At one time there were Islamic societies which led the world
in their arts and sciences: notably mathematics and astronomy but also
medicine, architecture, philosophy, and poetry. We owe to Muslims (and the
Christian Byzantines) the preservation of much of the literature and knowledge of
the ancient Greeks. By comparison, the Christian West was generally backward,
and I am sure that the Muslims regarded it as even barbarian.
So how and why did the Islamic civilizations decline? I am
not a historian but from what I do know, I think I can say this with hopefully
only slight inaccuracy: wars with the Christians were a big factor.
In Spain, where there was quite a glorious Islamic
civilization, with advanced medicine as well as philosophy and other arts and
sciences--and, incidentally, generally remarkable tolerance of non-Muslims
(Christians and Jews)--centuries of war (the so-called Reconquista or
reconquest by Christian Spanish kingdoms) culminated in 1492 with the fall of Granada
and thus the ending of the last Islamic kingdom in Spain. (In 1492, not
coincidentally, Spain's
Jews were expelled; the Muslims were granted tolerance but that promise lasted
only some 30 years.)
In the Middle East, where notable
Islamic civilizations centered on Baghdad
and Persia, there
similarly were several centuries of wars between Christians and Muslims,
centering on the Crusades, which supposedly had the aim of recapturing Jerusalem
for Christians but which caused enormous killing and destruction over a larger
area. Wars between Christian states and Muslim powers lasted at least until the
eighteenth century.
The last of the Muslim temporal kingdoms--and this is
starting to get off the subject--was the Ottoman Empire, which had absorbed the
Byzantine Empire (culminating in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople) but weakened
over centuries until its final collapse with World War I.
Copyright © 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment