To "integrate but not assimilate" is about as possible as swallowing but not digesting.

But the results are pretty messy.

Posted by: BigSleep at May 4, 2005 11:26 AM

Robert says, "Every culture builds on the achievements of other cultures, and borrows from those with which it is in contact."

My question is what achievements of other cultures did Islam borrow? I'd like to know, because it seems that even if Islam had this so-called "golden age" that Ms. Manji subscribes to, how did it effect their culture at large? Islamic culture never evolved from this "golden age" because there wasn't one. It's like saying, "Didn't you know that Sparta had philosophers, poets, and scientists to rival Athens?" Who cares if they did, because it never impacted Spartan culture!

So the question is, "Did these great Islamic achievements, that Ms. Manji likes to parrot, have any impact on Islamic culture?" The answer is NO! Why? Because obviously any evolution of thought, expression, and science is antithetical to Islam and Muslim Culture. Until these so-called "moderate Muslims" realize this basic truth, they will stop this nonsense of harking back to this fictious golden age and start telling the truth about how Islam is anti-freedom of thought, anti-freedom of expression, and anti-scientific.

Posted by: nuh at May 4, 2005 11:37 AM

Irshad's suggestion that immigrant identities are threatened in Western countries is nonsense. Most of them are very generous in providing all sorts of resources to them whereby they can retain their culture while being empowered to particpate fully in their new home.

The desire to segregate is more self-imposed, by the [xenophobic] immigrants and not the other way around, and my uneducated guess is that this is particularly true of the more recent waves of Muslim immigrants.

Posted by: waterdragon52 at May 4, 2005 11:56 AM

Waterdragon

[[Irshad's suggestion that immigrant identities are threatened in Western countries is nonsense. Most of them are very generous in providing all sorts of resources to them whereby they can retain their culture while being empowered to particpate fully in their new home]]

In the UK, Afro-Caribbean Christians, African Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, and Chinese Buddhists have all managed to do well, generally speaking, integrating whilst maintsaining their religions and culture. They have enriched Britain. They singlehandedly refute the odious claim that Britain is to blame for teh exclusion and backwardness of Muslims, especially the Hindu Indians and Sikhs who come from the same ethnic stock as Pakistani Muslims.

Blaming British society is the biggest lie that is being told today, it is odious and allows Muslims to wallow in their own failure and backwardness without addressing the root cause of their failure which lies in themselves.

Posted by: Zico at May 4, 2005 12:40 PM

"Between the 8th and 14th centuries, Muslim civilization led the world in innovation precisely because it let all manner of outsiders in — despite the threats they posed to order. The result? Several hundred years of creativity in agriculture, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, commerce, math, even fashion. It's when the empire became insular to "protect" itself that the motivation to remain robust, and the talent to do so, disappeared."

This business of "Muslim civilization" leading the world "in innovation" shows the shallowness and ignorance of that dyed-hair publicity-hound Irshad Manji, so very different from the articulate polemicist Ali Sina and the scholar Ibn Warraq, both of whom, as full-fledged defectors from Islam, are unbound by filial piety, or lies.

Consider first the very up-to-date language Manji employs. It is the language not of high culture but more suitable to a local politician booster trying to entice businesses to Austin, Texas or the Research Triangle, or the deplorable businessschoolspeak with which we all meekly define our Greatest Good -- "Muslim civilizaion led the world in innovation."

What is she talking about? In order to make this statement, Irshad Manji would have to be deeply learned in the history of other civilizations, beginning with that of the West, between the 8th and 14th centuries. It may surprise her to learn (no doubt she had a chapter in her high school text on "the Dark Ages" but that will not do)that the last century of Western scholarship has done one Big Thing: put paid to the idea of "the Dark Ages" and revealed achievement after achievement, either unknown or underappreciated or under-studied. Think in the first place of Byzantium, and the studies of Byzantine art, from Wladimir Weidle to Ernst Kitzinger. Or is Byzantium not part of the West, and Constantinople, for a thousand years, not the first city of Christendom? Think of all the work on the history of science, including that of Rodney Stark on why science developed in the Western world, and not in Islam?

And Manji fails to consider the hypothesis that looks more and more to be true: Islam itself did not develop according to the official Muslim story, and the Qur'an itself may not have been fixed into its present condition until a century or two later than Muslims believe. The conquest of peoples far more advanced, wealthy, and numerous did not lead to their immediate destruction; Christians and Jews continued to live, and their presence, in very large numbers, next to those who called themselves Muslims and whom those earlier and superior civilizations continued to fructify. The end of Islamic science comes about not because of the Mongol invasion of Baghdad, but because the Christians and Jews died out (i.e., many converted to Islam), and when the "gates of ijtihad" slammed shut, even Muslims such as ar-Rhazi, the most celebrated Islamic figure in science (medicine), would have been punished.

What is called, too loosely, "Islamic" or -- still worse -- "Arabic" science was in fact the product of many non-Muslims as well as Muslims. The famous translators in Baghdad and Corboda were almost entirely Jews and Christians. Even among the Muslims, none of the major figures were Arabs, but rather Persians and some from Central Asia (as al-Farabi) -- a possible reflection of the importance of having something other than Islam, which is all the Arab Muslims possessed, in the cultural background.

It is true that older Orientalists, wishing to curry favor with Muslims in their various audiences, often throw in a line about how in "1000 A.D. the Muslim civilization was the richest, the most advanced, etc..." in the world. Bernard Lewis never fails to do this, formulaically. But he, of course, has been concentrating on Islam, and may not have noticed the developments in the study of Western civilization which, over the past 50 years especailly, have led to a revaluation, top to bottom, of the so-called Dark Ages. The impulse of so many, who know so little, to simply repeat this phrase, or others like it, as if by parroting it they have acquired the authority to make it true, disturbs but does not surprise.

And Irshad Manji, and anyone else who wishes to lay claim to the "greatness" of Islamic civilizaion, beyond the first few hundred years (roughly, from 750-1000 A.D.), should have to answer comparative questions not only about the West (not the West as depicted by Protestant historians of the 19th century, some of whom had an ideological stake in minimizing the achievements of a Europe that was then entirely under the influence of the (Catholic) Church), but about China and India as well. No one expects Manji to begin mugging up the Five Thousand Dictionary, or to read all of Joseph Needham ("Science and Civilisation in China") or James Legge on Chinese literature. Nor need she brush up on the civilization of India, or her Sanskrit -- or the Sanskrit of some long-forgotten and distant ancestors, who existed before someone in her line converted to Islam, leaving Irshad Manji, from East Africa, and now of Toronto, convinced that she, without having studied Islam, is an expert on it, and a Brave New Muslim Voice that Needs to Be Heard.

But she should be careful, as should all those who continue to prate, based on evidence that every day looks thinner and thinner, about the "greatness" of Islamic civilization. It is amusing to note that the Ottoman Turks finally took a much de-populated Constantinople on May 29, 1453, a Tuesday, by using cannon constructed by a Hungarian, and that another Hungarian, a Jewish convert to Islam given the name Mutefferika, was the one who built the first printing-press in the Islamic world, centuries after Gutenberg in Europe, and centuries after the Jewish printing press at Safed -- the first in Asia -- had been in operation.

But who needs little details like that? "Islamic civilization" was the greatest in the world, Manji and others with far less excuse than Manji, like to prate or parrot. Who cares what the real story was? Who cares that so much of the 200-300 years of achievement depended so much on borrowing and transmission -- paper-making from China brought to Damascus (see Dard Hunter), the concept of zero brought from India to the MIddle East. And those acts of translation were important -- but why act as if the translation of some books of Aristotle rival in importance Aristotle himself, or why refuse to note that while Aristotle was translated, as a living thing, to be acted upon and developed, it was only in the Western world that Aristotle had influence. He remained, an authority but an inert one, for Islamic students of Aristotle.

And one should be careful, as well, when carelessly attributing to Islam the achievements made within those lands ruled by Islam, by non-Muslims or those who were Muslim in name only. Everyone -- Christians and Jews, Persians as well as Arabs -- had names which were in Arabic, or which we non-Arabs perceive as Arabic and can have difficulty distinguishing (a few names remained transparently non-Arabic: Bar Hebraeus comes to mind).

But of course there is another matter. Who, in Athens , insists that whatever happened in Periclean Athens necessarily relates to the inhabitants of Athens today? It is a distinct trait of Fascism to wallow in a supposed (or even real) past greatness -- a distinguishing feature of both Mussolini, and of Hitler (the greatness of the Teutonic races, whose race-energy once brought new vigor to a decadent Europe, and would do so again). When Mussolini, il Granitico, shouted about the Greatness that was Rome, and called the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum, he was befuddling the masses, and they wanted to be befuddled. When Hitler described the ancient Teutonic glories, and evoked tales of the shaggy aurochs hunted by ur-Teutons in the forests of Prussia or Poland (see Simon Sciama, "Landscape and Memory"), he was insisting on a non-existent past.

Islam as an ideological system is based on the idea of the Glorious Past in several ways. One, the Qur'an is only part of what a devout Muslim must read or accept. It is the Sunnah -- made up of the Hadith (the collection of sayings and deeds of Muhammad) and the Sira (the sacralized biography of Muhammad) that sets up the behavior of a supposed 7th-century Arabia, that of Muhammad and his Companions, as the ideal way of life, the ideal to which one can always attempt to attain. The Past is not the Past -- for the immutable texts that offer the Ideal do not change, are immune to change -- for that Past of Muhammad and the Companions is in a sense beyond history, always vividly present, always to be kept in mind as the ideal. Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are only the best-publicized of those carrying out a kind of Muslim version of the "imitation of Christ" -- this one somewhere in the vicinity, apparently, of Waziristan.

And even without the overwhelming significance, as models, of Muhammad and his Companions in 7th century Arabia, there is another fact or pseudo-fact: the belief that Islamic civilization was, as Irshad Manji and Bernard Lewis, at a different level like to insist, in the year 1000 A.D., or thereabouts, was the "greatest" (whatever that means) civilization then going.

The myth of Andalucia, the myth of the wise old scholars under the benevolent patronage of wise old Caliph Haroun al-Raschid in Baghdad, the myth of Ottoman tolerance (rather than Ottoman exploitation of Armenian, Greek, and Jewish talent in the running of things -- which is an entirely different business) have allowed Muslims to accept, and to promote among ignorant Infidels, the idea of Islamic greatness.

The little myths all helpo add up to one big myth. The more one looks closely, at this or that supposed achievement coming out of "Islamic civiliziation," the less one finds that can be attributed to Muslims (rather than to Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, or those whose families were just a generation or two away from their original, non-Muslim origins, which was still their cultural sustenance), the more those achievements seem to be non-Islamic in origin. Papermaking and the zero, the texts of Aristotle and other Greeks translated by Jewish and Christian translators, are not the achievements of "Islamic civilization."

Islam, after the first few unsettled centuries, when there was still room for a little mental freedom (or so, at least, some thought), there were achievements by those called Muslims. When the gates of ijtihad closed, when the fructiying influence of the prior, non-Muslim civilization and peoples who had been conquered diminished in significance, free and skeptical inquiry -- necessary for the development of science -- ended. It has hardly ended yet.

As for artistic expression, neither paintings (of living creatures) nor scultpure are allowed in Islam. One suspects that Byzantine iconoclasm comes from the Muslim example, not vice-versa. Today, in the Western world, Muslim migrants deface statuary -- for statues are permitted, as Al-Qaradawi says, only when they have been vandalized or defaced (see his book on Halal and Haram in Islam).

There were two possible outlets: architecture, and calligraphy. As for Islamic architecture, so heavily dependent on Byzantine models (e.g., the squinch) and naturally on Byzantine workmen -- for Arab tribesmen could not suddenly become experts in architecture. The Dome of the Rock is a Byzantine martyrium -- there is nothing especially Islamic about it. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus is essentially built upon the vast Christian church that was there first, and much of which remains. There have been Islamic architects -- Sinan comes to mind -- and some beautiful mosques, mainly in Persia and Central Asia. But a good-sized city in Italy contains more art work than all of Islamic civilization ever produced. Surely that is worth noting.

As for calligraphy, those versed in the importance of calligraphy in Chinese art, and in the products of East Asian calligraphers, are the ones most competent to judge whether the examples of Arabic (chiefly Qur'anic) calligraphy that exist really can -- or cannot -- hold a candle to what, in China, Korea, Japan, have been achieved.

A nine-word query, well-known to Americans, comes mind in this whole discussion of "Islamic civilization" and its greeatness or supposed greatness, and what this does to Muslim minds, determined to consider themselves victims, as they try to attribute their own intellectual and cultural failures not to Islam itself (but why not? If Islam limits artistic expression, and free inquiry that science requires, why not finally blame Islam?), but to Infidel malevolence. The blame-game attributes the last thousand years of "problems" to "colonialism" (for all but the last 200 hundred of those 1000 years it was Muslims who were the constant military threat to the coasts of Europe, seizing several million Slavs in the East, and a million Western Europeans, and enslaving them). malevolence or "Zionism" or to that new word that remains so usefully without a sell-by date: "Post-colonialism."

One wishes to address that nine-word query to the spokesmen for dar al-Islam, and that includes much-publicized Bright Young Muslim Thnings like Irshad Manji who do not, cannot, bring themselves either to learn about the history of Islamic conquest and rule, or about the reasons that art and science did not, and can not, develop wherever Islam rules and dominates.

Here it is:

Yes, But What Have You Done For Me Lately?

Posted by: Hugh at May 4, 2005 12:54 PM

Here in Holland, the immigrants have cost us billions. Seriously, studies show that we didn't gain anything from non-Western immigrants coming to the Netherlands. They're either unemployed and on welfare or they're in jail. Not all of them, of course. But it's complete baloney to say that these people are going to keep our welfare state afloat. If anything, they sucked it dry to the point we now HAVE to reform otherwise there won't be enough left for our pensioners. Studies show we don't need uneducated migrants from Africa and the Middle-East. Sure, we could use foreign workers but only if they are highly trained professionals. We don't need poor Muslims bringing in more poor Muslims because that's exactly what's tearing this country down. And we ARE full up. Holland is one of the most populated countries on earth. You can't get a house anywhere, not at a reasonable price. And we're fed up, too. Fed up with immigrants thinking they own the place, fed up with politicians telling everyone that we need to find a new identity which includes Islam. Muslims need to understand one thing very clearly. We don't need them. Now if you're a Muslim reading this I advice you to keep repeating that over and over again till it sinks in and then I want you to go out and tell it to your brothers and sisters who still live under the impression that for some reason the free, educated men and women of the West are really looking forward to submit to Islam. We don't need you.

Posted by: Leveller at May 4, 2005 1:33 PM

Just wait and see what happens when Turkey gets into the EU Leveller.

Posted by: ReligionOfPeaceMyArse at May 4, 2005 2:13 PM

Hugh

I know you do not like to make small talk or speak about yourself. But please tell us, are you going to write a book? Your posts are so informative, erudite and truthful, that I really do believe you could make some difference by putting all your knowledge, eloquence and wisdom down on paper.

I am a huge fan.

regards

Posted by: Zico at May 4, 2005 2:32 PM

The muslims are so unproductive that economically they do not pose any serious thereat to the Christians, Hindus and Jews. But in the unlikely event that they eventually empower the world with their brute primitive force we will have to kiss good-bye to the civilization as we know it.

Source:www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=645

The following are excerpts from a Friday sermon on Qatar TV by Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi
Dr. Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: We use trains and planes, but they are not our trains or planes. The (Westerners) manufacture them and export them to us. True, we can buy the most magnificent things in the world products for our homes and for ourselves. Our people can buy the most luxurious cars, Rolls-Royce or Mercedes 500 or 700, models S, M, and L with all the luxuries. We own them, but we don't manufacture them. We don't even produce a single nail in any of these cars. Others do this for us.
The income of the entire Arab world, including the oil-producing countries, does not reach the that of a European country, such as Spain. Spain – let alone Germany, France, Britain, or Italy. Just Spain, which is at the bottom of the list of industrial countries... The income of the entire Arab world does not reach it. How come? Because we don't work, and if we do work, we don't do it professionally.
They conducted a survey of the average time that a government employee spends working in a certain Arab country. The average was 27 minutes a day. 27 minutes! The rest of the time he drinks coffee, reads newspapers, and goes on errands here and there. Only a small number of people work. The rest do not.
In the mid 1970s I went to Germany. We arrived during in the morning. I asked the guy who took me from the airport to the convention hall… As I was passing through the empty streets, I asked him how come the streets were not busy, like in our countries. He said: "People are at work." After 7 p.m. he took me back to the hotel, and the streets were empty. I said to him: "What's going on, the streets are empty again." He said: people are back home from work, and they are exhausted. All they want is to eat their dinner, watch the news, and then go to bed, because early next morning they have to wake up for hard work. They commute more than an hour to work and back, and spend an hour at lunch. They work non-stop.
We are a nation that doesn't work. How can we develop if we don't work? When we do work, we don't do it professionally. We keep saying "Don't worry, later, later…" Islam teaches us to do things professionally. Doing things professionally is a religious duty. The Prophet said that Allah ordered to excel in everyhting. He imposed excellence and professionalism. Professionalism must be followed in everything. "If you kill, do it properly, and if you slaughter, do it properly." Even when killing, you must do well.
Unfortunately, we do not excel in either military or civil industries. We import everything from needles to missiles. This is our nation. We still haven't manufactured an engine in our Arab countries. We assemble parts, but have no manufacturing industries. India has manufactured a car, and even a plane, while we still go around in circles like a bull in who turns a grinding mill or a water weal until it reaches exactly where it started.
How come the Zionist gang has managed to be superior to us, despite being so few? It has become superior through knowledge, through technology, and through strength. It ahs become superior to us through work. We had the desert before our eyes but we didn't do anything with it. When they took over, they turned it into a green oasis. How can a nation that does not work progress? How can it grow?

Posted by: Londoner at May 4, 2005 2:47 PM

Londoner:

I am almost, but not quite speechless to read that Al-Qaradhawi, of all people, could not only say something remotely complimentary of the Zionists, but even inadvertently admit that Palestine wasn't some big, lush orange grove that was stolen away from the Palestinians.

But he barely half gets it right when he places the blame for things on the lack of productivity. What about the enormous diversion of resources to jihad?

Posted by: waterdragon52 at May 4, 2005 4:24 PM

Darn good post Hugh. Wish you'd been my history prof.

Saw Irshad and two things stood out.She thinks ijtihad will solve the mohammedans'
problems and she doesn't like the arabs and thinks part of the problem including the treatment of women is arab culture woven into the mohammedan fabric. Poor baby!

Four bearded mid-eastern men in identical dark pants and spotless white shirts came and set in the back of the classroom. She acknowledged them with a wave and "Hi guys, glad you could come." Their expressions never changed the whole lecture. She's ignorantly arrogant but brave.

Posted by: the poetess at May 4, 2005 5:03 PM

Yes, But What Have You Done For Me Lately?
-or you are only as good as your last cheque.
The enslavement of the human mind is indeed Islam's greatest contribution to humanity.

It is far greater than the enslavement created by the Christian Churches and inquisitons which retarded the evolution of the sciences and arts in Europe.
Muslims themselves are also enslaved and vitually lobotomozed by the religion.
It is possible that without Islam the Arabs or the lower echelon non arab muslims would have contributed greatly to the evolution of Mankind.
What they did contribute was plundered from the free thinkers they enslaved.
And now through the manipulation of the issue of the "Palestinians" they have enslaved the minds of much of academia.
Our universitie are now centres of sedition where free thinkers are afraid to speak up.
Centres of "workshops", falsely named to imply fraternity with the "ordinary less intellectual" folk.
Frantically searching for new undiscovered minorities.-Minorities they can then claim to defend against the evils of government.
Academia has become infested with a pestilence not seen since the black death.
the searth for truth has become the search for lies.
It is not enough to expose the false, twisted intellectuals such as ward churchill or jordan in some way exonerating the plethora of similar thinking academics who infect our universities.
SHould all the blame for the horror of Nazism be laid only at the feet of AH and his henchmen?
As our society drifts towards Chaos through the disintegration of the family unit, the collapse of basic educational standards, the corruption of sciences by the greens in their efforts to villify man's industrialisation , the push for the legalisation of drugs etc etc. the universities that should be bastions of the human spirit are leading the march down the road of intellectual corruption ready to embrace Islam and thus eagerly forego the duties at having to lead the way in the championing of human freedom.

Churchill is said to have commented that anyone who is NOT left wing at twenty has no heart and anyone who still is at forty has no Brain.
But the problems is not that universtiy intellectuals have no brains. It is that they never grow up beacuse they are etenally cocooned in a earld of easy living paid for by the very institutions they loath so vehemently.

Posted by: chevalier de st george at May 4, 2005 5:25 PM

Yay Hugh. Best post yet.

I'll just letting you all in "the know": I'm writing an article for a Graduate essay prize over the summer, and will let you guys know if I win, and when the article will be published. It's for the "Canadian Journal of History". Should be a real slammer. If it doesn't get published, I'll add to a book.

Posted by: Ibn Rushd at May 4, 2005 6:07 PM

For the record,Irshad's own biography points out the Madrassa she attended in B.C. Canada was
so oppressive and dictatoral that she left it to
be a Muslims on her terms.
While this may have been a noble act at the time,she still displays frustration and a lack of
inner peace that Islam will change during her lifetime.
The truth is she needs to change Faith and see the reality of Islam and Muhammeds adventures of violence and death for non-Muslims,she's whipping a dead horse and death threats against her by Muslims in Canada should set off alarm bells
in her head that MAYBE her and the likes of Hooper have it all wrong and Iraq is the true face of Allah that allows the Good Muslims to kill the Bad Muslims.

Irshad has a saturday show on TVO at around 1:00 pm and there have been times where she excuses away the violence within Islam as
the works of those that hijacked the faith for
Political causes,sadly this is exactly how Muhammed spread his version of God and the
true ways to paradise.

Posted by: ala-sux at May 4, 2005 9:23 PM

A little humble comment about the "worlds first university". India had Takshashila, Nalanda and many others in the BCE era. But of course no one would notice non-Abrahamic contributions. But its alright, we pagans have ourselves to blame for some part of it.

Posted by: Tushar Saxena at May 5, 2005 9:25 PM

A little enlightening fact on ARABIC NUMERALS as we all know came from India...UPS/Fed-Ex import. But let me go beyond the common knowledge. Mathematics in Arabic is called "Hind-sa" Hind is a Arabic for India. Bhaskaracharya first had the most accurate table of sines and astronomical observations long before Al-Khwarizmi. During the great raids of the Abassids on Sindh and continuing loot and plunder of India, Baghdad still was interested in these novel little treasures of sanskrit which contained much knowledge centuries ahead of christian europe and islamic west asia and africa. Pity hardly anyone knows about the Goan Inquisition. Thats right there was a Catholic inquisition in the Indian state of Goa. All Sanskrit manuscripts were burnt, people were forcibly converted. Pity too hundreds of thousands of sanskrit manuscripts were thrown to the flames after marauding soldiers of allah claimed the pagan paradise as dar-ul-islam.
It is indeed discouraging to see how little people know about the antiquity and enormous contribution of India to world knowledge. Greek genius is set at the highest standard which is regretabble since the greeks themselves claimed they had been influenced/inspired by others.

Apollonius Tyanaeus,
Ancient Greek Traveler: "In India, I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it, inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything, but possessed by nothing."

Romain Rolland, French Philosopher: If there is one place on the face of this Earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest day when man began the dream of existence, it is India.

That is but a tip of the iceberg. If folks do expect sincere support of indian pagans, perhaps you ought to rethink your funding for Christian Coalition, for Mr. Robertson is all for converting the "poor denizens" of India to be "saved" by the millions....after all, you see, 6 thousand years of civlization was just a fluke, vedantism and paganism only brought india the poverty it has today. Perhaps if "attacks" on Christians could be prevented from being concocted, then you might win some sincere support. When Popes decide that all that we have is "semi-erotic" and "misguided" spirituality, indeed its dismaying.
Enough ranting for the time being.

Peace offf!

Posted by: Tushar Saxena at May 5, 2005 9:42 PM