Rethinking the Crusades, Part III

Islamic Revisionism

Sociologist cum historian, Rodney Stark deserves the sobriquet "mythbuster". In his book on the Crusades, God's Battalions he tilts his lance at some pretty big academic windmills. One is the thesis that whilst Europe was truly the "Dark Ages" during the medieval period, Islamic society was enlightened, intellectual, artistic, technological and proto-scientific. A corollary is that Europe was only delivered from the Dark Ages by the arrival of Islamic learning, via written texts, in Europe.

Stark argues that all of the so-called Arab (then Turkish) advances were actually intellectual property that was present in captured Byzantine, Persian, and European regions. This applies to shipping and maritime technology (largely developed from Christian Coptic knowledge and skills), architecture (the famous and celebrated Dome of the Rock built in Jerusalem employed Byzantine architects and craftsmen--which is why it resembled Eastern Orthodox church architecture); Avicenna--ranked as the most influential Islamic philosopher-scientist--was actually Persian; the leading figures in Islamic medical knowledge were actually Nestorian Christians--and so on. (God's Battalions, p.58f)

This explains, in part, why Muslim intellectual progress failed to keep up with the West and it degenerated eventually into widespread ignorance.

But what has largely been ignored is that the decline of that culture and the inability of Muslims to keep up with the West occurred because Muslim or Arab culture was largely an illusion resting on a complex mix of dhimmi cultures, and as such, it was easily lost and always vulnerable to being repressed as heretical. Hence, when in the fourteenth century Muslims in the East stamped out nearly all religious nonconformity, Muslim backwardness came to the fore. Ibid, p.61.

One possible exception to this is the early acceptance (via Syrian translations) of the works of Plato and Aristotle amongst the Arabs by the late seventh century. However, rather than actually encourage learning, Plato and Aristotle in Islamic hands actually stifled it. The reason lies in Islamic scholars eventually marrying the Greek philosophers into the straitjacket of Muhammed's religious monism.

. . . rather than treat these (philosophical) works as attempts by Greek scholars to answer various questions, Muslim intellectuals quickly read them in the same way as they read the Qur'an--as settled truths to be understood without question or contradiction--and thus to the degree that Muslim thinkers analyzed these works, it was to reconcile apparent internal disagreements. Eventually the focus was on Aristotle . . . . Muslim philosophy as it evolved in subsequent centuries merely chose to . . . enlarge on Aristotle rather than to innovate. This eventually led the philosopher Averroes and his followers to impose the position that Aristotle's physics was complete and infallible, and if actual observations were inconsistent with one of Aristotle's teachings, those observations were either in error or an illusion."
Ibid, p. 62.

This may not sound too bad until one realises that Aristotle's ideas were rarely based upon evidence from observation and experience, but rather developed largely out of his own imagination and conjecture.

Aristotle's Earth is at the center of a spherical universe, and is immovable. Within the terrestrial or sublunar realm there is continuing change . . . but all such processes are in the long run merely cyclical. There is no genuine transition, evolution, or novelty in the terrestrial realm.
Lynn E. Rose, cited in I. Velikovsky, Mankind In Amnesia (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1982), p. 53f.

This fitted well with the Islamic cosmology; it also locked Islamic scholars into an anti-intellectual, static bind. Thus, in the hands of Islamic scholars, Aristotle became a force for an anti-intellectual, freeze-frame, static, and cyclical world-view.

The narrative of an enlightened Arab age racing ahead of a dying Europe in the thrall of a Dark Age makes for juicy reading. It also served the purposes of Enlightenment historians who wanted to conjoin the Christian religion with ignorant superstition--or, as Voltaire acerbically put it--wanted to play tricks on the dead.

But it is not true--which is why the Crusaders in the late 11th century, and for the next two hundred years, proved to be technologically superior in the theatre of war in the Holy Land--despite overwhelming numerical disadvantage. The Dark Ages had apparently not been so dark after all.