Islam defenders miss the point

http://www.napanews.com/templates/index.cfm?template=story_full&id=6AD2CB24-F43B-4BA6-9914-B705220CE8F2

ED. note.interesting letter to the editor with regard to
possible causes of terrorism in ME.

Dear editor,

I fear that Mr. Wolfe's main point (June 7) was lost amid some convoluted rhetoric. As a veteran of the Ed. Biz. at the college level, I hear Western Civilization constantly badmouthed by so called "cultural relativists" who wax ecstatic over every culture but their own. However, the letters of Mr. Morgan and Mr. Dobson who defend the historical accomplishments of individuals (much inflated in both letters) of Islamic culture seriously miss the point.

One of the political problems of the modern world lies not in what Islam did invent but in what it did not invent and what presently so many Muslims reject.

One of my former students, a very bright, pious, Iranian Muslim, recently asked me if I could explain the vast disparity between the economic and political power of the West and that of the Islamic world. My first reaction was to say that the answer was far too complex for a mere English professor. But then, after some reflection, I said that if he did not mind some oversimplification, I could offer, at least, a partial answer. I wrote on the chalkboard the following:

Experimental/Mathematical Sciences

Democracy

Free Market Capitalism

None of these intellectual inventions (with the exception of some important mathematical concepts as noted) were derived from Islamic culture. In short, what Mr. Morgan and Mr. Dobson fail to realize is that between the 16th and 18th centuries a few middle-aged European and American males ("white boys" in Mr. Morgan's racist lexicon) were busy inventing the modern world. Among them were Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Locke, Jefferson, Descartes, Smith, Recardo to name only a few. They introduced the concepts of scientific skepticism and technological innovation, limited government and civil rights, and international trade freed from the limits of national interests. In effect, we live in a world these "white boys" created whether we like it or not. As I explained to my student, it is these unique cultural innovations that underlie the power and wealth of the Western world. And it is these aspects of our culture that a large part of the Islamic world rejects. When Atta aimed the hijacked airliner at the World Trade Center, he was trying to destroy, symbolically, what he and his friends hated most: science and technology, democracy, and capitalism, i.e.; the theoretical pillars of the modern world.

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those crazy NAPA professors.....too much wine.

!!

This letter to the editor matches a email I recieved almost a year ago.

Could the Professor be stealing his material from the net?

Sounds like something David Duke might come up with.

Just think it is simple-minded and ignorant.
It's actually quite hard not to be made aware of this "point".

That is fairly moronic.

Our number system is I think Arabic, you may want to try multiplying two large numbers in the Roman Numeral system maybe about once.

First Encylopedia was Arabic.

The reason why the Renascience happened was because during the Dark Ages most of the books of learning had been burnt just to keep warm, it was only because these books had been translated into Arabic that they were still around to be translated back into the various Western languages.

History is totally relative to where you happen to be living. For example if you are british the computer was invented by Alan Turing and Babbage, if you are German it is Conrad Zuse, if you are American it is the inventors of ENIAC.

Ancient Greece is considered to be the birth of Western Civilisation. They invented everything, Philosophy, Medicine, Geometry, Mathematics, Democracy, you name it, they invented it. They made these advances in a exceedingly short space of time historically and they did it as a small, exceedingly new regional superpower sitting on the edges of two huge civilisations, Mesopetamia and Egypt which had been around for thousands of years. A more logical explanation is that Ancient Greece just sent scholars into the old civilisations to rip off the work these civilisations had done so as to make the little Greek empire stronger and more competitive. Luckily for the Ancient Greeks the fairly new writing system they happened to use (which they didn't invent either) became the standard, so the Ancient Greeks got all the credit for these advances.

(This post should be regarded as speculative in places ;) )

Not based on new news article