FD, I don't post in the member run forums as I find the whole concept absurd, like so many other aspects of this place, still shackled to such antiquated software.

freediver wrote on Jan 12^th, 2023 at 6:47am:


Where's the evidence that Muslims tried to impose Islam on Jews and then murdered them when they resisted?

Frank wrote on Jan 13^th, 2023 at 8:56am:


Saying it's disproportionate is an exaggeration. But go ahead, give names and state their acheivements.

Quote:


Not so.

1. A thousand years before the Wright brothers a Muslim poet, astronomer, musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made several attempts to construct a flying machine. In 852 he jumped from the minaret of a mosque using a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts. He hoped to glide like a bird. He didn't. But the cloak slowed his fall, creating what is thought to be the first parachute, and leaving him with only minor injuries. In 875, aged 70, having perfected a machine of silk and eagles feathers he tried again, jumping from a mountain. He flew to a significant height and stayed aloft for ten minutes before making another rough landing. Baghdad international airport and a crater on the Moon are named after him.

2. Distillation, the means of separating liquids through differences in their boiling points, was invented around the year 800 by Islam's foremost scientist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and apparatus still in use today - liquefaction, crystallisation, distillation, purification, oxidisation, evaporation and filtration.

3. The windmill was invented in 634 for a Persian caliph and was used to grind corn and draw up water for irrigation. In the vast deserts of Arabia, when the seasonal streams ran dry, the only source of power was the wind which blew steadily from one direction for months. Mills had six or 12 sails covered in fabric or palm leaves. It was 500 years before the first windmill was seen in Europe.

4. The fountain pen was invented for the Sultan of Egypt in 953 after he demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes. It held ink in a reservoir and, as with modern pens, fed ink to the nib by a combination of gravity and capillary action.

5. The system of numbering in use all round the world is probably Indian in origin but the style of the numerals is Arabic and first appears in print in the work of the Muslim mathematicians al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi around 825. Algebra was named after al-Khwarizmi's book, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, much of whose contents are still in use. The work of Muslim maths scholars was imported into Europe 300 years later by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci.

6. By the 9th century, many Muslim scholars took it for granted that the Earth was a sphere.  It was 500 years before that realisation dawned on Galileo. The calculations of Muslim astronomers were so accurate that in the 9th century they reckoned the Earth's circumference to be 40,253.4km - less than 200km out.


And how long a time frame do you mean by 'a brief period in the High Middle ages'? Because there were others, right on the cusp of the High Middle ages, like Ibn al-Haytham (965—1040), mathematician and astronomer:

Ibn al-Haytham made significant contributions to the principles of optics and the use of scientific experiments, and was the first person to realise that light enters the eye, rather than leaving it. He invented the first pin-hole camera after noticing the way light came through a hole in window shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the picture, he worked out, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room). He is also credited with being the first man to shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one.



Source: How Islamic inventors changed the world; "1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World" is a new exhibition which began a nationwide tour this week. It is currently at the Science Museum in Manchester - The Independent, Saturday 11 March 2006.

wombatwoody wrote on Jan 28^th, 2023 at 9:23pm:

This is so laughable. It highlight the poverty of Islamic curiosity and innovation.  Six things in 1500 years, all of them derivative imitations.

wombatwoody wrote on Jan 28^th, 2023 at 9:24pm:


The one you were trying to justify earlier in this thread.

Frank wrote on Jan 29^th, 2023 at 7:03am:


The enlightenment, affecting leaders in both Jewish and Christian thought.

Enabling Mendelssohn, born a Jew, to be baptized as a Lutheran  Christian at age 7, in 1816.

Frank wrote on Jan 29^th, 2023 at 7:03am:


To quote the good Professor again:

Since the time of the late Roman Empire, Jewish communities had considerable legal powers over their members. Not only powers which arise through voluntary mobilization of social pressure (for example refusal to have any dealing whatsoever with an excommunicated Jew or even to bury his body), but a power of naked coercion: to flog, to imprison, to expel—all this could be inflicted quite legally on an individual Jew by the rabbinical courts for all kinds of offenses. In many countries—Spain and Poland are notable examples—even capital punishment could be and was inflicted, sometimes using particularly cruel methods such as flogging to death...

This was the most important social fact of Jewish existence before the advent of the modern state: observance of the religious laws of Judaism, as well as their inculcation through education, were enforced on Jews by physical coercion, from which one could only escape by conversion to the religion of the majority, amounting in the circumstances to a total social break and for that reason very impracticable.

However, once the modern state had come into existence, the Jewish community lost its powers to punish or intimidate the individual Jew. The bonds of one of the most closed of "closed societies," one of the most totalitarian societies in the whole history of mankind were snapped. This act of liberation came mostly from outside...

But the social consequence of this process of liberalization was that, for the first time since about AD 200, a Jew could be free to do what he liked, within the bounds of his country's civil law, without having to pay for this freedom by converting to another religion. The freedom to learn and read books in modern languages, the freedom to read and write books in Hebrew not approved by the rabbis (as any Hebrew or Yiddish book previously had to be), the freedom to eat non-kosher food, the freedom to ignore the numerous absurd taboos regulating sexual life, even the freedom to think—for "forbidden thoughts" are among the most serious sins—all these were granted to the Jews of Europe (and subsequently of other countries) by modern or even absolutist European regimes, although the latter were at the same time antisemitic and oppressive. Nicholas I of Russia was a notorious antisemite and issued many laws against the Jews of his state. But he also strengthened the forces of "law and order" in Russia—not only the secret police but also the regular police and the gendarmerie—with the consequence that it became difficult to murder Jews on the order of their rabbis, whereas in pre-1795 Poland it had been quite easy. "Official" Jewish history condemns him on both counts. For example, in the late 1830s a "Holy Rabbi" (Tzadik) in a small Jewish town in the Ukraine ordered the murder of a heretic by throwing him into the boiling water of the town baths, and contemporary Jewish sources note with astonishment and horror that bribery was "no longer effective" and that not only the actual perpetrators but also the Holy Man were severely punished. The Metternich regime of pre-1848 Austria was notoriously reactionary and quite unfriendly to Jews, but it did not allow people, even liberal Jewish rabbis, to be poisoned. During 1848, when the regime's power was temporarily weakened, the first thing the leaders of the Jewish community in the Galician city of Lemberg (now Lvov) did with their newly regained freedom was to poison the liberal rabbi of the city,,.

It is important to note that all the supposedly "Jewish characteristics"—by which I mean the traits which vulgar so-called intellectuals in the West attribute to "the Jews"—are modern characteristics, quite unknown during most of Jewish history, and appeared only when the totalitarian Jewish community began to lose its power. Take, for example, the famous Jewish sense of humor. Not only is humor very rare in Hebrew literature before the 19th century (and is only found during few periods, in countries where the Jewish upper class was relatively free from the rabbinical yoke, such as Italy between the 14th and 17th centuries or Muslim Spain) but humor and jokes are strictly forbidden by the Jewish religion—except, significantly, jokes against other religions. Satire against rabbis and leaders of the community was never internalized by Judaism, not even to a small extent, as it was in Latin Christianity. There were no Jewish comedies, just as there were no comedies in Sparta, and for a similar reason...

It was a world sunk in the most abject superstition, fanaticism and ignorance, a world in which the preface to the first work on geography in Hebrew (published in 1803 in Russia) could complain that very many great rabbis were denying the existence of the American continent and saying that it is "impossible." Between that world and what is often taken in the West to "characterize" Jews there is nothing in common except the mistaken name.

However, a great many present-day Jews are nostalgic for that world, their lost paradise, the comfortable closed society from which they were not so much liberated as expelled. A large part of the Zionist movement always wanted to restore it—and this part has gained the upper hand.

Jewish History, Jewish Religion, The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Chapter 2, Prejudice and Prevarication