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The renowned European essayist Fjordman discusses Islam's encounter with Greek philosophy:
I have written a couple of essays regarding the Greek impact on the rise of modern science, and why the Scientific Revolution didn't happen in the Islamic world. I find this to be an interesting topic, especially since there are so many myths regarding this perpetrated by Muslims and their apologists today, so I will explore the subject in some detail.I mentioned the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in one of my previous essays. It has been claimed by one researcher that an Arab alchemist in the ninth century managed to decode some of the hieroglyphs. Even if this should be true, his research didn't leave any lasting impact and wasn't followed up by others, which is in itself significant. The proven track record is that Arab Muslims had controlled Egypt for more than a thousand years, yet never managed to decipher the hieroglyphs nor for the most part displayed much interest in doing so. The trilingual Rosetta Stone was employed by the French philologist Jean-François Champollion to decipher the hieroglyphs in 1822. He chose an intuitive (though ultimately correct) approach by employing the Coptic language, the liturgical language of the Egyptian Christians (which was a direct descendant of that of the ancient Pharaohs, as opposed to the language of the Arab invaders) rather than the more mathematical approach of his English rival Thomas Young.
For the sake of historical accuracy, it should be mentioned that when hieroglyphs were finally put out of use, thus ending one of the oldest continuous cultural traditions on the planet, dating back at least to the Narmer Palette celebrating the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in the 32nd century B.C., this was also done by Christians. The process was begun in the fourth century AD, before the partition of the Roman Empire, and was completed by the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Justinian who abolished the worship of Isis on the island of Philae in the sixth century. As the Egyptian religion was shut down, so the writing system associated with it was forgotten. The remnants of Plato's Academy were also closed in the name of Christian (Nicaean) unity.
Justinian is otherwise remembered for constructing the Hagia Sophia, the grandest cathedral in Christendom for almost a thousand years, and for his ultimately unsuccessful attempts at restoring the unity of the Roman Empire by reconquering the Western lands. This stretched the resources of the Empire, and along with a plague pandemic, drained its strength. The long wars between the Byzantines and the Sassanid (Persian) Empire weakened both states and were one of the reasons why the Arabs could make their Islamic conquests in the seventh century.
Logically speaking, the Middle East should be perfectly situated to combine the knowledge of all major centers of civilization in the Old World, from the Mediterranean and the Greco-Roman world via the Persian and other pre-Islamic cultures in the Middle East to India and the civilizations of the Far East. As I will demonstrate, the Muslim thinkers and scientists whose names are worth mentioning did just that.
According to scholar F. R. Rosenthal: "Islamic rational scholarship, which we have mainly in mind when we speak of the greatness of Muslim civilisation, depends in its entirety on classical antiquity.....in Islam as in every civilisation, what is really important is not the individual elements but the synthesis that combines them into a living organism of its own....Islamic civilisation as we know it would simply not have existed without the Greek heritage."
Greek thought was certainly an important inspiration for virtually all Muslim thinkers, but it wasn't the only one. Alkindus (Al-Kindi), the Arab mathematician who lived in Baghdad in the ninth century and was close to several Abbasid Caliphs, was one of the first to attempt reconciling Islam with Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle, a project that was to last for several centuries and prove ultimately unsuccessful. His other lasting impact was his writings about Indian arithmetic and numerals. Alkindus was one of a handful of people primarily responsible for spreading the knowledge and use of Indian numerals in the Middle East.
India has a long-standing mathematical tradition and the Hindu numerical system is one of its most important contributions to world culture. It was slowly introduced in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, gained momentum after the Italian mathematician Fibonacci in 1202 published his book Liber Abaci and reached wide acceptance during the Renaissance. Europeans learned about Indian numerals via Arabs, which is why they were mistakenly called Arabic numerals in the West. They were superior to Roman numerals in several ways, the revolutionary concept of zero being one of them. There is no doubt that this numerical system reached the West via the Islamic world, but we should remember that since the Middle East is situated between India and Europe, any ideas from India by necessity had to pass through that region to reach Europe. I'm not sure how much credit we should give Islam for this geographical accident.
Al-Razi was a talented Persian physician and chemist who lived in the ninth and early tenth century. He combined Greek, Indian and Persian traditions, and relied on clinical observance of patients in the Hippocratic tradition. He also commented, and criticized, the works of philosophers such as Aristotle. Some of his writings were translated into Latin. As Ibn Warraq writes in his book Why I Am Not a Muslim, "Perhaps the greatest freethinker in the whole of Islam was al-Razi, the Rhazes of Medieval Europe (or Razis of Chaucer), where his prestige and authority remained unchallenged until the seventeenth century. Meyerhof also calls him the 'greatest physician of the Islamic world and one of the great physicians of all time.'" He was also highly critical of Islamic doctrines, and considered the Koran to be an assorted mixture of "absurd and inconsistent fables." Moreover, "His heretical writings, significantly, have not survived and were not widely read; nonetheless, they are witness to a remarkably tolerant culture and society - a tolerance lacking in other periods and places."
Avicenna (Ibn Sina) was a Persian physician who continued the course set by al-Razi of mixing Greek, Indian, East Asian and Middle Eastern medical learning. His book The Canon of Medicine from the early eleventh century was a standard medical text for centuries. A striking number of the Muslims who did leave some imprint upon the history of science were Persians, who could tap into their proud pre-Islamic heritage. Historian Ibn Khaldun admitted that "It is strange that most of the learned among the Muslims who have excelled in the religious or intellectual sciences are non-Arabs with rare exceptions."
It is also interesting to notice that virtually all freethinkers and rationalists within the Islamic world, such as Avicenna or Farabi, were at odds with Islamic orthodoxy and were frequently harassed for this. Whatever discoveries they made were more in spite of Islam than because of Islam, and in the end, Islam won. As Ibn Warraq notes, "orthodox Islam emerged victorious from the encounter with Greek philosophy. Islam rejected the idea that one could attain truth with unaided human reason and settled for the unreflective comforts of the putatively superior truth of divine revelation. Wherever one decides to place the date of this victory of orthodox Islam (perhaps in the ninth century with the conversion of al-Ashari, or in the eleventh century with the works of al-Ghazali), it has been, I believe, an unmitigated disaster for all Muslims, indeed all mankind."Averroes (Ibn Rushd) was born in Córdoba, Spain (Andalusia) in the 12th century. He held comparatively progressive views on women, was in some ways a freethinker and faced trouble for this, yet he was also a jurist in the Maliki school of sharia law and served as a qadi, Islamic judge, in Seville. He supported the traditional view, held by leading scholars even into the twenty-first century, of the death penalty for persons leaving Islam: "An apostate…is to be executed by agreement in the case of a man, because of the words of the Prophet, 'Slay those who change their din [religion]'…Asking the apostate to repent was stipulated as a condition…prior to his execution."
Still, Averroes is chiefly remembered for his attempts at combining Aristotelian philosophy and Islam. According to Ibn Warraq, he had a profound influence on the Latin scientists of the thirteenth century, yet "had no influence at all on the development of Islamic philosophy. After his death, he was practically forgotten in the Islamic world."
Philosophy in general went into permanent decline. One of the reasons for this was the influential al-Ghazali, by many considered the most important Muslim after Muhammad himself, who argued that much of Greek philosophy was logically incoherent and an affront to Islam. Averroes' attempts at refuting al-Ghazali were ignored and forgotten.
The leading Jewish thinker of this era was the rabbi and physician Moses Maimonides. He was born in 1135 in Córdoba in Islamic-occupied Spain, but had to flee through North Africa when the devout Berber Almohades invaded from Morocco and attacked Christians and Jews in a classical Jihad fashion. Maimonides eagerly read Greek philosophy, some of which was available in Arabic. He also, for the most part, wrote in Arabic. His attempts at reconciling Aristotelian philosophy with the Torah influenced the great Christian thinker Saint Thomas Aquinas, who made similar efforts at reconciling Greek thought with biblical Scripture a few generations later.
It is true that some Greek and other classics were translated to Arabic, but it is equally true that Muslims could be highly particular about which texts to exclude. As Iranian intellectual Amir Taheri explains: "It is no accident that early Muslims translated numerous ancient Greek texts but never those related to political matters. The great Avicenna himself translated Aristotle's Poetics. But there was no translation of Aristotle's Politics in Persian until 1963."
In other words: There was a great deal of Greek thought that could never have been "transferred" to Europeans by Arabs, as is frequently claimed by Western Multiculturalists, because many Greek works had never been translated into Arabic in the first place. Muslims especially turned down political texts, since these included descriptions of systems in which men ruled themselves according to their own laws. This was considered blasphemous by Muslims, as laws are made by Allah and rule belongs to his representatives.
William of Moerbeke was a Flemish scholar and prolific translator who probably did more than any other individual for the transmission of Greek thought to the West. His translation of virtually all of the works of Aristotle and many by Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria and others paved the way for the Renaissance. He was fluent in Greek, and was for a time Catholic bishop of Corinth in Greece. He made highly accurate translations directly from the Greek originals, and even improved earlier, flawed translations of some works. His Latin translation of Politics, one of the important works that were not available in Arabic, was completed around 1260. His friend Thomas Aquinas used this translation as the basis for his groundbreaking work The Summa Theologica. Aquinas did refer to Maimonides as well as to Averroes and Avicenna and was familiar with their writing, but he was rather critical of Averroes and refuted some of his use of Aristotle.
Like Aquinas, William of Moerbeke was a friar of the Dominican order and had personal contacts at the top levels of the Vatican. Several texts, among them some of Archimedes, would have been lost without the efforts of Moerbeke and a few others, and he clearly did his work on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, one of the reasons why he did this was because the translations that were available in Arabic were incomplete and sometimes of poor linguistic quality. The Arabic translations, although they did serve as an early reintroduction for some Western Europeans to Greek thought, didn't "save" Greek knowledge as it had never been lost. It had been preserved in an unbroken line since Classical times by Greek, Byzantine Christians, who still considered themselves Romans, and it could be recovered there. There was extensive contact between Eastern and Western Christians at this time; sometimes amiable, sometimes less so and occasionally downright hostile, but contact nonetheless. The permanent recovery of Greek and Classical learning was undertaken as a direct transmission from Greek, Orthodox Christians to Western, Latin Christians. There were no Muslim middlemen involved.
As a result, by the late 1200s, Saint Thomas Aquinas and early Renaissance figures such as the poet Dante and the humanist Petrarch had at their disposal a much more complete and accurate body of Greek thought than any of the renowned Muslim philosophers ever did. What's more, many of the translations that did exist in Arabic had been undertaken by Christians in the first place, not by Muslims.
At the American Thinker, Dr. Jonathan David Carson dispels some of the hype regarding Islam's role in the history of science. In his view, "The 'Islamic scholars' who translated 'ancient Greece's natural philosophy' were a curious group of Muslims, since all or almost all of the translators from Greek to Arabic were Christians or Jews." Moreover, most Greek texts "did not make the long journey from Greek to Syriac or Hebrew to Arabic to Latin, and Western Europeans preferred [surprise!] translations of Aristotle directly from the Greek, which were not only superior but also more readily available."
In A History of Philosophy, Frederick Copleston says that "it is a mistake to imagine that the Latin scholastics were entirely dependent upon translations from Arabic or even that translation from the Arabic always preceded translation from the Greek." Indeed, "translation from the Greek generally preceded translation from the Arabic." This view is confirmed by Peter Dronke in A History of Twelfth—Century Western Philosophy: "most of the works of Aristotle, however, were translated directly from the Greek, and only exceptionally by way of an Arabic intermediary...translations from the Arabic must be given their full importance, but not more."
As Carson sees it, "the great rescue of Greek philosophy by translation into Arabic turns out to mean no rescue of Plato and the transmission of Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek texts of Aristotle, either directly or more often via Syriac or Hebrew, to a Christendom that already had the Greek texts and had already translated most of them into Latin."
Moreover, the intellectual curiosity was entirely one-sided. As Bernard Lewis states in The Muslim Discovery of Europe: "We know of no Muslim scholar or man of letters before the eighteenth century who sought to learn a western language, still less of any attempt to produce grammars, dictionaries, or other language tools. Translations are few and far between. Those that are known are works chosen for practical purposes and the translations are made by converts or non—Muslims." J.M. Roberts put it this way: "Why, until very recently, did Islamic scholars show no wish to translate Latin or western European texts into Arabic? (…) It is clear that an explanation of European inquisitiveness and adventurousness must lie deeper than economics, important though they may have been."
Much has been made of Spain's glorious Islamic past, yet more books are translated in Spain now in a single year than have been translated into Arabic over the past 1,000 years. As I have shown, what existed of advances in sciences in the early centuries of Islamic rule owed its existence almost entirely to the infusion of pre-Islamic thought, and even at the best of times the translations from non-Muslim ideas and books could be quite selective. Later, even the limited debate of Greek philosophy was curtailed. Muslims were assured of their God-given superiority and did not bother to look into ideas from worthless infidel cultures.
Toby E. Huff, author of the book The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, explains this. A landmark in Western science was Nicholas Copernicus' The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres from 1543. The same years also saw another milestone in the rise of modern science: Vesalius' On the Fabric of the Human Body, which created the foundations for modern medicine by representing an empirical agenda, the first-hand examination of the body through human dissection (autopsy).
According to Huff, "Vesalius claimed to have corrected over 200 errors in Galen's account of human anatomy," and his "illustrations are far superior to anything to be found in the Arabic/Islamic tradition (where pictorial representation of the human body was particularly suspect) or, for that matter, in the Chinese and (I presume) Indian traditions." In astronomy, "Kepler went far beyond Ptolemy's methods, and discovered entirely new principles for the precise description of the motions of bodies in the heavens," thus proving the elliptical (and hence not perfectly circular) orbit of Mars.
In the eyes of Toby E. Huff, "the twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a social, intellectual and legal revolution that laid the intellectual and institutional foundations upon which modern science was later constructed. At the heart of this development was the jurisprudential idea of a corporation, a collection of individuals who were recognized as a singular 'whole body' and granted legitimate legal autonomy. Such entities were given the right to sue and be sued, to buy and sell property, to make rules and laws regulating their activities, to adjudicate those laws and to operate according to the principle of election by consent as well as the Roman legal aphorism, what affects everyone should be considered and approved by everyone. Among the entities granted status as legitimate corporations were cities and towns, charitable organizations, professional guilds (especially of physicians) and, of course, universities. Nothing comparable to this kind of legal autonomy emerged in China or under Islam. In short, the European medievals created autonomous, self-governing institutions of higher learning and then imported into them a methodologically powerful and metaphysically rich cosmology that directly challenged and contradicted many aspects of the traditional Christian world-view."
This was also a time period noted for the growth of early modern capitalism, but Huff rejects any simplistic connection between money and science. Christian Europe exhibited an intellectual curiosity, a desire to uncover truth, that could not be reduced simply to a matter of economic interests: "There was indeed a 'commercial revolution' sweeping Europe from about the twelfth century, but that hardly explains the great interest in Aristotle in the universities of that period or the decision by medical practitioners to undertake dissections and to incorporate medical education into the university curriculum. Similarly, there was another rise in commercial activities in the sixteenth century, but this hardly explains either the motivation of the clerical Copernicus, or of Galileo, Kepler, or Tycho Brahe in developing a new astronomy against the interests of the Church."
One of the most groundbreaking innovations in Europe during the High Middle Ages was the creation of an ongoing, university-centered debate. This made all the difference, since, as Huff points out, "it is one thing if an activity is pursued randomly by various actors; it is something else altogether if that activity is carried on collectively as a result of a regularized process." While Islamic madrasas excluded all of the natural works of Aristotle, as well as logic and natural theology, European scholars benefited from "a surprising degree of freedom of inquiry" which "did not exist in the Arab/Muslim world then and does not exist now."
Centers of learning have existed in civilizations throughout recorded history, yet most of them did not possess all of the qualities generally associated with a university today. It is possible that the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese, the Indians and others had institutions that could be called universities already at this early age; I don't know Asian history intimately enough to judge that. But the Islamic world definitely did not.
The German-Syrian reformist Bassam Tibi points out that the Muslim thinkers who developed Greek rationalism are today despised in their own civilization. As he writes in his book Islam Between Culture and Politics, "rational sciences were – in medieval Islam – considered to be 'foreign sciences' and at times heretical. At present, Islamic fundamentalists do not seem to know that rational sciences in Islam were based on what was termed ulum al-qudama (the sciences of the Ancients), that it, the Greeks."
Science was viewed as Islamic science, the study of the Koran, the hadith, Arab history etc. The Islamic madrasa was not concerned with a process of reason-based investigation or unrestrained enquiry but with a learning process in the sacral sense. Tibi believes it is thus incorrect to call institutions such as Al-Azhar in Cairo, Egypt, the highest institution of learning in Sunni Islam, a university: "Some Islamic historians wrongly translate the term madrasa as university. This is plainly incorrect: If we understand a university as universitas litterarum, or consider, without the bias of Eurocentrism, the cast of the universitas magistrorum of the thirteenth century in Paris, we are bound to recognise that the university as a seat for free and unrestrained enquiry based on reason, is a European innovation in the history of mankind."
It is noteworthy that the first medieval European universities were sometimes developed out of monasteries or religious schools. However, here the Greek knowledge was adopted in a far more unfettered manner than it was in the Middle East. The earliest European universities, such as the University of Bologna in Italy and Oxford in England, were created in the eleventh century. More were established during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for instance the University of Paris (Sorbonne), the University of Cambridge, the University of Salamanca in Spain and the University of Coimbra in Portugal.
According to Bassam Tibi, the situation has changed less than one might think: "In Muslim societies, where higher institutions of learning have a deeply rooted procedure of rote-learning, the content of positive sciences adopted from Europe is treated in a similar fashion. Verses of the Koran are learned by heart because they are infallible and not to be enquired into. Immanuel Kant's Critiques or David Hume's Enquiry, now available in Arabic translation, are learned by heart in a similar manner and not conceived of in terms of their nature as problem-oriented enquiries." As a result, "In contrast to the European and the US-model, students educated in a traditional Islamic institution of learning neither have a Bildung (general education) nor an Ausbildung (training)."
This is a problem members of this culture bring with them abroad if they move. In Denmark, Århus city council member Ali Nuur complained that one of the challenges certain immigrant groups face in the education system is that they are unfamiliar with tests rooted in a rational, critical and analytical way of thinking. Guess who?
Another issue is the lack of individual liberty. I still haven't read Atlas Shrugged, a novel I know many Americans hold in high regard, and I have mixed feelings about Ayn Rand's philosophies. However, one thing I do agree with her about is that "Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." A Danish man who lived in Iran before the Revolution in 1979 noticed that if he suggested to his Muslim friends that he would like to enjoy some privacy for while, they thought he was crazy. The very notion of "privacy" was alien to them because it implies that you are an autonomous individual with needs of your own. A Muslim is simply an organic part of the Umma, the Islamic community. This lack of individualism and individual liberty is one of the main reasons why Muslims lost out to other cultures.
On the other hand, I believe the West has in recent decades gone too far in making individualism the sole basis of our culture. When a nation is reduced to nothing more than an atomized collection of individuals, with no ties to the past and no obligations to future generations, mounting a defense of a lasting society becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Posted by Robert at September 20, 2007 5:58 AM
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The west is a collection of shoppers.
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at September 20, 2007 6:27 AM
wow, I am getting a college education and don't have to pay tuition.....
Posted by: exsgtbrown at September 20, 2007 7:02 AM
"islamic civilisation". Oxymoron of the day.
Posted by: ImNoDhimmi at September 20, 2007 7:12 AM
I do believe the Fjordman has outdone himself here. Very, very informative.
Posted by: Cornelius at September 20, 2007 7:14 AM
We should never, ever again refer to numbers as "Arabic" numbers. Hindu, Indian numbers?
I recall the 1982 Worlds Fair where in the Saudi Arabian exhibit, they took credit for damn near everything. Celestial navigation, algebra, calculus were the ones I remember. I was ignorant then; no more.
We can divide our knowledge of Arabs and Islam into two phases. There is the Pre-911 Age of Ignorance and the Post-911 Age of Enlightenment. The most important thing learned is that Muslims are the world's consummate liars. Forget all these Arabic words shuch a takiyya and others, Liar is sufficient.
Posted by: Pelayo at September 20, 2007 7:16 AM
Fatwa against Bollywood muslim actor
http://www.ibnlive.com/news/fatwa-against-salman-for-attending-ganesh-puja/49007-8.html
at September 20, 2007 8:28 AM
Millions of Arabs and Persians have high scientific IQs but they can only blossom when they live in the West. They are suffocated and wither in Islamic countries. I have met many clever Muslims in the USA. This cleverness is perverted in Islamic countries
Posted by: dennisw at September 20, 2007 8:48 AM
I remember reading in a history of central Asia that the Arabic "renaissance" in the 8th century owes a lot to the Caliph's grand vizier at the time - an extraordinary individual named Ibn Beramak or Baramak, son of the head of a Hindu or Buddhist monastery in Afghanistan, forced into islam by the conquerors.
This individual was singularly responsible for the systematic gathering of knowledge from all sources on all subjects, especially from Greece and India, with which he was familiar. His logic to the Caliph was that an empire like that of islam could not be further sustained without greater knowledge.
I tried googling for this info, but didn't make much headway. Wonder if any of the folks out here know more about this?
Posted by: Dunk at September 20, 2007 9:05 AM
There is a travelling circus, sorry exhibition going round Britain at the moment called 1001 Muslim Inventions, here is the link for all of you masochists
http://www.1001inventions.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=main.viewSection&intSectionID=240
The sponsors are The British Government and several Gulf Banks. The muslims claim to have invented the 3 course meal and coffee. If this is all they have done in 1,400 year it doesn't say much does it. The site is slick and it is what would be described in the British army as Bullshit baffling brains.
Thomas Edison did more in his short lifetime than Islam did in 1,400 years, he at least had 2,000 inventions and patents to his name, most of them a factor of ten far more useful, than any of these moon loons invented or decided they invented. I always point out that when the the Muslims conquered North Africa it was criss crossed with good Roman roads and most of the internal trade was by carts. These fell into disuse and they resorted to the pack animal camel. This is a far more inefficient way to carry goods. You would have thought that the sheet people could have at least invented a good camel cart. I rest my case.
Posted by: Holger Dansker at September 20, 2007 9:19 AM
The sponsors are The British Government and several Gulf Banks. The muslims claim to have invented the 3 course meal and coffee.
Falafel sandwich with pickled cabbage and French fries
Posted by: dennisw at September 20, 2007 9:22 AM
Thank you, Fjordman. I'm very much looking forward to reading part 2.
Posted by: justamomof4 at September 20, 2007 9:34 AM
This article confirms the main contents of a letter sent by an Assyrian scientist to Ms. Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard Corporation, in response to a speech given by her on September 26, 2001. The Assyrians and Babylonians who translated i.a. Greek texts for the Arab Islamic bedouins and camel drivers, discovered many of foundations of mathematics even before the Indians.
Please read it, - it is really entertaining:
http://www.ninevehsoft.com/fiorina.htm
at September 20, 2007 9:39 AM
Pure gold. I consider myself fortunate for having read this piece.
Posted by: cruzado at September 20, 2007 10:14 AM
The Islamic "Golden Era" occurred at the time of Islamic conquest and expansion into the civilizations of Europe (Roman) Asia (Babylonian, Persian, Indian), ie when there was a continual inflow of loot plus slaves who knew how to operate a civilization. When expansion stopped, and the loot and educated slaves stopped coming in, Islamic civilization went into decline
Posted by: PapaBear at September 20, 2007 10:24 AM
Fjordman: Thanks, I've saved the essay. Well done.
Posted by: johnb at September 20, 2007 10:37 AM
Fascinating discussion.
The connection between the prevailing cultural and ideological milieu of any given era or society, and the associated intellectual output, is a complex and difficult one. For example - does anyone really think of Wagner as Nazi music? Does anyone - except perhaps a few lunatics in the Klan - consider any piece of science to be "Jewish"? Then also consider that some important science emerged from the Soviet Union, as did great literature.
It should not be a surprise that some important scientific or cultural developments emerged during periods when Islam was the dominant ideology. The real issue is the intellectual connection between the ideology and the individual at the time, and the subsequent use of the facts of discovery as evidence o the ideology itself being good or bad.
Ideology should be judged according to its intrinsic moral quality, and to its empirical effects. Empirically, Islam seems to diminish cultural and intellectual output. That a few people managed to produce significant discoveries or developments despite the effects of Islam does not mean that Islam was responsible for their valuable contributions.
Posted by: Obelisk1 at September 20, 2007 11:01 AM
Knowledge has to circulate, like blood.
The Life's blood of our Civilization.
Where is Islam's Sappho?
Its Aristophanes?
Or Epictetus?
Darwin?
Freud?
Hume?
It looks like an intimidation filter has been removing the possibility of progress within Islam.
By driving out all critical thought.
And leaving paralyzed sterility.
Posing as divine security
at September 20, 2007 11:40 AM
Islamic “golden ages” followed the re-establishment of peace and security under the auspices of the new regime. The time lag between the conquest and the peak of the golden age varied from a few decades through several centuries in different Muslim lands. However, these golden ages were a result of the parasitic exploitation of the intellectual and economic resources left over from the preceding civilization. When these were exhausted intellectual achievement went into a rapid decline.
However, the Muslim efflorescence, like the financial underpinning for the Muslim military campaigns, depended on the wealth expropriated from, and on the continuing economic exploitation of, conquered non-Muslim populations. In addition, it must be acknowledged that the Muslim invaders were not, in general, total barbarians; they were not Huns or Mongols or Vandals. They valued the level of civilization that they encountered in their invasions and maintained a cultivated and often comfortable existence. However, one thing about the historical record is noteworthy; the various golden ages of Islamic civilization always occur early in the first few centuries in which a new territory is occupied. Wherever the various Muslim vanguards invaded, the vast majority of the population was non-Muslim. It would take many years for this population to be converted and assimilated. These non-Muslims or recent converts are the ones who carried on the work which many historians are prone to attribute to "Islamic" civilization. Thus, a distinction must be drawn between the so-called high Islamic civilization and the religion of Islam. Eventually as the process of Islamization proceeds the non-Islamic component of the population becomes a small minority and stagnation sets in. This process is evident in the first centuries of the Arab conquests where the process of Arabization and conversion to Islam took a few centuries to complete; this was the "Arab" golden age, a product of unconverted or recently converted Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians. In Spain the golden age lasted longer, perhaps because the process of Islamization was never as complete in Moorish Spain as in the Arab East.
Following the “golden prime” of the early Abbasids, Islamic scholarship fell into a sharp decline. With the steady increase in converts and the decrease in the number of non-Muslims, the primary source of accomplished scholars dried up. With the passage of time, the descendants of earlier converts became far removed from the family and national traditions that promoted and sustained high scholarly achievement. The inner logic of the Islamic meme unfolded creating a climate of anti-intellectualism and a rigid pseudo scholarship; both of which were upheld by an increasingly powerful clerical class. Nevertheless, there were occasional intellectual revivals encouraged by some of the more enlightened rulers of the later local Arab dynasties. Non-Muslims, converts and heretics, once again, played a disproportionate role in these mini-renaissances.
The victory of the holy warriors of Islam and the economic recovery of the conquered territory was followed by a resumption of the civilization of the native population under Muslim auspices. In addition, Muslim rulers were able to capitalize on the different specializations of the conquered groups and on a division of labor based largely on ethnicity. Furthermore, the inclusion of the new territory within the trading network of a much larger Muslim empire created a brief period of intellectual and technological advancement due to the cross fertilization of different cultures.
Another factor in Muslim intellectual degeneration was, undoubtedly, the end of imperial expansion. Once the Arab empire reached its maximum extent the temporary bubble in wealth caused by economic expansion, trade, and the flow of technology and expertise, in the early Islamic oecumene ceased. Furthermore, considering the extent of the Muslim domains, the wealth expropriated by the Muslim elites, and the number of technologies and variety of ideas available to them, it is remarkable how little in terms of human advancement and accomplishment was achieved by Muslims even at the height of their golden age. Muslim accomplishments were paltry when compared to what was achieved in the small and fragmented cities of Greece, in the divided states of the Indian subcontinent or in parochial and isolated China. Still another factor contributing to Islamic intellectual decline was the tendency toward increasing despotism and the lack of independent centers of power such as church, monarchy, landed aristocracy and urban bourgeoisie typical of many parts of Europe.
at September 20, 2007 12:45 PM
Wow...so much here.
Thanks for all this wonderful information.
Posted by: Godefroi at September 20, 2007 4:53 PM
Does Fjorman consider University of Al-Karaouine as a real university?
Posted by: 2pacshakur at September 20, 2007 7:45 PM
When I read that the food service business must be shut down during ramadan, I knew that deductive reasoning is not a paramount quality of the islamic think-tank. Excuse me for the oxymoron.
Posted by: mustang65 at September 20, 2007 8:35 PM
Didn't Islam develop the only Ka-Boom University?
Posted by: tanstaafl at September 20, 2007 9:22 PM
Fjordman -
You write -
"On the other hand, I believe the West has in recent decades gone too far in making individualism the sole basis of our culture." - but you produce absolutely no evidence to back up your assertion that "...the West [has made] individualism the sole basis of [its] culture." The West has done no such thing. In fact, the culture prevailing in almost all civilised Western countries is remarkably complex and cohesive and acknowledges individual rights and privacies as merely one strand of its existence.
You write also -
"When a nation is reduced to nothing more than an atomized collection of individuals, with no ties to the past and no obligations to future generations, mounting a defense of a lasting society becomes difficult, if not impossible." -
but again you produce no evidence. Find me such a nation in the civilised West and demonstrate from first-hand evidence that it is so "atomized" [sic].
Whilst your historical facts, selective though they are (and all philosophers about mankind's state must be selective so I do do not intend insult but merely to point out that you are equally as selective as others are), are accurate and correct but I do take issue with your conclusions. The facts which you present do not support the conclusions which you draw. Your conclusions are not invalid - nor valid - they just require that you marshall much more relevant facts in their advancing.
You have an argument. You have conclusions. Regrettably, your argument does not relate to your conclusions in any meaningful way. History is not, in this instance the arbiter of modern fact - leastways, not the history which you use.
Posted by: OliverPCamford at September 21, 2007 12:25 AM
I am in way over my head, here....all I can think of is the Peanuts cartoon where Lucy is arguing with Schroeder about Beethoven, and the only thing she can say is, "Is he on bubble gum cards? How can he be anyone famous if he isn't on any bubble gum cards?"
I note with sadness, that the Muslim world has destroyed many antiquities, just as they are doing now. I find it almost comical that Egypt is rebuilding the library of Alexandria. Really, other than gullible tourists, what is the point?
at September 21, 2007 1:23 AM
Well that piece did a great job tiptoeing around Christianity's role in the evolution. But whatever, I'm not going to trample over someone's views.
But I will make the same point as RBLA. The Middle East and North Africa were largely populated by Christians. The primary preoccupation of the Muslims for the last 1400 years was assimilating the Christians into Islam, and exploiting the Christians to the maximum.
And guess what, those Christians' main interests were mainly in knowledge and work skills. They account for most of the innovation from that part of the world.
Eastern Christians, up until recently, literally served as a buffer between Islam and Europe. However, with the Islamic revival from oil wealth, many wars causing massive numbers of casualties, and mass immigration becoming possible, the 1900's saw the Eastern Christian buffer eroded to almost non-existence. Do you want to live with forever hostile neighbors and leaders?
Simply put, the floodgates of hell are now open to Europe.
Yes, Islam stagnates, but it survives parasitically. The only things it can be really credited with is the carcases of once progressing societies that it leaves behind.
Posted by: ofcourse at September 21, 2007 1:47 AM
From estbrown"wow, I am getting a college education and don't have to pay tuition....."
Oh, I know how you feel. And Fjordman's articles are so clearly and succinctly written too.
Posted by: ewha1 at September 21, 2007 4:11 AM
Hugh Kennedy (When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World 2006 - an easy read) provides some background that underscores the conjectures above about the exploitative even parasitical nature of intellectual progress in early Islam.
As well as noting the role of various caliphs and others as patrons of the arts, sciences and intellectuals, he suggests the depletion of the once highly fertile agricultural lands that sustained that period, an era immortalized in The Arabian Nights, explains much.
"Like the Italy of the Italian Renaissance, the intellectual world of ninth century Baghdad was a world where private patrons funded intellectual life and, to an extent, competed against each other for intellectual prestige. This may account for something of the variety and originality of the scholarly life that was one of the greatest achievements of the Abbasid period. Much of this freshness and vitality was lost with the development of the madrasa from the eleventh century onwards."
"The Caliphate, plagued by financial crises and ruined by military disorder, was reduced to complete impotence and effectively disappeared in the 930s. The diminishing resources provided by the devastated agricultural lands of Iraq could not sustain the ambitions of the caliphs."
"The failure of the caliphs to wage Jihad and protect the pilgrims was plain for all to see. [...] The passing of the Abbasid Caliphate marked the end of an era in many ways. It signalled the demise of the unity of the Muslim world under a single sovereign: in 909 a rival Shiite Fatimid Caliphate was established in Tunisia and in 969 the Fatimids took Egypt. In 931 yet another Caliphate was established by the Umayyads in Spain and Portugal."
"The Abbasid Caliphate was the last polity to use the resources of Mesopotamia to support a great empire. (Since the third millennium BC a succession of powers ... had used the fertility generated by the Tigris and Euphrates to create great civilisations and world empires.) "
Posted by: MBR at September 21, 2007 5:56 AM
Fjordman has covered the huge advantage given the Western university by the concept of a separate legal personality, the corporation.
Within Islam the situation of the madrasa as a center of learning remained static. In not being able to adopt this corporate structure which (for the Western university) ensured continuity beyond the death of a founder, better funding, owning its own land and security of employment for its more numerous teachers, the madrasa suffered from being generally set up as a waqf or charitable trust, by an individual and for a specific purpose, generally for the teaching of one or more schools of law and associated skills.
While the first Colleges at Oxford were being set up at the same time as the Mongols were sacking Baghdad in 1258, a Muslim student interested in wider learning faced difficulties. As George Makdisi puts it in "The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West" (1981)
"Both the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn were freedoms within the context of Islam. The teaching authority, the magisterium, resided in the ulama whose opinions eventually went to make up the consensus on orthodoxy in Islam. [..] But Muslim education was not all there was to education in Islam. Institutionalized learning was not all the learning available. Philosophy, philosophical or rationalist kalam-theology, mathematics, medicine, and the natural sciences, that is those sciences referred to as the ancient, or foreign sciences, as well as all fields not falling under the category of the Islamic sciences and their ancillaries, were sought outside of these institutions, in the homes of scholars, in the hospitals, in the regular institutions, under the cover of other fields such as hadith or medicine.
"A lay nomocratic theocracy, Islam is a religion based on a system of law whose legislator is God alone. It has no ecclesiastical hierarchy. The doctors of the law are its sole interpreters. The ultimate object of Islamic education is to educate in God's law, encompassing all facets of life, civil as well as religious. It was supported by founders as a meritorious act of charity bringing the founder closer to God. It maintained its private financial base throughout the Middle Ages."
"[The eventual] traditionalist victory was made permanent by the law of waqf through its one limitation on the founder's freedom of choice; namely, that there be nothing in the foundation that could be construed as inimical to the tenets of Islam. Not only were philosophical doctrines blatantly inimical to Islam banished from its colleges, but also anything tainted with philosophy...
"Thus, of the three major divisions of knowledge, the 'ancient sciences' were banished from the regular courses of institutionalized education, driven away by the waqf's exclusionary principle. From then on, these sciences lived a silent, discrete life."
Posted by: MBR at September 21, 2007 7:36 AM
Nice, nice piece.
And informative.
I'll say that it would be well worth the excellent Mr Fjordman's time to read Atlas Shrugged. And I'll add that his writing has, to my palette, a rather objectivist flavor already.
The question that he raises at the end of the piece is a commonly debated one, that is actually resolved within objectivist thought.
We are posed with the alternatives of the all too public and collectivized life of savages on the one hand, and the life of "an atomized collection of individuals, with no ties to the past and no obligations to future generations" on the other. And the question is raised of where is the happy medium? Where does one go between these poles and how?
In point of fact, the notion of the happy medium so to speak, is actually grounded in the writings of Aristotle. But that is my summary not Fjordman's -- and I don't mean to set up a straw man.
In fact, the cohesion of a nation or a culture is well accounted for in the objectivist concept of selfishness properly understood.
Love, which is ultimately the glue which holds cultures, nations, indeed any human relation together -- be it love of a person, a set of values, money, art, family, whatever -- love, is the most selfish of all emotions.
A selfish and rational individual, given variations in warmth of temperment, is precisely the person who loves most intensely -- and hence the most likely individual to dedicate their life to a lover, a marriage, a business or an ideal.
Given the common parlance of the cultures in which we all live, we are all still stuck looking at the world from the primitive point of view (me too, no insult intended here), where the world is divided between the good, unselfish tribe member, and the bad rogue outsider, the brute, the freebooter, the thief in the night.
And surely, as a culture deteriorates, (as is happening to the entire free world) and common values and understanding erode and fall into disuse, the culture becomes atomized into aimless individuals. deprived of the bonds that used to link them, with nothing other than their passing pleasures or the balance of their bank account to guide them. (Not that those are bad things in themselves, on the contrary).
But selfishness, as such, is not the problem.
If we do not teach history properly in our universities, (and we no longer do), even the most selfish of students, hungry for their own selfish sake to learn what they wish to know, will have a harder time learning it.
This is not a problem with selfishness, but a problem with teaching.
If there is no great art being produced, and I think our art schools are producing fewer and fewer truly capable artists, the most selfish business magnate, wishing to display his magnanimity to the public and to celebrate his own accomplishments, will have nothing to put in his museum.
Again, this is not a problem with selfishness, but a problem with the understanding and transmission of aesthetic values.
The same is true of morality and everything else.
========
Ultimately the choice between collectivism and "alienation" popularized by so many writers, including Marx, is a false alternative.
And the passage of Rand that Mr Fjordman cites is precisely the right one.
Certainly it is the most free and most selfish of men that develops his mind, his morality, his sensibilities and his capabilities to their highest pitch, and is most eager learn from the accomplishments of the past, and to exceed them, and to see his own live on into the future.
And that is the man you most want as a neighbor and a friend.
Indeed, that's the person you want to be.
Posted by: joeblough at September 21, 2007 3:26 PM
ofcourse,
"Eastern Christians, up until recently, literally served as a buffer between Islam and Europe."
What you say is quite true but it goes even further. When the Turks invaded Anatolia they were gung-ho to proselytize and convert the Christian population. However, when the Ottomans invaded the Balkans they were content to allow the local Church institutions to remain in place and governed through Church authorities. They might well have been more clever than their Muslim predecessors and had at least an intuition that a large reservoir of non-Muslims was essential to the survival of a strong Muslim state. So the Balkan, Caucasus and other eastern Christians continued to survive as a group and served as the raw material on which the Ottoman Empire was able to parasitize. They provided a continuing supply of converts both voluntary and through the horrendous institution of the devshirme. That may well be the reason that the Ottoman state was so long-lived as compared to other Muslim dynasties.
Posted by: RBLA at September 21, 2007 3:49 PM
Brilliant article.
It is interesting that Muslim claims to be preserver of Greek philosophy. It does not matter that nothing worthwhile or no truth exists outside Koran.
To see the complex relationship between Church and Greek philosophy see the following link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z94r8yBH4mM
The religions claiming to be the sole inheritor of divinity are curses on humanity. While it can be safely concluded (at least to the best of my knowledge) that Christ was blameless and it was political Church which perverted his message, we can not say the same about Mohammad. Here I do not mean the historic figures but the way they are depicted in their scriptures.
Though the gentleman is harsh on Church for suppressing Greek philosophy but he also points out that Greek thought reached Byzantine and was also part of early Christianity.
at September 22, 2007 1:25 AM
Regarding the question of mediation of Greek texts to western Europe, it was much the fashion among western mediaeval historians, especially after the publication of the Pirenne thesis (Mohammed and Charlemagne, etc.) to suggest that much of Greek learning in fact passed through the Arabs.
In fact this is resoundingly misleading and wrong. Milton V. Anastos, the great polymath in fields such as Greek literature, early Christian studies, Patristics and Byzantine history, actually inventoried all transmission routes of nearly all the Greek texts. He found that 98.5% were transmitted directly by the mediaeval Greeks (the "Byzantines") to the western Europeans, mostly through Italy.
Texts transmitted through the Arabs generally were themselves translations of the Syriac translations from the Greek, the most important perhaps (because the original Greek is lost) is that of the mediacl writer Galen.
In fact the "Byzantine" Empire, more correctly the Eastern Roman Empire, was culturally Hellenized from the beginning and ancient learning never was "lost." It was the west that rediscovered ancient learning, for a variety of reasons, not least being those of the conquest of the Empire by the western Crusaders in 1204, and its eventual collapse in 1453 as a result of Muslim Turk depredations for over two centuries. The last period forced a large number of learned Greeks to seek refuge in Italy (many bringing their books and libraries with them).
at September 22, 2007 1:08 PM
Ironically, just the other day I posted on my blog a description of the Institute of the Arab World in Paris [a French govt institution] that glorifies the Arab contribution to science. This is disgraceful. See link:
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2007/09/arab-nationalist-megalomania-endorsed.html
Yet, the Oriental Antiquities Dept of the Louvre recognizes --at least, implicitly-- that Islam put an end to ancient Oriental [ie, Middle Eastern] civilizations. In my informed opinion, the Arabs and Islam wrecked the ancient East which was previously a center of civilization which had in fact contributed a great deal to ancient Greek classical culture, that is, contributions from Egyptians, Phoenicians, Jews, Babylonians, Persians, etc. Contributions and influences from all of these peoples are mentioned by ancient Greek writers. As far as I know, the Arabs are not mentioned for making contributions to or influencing ancient Greek classical culture.
Re the Louvre's position, see link:
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2007/05/arab-conquests-finished-off-ancient.html
The relevant text displayed in the Louvre in French and Spanish versions is found at this link. The English translation is my own, although there may be an English version displayed somewhere at the Louvre.
Posted by: Eliyahu at September 23, 2007 4:38 PM
Good point, philobiblos (and nice points from profitsbeard, mbr and rbla): now to add my 10 cents.
First: something I found while rereading the jihadwatch archives:
“In a fascinating book called "For the Glory of God," comparative religion professor Rodney Stark argues why science developed in the Christian West, not the Muslim East…Historically, according to Mr. Stark, it came down to completely different visions of an Almighty.
‘Allah is not presented as a lawful creator but has been conceived of as an extremely active God who intrudes on the world as he deems it appropriate," Mr. Stark writes.
As a result, human efforts to understand natural law have always been considered nothing short of blasphemous because "they denied Allah's freedom to act." He continues: "Islam did not fully embrace the notion that the universe ran on fundamental principles laid down by God at the Creation, but assumed that the world was sustained by his will on a continuing basis."
'By direct contrast, Mr. Stark writes, Christianity did indeed fully embrace the notion that the universe ran on fundamental principles laid down by God at the Creation.'
"Christianity depicted God as a rational, dependable and omnipotent being and the universe as his personal creation, thus having a rational, lawful stable structure awaiting human comprehension." The intellectually questing European scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Mr. Stark writes, saw themselves "as in pursuit of the secrets of Creation." END QUOTE.
That is part of it. Now for my own thoughts.
We probably underestimate the effect, on the imagination, of a religion whose Incarnate Son of God is a carpenter and that therefore, at bottom, cannot ignore or despise the material world and those who deal with it hands-on. Whose image of God is…social. Whose God may be interrogated, questioned, wrestled with.
Or the long-term result of exalting humility as a virtue rather than despising it (as the Greco-Roman pagans did) as a vice.
What if humility is not just an erotic and a spiritual, but a political and a scientific necessity?
What if Islam, which views itself and its prophet and its system of sharia as perfect, the final revelation, beyond criticism, and Muslims as ‘the best of people’, simply cannot teach, or produce, that humility, that openness to change, self-interrogation and correction (however painfully achieved, in fits and starts, over time) which makes science – and, also, good government – possible?
The huge echoing hole in Fjordman's thesis is that he seems to see 'the west' as consisting entirely of the fusion of Greco-Roman pagan civilisation with certain elements of northwest European paganism, and the subsequent elaboration of same.
But it is not.
David Bentley Hart writes, in The Beauty of the Infinite:
“…there was, within the history of Western philosophy, in the midst of its achievements and failures, a singular interruption, the arrival of a discourse of truth in which every principle of necessity became subordinate to the higher principle of gratuity. Christian thought, and its long history of metaphysical speculation, did not occur as just another episode in the genealogy of nihilism.
“It was in fact so profound a disruption of many of the most basic premises of philosophy, and so audacious a rescue of many of philosophy’s truths from the impotent embrace of mere metaphysical ambition, that it is doubtful yet that philosophy understands what happened to it, or why now it cannot be anything but an ever more self-tormenting denial of that interruption."
“The Jewish language of creation…in truth introduced into Western thought the radically new idea that an infinite freedom is the ‘principle’ of the world’s being…And the Christian understanding of God as Trinity, without need of the world even for his determination as difference, relatedness or manifestation, for the first time confronted Western thought with a genuine discourse of transcendence, of an ontological truth whose ‘identity’ is not completed by any ontic order of descent and ascent. The truth of being, for beings, is a gift in an absolute sense, into whose mysteries no scala naturae by itself grants us proper entry.
“And if the world is without necessity…but is more originally grounded in gratuity…then transcendental reflection may be able to grasp many things, but by its own power it can accomplish neither the limits nor the contents of what is; it is at best a ship adrift when unanchored by the logic of the necessary."
(This may seem to contradict Stark - but Stark and Hart are agreed that what matters is the character of the Creator; both Islam and Christianity understand creation as radically contingent; but Islam's god is arbitrary whereas the Biblical God is rational and trustworthy, he - so to speak - 'lets be' in what Simone Weil called "the miracle of restraint").
“If there is no force of fate or negative determination or material limit in the order of being, but only a power of grace, creativity, imagination and love that gives being freely, whose gift is bound only by the necessity of ontological convenientia and concinnity [‘sounding together’] – as a manifestation of the beauty in which creation lives, and moves, and has its being – rather than by that of self-determination, then this misconstruing of the contingent for the necessary constitutes the primal error that renders all merely human philosophy incapable of receiving the real in the limpid truth of its appearing. Or, phrased theologically, it is in this way that even the wisest of philosophies attests to the universal blindness of sin."
“And it is for this reason also that theology’s INTERRUPTION of the ‘history of nihilism’ was philosophy’s redemption, its healing, the fullest possible deepening of its openness to being, and indeed the infinite increase of its highest eros. Within the environs of Christianity’s narrative – of Trinity, creation and divine incarnation – the language of beauty could not but become even more important, AND THE DIGNITY OF WORLDLY BEAUTY MORE VITAL, than had ever been the case in pagan Greek culture or the world it shaped.” DB Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, Part One, Section iv, ‘The Covenant of Light’, pp. 130-131.
Again: “totality – pagan, Hegelian, Nietzschean, post-modern – simply cannot grasp Christ as powerful in his powerlessness, cannot interpret him except as an evanescence. But Christ is no beautiful soul; nor does he come to the rescue of Sittlichkeit and its ethics of responsible action; he comes AS THE FIRE OF THE INFINITE, proclaiming another kingdom, another order, a story of being at odds with that of the totality he overcomes. To accept Christ as a real and appearing beauty, capable of assuming and sustaining his shape within time, is to be confronted by the limitations of the aesthetic of totality, its wearisome motifs of the hero, the peasant, and the occasional beautiful soul; the beauty Christ discloses remains invisible to anyone who finds beauty in a violent stilling of violence, in tragic grandeur lifted up above the squalor of creaturely abjection.”
“Nietzsche’s is a narrative in which the Christian God has never truly figured, and in the course of which the Christian story has never really been addressed; and the post-metaphysical flight from Apollo the tyrant to Dionysius the roisterer can have little or no consequence for Christian theology, because it is a tale told, and a war waged, between two competing paganisms” – D B Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, section 1, ‘The city and the wastes’, p. 39.
Hart says nothing, ever, about Islam; but when I reflect on his account of that ‘war of competing paganisms’ I must say I am reminded strongly of the history of the Empire of Islam, its continual abrupt alternations between chaos and a top-down order violently imposed, between – say – Gaza and Hussein’s Iraq, the Mamluks or the Ottomans.
I would urge Fjordman to read Hart – and to read also, perhaps, G K Chesterton’s biographies of St Thomas Aquinas, and of Francis of Assisi. He might be surprised.
at September 24, 2007 6:51 PM
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