Karnal wrote on Sep 19
th, 2014 at 8:58pm:
Oh, old boy, by being such a pedant, you’re missing the entire point - those scholars (and schools) were funded by Muslim caliphs. Are you suggesting they were slaves?
They were influential intellectuals and administrators within Muslim.society - dare I say it, a multicultural Muslim society that promoted scholars of minority religions - approved monotheistic ones, anyway.
Never ever, eh?
Ban them.
The furphy and the outright falsification is that the conquering muslims did the intellectual heavy lifting of translating and therefore saving the classical heritage for the Christian, backward West. This is completely untrue. You tried to promote it in your stupid, grinning way by citing Arab sounding translators, trying to show that despite what I told you, Arab Muslims engaged in learning other languages- those of their dhimmis. But as so often the case, you turned out to be an ignorant, tendetious idiot because what is more important to you than anything else is playing to the gallery. And it doesn't matter that your gallery is packed with intellectually negligible Brains and Hot Shites. Your vanity, like theirs, makes you persist with stupidity even in the face of evidence presented to you so you don't have to once more go the way of the clown. But clown you must be. And so your confidently presented muslim trannslators of the western heritage had to climb down to being mere administrators and functionaries and agents of the actual intellectuals they conquered.
There were no muslim arab translators. There were commentators and there was an arab market for certain types of ancient texts - texts that could be used to justify Islam. Literature, presenting a completely different way of looking at and seeing the world was completely ignored and avoided.
There was muslim arab intellectual labour but it was entirely within the Islamic limits of thought and was decidedly not open to other, for muslim minds inferior ways of being in the world. It confined itself to producing commentary and Islamic apologia. There was no multiculturalism of the mind, no community of equals, no universalist pursuit of truth. Nothing has changed in the Islamic frame of intellectual activity since then.
Have all the bananas you want, PB, and tell us what tired nonsense you have thought of to impess the Brains of this world.