Here is a taste of what Bat Ye’or and Andrew G. Bostom have to offer.

By the end of the eighth century, the rulers of North Africa and of Andalusia had introduced Malikism, one of the most rigorous schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and subsequently repressed the other Muslim schools of law. Three quarters of a century ago, at a time when political correctness was not dominating historical publication and discourse, Evariste Lévi-Provençal, the pre-eminent scholar of Andalusia, wrote: “The Muslim Andalusian state thus appears from its earliest origins as the defender and champion of a jealous orthodoxy, more and more ossified in a blind respect for a rigid doctrine, suspecting and condemning in advance the least effort of rational speculation.”

Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia

and

The Muslim Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations. This devastation- massacre, captivity, and forced conversion- was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim “inquisitors” (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators. Maimonides, the renowned philosopher and physician, experienced the Almohad persecutions, and had to flee Cordoba with his entire family in 1148, temporarily residing in Fez — disguised as a Muslim — before finding asylum in Fatimid Egypt.

Indeed, although Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule of Andalusia, his own words debunk this utopian view of the Islamic treatment of Jews: “..the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us…Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they..

It sounds far more brutal than brilliant …

One may read more here:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/001665.php

Thanks for your response Marie Claude.

Also, I suppose that Aristote is determinating for the new architecture gothic style in France, which is called the “french style”, where cathedrals never were so high and innovative as a building science.

They were opened to what wasn’t in contradiction to islam beliefs, therefore to philosophy.

“Muslims did not interest themselves in the languages of those whom they had conquered” because “Arabic was the sacred language par excellence, and that of revelation.”

Yet these arrogant supremacists fail, for well over a millennia, to notice that their sacred revealed Qua’ranic text is not written in Classical Arabic but in a blend of a lost Arabic and Syriac!

I think we may be on the same page here Marie Claude. And I think I can help you understand why the “brilliant civilization” of Al Andalous was so “kinda unbelievable”. It never happened. So don’t believe it. The Myth of the Golden Age of Andalusia Tolerance is a fraud, a myth, a social construct of the European Enlightenment. Islamic Spain was a place of fear, terror, massacre, oppression and genocide; a horror much like the rest. I refer you to Dr. Bernard Lewis, (Dr.) Bat Ye’or and Dr. Andrew Bostom in this regard.

Dr. Rubenstein, who I referred you to above, opened his lecture describing the debt of the “great” Islamic civilizations of the past owed to the Nestorian Christians, who preserved and transmitted to Islam the best of Classical Greece (and the Nestorians were repaid with expropriation, brutalization, humiliation, rape, massacre, slavery, jizya to impoverishment, genocide and finally with negation).

Hi, Bob. What you’re seeing doesn’t appear to be a lack of guts. Rather, it appears to be patience. One needn’t be dogmatically religious to understand that evil exists. The only real argument to be had is what ought to be done. You can argue that patience is the wrong approach; at least that seems to be a rational viewpoint.

#53 — They would demonstrate Intelligent Design, with Raymond Kurzweil et al in the role of intelligent designers. . .

Despite your amusingly ironic attempt at a takedown, that’s precisely the point of models. They exist to teach us, and learning what doesn’t work is just important (actually, moreso) as learning what does.

Even as primitive as computing is today, pharma companies are using models as a way to do gauge likely responses. Imagine the “designer” drugs that will be able to be made in the future when computing has enough horsepower to be more accurate; e.g. better modeling of cellular level response. Modern airframes are now almost entirely modeled from the ground up; this saves a great deal of time chasing ideas that aren’t likely to work.

the rest of you are busy making intellectual agruments FOR or AGAINST religion.. or sucking up to science and evolution..

In the mean time we are dealing with Islamic war as prophesied both in the Koran and the Bible.. Islam is a “satanic” religion. Satan does not negotiate, he takes no prisoners — he kills the spirit with hate — this is a war against God. The secular world doesn’t have the guts to do anything about Islam.. if anything, they play right into the hands of the devil.

You need to wake up people. All the intellectual babel in the world will not stop this impending march of evil. Allah will have his day in the “sun” with armies upon armies.. the only Nation that will survive is Israel and it won’t be because of anything any of you said or did.. the universe belongs to God, not man.. God will decide everything in the end!

I read it, thanks. Interesting. I’ve seen other such over the years. Doesn’t seem to me that the good Dr is really saying much other than arguing that sentience is an emergent property. This all seems quite consistent to me.

#62 — -but Darwin had many good reasons to anticipate genetics; you have yet to offer yours for believing that the biological explains the cultural…

Emergent property? Doesn’t seem to require explaining. I’ll visit your site and we can talk more.

#63 Chuck — Can we all point our rifles, metaphorically speaking for now, at the subject of this article? ?

Depends on what you think it says. Reads like old testament smiting prelude to me. e.g. wicked secular Europe and so on, caving in to the muslims.

Solway: would that be the same France that seems clever enough to have already anticipated and solved their energy problem by having over 80% of their energy derived from nuclear power? They’re bright enough to create nuke plants but too stupid to grasp the idea that maybe just maybe the muslims might be bad guys? You have to believe a lot that just ain’t so to buy the premise of this article.