Stark and his book--continued

This section of my summary of How the West Won continues with Rodney Stark's debunking myths about Muslim history. It has been said that Islam was so tolerant back in the Middle Ages. Is that true? Stark says no.

Consider, he says, Moorish Spain. Didn't the Muslims treat people well there? No, thousands of Jews were murdered. In 1148 all Christians and Jews were ordered to convert to Islam or leave Spain immediately upon pain of death. By the end of the 14th century only tiny remnants of Christianity and Judaism remained scattered in the Middle East and North Africa, having been almost completely destroyed by Muslim persecution. And as these conquered peoples disappeared, they took all the qualities that had helped advance the Muslim culture with them. What was left was a culture so backward it couldn't even copy Western technology but had to buy and often even had to hire Westerners to use it.

When Rodney Stark begins his 15th chapter entitled "Science Comes of Age," he echoes something he had said earlier when discussing Copernicus. Science did not suddenly erupt in a great intellectual revolution during Isaac Newton's time. This era of superb achievements was the culmination of centuries of sustained, normal scientific progress. He sees it as more of a coming-of-age of Western science.

He begins by attacking the claim that most of the great scientific stars of this time had freed themselves from the confines of supernaturalism and faith. He lists all the scientific stars from 1543 to 1680 and ends up with a set of fifty-two scientists. Were they skeptics like many during the Enlightenment? Absolutely not. One fourth of them were members of the clergy, nine of them Roman Catholics. Nearly 2/3 of them were devout believers in God while 38% were conventional churchgoers. Only 2% could be labeled skeptics. So much for the idea of an Enlightenment freed from religious superstition.

England ended up having more scientists on this list than any other nation. Stark believes that's the case for the same reasons that England led the way in the Industrial Revolution: it had substantially greater political and economic liberty, which produced a relatively open class system that enabled the emergence of an ambitious and creative upper-middle-class.

OK, I'll stop here. More to follow.

Yes, more from How the West Won

You know by now I think How the West Won, by Rodney Stark, is a terrific book that people should know. He rips up myths about our Western history which have been perpetrated in order to make Christianity look bad. Here we go on another section summarizing his book.

My favorite chapter in this section was 14: "Exposing Moslem Illusions." He says there are too many politically correct myths about Islam, including the claim that once upon a time Islamic science and technology were far superior to that of a backward and intolerant Europe. He starts with discussing the vicious nature of the Islamic invasions of various lands. For example, when Constantinople fell in 1453, what followed was mass slaughter and enslavement.

But he spends more time on the illusions about Islamic culture. He says the typical story is that while Europe slumbered through the "Dark Ages," science and learning flourished in Islam. Here's the heart of his response to this – to the extent that Muslim elites acquired a sophisticated culture, they learned from their subject peoples. It was the Judeo-Christian/Greek culture of Byzantium, combined with the remarkable learning of small Christian groups, plus extensive knowledge from Persia as well as great mathematical achievements of the Hindus that made up the so-called sophisticated culture often attributed to Muslims. Even the highly acclaimed Muslim architecture turns out to have been mainly an achievement of the conquered people from Persia and Byzantium. For example, when a caliph wanted to build the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, he employed Byzantine architects and craftsmen. Many of the Muslim world's most famous scholars were Persians, not Arabs. The so-called Arabic numerals were entirely of Hindu origin.

Many Western writers have stressed the Arab possession of the classical writers, assuming that by having access to the wisdom of the ancients, Islam was a much superior culture. Here's the problem, according to Stark. Access to Greek scholarship had a negative impact on Arab scholarship. When they read the works of Plato and Aristotle, they did not treat these works as attempts by Greek scholars to answer various questions. Instead, Muslim intellectuals read them the same way they read the Koran – as settled truths to be understood without question or contradiction. In contrast, knowledge of Aristotle's work prompted experimentation and discovery among the early Christian scholastics. They valued innovation and correction.

He ends this chapter by taking on another myth of the Muslims – that in contrast with Christian brutality against Jews and heretics, Islam showed remarkable tolerance for conquered people, treated them with respect, and allowed them to pursue their faiths without interference. The truth is quite different. Stark says it is true that the Koran forbids forced conversions, but that doesn't mean much given that many subject peoples were often allowed to choose conversion as an alternative to death or enslavement. Jews and Christians were supposed to be tolerated and permitted to follow their faiths, but this was allowed only under quite repressive conditions. Death was (and remains) the fate of any Muslim who converted to either faith. No new churches or synagogues could be built. Jews and Christians were prohibited from praying or reading their Scriptures aloud, even in their homes or in churches or synagogues, less Muslims should accidentally hear them. Muslim authorities went to great lengths to humiliate and punished Jews and Christians who refused to convert to Islam. They imposed restrictive laws on Christians and Jews. Their taxes were severe in comparison with Muslims. Starting in the 1300s, mobs began destroying Christian churches throughout Egypt, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Syria.

So, again Stark has shown the deliberate rewriting of history, done to put down the Christian West. Thanks for the truth, Mr. Stark.

How the West Won--continued

I just saw a review of How the West Won in Salvo, a great magazine. Hope you get a copy and enjoy it when you have the chance. The book got a glowing review. That's why I'm spending so much time summarizing the book--so you can make a case for the values of the Western world and all the good it has done, thanks to its foundational ideas, including Christianity.

The author, Rodney Stark, moves to a discussion of the Reformation. And he claims this name is not exactly true. There were several independent and quite different  reformations involving Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism. The backbone of the most famous of these, the Lutheran Reformation, was provided by urban middle and upper middle class people – the merchants, bankers, lawyers, physicians, manufacturers, schoolmasters, shopkeepers, and bureaucrats. They were effective because many German towns and cities had sufficient autonomy to make Lutheranism the only lawful faith without suffering outside interference. So, once again Stark goes back to his key idea – small, local governments foster more creative ideas than do large empires. 

As a side note, Stark takes on myths dealing with Puritans, who arose during this time. He says many have spread the idea that the Puritans initiated an era of extreme sexual repression which has lived on to disfigure modern life. He quotes Bertrand Russell: "Puritanism consisted of the determination to avoid the pleasures of sex." But Stark points out that this is a malicious myth; the Puritans were very frank and enlightened about sex. Whenever I teach a class on American literature and we are reading Puritan authors, I feel like I have to discuss this and other unfair stereotypes about Puritans with my students. I have a talk that focuses on the benefits of the Puritans to American culture--education, science, free enterprise, hard work, morality, giving, etc. It's so sad that today's students know so little about these people.

Yes, more from Stark's book

OK, on we go--another section summarized of Rodney Stark's book How the West Won. Terrific book.

Of course, slavery is terrible but in chapter 11 Stark wants to point out the falsity of the claim that Europeans forced slave trading on Africans. The enslavement and sale of black Africans by other black Africans goes back at least to ancient Egypt, where the pharaohs bought large numbers of black slaves. As mentioned before, the Catholic Church condemned slavery in the New World, but the Pope had very little power among the Spanish and Portuguese. He ends this section by saying, "We would do well to remember that had it not been for the rise of Western modernity, slavery would still be everywhere. Even today, it exists in too many places."

Another false claim Stark takes on is the myth of the "noble savage." Europe's intellectuals during this time (around 1750)depicted the Indians as people unsullied by civilization and therefore innocent, honest, gentle, moral, peaceful, kind, and generous. One of the most influential proponents of this idea was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

However, there are many obvious historical facts that contradict this picture. For one thing, Stark points out the existence of New World cannibalism. Archaeology has also revealed the pre-Columbian remains of North American Indians who were scalped, so it's not true that it was the Europeans who taught the Indians this awful practice. Needless to say, warfare was chronic everywhere in the New World. 

In addition, the inhabitants of the New World had no notions about ecology; there is ample evidence of Indian activities inconsistent with reverence for the earth, including deforestation and worn-out fields. Take the Mayans as an example. They apparently succumbed to a combination of ecological disaster and large-scale warfare. They appear to have cleared too much of the forest for cropland, slowly wearing out the soil to such an extent they were helpless when faced with a minor decline in rainfall. There's one more  point he brings up – slavery was widespread in pre-Columbian North America, and it was as brutal as anywhere else. As an illustration, Stark says in 1838, when the Cherokee  Indians were forced to leave Georgia for resettlement in the Oklahoma territory (the famous "Trail of Tears"), they took along a number of their black slaves.

That's enough to think about for now.