with the world that made al-Jazari. Or perhaps more importantly, the rest of the world has advanced in 700 years, but they have staid behind.
Generally, I don't completely get why do humans feel pride for things they didn't have anything to do with? Probably has something to do with ego.
Re: Al-Jazari
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arab can be a very generic and overly used term in many conversations. Please define who you think are Arabs. Also the link this whole thread is about on wikipedia is about a Scientist from Turkey, not Arabia. > "Badi'al-Zaman Abū al-'Izz ibn Ismā'īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī (1136–1206) (Arabic: بديع الزمان أَبُو اَلْعِزِ بْنُ إسْماعِيلِ بْنُ الرِّزاز الجزري) was a Muslim polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engi…
Arab is not really generic. It is an ethnicity. An Arab does to have to be living in Arabia. Cizre at that time, was inhabited by Arabs. Al Jazari was an Arab, living in Cizre (Jazeera Ibn Amr in Arabic). It happens that this city today is a Turkish city.
> It is an ethnicity.
I'm aware that it is, but many people seem to like to use it for an (incorrect) generalization.
Re: Al-Jazari
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't a very fair or accurate statement given that many of the greatest scholars of Islam weren't Arab (a large number were Persian for example). There were multiple centres of scientific endeavor throughout Islamic history including (but not limited to) Baghdad, Damascus, Al-Andalus (i.e. Islamic Spain) and Africa. Much of the Islamic scholarship at the time revolved around gaining a greater understanding of th…
Right, a Muslim scholar in Persia could be seen as a Persian scholar or a Muslim scholar. However, Arabs often end up looking at their contributions as Islamic Contributions, or rather Arab-Islamic dismissing non-Muslim Arabs. To your point, there were many non-Muslim Arab scholars.
My point isn't that there are many non-Muslim Arab scholars, it's that a lot of the greatest Muslim scholars at the time weren't actually of Arab origin. e.g. Ibn Sina and Al-Ghazali were both of Persian origin (although the lingua franca was Arabic).
Islam was the catalyst of change in the 7th century, I don't see how that could be denied. Yes, it was predominately Arabs that brought it outside the Peninsula but the scholarly achievements weren't Arab achievements, because, again, many of the scholars weren't Arabs. Heck, the most important book in Sunni Islam after the Qur'an was compiled by al-Bukhari, a non-Arab from Bukhara in modern-day Afghanistan.
If you look into it, Islamic scholarship didn't really kick off until the Abbasid Dynasty was established. Non-Arabs played a large role in allowing the Abbasids to come into power in the first place.
The jizya (tax on non-Muslims) was a higher fee than the zakat (religious tax on Muslims). As more and more non-Arabs started to embrace Islam, the Umayyads were getting less and less tax revenue because the new Muslims were playing zakat instead of jizya.
As such, they stated (against the laws of Islam) that non-Arab converts to Islam still need to pay the same amount as they were paying before they embraced Islam. Naturally, this led to a lot of resentment amongst the new non-Arab Muslims who would later support the Abbasid rebellion against the Umayyads.
The Abbasids would go on to employ many non-Arabs, especially Persians, into high positions in government.
Re: Al-Jazari
#65Why does it lead by describing him as a Muslim? I don't see anything else in the article that refers to that - he's not noted as a Imam or a Koran scholar or anything similar. Wouldn't it make more sense to simply say he was from an area that today is Turkey?
Re: Al-Jazari
#66The Islamic Golden Age is pretty fantastic, not the first time I heard about it and usually a cause of pride among my muslim friends (and for good reason). Too bad we're witnessing the Islamic Dark Ages right now.
To use strokes so broad that any historian would like to harm me... what happened was basically that the Islamic world came up against the Crusades, and with Catholics murdering them with terrible savagery, they decided to seal themselves off from the world. And in that seclusion they missed out on the most important development in human history - The Enlightenment. Possible the greatest achievement of The Enlightenment was driving a wedge between religion belief and beliefs about the material world. Prior to The Enlightenment, these two things were the same thing - a concept which is VERY difficult for people from post-Enlightenment cultures to understand. Seeing gravity as an expression of a gods will? Thinking it sensible to look for religious explanations to solve mechanical problems? No belief in an afterlife, but belief that the material world was a thing skin over the supernatural world which actually controlled everything? These things just don't make sense to post-Enlightenment folks.
Those ideas are absolutely and totally required to support the idea of coexistence of peoples of different faiths. Otherwise, religious ideas about eternity and salvation trump any concerns. There is nothing which can outweigh the importance of eternity. And in their isolation, concerns for eternity (and self preservation) consumed the Islamic world. The division between modern 'moderate' Islamists and 'fundamentalist' Islamists is this exact divide solved by The Enlightenment.
And the outcome is by no means a foregone conclusion. People are going to have to choose to believe that their religious beliefs are "just religious" and have no serious relevance to the material world (the exact notion their religion decries as the ultimate heresy) and join the modern world... or cling to their pre-Enlightenment system and be exterminated through violence by the rest of the world. Coexistence with pre-Enlightenment people in a world where technology gives individuals so much power of different kinds simply is not possible.
Re: Al-Jazari
#67What alphabet is used for the letters in the diagrams[0]? It's not Arabic, and it looks sort of like Greek (or maybe Phoenician), but different. 0. Such as this one: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Al-jazari...
It is Arabic, Islamic calligraphy[0] can be confusing, I'll reckon that. 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calligraphy
He's asking about the symbols against the diagram itself, not the preface.
Re: Al-Jazari
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was reading Why Nations Fail , recently, and came across a similar sentiment: > While the Egyptians were building the great pyramids of Giza around 2500 BC, the English constructed their most famous ancient monument, the stone circle at Stonehenge. Not bad by English standards, but not even large enough to have housed one of the ceremonial boats buried at the foot of King Khufu’s pyramid. England continued to lag b…
You can only connect the dots looking backward. How do we know that our society won't be viewed 500 years from now the same way we view the Roman empire or Egyptian kingdom?
I don't think it's entirely true that you can only connect the dots looking backward... certainly it is an order of magnitude more difficult to be objective about ones own time, but it can be done if approached correctly. For instance, we can look back at the past and realize that choices were made in certain situations that were flat out in opposition to reality, and in such a way that the people of the time KNEW (or had the tools to know) that it was the wrong choice. Looking at present society through this kind of lens, ignoring social convention and analyzing things objectively, is, I think, helpful. For instance, it would not surprise me if within 100 years our current culture is looked down upon for being extremely oppressive and prejudiced against adolescents, harming them tremendously by denigrating them during a very formative period of their lives. It follows the pattern of every form of prejudice we have overthrown in the past. We view ourselves as superior, construct very poor scientific arguments for that superiority, and go about enacting great oppression, controlling the group 'for their own good' while expecting the worst of them (humans react poorly to oppression, so this expectation will be met).
Similarly, it is very likely that we will find many of the general ideas we have about sexuality will be shown to be very destructive and unhealthy. Our research already shows that increasing sexual activity by any amount results in real measurable health benefits. And history can show us that we exist in the most non-sexually-active period in human history. We'll certainly correct that at some point, history pretty much guarantees it. Wherever our society is a freakish unique outlier on something as basic as that, I think it's safe to expect it to be shown to be folly later.
Re: Al-Jazari
#69Why does it lead by describing him as a Muslim? I don't see anything else in the article that refers to that - he's not noted as a Imam or a Koran scholar or anything similar. Wouldn't it make more sense to simply say he was from an area that today is Turkey?
Not sure what Turkey has to do with him. But it makes sense to attribute someone to country/empire at the time he lived in. Which is the Islamic Empire. So saying he was Muslim, is as much as saying a scientist today residing in the US is American.
Contrary to popular western belief, Islam is one of the main enablers for these great scientists... as many were "influenced by the Quranic injunctions and hadiths, such as "the ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr," that stressed the value of knowledge.'" But more than that, is the amount of government funding and salaries these guys would get (in some cases, what would amount to today's pro athletes'). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
Re: Al-Jazari
#70Why does it lead by describing him as a Muslim? I don't see anything else in the article that refers to that - he's not noted as a Imam or a Koran scholar or anything similar. Wouldn't it make more sense to simply say he was from an area that today is Turkey?
I think it's using 'Muslim' as an ethnicity, which is of course incorrect. This would explain why his religious stuff isn't noted anywhere else. I encourage you to amend the article :-)