The Armour Archive

HAHAHAHAHAHA did I say I had one? I haven't even discussed the original premise of the post. I have corrected a child for spreading disinformation about the origin of certain inventions and I corrected a child who feels the need to broad brush an entire state's educational system based on what is probably a product his own teenage angst and rebellion against what he perceives as a problem. That problem may or may not even have a basis in fact. Then another child comes to the defense of the first and spouts about his nonexistent credentials. You don't even have a bachelors degree yet so I'm not sure who you think your are? I await your Phd with baited breath.

I was referring to the premise of your posts, which I clearly stated in my previous post. That's what the word "your" means. I don't need any credentials to know that you have not said a single thing to defend the broad-brush effects of your own words against Andrew. You mentioned a website that I could find with a simple search for "North Carolina academic standards" that tells me nothing about the bias of teachers in NC, and the location of a central area for scientific research in the same state. Andrew graduated from high school recently and is surrounded by peerage and can recollect recent memories of what the high school experience was like for himself.

That's Andrew - 1, Astaroth - 0

Wow in what world does a website that lays out the exact curriculum used by NC schools (if you bother to read the pdfs) not proof of what the schools in that state teach. Bias can run both ways so whose bias am I too countenance, Andrew's or the teachers'? Since the teachers have a direct mandate to teach certain things I will side with them and since that standard of curriculum directly contradicts Andrew's contention then he is either mistaken or as I said his school is a "really weird school".


I love the fact that you can place a score on something like these posts so I'll score you a 0 as well. Andrew's score btw should actually be -9 as eight of the inventions he claimed were Muslim were not and he was mistaken about the curriculum.

Wow in what world does a website that lays out the exact curriculum used by NC schools (if you bother to read the pdfs) not proof of what the schools in that state teach? Since that standard of curriculum directly contradicts Andrew's contention then he is either mistaken or as I said his school is a "really weird school".

No, it doesn't, actually! Because most high school teachers in the United States are in unions that protect them from being fired if they are not up to snuff, so the scrutiny of districts regarding the standards is very relaxed (since it doesn't do any good for them to check, anyway!) At my high school, standards were almost never mentioned and the fact that a great many of students in high schools across the country today do not come out meeting state standards is testament to the fact that either a ton of people are idiots, or else teachers aren't doing their jobs correctly according to the state. From what I know of my peers, it seems to be the latter - most students I know who failed state examinations have gone on to be brilliant mechanics, machinery operators or skilled laborers in various fields such as construction or else have found themselves being incredibly efficient in some service-oriented job. But they didn't know fuck about any tectonic plates and Darwinism.

Also in my own naive experience, a great deal of teachers at my high school were not teaching the standards because the standard specifics were fucking dumb. Most students could do decently in class because they were taught what the teacher thought was appropriate - not because they were keeping up with standards. That creates high rates of graduation with low average state testing scores, a model of modern American education that is typical.

A list of standards means nothing about how classrooms operate in 21st century American high schools. You'll have to do much better than that.

-Gerhard

GIRLS! GIRLS! YOU ARE BOTH PRETTY! NOW STFU ALREADY!

Nah man, this is fun. It'll all get deleted anyway!

Wow you really think teacher's unions are out to protect pro-creationist teachers? I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

Astaroth wrote:I love the fact that you can place a score on something like these posts so I'll score you a 0 as well. Andrew's score btw should actually be -9 as eight of the inventions he claimed were Muslim were not and he was mistaken about the curriculum.

And yes, that's problematic. I'd blame wikipedia. Almost all of the inventions he mentioned are listed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_in ... eval_Islam

If one uses wiki as their source of factual information then said person is doomed to never even rise to the level of educated moron.

Astaroth wrote:Wow you really think teacher's unions are out to protect pro-creationist teachers? I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

I would hardly be surprised if they protected a pro-creationist. There are much bigger issues at stake, even, sometimes.

http://teachersunionexposed.com/protecting.cfm

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_bi ... _says.html

http://www.verumserum.com/?p=20091

http://www.protectingbadteachers.com/

The list of articles on this subject is endless. I'd suggest you do a search for yourself.

-Gerhard

Maeryk wrote:GIRLS! GIRLS! YOU ARE BOTH PRETTY! NOW STFU ALREADY!

It is quite sad right? I didn't join the AA forum so that I could hear my 15 year old sister bicker about her knowing everything some more.

If it will make everyone happy, I talked with my mom earlier and she'd be more than willing to vouch for my statements to date. She's an experienced teacher, grade level chair at her school, and was quite a few years over 15 when she had me(Not giving an age because that's disrespectful). She remembers me coming home and complaining about "the rednecks not letting us learn evolution."

A fun fact as to how backwards the local area is:
Until 1992(when GW Bush rolled through), there was a sign in the neighboring town of Faith NC that read something to the extent of "No Coloreds." Now, LAW dictates that this thing should have been gone long before, but alas, law is nothing in the face of the majority.

Also waiting for a recension of the statement that I live close to Raleigh, that was a bold lie, and typing Rockwell NC into a map proves that. Making a false point to banter a "child" is very childish.

Haha, I really can't believe that I got so into this earlier. Talk about provocation... I probably shouldn't have been drinking a bottle of Amaretto at noon, honestly, but it's no excuse - I apologize to everyone except Astaroth.

-Gerhard

Everyone...

Get on topic for this forum...
or get off the thread...
or get a time-out.

The choice is yours.

jester wrote:

Ziad wrote:I dunno. If you used a simplified version Geometric Kufic calligraphy, it would have been easier to read and to print with block printing than what they have now.

Here's a sample alphabet:


Since the diacriticals could be omitted completely, it could be done.


Z

Interestingly enough, Kufic calligraphy was the script of choice in the early amulets. Whether this is a choice based on ease of use or indicative of area of origin is up for debate.

Well, Kufic itself was the most generally prevalent at the time; the specialized Geometric version was less so. I am willing to admit that I have never been able to read some of the inscriptions at all:

But in a plain, block-printing style it would have been easy enough.

I suppose it is one more of those "almost-but-not-quite" categories that we stumble upon occasionally.


Z

Ziad wrote:
Well, Kufic itself was the most generally prevalent at the time; the specialized Geometric version was less so. I am willing to admit that I have never been able to read some of the inscriptions at all:
But in a plain, block-printing style it would have been easy enough.

I'm one who loves some of the things done with Kufic calligraphy. It can be freaking amazing. I tend to think of Kufic as a sort of "runic" equivalent script -- it works well "architecturally" and when incised, sculpted, or embroidered, while Nashkh and other forms are more conventionally "written" script-ish calligraphic styles.

Does that make sense?

Eff - it does. I have also seen someamazing masonry using kufic.

Yes, indeed. Mosaics (or, is that too ironic?) using tiny tesserae, with incredibly complicated designs.



Beautiful stuff. Like I said, reading it gives me a headache, but beautiful.

Here's something a little mind-blowing...





Z

Hey, the Syrian Orthodox Church, and the Antiochian Orthodox, use Arabic. Doesn't surprise me.

I dont think anyone is denying that a] there were Islamic inventions or innovations or b] there were great thinkers who pushed the envelope.


I think the essence of this debate boils down to three key elements

1] In the same way I hear the phrase "dark ages" or "barbarians," "corrupt church," "medieval torture" "Spanish Inquisition" over and over and over again, I find myself wondering where, how and why these phrases originate...and how qualified are the people/the evidence who cite these supposed things. At some point we have to question traditional wisdom and cite the proof (or results of) of such things.

2] The historiography and approach to Islam has changed. I took three 400/500 level courses on Islam in college and about four on Africa (in which Islam plays a significant roll). I am not an expert but I have a fairly good idea of the history of Islam and how we have viewed it. The problem I have with assuming anything about Islam, stems from the very same reason George Lucas wrote Star Wars against the Cold War tension of those years. There were trends in how the public viewed things and this is also reflected in how academia of the 1960s and 1970s viewed Communism, the Russians etc. Now, we have come to realize that there were pros and cons to the Soviet Unions long arm. The Russians themselves clearly loved their children too, but communism (while rather noble in its basic tenets) just plain didnt work very well in practice; wherein human corruption cant be quelled, communism made it worse....and despite the claims of the Soviet powerhouse....how durable are those claims? Has it really, truly thrived? Or has it had to come to grips and westernize in many ways to adapt to the modern world? Love, adoration and respect for something does not make its claims true. As I said earlier, the proof is in the pudding.

3] And so with Islam, the problem I have with assuming its past glory (compared to what???) is that there is not a significant amount basis for asserting it was any better than Europe, Africa or Asia at the time. And to be frank, while acts of God, catastrophes, climate change, and plagues can cause many cultures to crash and burn, others do not...they survive, regroup and the combination of discovery and technology continues. In short, they are ABLE to pick up the pieces and continue. So while my logic may be frustrating to some (I apologize), I also believe we are predicating questions like the decline of Islam in the 1300s on faulty assumptions of where its culture/technology stood in the first place.

Sure, no doubt great thinkers did exist. All cultures have rebels, visionary thinkers that push the walls out a bit farther. So if the question is, "what made a great culture's walls shrink," a part of that answer's perspective has to measure the distance in between the walls to begin with. And if it was as great and durable, why hasnt its supposedly superior and advanced legacy sent rockets to the moon? Or advanced the human genome? Or given the world Oprah? A big part of that answer might lay in the assumptions of its inventions, its technology and the culture that either fostered or did not foster as much as we might assume.

_______
PS, Greg, as far as Im concerned, this isnt about personal agenda or winning. Its about questioning assumptions (a question can reflect an assumption) without significant evidence to back it up.

There is documentation that, at the time there was a level of science and technology that did not exist in Western Europe at the time. This does not say that one culture was better or worse; that one religion was repressive and another was not. But it does say that, at that time, this was the case.

Your point 1 - which term were you comparing to? The Golden Age? It is one of the terms that is used to describe the period; what the dates are for that period are changeable, of course.

Point 2 - Okay, the approach has changed. In what way does that apply to the current discussion?

Point 3 - "Assuming" implies that the conclusion is not based on facts. The facts are there. What is the problem? By the 13th century, things were in "decline" from a prior period when technology, science, and the arts flourished. But you seem to have put in a bit of a straw-man argument.. "there is not a significant amount basis for asserting it was any better than Europe, Africa or Asia at the time." Nobody is saying that "Islam" was better. However, it is true that, at the time of the Zaman al-Thahabiya, the level of technology was higher in the Western Caliphate, for instance, than in the rest of Western Europe in most things.

And if it was as great and durable, why hasnt its supposedly superior and advanced legacy sent rockets to the moon? Or advanced the human genome? Or given the world Oprah? A big part of that answer might lay in the assumptions of its inventions, its technology and the culture that either fostered or did not foster as much as we might assume.

You seem to be saying that any admission that a civilization under Islamic rule could ever be advanced is a claim that Islam is somehow inherently better. That is not the case. Just as the Roman Empire could fall, and with it many forms of technology that were not rediscovered until the 19th or even 20th century, it was possible for Islamic society to lose pre-eminence in science and technology; conversely, a society that is now considered somewhat backward could once have been a leader in such things. Look at Angkor Wat - though the Cambodians could not have built such a thing in the 18th century, this did not mean that aliens or some lost foreign civilization built it and then left.


Z

Please don't feed the troll, Z.

Russ Mitchell wrote:Please don't feed the troll, Z.

Because he disagrees with you, he's a troll?

Hey, the same damn history books that blow smoke up Islam's ass, also tell us Armour weighed many hundreds of pounds, serfs lived in huts with no windows, and castles were drafty and cold and dark because light had not been invented yet.

Why assume one is correct when the other is demonstrably false?

We have selected entries from history held up as "shining examples" while equivalent examples "from the other side" are ignored or downplayed, and the contributions of Asia are completely and utterly ignored.

Because he and you are trying to force us to have *your conversation*, which is valid in its own sphere but has jack-all to do with the actual question the OP put to the thread. And for that purpose, the thread has *already* been split into two sections, but instead of letting us discuss the actual original question, there's a bunch of bullshit red herrings and straw men -- including yours! -- tossed into the thread again.

Russ Mitchell wrote:Because he and you are trying to force us to have *your conversation*, which is valid in its own sphere but has jack-all to do with the actual question the OP put to the thread. And for that purpose, the thread has *already* been split into two sections, but instead of letting us discuss the actual original question, there's a bunch of bullshit red herrings and straw men -- including yours! -- tossed into the thread again.

Read the OP again:

I've looked and can't find anything clear. I get the sense that the Islamic states were kind of cruising on the fruits of expansion for a couple of hundred years and then as the resources began to dry up the Christian states experienced a resurgence that coincided with the Islamic decline.

That's what we are addressing. They were cruising on the fruits of expansion.. then STOPPED. Which points out to many people that they were aquiring, not developing.

I hate to say it, Maeryk, but after ten-plus years, you have finally managed to chase me off the Historical Research Board.
Unbelievable. I'd say "I know you're not that stupid..." except I *do* know you're not that stupid.

Anybody wanting to talk history, PM me. I'll hang around to close out the other research stuff I'm on before leaving permanently.

Russ Mitchell wrote:I hate to say it, Maeryk, but after ten-plus years, you have finally managed to chase me off the Historical Research Board.
Unbelievable. I'd say "I know you're not that stupid..." except I *do* know you're not that stupid.

Anybody wanting to talk history, PM me. I'll hang around to close out the other research stuff I'm on before leaving permanently.

Ta! You get AMAZINGLY bitchy when proven mistaken.

Maeryk wrote:We have selected entries from history held up as "shining examples" while equivalent examples "from the other side" are ignored or downplayed, and the contributions of Asia are completely and utterly ignored.

Just to add to this thought - 'Asia' starts on the East side of the Golden Horn...

Sasha_Khan wrote:

Maeryk wrote:We have selected entries from history held up as "shining examples" while equivalent examples "from the other side" are ignored or downplayed, and the contributions of Asia are completely and utterly ignored.

Just to add to this thought - 'Asia' starts on the East side of the Golden Horn...

Yes, I know.. but you _KNOW_ teh Chinese had some incredible developments early on. They forgot stuff that other people didn't rediscover for another couple hundred years.

Sorry, Russ.

I should have known better. It would have been nice to be able to discuss historical fact instead of fantasy.



Z

Yeah. I apologize for the outburst. I'll keep the leather threads appraised of my research once I get the shield molds and supporting tools required for the experiments, but I've simply had it with the trolling.

Maeryk wrote:Hey, the same damn history books that blow smoke up Islam's ass, also tell us Armour weighed many hundreds of pounds, serfs lived in huts with no windows, and castles were drafty and cold and dark because light had not been invented yet.

You're reading the wrongs books.

-Derian.

Ziad wrote:There is documentation that, at the time there was a level of science and technology that did not exist in Western Europe at the time. This does not say that one culture was better or worse; that one religion was repressive and another was not. But it does say that, at that time, this was the case.

Your point 1 - which term were you comparing to? The Golden Age? It is one of the terms that is used to describe the period; what the dates are for that period are changeable, of course.

Point 2 - Okay, the approach has changed. In what way does that apply to the current discussion?

Point 3 - "Assuming" implies that the conclusion is not based on facts. The facts are there. What is the problem? By the 13th century, things were in "decline" from a prior period when technology, science, and the arts flourished. But you seem to have put in a bit of a straw-man argument.. "there is not a significant amount basis for asserting it was any better than Europe, Africa or Asia at the time." Nobody is saying that "Islam" was better. However, it is true that, at the time of the Zaman al-Thahabiya, the level of technology was higher in the Western Caliphate, for instance, than in the rest of Western Europe in most things.

And if it was as great and durable, why hasnt its supposedly superior and advanced legacy sent rockets to the moon? Or advanced the human genome? Or given the world Oprah? A big part of that answer might lay in the assumptions of its inventions, its technology and the culture that either fostered or did not foster as much as we might assume.

You seem to be saying that any admission that a civilization under Islamic rule could ever be advanced is a claim that Islam is somehow inherently better. That is not the case. Just as the Roman Empire could fall, and with it many forms of technology that were not rediscovered until the 19th or even 20th century, it was possible for Islamic society to lose pre-eminence in science and technology; conversely, a society that is now considered somewhat backward could once have been a leader in such things. Look at Angkor Wat - though the Cambodians could not have built such a thing in the 18th century, this did not mean that aliens or some lost foreign civilization built it and then left.

Z

Ziad


Let me throw some of my initial thoughts out to you....

First, as I mentioned earlier, no culture is an island with respect to the furtherance of ideas and technology. Many borrow from other cultures or expand on previous cultures. I dont doubt Islam produced great scholars...thats never been my doubt. I would argue they were truly rebellious innovators however and we have some degree of anecdotal evidence that this cross grain rebellious thinking is true. What I do have problems with is this notion that Islam created a ""superior"" atmosphere insofar as fostered continuous boundary-pushing of ideas and technology because frankly, where is this evidence? Or perhaps more presciently, where is the legacy of this ""superior"" cultural atmosphere if it did not or could not survive? I know this sounds rhetorical but there is a lot of truth in that question. If Islam did foster an atmosphere of such great and particularly profound discovery, doesnt it hold true that the results of that atmosphere would translate into technology, or transform a culture such that it would remain the powerhouse of ideas, discovery, technology?

You hit the nail on the head....many apparently vibrant cultures DO fall. I submit that those with a sufficient robust base and mindset, typically do survive turbulent times, survive and thrive again not long after. Transformation is part of survival; I would argue that the Roman Empire did survive through the Eastern Empire and through a lesser extent, the normative Roman Church.

There is documentation that, at the time there was a level of science and technology that did not exist in Western Europe at the time.

This is a very lofty assertion, isnt it? I mean, if we trace Islam chronology, the first 2-3 centuries puts us in an era of warring tribes and militant expansion. And yet by the 13th century, we cite a decline in Islam. By the time we reach the 11th and 12th centuries Europe is building cathedrals and entering the '12th century renaissance' and establishing the great universities. Some of this is due to the influence of other 'exotic' cultures, including Islam, Africa and Asian influences but its the combination of those ideas that allowed Europe to continue developing new things, new ideas, new technology due to its base social-philosophy which I discussed earlier. And by contrast, we should not forget that Islam had spread far and wide...and covered and conquered numerous cultures.....yet it began to decline. And, again I submit to you that the base social-philosophy in Islam created limitations which did not/do not foster certain types of thinking that would otherwise lead to a continuance of novel ideas, discoveries and novel technology. That is why Islamic countries seems stagnant, almost archaic to us, even today. Are there exceptions...sure. But look at the culture as a whole. Even 16th and 17th century European accounts discuss the Ottomans as "decadent and exotic" by contrast to other Islamic regions.


In other words....In all of this discussion, there is very little willingness to read the Koran and understand those teachings of the prophet and disciples that warn against certain types of thinking that might challenge the structure, the authority. In all of this westernized discussion we are frankly afraid to ask the hard questions about a culture that, at its base, has a very different social philosophy which puts question-asking and technology on a different shelf than we do.


PS, Ziad/anyone, I do appreciate the amicable, civil tone. *Tips hat.*

Maeryk wrote:That's what we are addressing. They were cruising on the fruits of expansion.. then STOPPED. Which points out to many people that they were aquiring, not developing.

Well, there are those, like Tyson, who suggest that they WERE developing, but stopped because of a philosophical development. I posted the link to that discussion, but it got peeled off into political.

And here I thought I was making a point...

This is a sort of repost spring boarding off of the philosophical development angle:

There are differences in social philosophies that can have a bearing on what that culture values or allows.

Technological innovation is not inevitable....there are times when a culture rejects something or whole hosts of things.

Take us in the west for example...we have not traditionally, in the last 30 years, been very big on: embryonic re-purposing issues, cloning, suicide, types of "inhumane" warfare equipment, renewable energies ..on and on. And while we may generally deep these as 'bad,' other cultures accept them more readily. Yet if a culture did accept these things, there would be, almost invariably a tracable evolution that would spawn other discoveries, inventions and technologies. But we have generally shunned these pathways, these routes. For us, we would generally find alternative routes.

To whit I highly recommend this series. Burke is a profound historian; I think he will be remembered as one of the pioneers of socio-technolgoical histories.

Most are on youtube...a highly entertaining and insightful look at technology, philosophy and change:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtWVfTiQQW8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONMx57cy8fc&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LEIlPsXnn8&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V3zfLOMMh0&NR=1
...and so on

.

Parts, you need to work on your chronology and geography. You've got a lot of high culture in the Umayyad dynasty in the 8th century. Your simply wrong when you say that Muslims were nomadic for the first three centuries after Mohammed. You're also saying that Europeans borrowed culture from Africa and Asia, but all of Northern Africa (the part Europe came into contact with) was Islamic, as were most of the parts of Asia with which Europe was able to interact.

PartsAndTechnical wrote:Yet if a culture did accept these things, there would be, almost invariably a tracable evolution that would spawn other discoveries, inventions and technologies..

That's not really how scientific changes work. You should read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (your library can probably ILL it). The wikipedia summary is pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Struct ... evolutions . Science - and cultures - don't continually accrue knowledge in an evolutionary trajectory (that's a myth of the Enlightenment that we still largely buy into). They change, because of a host of historical and social reasons, religion being only one of them, and that change can only be made sense of in its historical context.

The western middle ages (to briefly use a less loaded example than Islam) have been characterized as a fall, decline, and dark ages since the beginning of the Renaissance, and this argument made sense viewed from the perspective of a culture that loved classical antiquity. If the Roman empire was everything good and civilized (to the historian's perspective), then the middle ages WERE a decline into barbarism. Recent work that has (rightly) dispelled the 'dark ages' myth did it not by showing that the middle ages weren't as bad as people said (pointing out that there was a renaissance in the 12th century doesn't make the 6th century look any better); it did it by showing that medieval culture had a value when judged on its own terms, not as a second-class imitation of the Roman world. The work of Peter Brown and the other scholars of 'Late Antiquity' has been able to help historians see the early middle ages as something vibrantly different from Roman culture, not just as the fallen remnants of a collapsed empire.

There are two problems I see with the way in which you're looking at the 'decline' of Islam in the 13th century. The first is that it's measuring the 13th century changes by the wrong standard. Yes, Islam didn't create a culture of continued scientific progress (no culture does, check out Kuhn's book). But we aren't talking about the whole scope of Islamic history, we're talking about a series of discrete changes that occurred in a specific century. The question to ask is, why did Muslims in the 13th century choose to stop putting their energies into 'scientific' endeavors and direct them elsewhere? You've advanced a theory, that their religion forbade it. That's a historical argument, and can be backed up by research, which brings me to my second problem with your argument.

That is, that you can't use a generalized concept of 'Islam' to explain the specific events of the 13th century, because religions change through time, and people's practice changes through time. Some modern fundamentalists (responding to 20th century imperialism and western culture) interpret the Koran to be against technology, but did the Muslims in the 13th century believe this interpretation? It would be silly for me to say that shops close in all Christian countries on Sunday because the Bible says not to work on the sabbath. It's equally foolish to assume that all Muslims share a common religious culture.

Your arguments - that 13th century decline was caused by religious prohibitions, and that Islamic high culture was an aberration only enjoyed by deviants - are both historical arguments. That is, they can be verified by evidence specific to the 13th century. If you want to make these arguments, you need to look at several things. First, you need to read the religious texts from the period and see whether they support your claim that Muslims considered high culture to be against the Koran. Secondly, you need to look at other causes, because historical events are rarely caused by a single factor. What political changes were happening, economic shifts or climatic events (both important because your culture will probably focus less on high culture if its people are starving), military threats, etc.

Once you can show how the specific religious context of the 13th century was hostile toward high culture, and how this religious hostility related to the other factors involved, we'll start to take your argument more seriously.