I am interested in the validity of the assertions that Dr. Bill Warner makes in his video, the golden age of islam is not so golden. The following is a summary of the main assertions he makes:
The idea of a golden age came from Europeans who were critical of the catholic church, like Voltaire. Dr. Warner says that this was done to point to the dark ages as being so terrible compared to Islam, as an attack against the Catholic church.
He goes on to ask rhetorically "what wonderful novel have you read by a Muslim?" to make the point that Islam does not give us much creativity but it can do routine work. He also mentions that there are very few muslim Nobel laureates in muslims lands.
Islam was constantly attacking Europe during the golden age.
Muslims captured over a million European slaves during the golden age.
One of the reasons there was a golden age is that Islam was conquering a lot of territory and as a result brought in a lot of intellectuals from all different cultures, by force.
Muslims only preserved the parts of Greek and Roman work that was useful for them and as a result did not preserve any of the literature or art, and destroyed 90% of what they found.
The rest of the doctrine by the Greeks and Romans made its way to Europe only when Islam defeated the Byzantine Empire, and scholars from Constantinople escaped to Europe.
Muslims did well in geography, star maps and mathematics, but their achievements were very limited.
One of the dominant philosophies from the golden age (dominant because he later uses it as reason for why not many noble laureates are Muslim) is that there is no cause and effect and no natural law.
Regarding the golden age, whatever golden flecks (i.e. achievements) that came were brought by the non Muslims.
I realise that the language Dr. Bill Warner uses is a bit biased in many occasions (like saying Muslims crushing Constantinople, instead of conquering for example), but I am more interested in the validity of the points he is making.
Thank you
Edits: (1) by mod request, I removed link to video, however main assertions are summarised here anyway. (2) made multiple edits to improve readability taking into consideration that the post is now meant to be read without watching the video.
n.b. I read OP's summary; I did not watch the video itself
Boy, that's a special argument. Usually modern Islamophobes like Warner, a pseudonym for Bill French, appreciate the "Golden Age of Islam" because it tucks away "the positives of Islam" safely in that scary, exotic, remote medieval past.
I will say that this list as typed contains some things that are categorically false, some things that involve terrible modern projections onto the past, one true fact, and one ideologue professional hate activist who has never seen Aladdin.
Warner sets the bar for Islam to "have a Golden Age," by which he really means make any positive intellectual contributions, as "to produce modern, post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment, secular, scientific and intellectual output that values the classical heritage." Now. The time period he's discussing is, you know, 750 to 1150 or so. Post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment secular intellectualism is exactly what I, personally, think of when I think of the Middle Ages.
Indeed, there was an absolutely gobsmacking amount of intellectual exploration occurring in the Middle Ages--but not guided by modern terms of experimentation and modern ideas of subject division. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars all pursued knowledge towards religious ends. That's not something unique to medieval Islam. It's all over Anselm of Canterbury, one of the most important Christian theologians of the Middle Ages: "I believe so that I may understand," he famously wrote. Muslim and Christian scholar studied law and other subjects extensively in service of their religions.
Warner, on some level, realizes that his attacks on the intellectual output of Muslim scholars are groundless (yes, their progress in mapping the sky was limited. Tell me about those wonderful medieval orbit-based telescopes). That's why he has to cover his tracks and say, "But they weren't really Muslims' achievements; they were the work of people conquered by Muslims."
Indeed, during the 7th century into the 8th, Arab forces under the banner of apocalyptic Islam swept across the Near East, North Africa, and into Iberia--an absolutely stunning conquest in both its expanse and in its longevity. But this does not mean that the intellectual elite of Tunisia or Alexandria was hauled off in chains to Toledo and Baghdad. In fact, scholars of multiple faiths flocked to court circles. In Persia, Zoroastrians in the government, in cities, turned to Islam very quickly. Christian and Jewish scholars continued to pursue their intellectual work, including in service to their religions as theologians, as Christians and Jews. Muslim rulers in Iberia and Baghdad supported scholarship in a way that would eventually prove a model for Christian rulers like the Normans in Sicily. In a multireligious empire, that support was valuable to more than just Muslims.
But we also absolutely should not have a picture of medieval Islamic intellectual life as sequestered at a couple of courts as little tiny bright stars in a vast dark desert. Medieval Muslim ethnographers or anthropologists used the fruits of their travels throughout the Islamic world and their knowledge of older literature to produce vast catalogues of people and histories. It's during this era that Islam becomes the dominant religion of the West African gold empires. Not by force, mind you. Because enough traffic was going back and forth with the Islamic heartland in (at the time) Egypt that, starting with individual merchant communities, many West African people affiliated with the Mali Empire found conversion attractive for its trade-facilitating, literacy, and intellectual benefits.
This applies to the creative arts, too, which honestly is the weirdest criticism on this list. Medieval Islamic art (conveniently ignored; I wonder why) is gorgeous. As for literature? I'll make two points here. The first is that medieval vernacular literatures around the Mediterranean developed in contact and interchange with each other. Romance in particular--the style of literature so important to the formation of a modern literary sensibility that lets its characters be people instead of types, recognizes emotions and human relationships, and gives agency to women characters--is a mutual development of the Islamic and Christian literary worlds. Not only are Christian and Muslim characters written into each other's romances, but some tales have striking similarities. Beroult's Arthurian (!) Tristan and Isolde resembles one of the central versions of the Layla and Majnun tale in surprising way.
I'm genuinely perplexed by that criticism. Because honestly, the name recognition of medieval literature from the Christian and Islamic worlds is probably not that far off from equivalent. I'm guessing most English-speakers with a standard education can call to mind Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, and "King Arthur." They can probably also sing Eric Clapton's "Layla" and at least one song from the Disney movie Aladdin. Well, right there, that's Layla and Majnun (yes, the reference is the medieval romance; I've checked) and the Alf layla wa layla, a.k.a. 1001 Arabian Nights. There's loads and loads of medieval Arabic literature that should be as famous today--the satirical law commentary recently published in English translation as "The Art of Party-Crashing in Medieval Iraq" has got to be in my top five--but that doesn't mean that two of the most well-known works of the Middle Ages in fact hail from the Islamic world.
And again we cycle back to, Warner is just so uncomfortable with the medieval aspect of things it's hilarious. Muslims enslaved a million Europeans? I really, really don't think anybody of European descent (assuming the pictures of him I saw with GIS are accurate) should rev up the comparative slavery blame game, but okay, let's roll with it. Yes, medieval and early modern Muslims had slaves. Guess who else did? Medieval and early modern Christians. You know what? Sometimes they even traded with each other, either human trafficking or for ransom. If Michael McCormick's argument is right, the international slave trade during the early Middle Ages was basically the reason a Mediterranean economy managed to survive the crises of the sixth century and allow the subsequent rise of Europe. We don't approve of this practice today, much like we don't approve of border expansion through force. Again, the Middle Ages were not the modern world, which Warner just cannot seem to fathom.
But then, I guess that's the level of excellent historical methodology you'd expect from someone who talks about history on the authority of his status as "Dr., PhD".
Yes.
In physics and math.
It's worth noting that Bill Warner's PhD is in math. That doesn't make him wrong, but it does mean you should wonder why he ambled over into history, and why the history of Islam in particular.
Next, there are a lot of things that go unstated here that undermine his overarching point. One of the main things is how he freely moves between comparing Middle Eastern Islamic intellectual institutions to those of Christian Europe, and comparing them to some sort of scientific ideal. For instance:
Muslims did well in geography, star maps and mathematics, but their achievements were very limited.
If he compared them to Christians of the same era, their achievements wouldn't seem so limited. In fact, he seems to assume a Christian affinity from his audience - he figures we won't spend much time wondering if a secularist like Voltaire was right.
In the end a lot of his points rely on the audience understanding little about history, or being swept along by the emotional tenor of his argument. Military excursions, for instance, don't have any relationship to intellectual achievements - unless maybe they're a sign of centralized power, in which case you would expect greater intellectual accomplishment. Remember that Rome was constantly fighting wars on its borders to expand its territory. Athens was militant and expansionary during their cultural and intellectual peak. Galileo did his work under an expansionary archduchy of Florence.
I hesitate to give you an alternate picture of the Islamic golden age because I'm much more knowledgeable about the middle east under the Ottoman Empire than I am about the middle ages. Hopefully someone else can point you in the right direction in that regard.
It may be worth taking a browse through a few other posts on this video and/or its claims; there were several posts on this topic a couple of years ago, when the video was making the rounds
a couple of more recent posts:
How accurate is this image about the Crusades and Islamic conquests? - featuring /u/shlin28 and /u/textandtrowel
Islamic Jihad vs The Crusades - featuring /u/CptBuck
