31–40 of 94 posts
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Spanish_autonomous_com...
No mention of the Toledo School of Translators, the equivalent to the Tizard mission of the 12th century. That event along with similar events in Italy and elsewhere was what truly triggered the Renaissance but historians in the West won't ever acknowledge it using that phrasing. Today, people are taught that Leonardo Da Vinci was hiding in a room somewhere and suddenly the Renaissance happened. That caliber of nonse…
The Mongols opened the door to fundamentalism, but it didn't have to go that way. The sack of Baghdad is a simplification
Read up on Al Ghazali, it is eye-opening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ghazali
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Read the book. Preservation of knowledge was done by the Byzantine empire not the Arabs.
A part of the ancient Latin and Greek literature has been preserved by the Byzantine Empire and another part by the Arabs. The Arabs actually had much more interactions with the Western Europeans than the latter had with the Byzantines, so much more old books have reached Europe through the Arabs. Most Byzantine books have reached Europe only after the Fall of Constantinople and the invention of the movable-type prin…
p.s. important to amend this here to note that certainly, Muslim civilization had many towering Arab (and non-Persian non-Arab) intellects as well. In my personal opinion, the correct terminology would be Muslim and Islamic (since it certainly was that) instead of Arab or Arabic. The latter apparently is favored by European “Orientalists” but it is both incorrect and further it is divisive.
I have to find the letter (possibly a Jewish reader can dig it out?) but I remember reading and being amused by a letter penned by Maimonides to iirc Jews in Arabian peninsula. Apparently they had written to him having heard of the paradise of tolerance in Muslim Spain and his letter poo pooing it, telling them it’s no better than their locale. I always read that letter as a sort of rabbinical wisdom on his part: he knew they wouldn’t be able to get there so he painted a dismal picture.
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That book is likely to be correct that it is a myth that "al-Andalus" was "a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony" and that in reality being a non-Muslim must have caused many disadvantages. Nevertheless, even without examining any evidence from that book, it is beyond any reasonable doubt that the non-Muslims had been much better treated under the Arab rulers than the non-Christians were treate…
Why would it be symmetric? This is like if North American natives had successfully expelled the Europeans after some amount of time, and then saying that the natives were meaner to the Europeans than vice versa. Wouldn’t expulsion be justified from the North American native’s perspective?
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It turns out that the page I linked to has more than just pictures of the covers, and if you click thru you can find the publisher's blurbs which are brief descriptions of the contents spun in a way favorable to them. As an example, there's this biography of William F. Buckley Jr : https://www.regnery.com/9781610171557/william-f-buckley-jr/ whose blurb reads in part "William F. Buckley Jr.: The Maker of a Movement te…
> which doesn't leave much room for ambiguity specialising in conservative books isn't the same thing as catering primarily to "right wing culture warriors", in the sense that any book from their collection can be assumed as biased.
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Why would it be symmetric? This is like if North American natives had successfully expelled the Europeans after some amount of time, and then saying that the natives were meaner to the Europeans than vice versa. Wouldn’t expulsion be justified from the North American native’s perspective?
Note that there was about 9 centuries between the Umayyad conquest of Iberia (8th century) and the explulsion of Moriscos (17th century). So the analogy with North American natives would be something like - if somehow the Native Americans win political/military control in the 23th century (9 centuries after the arrival of the Europeans) and then decide that all non-native Americans will have to leave the country to w…
As a side note, I feel a lot of people have a hard time processing conflicting perspectives and instead project their own moral views as a uniform perspective onto everyone at once, which does not produce a useable model of reality IMO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_Jewish_culture_i... I have to find the letter (possibly a Jewish reader can dig it out?) but I remember reading and being amused by a letter penned by Maimonides to iirc Jews in Arabian peninsula. Apparently they had written to him having heard of the paradise of tolerance in Muslim Spain and his letter poo pooing it, telling them it’s no better than their locale. I always…
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One has to really stretch the modern definition of "colonization" and its moral implications for it to be applicable to the 7 centuries of Muslim Spain, but not make it applicable to the immediately preceding Visigothic and Suevi kingdoms of Hispania, some of the Germanic tribes who invaded and took over during the fall of the Roman Empire. Even if we were to accept invasion of Iberia by the Umayyad Caliphate of Arab…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_Jewish_culture_i... I have to find the letter (possibly a Jewish reader can dig it out?) but I remember reading and being amused by a letter penned by Maimonides to iirc Jews in Arabian peninsula. Apparently they had written to him having heard of the paradise of tolerance in Muslim Spain and his letter poo pooing it, telling them it’s no better than their locale. I always…