I don’t know what’s worse, junk science or junk history. There is unending propaganda about an Islamic Golden Age of the past that today’s Islamists want to recreate. Much the same as a century ago, fables about an “Aryan super-race” long before Western Christianity motivated a lethal totalitarianism. Neither is true, of course, and obscures the amazing story of how Western Civilization got us to where we are.
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A good example is a recent podcast by Tharik Hussain, a Muslim travel writer praising the contributions of Muslim Cordoba to Europe. The best evidence this chap offered was an odd paean from an amateur historian a century ago — that in Cordoba’s prime it had street lighting, public baths, paved streets, arabesque decorations on palaces, schools for children, and an “Alexandrian library,” while Christian Europe was dark, dirty, muddy, and its monks and rulers unlettered.
Sorry, that’s all wrong. A few of the wealthiest Muslim cities in the Middle Ages did manage to hold on to the benefits of the Roman world they had conquered, including architecture and street layouts. But the vast majority of Islam was illiterate and impoverished. Cordoba’s streetlights were just some oil lamps hung along the central arteries. Big deal. Public baths, another legacy of the Romans, were much more common in Europe. Only in the 16th century, with waves of new diseases, did they decline, when some Tony Fauci in that era decreed that hot water spread disease.
Far from being uneducated, Europe’s Christians led the way past the fall of Rome and into the future after the barbarian invasions. Unlike Muslims, Christians have always believed the pen is mightier than the sword. For its first 500 years, the Church didn’t fight — it preached, argued, evangelized, and published its teachings on a scale the world had never seen. Then, it began a process of previously unimagined formal education, based in churches and tens of thousands of monasteries and convents. Monasteries ran local schools, assembled libraries, published books (before the printing press, everything had to be hand-copied), advanced agriculture and technical research, cared for the poor and elderly, conducted trade fairs, and often protected locals with their massive stone walls.
Compare that to just a few big Muslim towns like Cordoba and Baghdad that had libraries, while in their hands, the greatest library of all, the one in Alexandria, Egypt, fell to ruin. Similarly, the great Roman canal that linked the Red Sea to the Nile and the Mediterranean was neglected, then demolished. Most of the achievements of Islamic scholars descend from the great Persian and Byzantine schools, persisting under their new Arab masters. Raymond Ibrahim and Goldie Ghamari have many podcasts on just that. The question is not what Islam gave Europe, but just how far Europe and the rest of the world might have advanced without Islam.
Anyway, Christian Europe recovered from the barbarian wave because it had the secret sauce. The rule of law, based on the Imago Dei. The rights of all mankind because we are made in His image.
Ordinary people got to live more freely than in any previous society, and they even got to vote on their government — at towns and cities, often with strong written charters; and judicial officers like the Saxon hundred, in trials by juries; and professed monks and nuns even voted for their leadership.
Beginning with , the modern concept of natural law emerged. As St. Augustine explained, an unjust law is no law at all, while King Alfred and his monks created the English common law by merging Saxon custom with the teaching of the Decalogue and New Testament. Concepts like natural rights, limited government, and separation of powers were already laid out in the Middle Ages and flourished in the centuries to follow, while the Muslim world never got past the simple hierarchy of tribal chieftains.
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Unsurprisingly, the Muslim world decayed under its authoritarian ways, but once Europe got the Muslim and Viking invaders under control, and its economy took off in the Commercial Revolution. Later era Catholic Scholastic thinkers like Pacioli, Eck, Molina, Suarez, Bellarmine, and Lessius invented modern finance and economics, and the West raced ahead permanently.
Europeans were also happy to get whatever they could from the Muslims: ancient texts of the Greek philosophers, new works by scholars such as Avicenna, or things Muslims imported from China and India, such as gunpowder and advanced mathematics.
On the whole, though, trade with the Muslims was dangerous and unreliable for outsiders. So, Europeans built new types of ships and mastered the world’s oceans, just to get around the troublesome Muslim lands.
One might ask, then, how did the Muslims ever get as far as they did? Here, we do have to credit Muhammad and his companions. They were resourceful and charismatic leaders. They led their powerful desert army into the Levant and North Africa, just as the Byzantines and Persians were exhausted from 20 years of war following a lethal plague that killed a large percentage of the population. The Rashidun Caliphs who succeeded Muhammad were very clever. They kept educated Christians running the civilian government for over a century and, by many accounts, lowered taxes. A public welfare system was set up with Muslims paying the zakat and non-Muslims the jizya to support this. Jews and Christians were largely left alone to pursue their interests. In fact, for over 600 years, Muslims were likely a minority in their own lands.
But the weak foundations of Muslim civilization and government became more obvious with time, leading to a millennium of decline. Beginning with the Mongol invasion, their armies entered a losing streak that, aside from a few highlights during the Ottoman era, continues to this day.
Interestingly, what we never hear about in the West is so-called Islamic Modernism. By the 19th century, the Muslim world could no longer deny its obvious failings. This led in two different directions. Militants wanted a “purer” form of Islam and called for more violence and destruction — what they show on TV every day. Others, such as the philosopher Syed Khan of India, called for western education and wanted a complete rethinking of the Islamic texts. Other Muslims agreed. Many have come to question the whole idea of hadith. We even see the Saudi crown prince leading modernization in that once forbidding country.
One can only hope the modernizers prevail. That a real exegesis of the Quran comes about, and average Muslims begin to comprehend all the strange and contradictory passages in their sacred texts.
Islam teaches that the Jewish Torah and the Christian Gospel are authoritative, just like the Quran. When it was finally discovered by Muslims in the 11th century how these books differed from the Quran, Ibn Hazm and others asserted that the Bible must have been corrupted and extensively rewritten, a claim found nowhere in Islam until then, and an historical absurdity. Sadly, this is the infantile understanding of many Muslims. We would have a real Islamic Golden Age, however, if more Muslims summoned the intellectual honesty of a Syed Khan and began a genuine re-examination of their religion.
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Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, KY.
Image: Peter Brueghel the Younger