The Golden age of Islam, scientific discoveries, translations of the Greek philosiphers into Arabic and other such wondrous things all of which are claimed by Muslims as their cultural heritage and gift to the worlds development and enrichment - well, er - no actually not, the people that achieved all of those things in that time were Christians living under Muslim rule

A Christian world under Islam's rule

In place of knowledge a series of myths has grown. One is of a cultural golden age in Islamic Spain, with Muslims, Christians and Jews living in harmony. Yet Americo Castro, who coined the word convivencia to describe the life of the three faiths in the caliphate of Cordoba, wrote, in his book The Structure of Spanish History: "Each of the three peoples of the peninsula saw itself forced to live for eight centuries together with the other two at the same time as it passionately desired their extermination."

The tension was resolved in the reconquest of Spain by Christian forces and the later terrible expulsion of Jews and Muslims. Spain was the only territory long under an Islamic rule where Christians did not (from the pressure of taxation, law and periodic massacre) eventually dwindle into a helpless minority.

To be sure, philosophy and religious discussion flourished for a time in Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphate, established in ad 750. How this struck more hardline Muslims is shown in an account by a visitor from Spain, Abu Umar Ahamad ibn Muhammad ibn Sadi. "I witnessed a meeting which included every kind of of group: Sunni Muslims and heretics, and all kinds of infidels: Majus, materialists, atheists, Jews and Christians. Each group had a leader who would speak on its doctrine and debate about it," he recorded with a shudder. "I never went back." This snippet comes in a fascinating survey I mentioned two weeks ago, Sidney Griffith's The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque (Princeton, 2008).

He gives a vivid picture of how Christians contributed to intellectual life under the Abbasids, and how they developed their theology in response to the stimulus of Islam. Theirs was a rich and unsuspected world.

It is well known that the West rediscovered ancient philosophy, notably Aristotle, via Arabic translations. I had not realised that the majority of the translators of Greek texts into Arabic in the lively early Abbasid translation movement were Christians.

One translator was Patriarch Timothy I of the Church of the East. He lived in the generation after John of Damascus, and he transferred his see from ancient Ctesiphon in Persia to the new centre, Baghdad.

Patriarch Timothy, who ruled his church for 43 years, translated Aristotle's Topics for the caliph al-Mahdi, in whose court he conversed with other Aristotelian philosophers on knowledge and the doctrine of God.

Such discussions were not to endure. A straw in the wind was the anti-Christian policy of al-Mutawakkil (who reigned as caliph from 847 to 861). It was he who squashed the philosophically rich speculation within Islam exercised by the Mutazilite movement. In our own day, praise of the great Islamic philosophers Ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Farabi or Ibn Rushd (Averroes) will win you few friends in orthodox Islamic circles.

The numbers of Christians in the territories of Islam declined with the 13th‑century Mongol invasions, followed by a rigorously hostile interpretation of proper Islamic relations with Christians, advocated by the permanently influential Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328).

Christians who still speak Syriac, Arabic and Coptic, who have survived the centuries, deserve our understanding and help.

Having read the above it is now interesting to read the following as it shows the complete disdain that the Muslim has for progress and development yet they as a people are more than willing to claim the intellectual property of others as their own

The Kuffar myth of progress

Another of the fundamental errors of the kuffar - one more sign of their ignorance, their pride, their refusal to see the Unity of Tawheed behind the illusion of their manufactured divisions - is the error, the Taghut, of progress, and the "modernization" that is part of this.

The kuffar, in their ignorance, consider that we human beings, individually and collectively, should strive for "progress" and that this involves advancement, toward some abstract, or mythical - some manufactured - ideal or toward some state of being.

According to the kuffar, true progress primarily involves two things: (1) advancement toward their manufactured concept of "freedom" ( see Errors of the Kuffar, Part 1: The Kaffir Error of Freedom) and (2) the acquisition of material wealth and material luxury. Some of the kuffar would add that progress also involves advancement toward, and the acquisition of, reason. Thus, according to the kuffar, people and their way of life can and should be judged by this kaffir criteria of progress - by the move from what they would call a more "primitive way of living" to what they would call a more "enlightened/civilized/material/prosperous" way of living. To achieve this, people must "modernize", as their ways of life must be "modernized".

The basis of this manufactured concept, this idea of the kuffar, is that life can, or should be, "better" - that there is, has been, should be, or could be, a movement, a change, toward this "better", defined as this "better" is by various assumptions concerning what is important about life, by assumptions about the meaning of human life itself.

The fundamental error here is the error regarding the meaning, the purpose, of our mortal life. For Muslims, the meaning of our life is to know, to submit to, to obey, our Rabb, Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala. The purpose of our lives is to strive for Jannah - to strive to attain the eternal life which can be ours in the Gardens of Paradise. Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala says:


"What your heart desires and your eyes delight in will be there in that Garden of Paradise you can inherit through your deeds in your life in this world." 43:71-72 Interpretation of Meaning

Need anyone say anymore?