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Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

Not only India, but Persia, countries in The Levant, North Africa and Mediterranean were highly developed before the advent of Islam (which originated amongst desert tribes). It is their knowledge which gave rise to the so called "Golden Age of Islam". Islamic conquest merely acted as a conduit for the spread of these ideas from one geographical region to another (a la the later Mongol Empire).

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It is not merely act as a conduit. Using your anology they act as amplifier, filter, signal processing, etc toward the knowledge contributions. These regions becoming even more prosperous due to these knowledge based activities after Islamic rules unlike India who becoming much poorer after the British colonization.

Your first part is debatable.

The analogy i see is Arabs->later advancements(7th century and later) is the same as Mongols->later advancements(13th century and later). Both Arabs and Mongols were not inherently as "advanced" a civilization as the ones they conquered.

I'm not sure if you're trolling but I'll bite.

Unlike Mongols, Arab and Muslim scientists are well-knwon to have numerous and extensive contributions to the scientific knowledge. A lot of the novel scientific, mathematics, and other knowledge terminology are based on the Arabic languages namely algorithm, chemistry, alkali, just to name a few [1].

For medicine alone the contributions are numerous from Al-Nafis discovery of blood cirtculation several hunderds years before Harvey[2], Avicennna's book adoption as standard medicine textbooks for several hundred years at Oxford, Cambridge and other major European university [3], Ibn Al Quff the father of modern anesthasia [4] and Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawai the father of modern surgery [5].

Actually I want to mention well-known contributions to mathematics and astronomy by Arab and muslim scientists and mathematicians as well, but I think you probably get the points by now.

If your claim is true about the Mongols I'd like you to come up with similar list just for modern medicine alone from the Mongolian scientists (not ancient China) but I doubt you can and will.

[1]List of English words of Arabic origin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabi...

[2]Ibn al-Nafis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Nafis

[3]Avicenna:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna

[4]An Arabic surgeon, Ibn al Quff's (1232–1286) account on surgical pain relief:

https://journals.lww.com/anar/Fulltext/2010/04010/Historical...

[5]Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi: Father of Modern Surgery:

https://www.hbku.edu.qa/en/academic-events/CIS-PM-AQAZFMS

You have not understood my point at all.

If anything, pointing to various scholars with Arabic names in a large geographical area which hosted "advanced civilizations" before their conquest by Islam only strengthens my argument.

It is the achievements of the native people which were built upon by the now larger group of people of various ethnicities which is being pointed out. Islam was a conduit for the spread of ideas and not their originator. The Arabs were as "primitive" as the Mongols after them. Only after "mixing" with other ethnicities, converting them to Islam, making Arabic official lingua franca were these countries "Arabicized".

The difference between Arabs and Mongols is that the Arabs gave themselves a specific identity i.e. Islam which they then imposed on others while the Mongols integrated themselves into the native cultures.

Central Asia certainly played its role too. I invite you to consider that when Jai Singh II built Jantar Mantar, he used "Islamic" sources (Zij) as well from there.

Central Asia's prominence before Islam was mainly due to trade routes (later named the "Silk Road").

It is fairly standard in Indian right wing media to be dismissive of anything positive of Islamic origin, by constructing a short alternative history as per the writers imagination.

So any post Islamic Arab contributions to math would have to be stolen from India, using bloodshed - as if math is a treasure that can be lifted or looted or were existing amongst Arabs before Islam.

Nobody is talking about "right wing media" etc other than you.

What is being pointed out is the achievements of civilizations predating Islam in those countries which are today Islamic.

It is simple factual History.

Very well, so what is wrong about mentioning Al Biruni or Ulugh Beg or Zij-i-Sultani as well?

It is was fairly straightforward for me to tell that you belong to the Indian right wing, from your biases when commenting about a secular topic like mathematics.

> It is simple factual History.

Just like post Islamic Arab mathematics by Al Khawrizmi, Al Biruni et al.

> Nobody is talking about "right wing media" etc other than you.

Yes, and ... ??

>It is was fairly straightforward for me to tell that you belong to the Indian right wing

None of my posts have anything to do with "right wing"; It is your reading of them that is flawed.

If anything, hiding behind internet anonymity and posting ad hominem comments tells a lot about you.

Basically nobody invents anything from scratch. It would be a pity if we have to rediscover everything all over again, every time there is a major change in a regions political order.

The modern USA is today a continuation of the Europe's printing press revolution.

The point was that the achievements of civilizations predating Islam have been given short shrift.

I can't think of anybody giving short shrift to the achievements of civilizations predating Islam: Rome, Ancient Greece, Ancient China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and many more civilizations are all commonly referred to as having made major achievements.

I thought it was obvious but apparently not; my other comment clarifies it as;

>What is being pointed out is the achievements of civilizations predating Islam in those countries which are today Islamic.

Oh yeah - that's a big issue. Lots of big civilizational achievements were happening in what became the Islamic world before Islam became dominant.

My strong contention is that much of the credit for the "Golden Age of Islam" should go to these pre-Islamic civilizations whose achievements were forcibly appropriated by the Arabs under their "Islamic" conquest.

Perhaps Indian author Vishal Mangalwadi's example of the mathematical theory behind the mechanical clock would illustrate the flow of ideas well. He wrote (I'm going my memory here, so I don't have his exact dates) that an Indian mathematician came up with the theory for a mechanical clock in the early 11th century, but didn't try to build one; 50 years later middle eastern Muslim scholars were debating and studying the theory, but didn't try to build one; another half-century later the idea had come to Europe, and it was there in the early 12th century that the bishop of Paris suggested to his monks that building a mechanical clock would improved their ability to organized their communal work and worship in their monastic communities.

Mamgalwadi also asks the question of why neither the Indian nor Islamic cultures tried to build a mechanical clock when they knew of the theory. He suggests that the Indian Hindu belief that reality is /maya/ or illusion (and one meditates to escape the illusion) prevented them from trying to make a clock; in the middle-east, he suggests that the Islamic rejection of possibility of God becoming incarnate in the person of Jesus prevented them from trying to flesh out the theory, while in Christian medieval Europe their belief in incarnation primed the culture for trying to work the theory out in practice.

I think you've missed Al-Jazari who's well regarded as the father of modern robotics several hundred years before Leonardo da Vinci [1]. Some historians even suggesting that some of the da-Vinci inventions were copycats and derivatives of the Al-Jazari's more than hundred of inventions but he's not properly credited by da Vinci [2].

FYI, of al-jazri most famous invention is the elephant clock [3].

[1]Ismail al-Jazari:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_al-Jazari

[2]Ismail al-Jazari: The Muslim inventor who may have inspired Leonardo da Vinci:

https://www.europeana.eu/en/blog/ismail-al-jazari-the-muslim...

[3]al-Jazari's Clocks: Perhaps the Earliest Programmable Analog Computers:

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=2341

To be honest it's not your "strong contention" but rather your ignorant or in denial contention, but I think you probably is the latter. In Arabic the word kafir is not translated to the infidel as made popular by the western media but literally means the "those who are in denial" or "those who cover up".

Why not you provide and share your proper references of your case for not overly crediting the Arab and muslim contributions so we can all can learn and move forward, or you can create a reference book and a thesis on that? But even if you can provide proper references, in which I strongly doubt, what's wrong for crediting the Arab and muslim scholars where credits are due. It seems to me you have strong enmity towards them that they have had more contributions to the knowledge than you can even dream of yourself in your lifetime.

You seemed to have popped out of the proverbial woodwork and that too of a most malodorous kind.

If you want to engage in a discussion on this topic, don't hide behind anonymity, understand properly what has been written and don't use ad hominem attacks.

For your edification w.r.t. my comments; there is a lot to unpack but here are the highlights for you to research on :

a) Arabs as a Ethnic group who originated in a particular "backward" geographical area.

b) Islam as a religion/philosophy/political/social framework which originated with them. Note also that Islam is the youngest of the major abrahamic religions.

c) Conquest of neighboring "advanced" countries under the Islamic banner thus appropriating their achievements under the same. Do some research on the civilizations of these countries as they were before Islamic conquest.

d) Spread of these achievements to Europe who named it the mythical "Golden Age of Islam". Note that this also includes knowledge gained from other civilizations who were not conquered but whose knowledge was studied and spread by scholars (of various ethnicities) in the now large geographical area under Islamic rule.

The above is factual History and this is what is being pointed out.

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