Forget What You Thought You Knew

I became suspicious of the "everybody knows" theory of history very early in my life. In elementary school, we were told that "everybody knows" that the movies are wrong, and that white settlers invented the delightful practice of "scalping" which the Indians merely copied. In what I am sure was an attack of ethno-centrism, I just couldn't accept that, so I started reading up on the subject.

Son of a gun, it turned out that "everybody" was wrong. The natives had been practicing scalping for many, many years before the settlers ever arrived from the Old World. In one of the earliest attempts to "de-villainize" the Native Americans, some cultural anthropologists in the 1930's and 1940's had decided that they would isolate a few settlements of Europeans where the natives had not practiced scalping, and make that into a general thesis. Pretty soon, "everybody knew" it was true that Indians didn't scalp enemies before the foul Europeans arrived.

Until yesterday, I knew just like everybody else that the Arabs invented algebra. Well, everybody was wrong. Since President Peacemaker included this in his love-fest speech to the "Muslim World," a scholar at Tulane University decided to de-bunk that idea, along with more than a few others praising Arabs and Muslims. I did some further searches at the UC Bancroft Library at Berkeley, and Obama "knew" a whole lot of things that aren't true about the scientific past of the Caliphate.

In a post at Pajamasmedia, Tulane Professor of Mathematical Physics Frank J Tipler pointed out that "The non-Muslim Hindus of India invented algebra." Of course in his speech, Obama repeated what "everybody knows"--that the Arab Muslims invented algebra. Strike one.

So what else showed up in Obama's speech that "everybody knows?" The Arabs invented the magnetic compass. Well, no. The non-Muslim Chinese invented the magnetic compass. Strike two. The Muslims invented pens and printing. The pen has been around for thousands of years, and the Chinese invented printing. Printing as we know it was invented by Lutheran Johannes Gutenberg with the printing press and movable type. Strike three. Muslims invented the university. Nope, European nobility who wanted to get rid of their eldest sons for four years invented the university. We've run out of strikes, so I'll can the baseball analogy.

Muslims invented the decimal system. Wrong, oh Great One. The Hindus of India invented the decimal system. Astronomy? No, no, no. The Greeks of old came up with that largely via Ptolemy, and modern astronomy develops from Archimedes through Galileo and Copernicus. Nary an Arab nor a Muslim in the bunch. Though Ptolemy made the mistake of putting the earth in the center of the universe around which everything else revolves, his basic concept and calculations were tweaked a bit by his successors in Greece, Rome, Italy and Northern Europe, and we now have the heliocentric solar system. Muhammad and his progeny didn't get it. The earth isn't even the center of the solar system, let alone the entire universe.

But everybody knows the Moorish Arab Muslims invented physics, right? Wrong. Physics is founded on basic Greek mathematics and developed into its modern form largely through Western, Christian and Jewish (God forbid) scientists. The Muslim students had been taking a long recess. In fact, Muslim scientists never developed a system of physics because, as Tipier points out, "The leading Muslim theologians declared the idea of fixed physical laws to be heretical. The Qur'an states 'The Jews have said, God's hand is fettered. Fettered are their hands, and they are cursed for what they have said. God's hand is unfettered by such nonsense as the laws of physics, and Allah works his will as he chooses'." At least now we know why they hate the Jews. It is un-Islamic to believe that mixing hydrogen and oxygen in a consistent way will always produce water. "Water is produced solely by the will of Allah."

In his speech in Cairo, Obama singled out Al-Azhar University as a particularly shining example of Arab/Muslim scientific excellence. Small problem. That university still teaches exclusively Ptolemaic astronomy, with the earth still sitting there smack dab in the middle of all those revolving orbs--including the sun. Obama and his Islamoboosters should consider that the next time they want to make fun of some Southern Baptist college.

The only truth about Muslim/Arab scholarship is that they were great librarians. When the West tore itself apart during the religious and territorial wars, many great works were destroyed or disappeared. The Arabs in North Africa and Spain had held onto the works, but they had all been translated into Arabic. So many names of celestial bodies have Arabic names because the West never bothered to translate them back into their original non-Arabic form. They invented or improved nothing. They just catalogued it. And the few Middle Eastern works with some original scientific concepts come from pre-Muslim Persia (modern day Iran), not from any Arabic Muslim thinkers. Furthermore, the Arabs didn't invent the library, either. Assurbanipal the Assyrian king of Nineveh did that about 680 B.C., and the Greeks brought it to its height in the library at Alexandria, which the Romans unfortunately burned to the ground. Muhammad was not even yet a twinkle in his great-great-great grandfather's eye.

So when the day comes that Obama praises the "Muslim World" for inventing computers and the internet, you may want to consider that he's just full of European baloney.