Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy this argument.

In the 1960s you could have made the same argument about cultural collapse in China, India, or South Korea, yet look at them today.

And clearly, it's not Islam related based on Turkey's (automotive and aerospace) and Malaysia's (semiconductors and microelectronics) relatively decent R&D capacity despite being upper middle income countries neighboring R&D laggard non-Muslim countries (Greece and Thailand respectively), or even Iran and their fairly robust STEM R&D base (looking at you Shiraz University of Technology).

My hunch is probably moreso institutional, or lack thereof.

The Arab world was basically in a state of managed chaos from the mid-19th century to present due to colonialism (both Western European and Ottoman), the World Wars, and the subsequent decolonization movement, and institutions weren't able to be sustained.

Those that did thrive (Cairo University, Baghdad University, Damascus University, American University of Beirut) in the early to mid 20th century were purged - either by the Baathists or due to the Lebanese Civil War.

> could have made the same argument about China, India, or South Korea in the 1960s

China, sure. They rapidly course corrected. India and Korea didn't have prominent anti-intellectual movements.

> Arab world was basically in a state of managed chaos from the mid-19th century to present due to colonialism

It would be fair to characterise the region that way going back to the Bronze Age.

> it's not Islam related based on Turkey and Malaysia's relatively decent R&D capacity

The article seems to go out of its way to restrict its arguments to the Arabic world, not Islam in general. (Its arguments are also strongest in the pre-modern world, proximate to Islam's Golden Age.)

> prominent anti-intellectual movements

Parts of India did.

Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India's two poorest states today used to have relatively decent British built universities (Lucknow University, Allahabad University, Patna University) that stood toe-to-tow with top universities like Delhi University, Calcutta University, Osmania University, Panjab University etc.

But in the 1960s-70s, Ram Manohar Lohia [0] lead an anti-intellectual, pro-Hindi and anti-English [1],and anti-rich movement in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar that lead to the rise of Lalu Prasad Yadav (Bihar) and Mulayam Singh Yadav (UP), both of whom were directly influenced and in some cases mentored by Lohia.

It was under those two CMs that Uttar Pradesh and Bihar began falling behind the rest of India in the 1980s-2000s period.

With Korea, I guess we can point to Juche but then again I said South Korea, and not North, though university purges were very common during the democracy movement of the 70s and 80s leading to events like the Gwangju Uprising.

> It would be fair to characterise the region that way going back to the Bronze Age

I mean you can characterize any region like that. For example, arguing that China was basically in a century long civil war from 1850-1950, along with the multiple other chaotic periods in between dynasties. For example, China didn't even catch up to Iraq's developmental indicators until the 2000s

> The article seems to go out of its way to restrict its arguments to the Arabic world, not Islam in general.

Fair enough.

[0] - https://theprint.in/opinion/great-speeches/when-ram-manohar-...

[1] - https://www.epw.in/journal/2009/48/discussion/lohia-and-lang...

> Parts of India did

Parts of everywhere have fundamentalist nutters. What happened in the Arab world is distinct from what happened in Korea, India or China, and I don't think we can dismiss what happened to it as being analogous to their experience.

> you can characterize any region like that. For example, arguing that China was basically in a century long civil war from 1850-1950

Come on, the Levant has probably seen the highest frequency of violent redrawings of boundaries and governments per square mile in human history. (Baghdad would have probably won had we not ruined its soil.)

I think Western and Ottoman colonisation are valid explanations for why the Arab world looks the way it does today. I don't think it's an adequate explanation for why it fell from being the centre of the world in its heyday.

> Parts of everywhere have fundamentalist nutters

Well, in Lohia's case it was proto-Maoism.

And I think it matters in the sense it's a good example of how we can't really generalize a "culture" or "civilization" because such grand visions are basically marketing for all intents and purposes.

Like during the Islamic Golden Age, was there truly a difference between Byzantine Damascus or Arab Damascus? Can't you argue that al-Khwarizmi is actually a descendent of Persian High Culture, as he was from Khiva in Central Asia before it was Turkified. If it's based on Arabic as a language, then you can argue that most of Indian civilization in the 1st millennium was actually Persian due to Farsi-Dari being the lingua Franca of the educated (eg. My great-grandfather and grandfather both learned Farsi-Dari at the village school).

> Come on, the Levant has probably seen the highest frequency of violent redrawings of boundaries and governments per square mile in human history

I can say the same about Punjab, with the multiple Afghan, Turkic, Maratha, British, and indigenous invasions.

Or Southern China which was only pacified in the 1700s before collapsing into clan wars, a messianic revolution, and then the collapse of the Qing empire so around 150-200 years of war.

All history was bloody and brutal, and the Levant was fairly stable under Ottoman rule, which was around 500 years in those regions. Compared to the multiple Warring States periods in China and India, that's pretty stable.

Also, why are you getting downvoted?!? Nothing you said deserves a downvote.

> you can argue that most of Indian civilization in the 1st millennium was actually Persian

I'd say that's valid, particularly if you're tracing specific intellectual or cultural traditions. (Agree in not keeping culture/civilisational scorecards.)

> can say the same about Punjab, with the multiple Afghan, Turkic, Maratha, British, and indigenous invasions

Fair enough. It's another patch of fertile land, at a crossroads between birth sites of human civilisation. That does advance the point, however, that managed chaos is not necessarily inimical to intellectual traditions being preserved.

> why are you getting downvoted?!? Nothing you said deserves a downvote.

I sort of assume in these discussions everyone gets downvoted and we try to find folks who will change our mind :).

Your response is not entirely correct.

Lucknow university was not toe-to-toe with anything. But you are right, Allahabad university had people like Meghnad Saha and C. V. Raman working there at some point.

Also, Mulayam Singh did not come into power until the 1990s. The deterioration of universities all over India (not just UP and Bihar) started soon after Independence, with the nascent government looking for leapfrogs through the establishment of IITs, RECs and medical colleges, diverting money away from full-fledged universities. This policy has had some success, but the universities were left in shambles. India has still not done course-correction on that.

> Lucknow university was not toe-to-toe with anything

Back when my Nanu was helping with all this post-independence "mandirs of science" stuff in the 60s-70s period Lucknow University was fairly competitive in Electronics, Mechanical Engineering, and Aerospace because of Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd - their secondary R&D and production center was Lucknow as it was close enough to Delhi for government oversight yet far enough that it wouldn't be impacted by a India-Pakistan War.

> universities were left in shambles

Yet Osmania, Panjab, Visevarya, Anna, etc continued to perform (and in some cases still do) in STEM.

They never truly declined in the 1960s-2000s period, while Bihar and UP's GDPs both crashed under Lalu and Mulayam, and largely because of de-industrialization in Eastern UP and Bihar due to their warped version of Lohiaism (which Lohia would have hated)

>It would be fair to characterise the region that way going back to the Bronze Age

It would even fairer to say that that region had advanced civilization, huge riches, stable organization, culture (music, poetry, literature), science (math, chemistry, engineering), and so on, at times when America was still inhabited by the Native Americans, and Western Europe was a bunch of barbarian tribes living in shitholes, and well after it started turning into medieval shithole fiefdoms (and then started using the loot of the Americas and the advantage of gunpowder to dominate).

Rome and Byzantium excluded of course.

> even fairer to say that that region had advanced civilization, huge riches, stable organization, culture (music, poetry, literature), science (math, chemistry, engineering), and so on

Yes. This is the entire point of the article. It was an advanced civilisation. Then it fell to the point that it could be colonised by its former inferiors. How that happens is objetively interesting.

>Yes. This is the entire point of the article. It was an advanced civilisation

Nowhere as back as "the bronze age" though. More like "well into the 14-15th century".

>Then it fell to the point that it could be colonised by its former inferiors.

Not very difficult since they eventually had the looting of the Americas and gunpowder to their advantage. Even with that, they came close to being conquered themselves when the Ottomans went westwards (not to mention the Caliphate of Cordoba).

> Nowhere as back as "the bronze age" though

The Hittites. (The Sea Peoples?) The Parthians. The Romans. You're talking about a fertile patch near the birth of civilisation, of course it's going to have had an old and violent history.

> since they eventually had the looting of the Americas and gunpowder to their advantage

Gunpowder was invented in China. The Arab world had vastly superior maritime capabilities in its heyday. (To the extent that it single handedly enabled Europe's blue-ocean capabilities.) Its empires were also colonising powers, so it's not like in an alternate timeline they wouldn't have expanded across the Atlantic.

And in case it needs to be stated, the Arabs were successful colonisers and conquerors [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayyubid_dynasty

> You're talking about a fertile patch near the birth of civlisation

Near --a-- birth of civilization.

> Near --a-- birth of civilization

I was referring to Ur, but fair enough, I haven't tracked recent discoveries in other cradles.

>The Hittites. (The Sea Peoples?) The Parthians. The Romans. You're talking about a fertile patch near the birth of civilisation, of course it's going to have had an old and violent history.

I contested the "Arab world was basically in a state of managed chaos" similar to the colonial era situation "since the Bronze Age" claim. The arab world (speaking of the areas) did quite well for close to a millenium before the colonial era. And Europe itself had a huge bloody history of course both until Westphalia (and, unfortunately) well after it - so if the arab world having wars and disputes before the colonial era can be said to be "managed chaos", then the same can be said of it.

>Gunpowder was invented in China.

It was still put to use for guns in a large scale in the west first. This just says that the Chinese and the Arabs missed the opportunity to adopt it first - it doesn't disprove that gunpowder was a key advantage for the european rise and dominance.

>Its empires were also colonising powers, so it's not like in an alternate timeline they wouldn't have expanded across the Atlantic.

In an alternative timeline they could even go to the moon first. In this timeline, they didn't benefit from the looting of a whole new continent with easy to defeat locals dying of gunpowder and sickness.

> This just says that the Chinese and the Arabs missed the opportunity to adopt it first

On a slightly unrelated tangent, I recommend reading "The Rise and Fall of E.A.S.T" by Yasheng Huang [0].

He's a Professor at MIT Sloan who has advised the Chinese, Israeli, and Indian governments on Human Capital Development, and provides a pretty interesting take on the development of management and institutional capacity within China, and how it's impacted R&D capacity.

[0] - https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300266368/the-rise-and-f...

When Muslims rule over anywhere, they don't exploit, loot, and abuse their resources for their own selfish advantage. That's the biggest difference that has led the West to remain powerful and prosperous while the Arab and Muslim world have been in this situation for so long.

Muslims also don't murder adversaries' scientists.

That's not even close to true. Look at the massive growth of slavery and religious violence under Arab and Muslim conquest across Asia and Africa.

Arab and Western conolialism have different flavors but enormous exploitation and abuse.

> It would even fairer to say that that region had advanced civilization, huge riches, stable organization, culture (music, poetry, literature), science (math, chemistry, engineering), and so on

Religion hampered all this progress still. Those things would have happened far quicker without religion dragging humanity down.

Turkey, a relatively new country that is the successor of the Ottoman empire, was founded with secularism in mind. You can learn more about that by reading about the Ataturk reforms.

And the rest of the reply is just as equally uninformed.

OP is not only informed, they're also entirely correct.

OP mixes different centuries that are far removed from the root cause that is correctly identified in the article.

> In other words, Islamic civilization did not have a culture hospitable to the advancement of science, while medieval Europe did.

That's a quote from the article, not me, to further the parent's point.

Medieval Europe changed its posture towards science through movements such as Scholasticism.

Where does Scholasticism come from? If you trace its origins you will get to Islamic Spain and other Islamic territories.

Saint Thomas Aquinas studied under Saint Albert the Great, who was someone who studied translations of books from Islamic libraries produced in Toledo, Spain, as well as works from Jewish scholars such as Maimonides (who also lived in Islamic Spain).

Even after these reforms, scientists like Galileo Galilei were prosecuted so the tolerance of science was only up to the point in which it caused discomfort to the Church.

My point is you can't make a cultural argument about human development, as culture and identity are inherently intersectional and wishy-washy, and cultures change very rapidly.

Institutional arguments are easier to test and validate, as there are actual benchmarks you can use.

There is too much distance between culture in the 1500s and the 21st century to accurately garner an impact between one or the other. The world has been globalized since the 19th century, and as such all societies have mixed and matched ideas and philosophies.

Heck, my great-grandfather - who never lived in a house with electricity until our ancestral village in the high Himalayas was electrified in the 1980s - knew about Hitler and FDR, and vaguely heard about "communism", Wilson's 14 Points (being a village teacher didn't hurt either), and switched from drinking Gurgur Cha made using Gunpowder Tea to Masala Chai using Assam tea after the British lead marketing campaign during the Great Depression.

Yeah, if anything Turkey's a damning argument against Islam-influenced governance. Ataturk dragged Turkey into the 20th century with his secular "reforms". I put quotes there because the word seems like an understatement.

For a US audience, imagine if George Washington had declared that we were abandoning Latin script for Cyrillic (Ataturk brought in Latin script to replace Arabic), abolished common law for civil law (islamic law to civil law), banned people from wearing crucifixes in public (banning the fez, headscarves, veils), made the weekend a Sunday-Tuesday affair (thursday-saturday became the European friday-sunday), gave women the right to vote, gave us all an additional name (introduction of surnames), and put us on the Chinese calendar (Gregorian).

Ik about Laiklik and Kemalism, yet it was under Erdogan that Turkiye became a leader in UAV research.

And it's not like Islamists weren't attending METU or ITU - look at Erbakan (the founder of the precursor of the AKP and Erdogan's and other Turkish Islamic politicians mentor) and the fact that he was a western trained MechE professor and researcher. Or Turgut Ozal (a Power Engineer and Professor by training) in the 1980s and his hardcore Naqshabandi leanings, as a number of Kurds in Turkiye like him are. Heck, ITU was an Ottoman institution.

And that doesn't explain modern Malaysia which was basically a product of the Hertog riots, and Tunku Abdul Rahman and Mahatir Mohammad's Islamist leanings.

Heck, Erdogan is literally a Turkish knockoff of Mahatir Mohammad - who was the original Erdogan back in the 1980s-2000s

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