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Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

My strong contention is that much of the credit for the "Golden Age of Islam" should go to these pre-Islamic civilizations whose achievements were forcibly appropriated by the Arabs under their "Islamic" conquest.

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To be honest it's not your "strong contention" but rather your ignorant or in denial contention, but I think you probably is the latter. In Arabic the word kafir is not translated to the infidel as made popular by the western media but literally means the "those who are in denial" or "those who cover up".

Why not you provide and share your proper references of your case for not overly crediting the Arab and muslim contributions so we can all can learn and move forward, or you can create a reference book and a thesis on that? But even if you can provide proper references, in which I strongly doubt, what's wrong for crediting the Arab and muslim scholars where credits are due. It seems to me you have strong enmity towards them that they have had more contributions to the knowledge than you can even dream of yourself in your lifetime.

You seemed to have popped out of the proverbial woodwork and that too of a most malodorous kind.

If you want to engage in a discussion on this topic, don't hide behind anonymity, understand properly what has been written and don't use ad hominem attacks.

For your edification w.r.t. my comments; there is a lot to unpack but here are the highlights for you to research on :

a) Arabs as a Ethnic group who originated in a particular "backward" geographical area.

b) Islam as a religion/philosophy/political/social framework which originated with them. Note also that Islam is the youngest of the major abrahamic religions.

c) Conquest of neighboring "advanced" countries under the Islamic banner thus appropriating their achievements under the same. Do some research on the civilizations of these countries as they were before Islamic conquest.

d) Spread of these achievements to Europe who named it the mythical "Golden Age of Islam". Note that this also includes knowledge gained from other civilizations who were not conquered but whose knowledge was studied and spread by scholars (of various ethnicities) in the now large geographical area under Islamic rule.

The above is factual History and this is what is being pointed out.

Perhaps Indian author Vishal Mangalwadi's example of the mathematical theory behind the mechanical clock would illustrate the flow of ideas well. He wrote (I'm going my memory here, so I don't have his exact dates) that an Indian mathematician came up with the theory for a mechanical clock in the early 11th century, but didn't try to build one; 50 years later middle eastern Muslim scholars were debating and studying the theory, but didn't try to build one; another half-century later the idea had come to Europe, and it was there in the early 12th century that the bishop of Paris suggested to his monks that building a mechanical clock would improved their ability to organized their communal work and worship in their monastic communities.

Mamgalwadi also asks the question of why neither the Indian nor Islamic cultures tried to build a mechanical clock when they knew of the theory. He suggests that the Indian Hindu belief that reality is /maya/ or illusion (and one meditates to escape the illusion) prevented them from trying to make a clock; in the middle-east, he suggests that the Islamic rejection of possibility of God becoming incarnate in the person of Jesus prevented them from trying to flesh out the theory, while in Christian medieval Europe their belief in incarnation primed the culture for trying to work the theory out in practice.

I think you've missed Al-Jazari who's well regarded as the father of modern robotics several hundred years before Leonardo da Vinci [1]. Some historians even suggesting that some of the da-Vinci inventions were copycats and derivatives of the Al-Jazari's more than hundred of inventions but he's not properly credited by da Vinci [2].

FYI, of al-jazri most famous invention is the elephant clock [3].

[1]Ismail al-Jazari:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_al-Jazari

[2]Ismail al-Jazari: The Muslim inventor who may have inspired Leonardo da Vinci:

https://www.europeana.eu/en/blog/ismail-al-jazari-the-muslim...

[3]al-Jazari's Clocks: Perhaps the Earliest Programmable Analog Computers:

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=2341

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