In “1001 Pieces of Islamist Propaganda: Fabricated Exhibit Comes to D.C.,” in PJ Media today, Pamela Geller examines the disingenuous and misleading 1001 Muslim Inventions exhibit, which I discussed at length in my 2007 book Religion of Peace? — that it is still going strong five years later is testimony to its popularity.
…The exhibit is almost unfailingly dishonest. As Adams explains, even if everything
it says about Muslim inventions were true, it does not and cannot
explain why Muslims never followed up on these inventions. If Firnas was
really the first to fly, why did it fall to the Wright Brothers 1000 years later
to follow up on what he supposedly discovered about how to do it? Why
weren’t Muslims flying around in airplanes centuries before the Wright
Brothers were born?If, as Adams also recounts, Muslims really invented the camera as the
exhibit claims, why don’t we have snapshots of Saladin and Suleiman the
Magnificent? Why did we have to wait for Daguerre and Niepce?1001 Muslim Inventions raises more questions about the decline of
Muslim civilization than it answers, yet projects like 1001 Muslim
Inventions have support at very high levels. Remember in June 2010 when
Charlie Bolden, the NASA chief appointed by President Obama, revealed
that Obama had asked him to “find a way to reach out to the Muslim world
and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them
feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and
engineering”?The truth: what contributions?
Islamic scholar Robert Spencer points out that much of what are
considered Muslim inventions today, including many that 1001 Muslim
Inventions celebrates, have been wildly exaggerated if not outright
fabricated, “often for quite transparent apologetic motives.” You”ve
heard Muslims invented the zero, right? Actually, as Spencer writes:The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what
we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in
pre-Islamic India.They preserved Greek philosophy when Christian Europe had thrown it away, correct? No. Spencer:
Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by
Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest
Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking
world. Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873), translated many
works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son
then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn “˜Adi
(893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one
of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another
Christian named Abu “˜Ali “˜Isa ibn Zur”a (943-1008), also translated
Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic.Aristotle’s philosophies would be prohibited under Islam; Muhammad
most likely would have beheaded him. He stands for everything Islam is
against. Ayn Rand wrote this of Aristotle: “Aristotle’s universe is the
universe of science. The physical world, in his view, is not a shadowy
projection controlled by a divine dimension, but an autonomous,
self-sufficient realm. It is an orderly, intelligible, natural realm, open to the mind of man.” These very ideas are anathema to Islam; they are blasphemy.But what about medicine? The Muslims were great innovators in the
medical sciences, weren’t they? Here again, Spencer points out that it
was non-Muslims in the Islamic world who were doing the heavy lifting:The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by
a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in
683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid
caliphate “” not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering
medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia “” by Assyrian
Christians.The bottom line: the inventions and discoveries attributed to the
Muslim world were actually stolen from conquered peoples. The 1001
Muslim Inventions exhibit is not history, it is propaganda, and the
foolish infidels keep lining up enthusiastically for more.