God's Battalions--Western Ignorance and Muslim Enlightenment?

Much of the next section of Rodney Stark’s book God’s Battalions, which deals with the Crusades, looks at Christianity's attempts to stop the onslaught of the Muslims over a thousand years ago. Due to victories at Constantinople, Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy, Islam was beaten back from Europe. I won't spend time on the history that he recounts other than to say it's fascinating. The main purpose for my series of blogs about this book is to highlight the politically correct thinking that has attached itself to the Crusades and to show the true story behind them. For example, Stark has one chapter called "Western Ignorance Versus Eastern Culture."

The author says current thinking claims that while Europe slumbered through the “Dark Ages,” science and learning flourished in Islam. Stark says this story is "at best an illusion."

The key point for this chapter is that whatever sophisticated culture the Arabs picked up, they learned from their subject peoples. So, the sophisticated culture so often attributed to Muslims was actually the culture of the conquered people -- the Judeo-Christian-Greek culture of Byzantium, the remarkable learning of several Christian groups, extensive knowledge in Persia, and mathematical achievements of the Hindus, where Muslim armies had invaded.

He gives many examples of this. In one case, Muslims used ships designed, built, and sailed by conquered peoples within Arab territories. What about highly acclaimed Arab architecture? It too came from captive peoples, this time in Persia and Byzantium. Then there is the supposed contributions of the Arabs to science and engineering. Very little of this can be traced to Arab origins. Their best scholars were Persians, Syrians, Christians, and Jews. People have been misled because these early contributors to science and philosophy were given Arabic names and their works were published in Arabic. In another case, people may think of Arabic numbers, but they were entirely of Hindu origin and brought into the Arabic world due to Muslim attacks into Hindu lands. Then there are those who have credited Arabs with sophisticated medicine. Not so. Their medicine was in fact of Christian origin.

It is true that Arabs possessed much classical writing from the ancients. But this actually had a negative impact on their society. Muslim intellectuals read the ancients and decided these early Greeks must be read without question or contradiction. Greek ideas, such as those of Aristotle, were seen as complete and infallible. In contrast, knowledge of Aristotle's work prompted experimentation and discovery among Christian scholars in the West.

Stark then shows Muslim disregard for education by how they treated libraries. Early Muslims record the fact that it was Arabs who burned the huge library at Alexandria. Saladin, the famous 12-century Muslim hero, closed the official library in Cairo and discarded the books.

After dispelling the idea that the Muslims had a sophisticated culture, Stark turns his attention to those who suggest the West was terribly ignorant during this same time. He says the claim that Muslims possessed the more advance culture rests on an illusion about the cultural backwardness of Christendom in the so-called "Dark Ages." Those who discredited Western learning had a special agenda: they wished to indict Christianity as a backward way of thinking.

The heart of his message here is that these so-called “Dark Ages” were actually a great era of innovation with technology being developed and put into use on a scale not previously known. In fact, it is during these times that Europe began its great technological leap forward to put it way ahead of the rest of the world.

Stark spends the rest of the chapter talking about various innovations that Europeans came up with during this time. For example, they were the first to develop a collar and harness that would allow horses rather than oxen to pull heavy wagons. Their wagons had front axles that swiveled as well as adequate brakes. In addition, food production per capita rose dramatically in this time. Better plows were developed, a three-field system of agriculture was established -- all leading to bigger, healthier, and more energetic people than elsewhere on the globe. Other areas of improvement included armor, crossbows, and ships.

So, it appears that the traditional picture of Western and Muslim advances is far from the truth. Keep that in mind the next time you hear of the enlightened Arab culture of long ago.