If there was a general election tomorrow….

MNW67 said:
Yes, but not enough to discuss it without embarrassing myself.
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You needn't feign ignorance just because you are asked for your opinion. It's what makes conversation, 99.9% of every discussion on this board would not be here without it.
 
. said:
You needn't feign ignorance just because you are asked for your opinion. It's what makes conversation, 99.9% of every discussion on this board would not be here without it.
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I'm really not feigning ignorance. If you look at my posts they are mainly boring and technical. I actually use this board mainly to learn stuff rather than argue. That's why I ask so many questions. I honestly can't give you an opinion as to why so many Muslims are fundamentalists. But if somebody else joined in, I would enjoy following the discussion. I know a lot more about things like climate science and basic law.
 
MNW67 said:
I'm really not feigning ignorance. If you look at my posts they are mainly boring and technical. I actually use this board mainly to learn stuff rather than argue. That's why I ask so many questions. I honestly can't give you an opinion as to why so many Muslims are fundamentalists. But if somebody else joined in, I would enjoy following the discussion. I know a lot more about things like climate science and basic law.
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There are no wrong answers when discussing belief, just differences of looking at things.
 
. said:
There are no wrong answers when discussing belief, just differences of looking at things.
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I believe that most Muslims live in very poor, inhospitable countries. But I have also read that they used to be at the forefront of science and all things modern and then went "backwards". I did try to get my head around it all a long time ago but I didn't really get anywhere.
 
MNW67 said:
I believe that most Muslims live in very poor, inhospitable countries. But I have also read that they used to be at the forefront of science and all things modern and then went "backwards". I did try to get my head around it all a long time ago but I didn't really get anywhere.
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Romans, Greeks, Turks, Persians, Egyptians. All advanced but surely all this was long before Islam.
 
fillyboy said:
Romans, Greeks, Turks, Persians, Egyptians. All advanced but surely all this was long before Islam.
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There is a good discussion on Quora here. Especially, Tim O'Neill who I think is the eighth post down. The start of his post is quoted below:

The "Islamic Golden Age" was a period in which Greek and Roman works of philosophy and proto-science were translated copied and studied and these disciplines were expanded on by Arabic scholars from Spain to Baghdad. Arabic-speaking scholars analysed and synthesised ancient Greek knowledge, assimilated it into Islamic thought and significantly developed it. As a result, they advanced knowledge in mathematics, chemistry, physics, optics, medicine and many other disciplines. This period of rich Arabic scholarship truly began in the period of the Abbasid Caliphate, c. 750 AD, but declined in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By that stage medieval Europe was beginning to take a leading role in the advancement of knowledge in these disciplines and to lay the foundations of the later Scientific Revolution.

The reasons for the decline of the Islamic Golden Age is partially found in the reasons for its rise. As Islam expanded it conquered the Persian Empire and parts of the Eastern Roman Empire. In the process it absorbed some of the ancient world's most significant centres of learning. In the eastern Mediterranean the scholarly centres of Alexandria and Antioch came under Islamic control. In the east the Nestorian Christian schools of Nisibis and Edessa and the Persian scholarly centre of Gondishapur continued to be centres of learning under Muslim rule. The Nestorian schools in particular were major conduits of ancient Greek learning, since many Greek works, which at around this time were being lost in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and its aftermath, were preserved by the Nestorians in Syriac translation and so found their way into Arabic.
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Good. Interesting slant in the conversation. The Moors for example in what is now Spain and Portugal.
 
. said:
Good. Interesting slant in the conversation. The Moors for example in what is now Spain and Portugal.
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Yes, indeed, although I can't actually remember what period that was. Anyway, according to Tim O'Neill on Quora, various invasions destroyed the Islamic centres of learning and then he goes on to say that they seemed to retreat back into conservative and religious ideas. That may have been the start of what led to where we are today.

Secondly, philosophical changes in the Islamic world meant attitudes to free inquiry began to shift, which had some effect on the study of the sciences. As time went on, the ijtihād approach to the study of the Qu'ran and legal issues began to be replaced by a less open and more traditional position. The new attitude was that all the important questions had been settled and all that was now required was to follow set precedents and traditional answers. This position was called taqlīd, or "imitation", and represented a more rigid and conservative approach to analysis. Just as it is thought ijtihād helped drive an open and free way of inquiring about the world in the sciences, so it is thought that the intellectual shift to taqlīd saw a decline in that kind of inquiry.

There was also a struggle for dominance within Islam as early as the eleventh century between the falasifa or "philosophers" and more conservative theologians. The latter school of thought was exemplified by the conservative reformer al-Ghazālī, who heavily criticised the school of ibn Sīnā in his book Tahāfut al-Falāsifa or "The Incoherence of the Philosophers". Al-Ghazālī's main issue with the falasifa was the idea that universal natural laws put a form of restriction on the omnipotence of Allah and so were contrary to Islam.
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MNW67 said:
Yes, indeed, although I can't actually remember what period that was. Anyway, according to Tim O'Neill on Quora, various invasions destroyed the Islamic centres of learning and then he goes on to say that they seemed to retreat back into conservative and religious ideas. That may be what led to where we are today.
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Around the Middle Ages I think. I don't know if Islam hasn't evolved like Christianity and Judaism, I think it has, it's just that it has evolved in a different direction. I think there was around a 400 year gap between the Old and New Testament within the Christian faith. It can take a long time for thought and change to spread ;)
 
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