How much did muslims really contribute to technological advancement?

they had a number of good scientists that i know of like al-khawarzmi and al-idrisi etc
but how much did it really matter in terms of advancing human knowledge?
all answers i got were nothing europeans invented everything hurr hurr or it was all in the quran my brudda

Literally fucking nothing. 100% chance anything they “discovered” was Persian knowledge whose source was destroyed so there would be no evidence that it wasn’t a Muslim idea.
Muslims are fucking worthless and they didn’t invent shit, sorry Achmed the last thread was right.

Im fairly certain they made some amount of advancements but Islam hindered them greatly. Plus most knowledge was probable stolen from Zoronastrians seeing as they were smart as fuck.

Quite a bit, at least the Persians did. They didn't just sit on Greek knowledge of geometry, geography, astronomy and alchemy, they expanded on it too.

...

can you not? either say something useful or fuck off
every time
but how of an impact would you say it really had is what i'm asking
did they contribute say as much as china?
i did some research of my own on the Baghdad house of knowledge and it seems most of said persian work was either translated or expanded on
so how much does that really count for?

>Persians weren't Muslims as well

>most of said persian work was either translated or expanded on. so how much does that really count for?
Not that user, but even if they did nothing but copy and translate the books they found, that's a significant contribution to preserving that knowledge until it could be "rediscovered" by Renaissance scientists.

>americans

If you wanted to be cheeky, you could argue the pressure of Muslim expansion and the overhead of doing business with them is what drove European expansion, trying to find a way around them.

OP here i've seen this once before and i'm not sure whether to trust it or not
two anons ere arguing about it
the version of umdat al-sadik was of an "alternate" translation and some of the things said about the "dhimmi" scientists were either ahistorical or just rumored to be true
care to expand on it more?

>only Wahhabist interpretation of Islam exists : the post
If everyone had to follow these meme rules pushed by sunni purists literally no one since Muhammad would be considered a muslim, I like how the post judges whether a scholar was or wasn't a Muslim based on said Sunni rules without even considering whether those people saw themselves as Muslims or not

What they mostly did was preserve some ERE, Persian or Hindu texts and then some European re-translated them back (like Toledo or Salamanca where a big deal back then becasue they translated lots of texts from the Andalucians, than got they own from the Persians, than got them from Sirian Christian priests and Hindu trade etc), the Arabic numerals for example are Hindu in origin.. As a whole the only parts than contributed something to the whole Humanity where some Persians (than ended mostly killed because they didn't have a haram enough view of Islam, mixing Platonism like the Early christian church) or in a lesser way the Andalucians (than ended mostly the same), also lots of people for some reason mix the subjected people in those parts to the whole Muslim thing, even when they ended most of those killed be Orthodox muslims (the fate of no few Jews, Zoroastran or Christians scientists/literates in they lands), things like some Astrology, Early Chemical contributions (like fancy distilleries),some medicinal, some Mathematics (lots of them Hindu in Origin) like making Algebra than does sense and lots of poems and historical legacy.

in regards to this i've seen a point raised before
where is the line drawn between preservation and expansion?
say how much of khawarzmi's works were actually just translations?
the issue with this argument is that there is no way to know what was really orginal works and what was mere translations
so how correct really is it to say thet they were just translated greek/hindu/persian works?
P.S about the arab numerals thing aren't the ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩ hindu while the traditional 123456789 are arabic or something?

>Reliance of the Traveller is Wahhabi

It was written in the 14th century by an Egyptian scholar. You might say it's doesn't represent all of Islam, but it's literally not Wahhabi.

>I like how the post judges whether a scholar was or wasn't a Muslim based on said Sunni rules without even considering whether those people saw themselves as Muslims or not

Is this the Islamic version of apologism for "Christian" scientists like Newton?

ye there was also the issue of schools of thought now that i think about it
ye not Wahhabi definitely but there was still the question of muthabs like if extreme orthodox muslims consider you a heretic and sufis/malakis/hanbalis don't are you muslim or not?

If advancing human knowledge generally means "was the knowledge we have now ever influenced or impacted by it" then yes. Modern science, philosophy and art was greatly influenced by the works of the Enlightenment and Renaissance, which gathered everything they could get their hands on: Ancient Classics, Medieval Latin texts, and of course Arab-Persian works.

It ignores the history.

To oversimplify,
>Arabs overrun Middle East and Central Asia which was a intellectual powerhouse already
>initially bad because war and Arabs were tribal desert fucks
>after a century or so its good for intellectual development
>cos Arabic is the language everyone can speak so communicating with some randomer in Baghdad from Samarkand to pontificate is possible
>Arabs also get civilised or replaced by Persian or Central Asian locals as leaders
>Muslim strength also keeps the eternal steppeniggers at bay
>Much like later Florentines would show status through patronage of art, Muslim rulers of this time collected and patronaged thinkers. Literally collected, they would take custody of them in peace treaties like writing booty

But.....

No, the first set is Arabic.

It's generally unreliable, as it leaves out enormous amounts of information about the texts and the lives of the mentioned polymaths to push a certain narrative. For example, what's not mentioned about Averroes is that he lived much of his life as a Maliki judge (one of the four current main schools of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam), how his religious works are still around and studied by Islamic jurists, and how the people who persecuted him were rival Almohad theologians angry over his political influence and were not at all mainstream in the eyes of the rest of the Islamic world both then and now.

>Is this the Islamic version of apologism for "Christian" scientists like Newton?
That may have been the case for the likes of Razes, but Averroes literally wrote the book on intro to Islamic law that's still being used today. And while Newton was a scientist, many of these men were themselves religious scholars, and their accusers were regularly engaged in accusing other theologians of blasphemy and other errors in a free-for-all over schools of thought. Even then, very few heterodox thinkers were ever actually killed for their beliefs, and acquired wide followings during and after their lifetimes. Razes for example died peacefully after a long and distinguished career.

>there was always a tension between Hardcore religious freaks who disliked inquiry and the basically neo-greek Muslim thinkers
>Hardcore fucktatds btfo intellectually for centuries, but then start to win
>Ghazali is there poster boy who leads the charge against the "incoherent philosophers"
>fucktards win, also helped by the ascendancy of converted of steppenigs in the area, who recent converts being converts were more fanatical
>The thinking man's Islam was basically dead apart from lonely Avveroes in Spain by the end of the twelfth century
>then Mongols

>it happened because of Islam which changed
>it ended because of Islam when it changed
>legit advances were made though, people suggesting otherwise have as big an axe to grind as the people who wank over it too much

Check out Lost Enlightenment, by F Starr if you want a good read on the topic

Your first part was alright, but I have problems with this part.

>there was always a tension between Hardcore religious freaks who disliked inquiry and the basically neo-greek Muslim thinkers
There was always tension between everyone on every side. Said 'hardcore religious freaks' fought each other way more than neoplatonists, and the neoplatonists fought each other over similarly little disagreements.

>Hardcore fucktatds btfo intellectually for centuries, but then start to win
>Ghazali is there poster boy who leads the charge against the "incoherent philosophers"
Ghazali was actually one of these neo-Greek Muslim thinkers who fought other neo-Greeks, and was similarly disliked by the hardcore religious freaks. His popularity saw the near permanent fusion of Greek logic into Islamic legal science for centuries. The real problem is that he also popularized mysticism for the common man, and that - not the hardcore religious freaks - is what caused the downfall of more academic thinkers (both religious and secular).

The thinking man's Islam didn't die until the 15th century however. It only feels like it died earlier because that's about when Western Latins stopped expanding and acquiring texts as trade and intellectual output moved east into Egyptian and Persian strongholds.

Their contributions continue to this day. We're constantly having to adapt technology to their latest murderous tantrums.

maybe >>/pol/ is something more your speed pal?

Theories and philosophy is all well and good, but their most important and most underrated contributions are economic and material: the Muslims created a knowledge economy.

In the Classical world knowledge was strictly an engine of religious/state bureaucracy, something that was required for the maintenance and propagation of order and ritual. But in the Islamic world it became a commodity, something to collect and profit from, a kind of capitalism that drove a lot of innovation ridiculously fast and over an enormous geographic area. With it came entire industries devoted to supporting it: tool-makers building astrolabes, surgical tools, even automatons, or guilds to support a glut of graduating scribes, or a service industry around itinerant students and eventually madrassahs.

Europe absorbed this through osmosis and developed their own knowledge economy, and the results were even more astounding.

I'm trying to oversimplify.

Yes it continued post Ghazali, and really it was his more rabid followers that did the most damage. But he and his wake redistributed intellectual resources towards religous study.

You must surely agree that pre-Mongol post Ghazali ME/CA had a much lower intellectual output than before?

Which followers though? Al-Ghazali is commonly blamed for this downturn, but at best the only source I can find for the claim is an amateur philosopher. There hasn't been a strong amount of research on this supposed influence. Religious works had a resurgence in the 11th and 12th century, but it hardly seems affected by Ghazali and had more to do with the rise of Turkic and Berber military rule cranking out war theology and propaganda to justify their rule.

Ghazali gained popularity with the masses, and those did not involve themselves with anti-intellectual violence until after the Mongols, and all throughout were hated by fundamentalist religious scholarship.

The pre-Mongol/post-Ghazali period was only about 150 years, and a lot happened during that time to explain a decreasing intellectual community - the rise of the Berber, Turk, and Frankish conquerors that replaced the old aristocratic Arab courts, for example.

less than leftists would say more than christians would hope.

it is well documented that muslims spared some pagans who created the house of wisdom for example.

i dunno greeks and romans knew how to built primitive machines. slavery stopped them from advancing forward

Fair points, maybe I am "great manning" the narrative a bit by slamming Ghazali so hard.

>i dunno greeks and romans knew how to built primitive machines. slavery stopped them from advancing forward
I didn't say they were stupid, only that knowledge in their world had a particular purpose to it and not simply a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Said primitive machines for example were generally relegated to displays of divine or royal power. It's why an ancient academy usually graduated and immediately placed bureaucrats, but a Medieval madrassah or university graduated a student with a diploma who had to figure out how to leverage his knowledge for a career. And while plenty went into government or religion, the best of them managed to continue their studies and earn a living on their teaching and research alone.

They translated a lot of ancient Greek and Roman texts into Arabic and helped keep that knowledge alive. Many works of Aristotle and other shit that contributed to the European Renaissance came into Europe through Andalusia and European scholars studying Arabic texts.

So I mean they never really had many original ideas, but they did help keep the flame alive before the torch could be passed. You have to remember that Muslims back then weren't as anti-science and anti-progress as they are now. Mudslimes didn't start blowing up libraries and monuments until relatively recently.

I don't have much against a great man narrative, but Al-Ghazali is one of the more confusing examples of being so overblown with so little evidence. Napoleon at least crushed a few armies along the way, but all Ghazali ever did was make Sufism popular and get screencapped in a legendary shitposting thread with Avicenna and Averroes, and somehow this is enough to extrapolate centuries of material and cultural change.

>nobody mentions Ibn Sina in the entire thread
What did they mean by this?

He was mentioned in this screencap shitpost here: But speaking of, the part about him is total bullshit. For someone who 'denied physical resurrection and thought the prophets were simply "inspired philosophers"' he seems to have been a completely different person when he claims Satan's followers whisper in mens' ears that there was no resurrection and when he wrote a letter to someone else about the truth and existence of prophethood. Also, ibn Qayyim and Ghazali lived decades if not centuries after him, and their opinions after the fact don't suddenly equate to 'Islam's rules.' But I'm sure a man who repeatedly read through the Quran on his deathbed was totally not a Muslim.

Veeky Forums is /pol/ with dates. Don't bother trying to find unbiased answers to things like Jews, Islam, Feminism and blacks in this board.

>Veeky Forums is not /pol/, and Global Rule #3 is in effect. Do not try to treat this board as /pol/ with dates. Blatant racism and trolling will not be tolerated, and a high level of discourse is expected
>Veeky Forums is /pol/ with dates. Don't bother trying to find unbiased answers to things like Jews, Islam, Feminism and blacks in this board.

Veeky Forums was supposed to save Veeky Forums. It was supposed to destroy the /pol/yp, not join them.

saved thanks
cute

Why is it complaining that he built his knowledge on other people before him? Fucking everybody does, that's how science works. He was extremely influential in the development of modern medicine.

I mean, they weren't for most of their history.

A lot of their knowledge came from the Greeks, Persia, India

Bertrand Russel wrote that they did a good job curating science and technology from other peoples but did not add very much themselves. At least not compared to many others. I believe he thought the reason was their strict adherence to their religion. Seems about right.

>At least not compared to many others.
Who are these others exactly? Aside from later Renaissance scholars, there's really no other period beyond the Greek Golden Age that's comparable - and that's only because we don't know what the Greeks curated from elsewhere and what they came up with themselves.

They were Muslim for nearly all of their history concerning scientific advances however.

>100% chance anything they “discovered” was Persian knowledge whose source was destroyed so there would be no evidence that it wasn’t a Muslim idea.
That sounds ridiculous. Why didn't they destroy all those Greek and Indian sources, too? Why didn't the Greeks ever mention these amazing Persian sources in the many centuries before the rise of the Muslims?

Romans weren't that big on science either. It's just that they didn't snuff it out like mudslimes.

True. I think they somehow managed to do even less then the caliphate monkeys, at least when it came to math. There are some treatises on algebra and algorithms from muslim scholars afaik, or at least that one example they keep pushing in every math book to show how great they were, kind of like how they push "womyn stronk can do science don't need no man" and use Marie Curie as the example every time.

>snuff it out like mudslimes
?

So the Christian monks who translated Al-Khwarizmi's works in the 13th century were SJWs trying to push an agenda?

I don't like the framing of the question. Islam should not get credit for the non-religious work of people who happened to be Muslim. We don't call it the Christian Industrial Revolution or Jewish Nuclear Physics, why should Islam be any different?

Because the specific culture of Islam C9-C12 massively helped.

The lingua franca of Arabic.
The heightened middle to elite level literacy.
The political unity which kept Steppelings at bay.
The expression of elite status through patronage of intellectuals.

They had a few historians, poets and mathematicians but by and large contributed jack shit and those who did were usually accused of blasphemy and/or apostasy so it's hard to argue that they were Muslim in the first place.

The ones you are unfamiliar with are Indian. One of the Arab mathematicians altered them so that the number contained as many angles as its value. 1 has one angle, 2 has two, etc. The ones we use broadly are Arabic numerals.

On a related note the Arab world uses both now but for some reason most Qurans use the Indian numerals

This evaluation of the Muslim philosophers and scientists is correct.

They were essentially admirers of Greek thought that aimed to smuggle the treasures of the classical world under the watchful eyes of the clergy. They either denied fundamental Islamic beliefs or tried to hallow an area that made philosophy and science ok. Their ideas were not accepted on a wide scale by Muslism at all.

The achievements of the Islamic Golden Age were for the benefit of Muslims themselves, not Europe, just like European achievements were for the benefit of Europeans, if others benefitted from them, it was a side-effect.

>implying that persians are not muslims
wew lad