Hey , Arabs gave the world Algebra.

stop using Arab as a slur !

You know all that Greek Philosophy ? without Arabs it would have been lost while Europe was enjoying the Dark Ages.

The only thing Arabs have to apologize for is Fundamental Islam. Other than that they are pretty cool.

I can't forgive them for the algebra thing either. Horrible.

or any other fringe lunatics.

Algibberish!

Did Arab inventors of the Phoenician alphabet have some reason to avoid people who spoke Arabic while instead communicating with people who spoke Hebrew?

The Phoenician alphabet is older than the Hebrew alphabet, but Arabs did not invent it.

The Code of Hammurabi, from what is now Iraq. Amd agriculture. And geometry. And medicine.
But they also gave us the myth of the virgin birth.

According to Joseph Campbell, many religions adopted the virgin birth myth in some form or another.

myths and religion.

CAMPBELL: I taught a course at Sarah Lawrence College on comparative mythology for thirty-eight years. I taught young people of every available creed. More than fifty percent of my students from the New York area were Jewish; many were Christians – Protestant, Catholic; there were Mormons and Zoroastrians and Buddhists. There wasn’t much of a problem with the Buddhists, but all the others were somewhat stuck in their provincial traditions.

It was the simplest thing; all I did was to point out the parallels and identities all over the place. You see, when there is a motif – such as that of the virgin birth – which occurs in American Indian mythologies, in Greek mythology, and so on, it becomes obvious that the virgin birth could not have referred to a historical event. It’s a spiritual event that’s referred to – even in the Christian tradition. One after another, these motifs became spiritualized instead of historicized. And the interesting thing is that instead of the person losing her religion, she gained it. It became a religion instead of a misleading theory.
http://www.whidbey.com/parrott/toms.htm

The flood story is also common to many religions. Campbell also discusses this in the link posted above.

I believe people traveled much more in ancient times than we would believe. When they heard a really good story on their travels, they retold it when they returned to their homeland. A good story is a good story. After a period of time, it gets appropriated and plagiarized by the religious leaders to led credence to their religion.

There's some genetic continuity, but they're not the same ethnicity, by any stretch of the imagination.

Agriculture goes back millennia before the first trace of Semitic speakers is attested in the ME. Hammurabi may have met some Arabs if he got deep enough into Arabia, and maybe a trader or two in Babylonia or Assyria, but that's about it. Geometry was mostly Greek.

Even the zero was looted from N. India. Jared Diamond made one useful observation: Connections with other cultures and parts of the world help a culture's science and economy, and by conquering from Spain to N. India, the Arabs had a lot of input.

Of course, the Arabs claim it all. But they need to feed their honor, esp. after a rather lousy 600-700-year run, and not always great reviews before that (unless they get to write the history). The very idea that Indo-Europeans were probably in the area before Semites played a major role, well, that just can't stand. (Mostly they were mercenaries from Asia Minor.)

:dunce:

:shrug:

As much as I love algebra, you cannot say that any group of people are absolutely perfect or completely evil.

The Arabs do, however, have to apologize for Wahabi-ism and that fucked Saudi royal family, which as far as I'm concerned has empowered Fundamental Islam.

and support the House of Saud and Wahabism over more moderate forces.

I guess the House of Saud is the dictator of choice for the oil-addicted West!

Just as soon as you apologize for Germany and the Nazis.

dunno 'bout allergic, tho.

My only D in high school.

McCain's campaign couldn't try to exploit the transitive property of equality!

Funny how that all works out.

plain and simple....

Case closed.

concept of zero "0" = nothing. A numerical symbol to represent an absence and a deci, try counting past 9 and carrying another column without it. The Arabic culture is responsible for ours and there would have been no awakening from the dark ages without it.

Though many Arabs are Islamic, some are Xians and many are Jewish. People that associate a region with a religious belief are drinking Kool-Aid and discounting that regions scholars and philosophers. Nobody worth drinking a beer with puts religious beliefs before knowledge of facts.

and algorithms...

But nobody who understands isn't already voting for Obama.

Look what they are trying to do with that.

Its a constant struggle against those who want to drag us back to the Middle Ages, when religion ruled everything.

Omar Khayyam was Persian (now Iran).

He invented the calender used in the Muslim world which is more accurate than the Gregorian calendar.

He lived about 1000 A.D.

EXCELLENT MOVIE ABOUT HIM:

The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam

www.keepermovie.com www.greatomar.com

One of the BEST movies I've EVER SEEN!!!! REALLY!!!

Egypt... Persia... Baghdad...

Try multiplying 17.3 X 23.9 in Roman numerals.

we never would have had video games, motorable roads, sturdy buildings, cars, trucks, heavy machinery, etc., as we know them now. Algebra is the fundamental of the mathematics which gave rise to calculus, analytical geometry, differential equations, etc., that allow programmers and engineers to design the stuff we now take for granted as part of everyday life.

I thank the Arabs for discovering the advanced mathematics which allow us to live as we do now.

Another thing: Muslims have, apart from the fundies, a strong education ethic.

That will never be known.

Why?

Because the Gk mss were kept in monasteries and libraries from SE Europe thorugh the ME and in N. Africa. Byzantium had been re-establishing the Roman Empire when the war with Persia broke out, and lost most of the re-acquired areas. Not all. But hard on the heels of the Persian war were two problems--the Slavic immigration (which probably also hinded the effort against the Persians), and the Islamic Conquest.

Would Byzantium have returned to reunifying the Mediterranean basin, which would have had the consequence of bringing Europe more closely in touch with te Grk mss, philophical and scientific, that were in N. Africa and the ME? We'll never know.

Would Europe have recovered faster had Spain not been involved in a 600-year war, if Italy wasn't under fairly frequent attack, if they hadn't been under attack in SE Europe? If they hadn't felt finally able to not only defend and lose ground, but actually try to gain ground and establish a beach-head in the ME (usually dubbed "the Crusades", a war of aggression after 300 years of pretty much consistent retreats which are, by default, thought of as "peaceful Islamic expansion")? Dunno. Can't know.

In any event, when the Islamic Conquest was over, they'd managed to "collect"--usually after invasion and annexation--the mss that were later so graciously returned to the West, whether from Spain or S. Italy, N. Africa or the ME.

Now, we know of many mss that were lost because they're mentioned or quoted in those that survived, or survived in fragments. We don't know when they were lost--between, let's say, 50 BC when they were written and 700 AD when the Arabs conquered the territories, or during the conquest itself, or afterwards when "Muslim" scholarship fell into decline? Even most of the Gk texts themselves were recovered from odd places, not from Muslims themselves--they had translations made, and didn't read or concern themselves much with the Gk texts themselves after that.