The Muslim Civil War: ‘The Most Important Ideological Struggle in the World Today’
The quote below is from http://bznotes.wordpress.com/2007/08/06/science-and-the-islamic-world%E2%80%94the-quest-for-rapprochement/.
This “civil war” is ancient, and the triumph of the orthodox and more restrictive Muslims in this war in the 13th century plunged Islam into darkness.
Frankly, moderate Muslims remind me of moderate communists who lamented when one of their own goes off the reservation and does something right out of the Marxist-Leninist playbook, such as kidnap Aldo Moro, the Italian prime minister (’70s), and kill him.
The essential premise of Islam, that Mohammed is THE prophet, will always lead to the burning down of whatever the library of Alexandria of the day is, as we see in Afghanistan, for example.
Islam’s encounter with science has had happy and unhappy periods. There was no science in Arab culture in the initial period of Islam, around 610 AD. But as Islam established itself politically and militarily, its territory expanded. In the mid-eighth century, Muslim conquerors came upon the ancient treasures of Greek learning. Translations from Greek into Arabic were ordered by liberal and enlightened caliphs, who filled their courts in Baghdad with visiting scholars from near and far. Politics was dominated by the rationalist Mutazilites, who sought to combine faith and reason in opposition to their rivals, the dogmatic Asharites. A generally tolerant and pluralistic Islamic culture allowed Muslims, Christians, and Jews to create new works of art and science together. But over time, the theological tensions between liberal and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam—such as on the issue of free will versus predestination—became intense and turned bloody. A resurgent religious orthodoxy eventually inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mutazilites. Thereafter, the open-minded pursuits of philosophy, mathematics, and science were increasingly relegated to the margins of Islam.1
