Quote:No, the point is that even half-educated Muslims have heard of Homer, Plato, Aristotle...
Please.. Claiming these ancient Greek writers as Western civilisation's own, whose writings are completely disconnected from modern Western culture by not only thousands of years, but also by language and cultural gaps that could fill a small abyss, is just ridiculous. It'd be like Islamic/Arabic culture claiming the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enuma Elis, Letters of Hammurabi, the Enmerkar Legends, Book of the Dead, The Tale of Sinuhe, the Bible, Talmud etc. were all part of the Arabic/Islamic tradition, since they were written in the Middle East, by people with similar languages and contain similar cultural traditions to our own....
The reason these names are known to Muslims/Arabs is because we're the ones who discovered them!!! Europe washed their hands at them and burnt their books by the time Islam arrived on the scene. We found copies of their works in the ruins of their civilisation that we took over, translated them, studied them, and eventually passed them on to you. That's why they're known to us.
Quote:Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven, Hemmingway, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Dante, Balzac, Tolstoy, Einstein, Freud, Camus, Voltaire, Hegel, Hume, and the rest.
I could name just as many Islamic writers who are known to genuine Western intellectuals. Not to the Euro-centric ignoramuses you read.
Quote:Not even well-educated westerners can name notable muslims beyond perhaps Naguib Mahfouz and Avicenna and Averroes.
Ibn Khaldun, Omar Khayyam, Abu Nawas, Ibn Zaydun, Antarah Ibn Shaddad, Ibn Tufail, al-Jahiz, Ibn al-Haytham and many others could be added to that list, along with plenty of other contemporary Arabic writers.
Besides even if the West did not recognise them, that does not detract one iota from their achievements or their greatness. In fact it just makes the West's self-centred introspective view of the world all the more bland and limited.
Each and every people have been grand and well known during their heyday, don't let it goto your head and convince you that you're the only show that's ever blown into town. 1000 years ago, some Muslims may have been deluded with a similar kind of self-importance and distorted impression that they were the only show ever to make the big time also....
The interesting thing is that you [unintentionally] recognised that between the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance, nothing of note came out of Europe, ie. for the entire Christian period.