Islam’s Golden Age of Science

Posted on by

House of WisdomJonathan Lyons’ book House of Wisdom is about the most splendid period for science in Islamic – and particularly the Arab Islamic – history. This corresponded with Europe’s Dark Ages when a “great struggle between faith and reason was about to come crashing down on an unsuspecting Europe.”

The arrival of Arab science and philosophy “transmuted the backward West into a scientific and technological superpower.”

Too many Westerners think of Arabs as mere guardians of ancient Greek scholarship, holding it safely until it could be recovered by its rightful European heirs. Lyons wants you to see that Muslims made vast additions to this ancient base, and that the religion of Islam was a driver for many of their efforts.

Lyons feels the “Western consensus… that Islam is inherently hostile to innovation” is a “persistent notion” that is wrong. Because of this, Lyons tells the story from the viewpoint of Arabs – invaded by brutal, ignorant, and unsanitary barbarians (they tended to call all Europeans “Franks”) as the Crusades began.

Anyone clinging to a romantic of the Middle Ages will be disgusted by accounts of the People’s Crusade, fueled as much by political machinations as religious furor. A rabble swept towards the Middle East, killing and sacking through Christian Europe as they went, only to be slaughtered by Muslim troops. A few years later, a Crusade of troops had better luck in war.

The first couple chapters cover this period and amply document its horrors, but I was more interested in Muslim science.

“Early Islam openly encouraged and nurtured intellectual inquiry of all kinds,” which was encouraged by many sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad.

Caliph al-Mamun was anxious to collect knowledge from Hindu, Persian, and Greek scholars, and initiated the House of Wisdom, “the collective institutional and imperial expression of… intellectual ambition.” But they didn’t simply translate and copy the works of others.

Here’s what I found most interesting – how the religion of Islam encouraged science. Continue reading →

Indian Summer – Can We Be Offended If We Don’t Know?

Posted on by

Recently on Weather Underground, a show on the Weather Channel, the host said management had decreed they no longer use the phrase “Indian Summer” for a warm autumn day, but rather “Second Summer.” He went on to say some Native Americans find the phrase offensive but others do not, and left the impression he disagreed with his management – I don’t know how brave or foolish that may be for an employee on cable TV.

My Google search provided this as its top link: “Although the exact origins of the term are uncertain, it is thought to have been based on the warm and hazy conditions in autumn when native American Indians chose to hunt.”

While that certainly refers to Native Americans, it hardly seems offensive. Though I doubt warm fall days were the only time to hunt!

Phrase Finder says

“Indian summer is first recorded in Letters From an American Farmer, a 1778 work by the French-American soldier turned farmer J. H. St. John de Crèvecoeur…[It arrived in England] during the heyday of the British Raj in India. This led to the mistaken belief that the term referred to the Indian subcontinent.”

No one knows why the phrase refers to Indians, but Phrase Finder lists several theories. The one that may lead to offense is:

In a parallel with other ‘Indian’ terms it implied a belief in Indian falsity and untrustworthiness and that an Indian summer was an ersatz copy of the real thing.

Since no one knows the source of the term and there are many “harmless” theories, I’m surprised the phrase is falling into disrepute.

Too Much Debt, Not Enough Solutions

Posted on by

That’s the title of a recent opinion piece written by Alan Simpson and Maya MacGuineas. Simpson is a former Wyoming senator and was the co-chair of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (the Simpson-Bowles commission). That commission offered common sense approaches to controlling the national debt in the report it issued in 2010. The commission’s findings were of course ignored by the President and Congress because they couldn’t reach a consensus. Politicians kick the can down the road when someone, such as the commission tells them, “Our fiscal challenges are real. The solutions will be painful, and there is no easy way out.” Those words will never escape the lips of a politician whose primary focus is getting reelected.

The national debt has increased markedly in the past few years, and is approaching $18.5 trillion dollars. The article points out that people have a difficult time conceptualizing a trillion dollars. “If you spend a buck a second, you won’t hit a trillion for 32,500 years. If you spent a million a day since the birth of Christ, you wouldn’t be at a trillion yet.”

The headlines today indicate that our current politicians are not ready to take action on getting the debt under control. The new grand plan that was cobbled together to prevent a government shutdown increases the debt by $80 billion over the next two years. Debt has increased from 34 percent of the GDP in 2007 to 74 percent today. Further increases will only add to the crushing problem we are willing to leave to future generations.

Co-author of the article MacGuineas is president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and head of Campaign to Fix the Debt. I predict the AARP won’t like anything that the committee or the campaign recommends.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

Posted on by

so youve been publicly shamedJon Ronson has written a fascinating book that may scare you off the internet. It’s about the cliques (perhaps they should be called gangs) on social media, and how each becomes an “echo chamber where what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing… ‘It locks people off… trapped in a system of feedback reinforcement.'”

The topic is timely. I’ve read, for example: It’s “almost as if the Web had been calibrated from the very beginning to allow a bigoted harassment campaign to flourish,” from Slate.com; and that abusive behavior on Twitter is causing people to abandon it and could even kill the company.

Ronson examines the plight of several individuals who posted something that made them the target of attacks – “public shamings” that ruined their lives, at least for a while. The attackers claim to be punishing racism or other anti-social behavior, but I think the internet term that applies is “troll.”

When shaming is good
Ronson set out to “chronicle how efficient [social media] was in righting wrongs.” There were “recent social media shaming I’d enjoyed and felt proud of.”

  • Following an anti-gay item published by The Guardian, the “collective fury” of people on Twitter led to companies pulling their advertising from the paper,
  • When the Daily Mail mocked a food bank, Twitter users led a campaign for donations to the charity,
  • LA Fitness refused to cancel the gym membership of a couple who lost their jobs until a blizzard of tweets shamed them into agreeing.

“These giants were being brought down by people who used to be powerless [by] the weapon: online shaming.” Continue reading →

What To Do With Racist Origins

Posted on by

I recently read an article about expressions with racist origins, which said:

  • Peanut Gallery was a segregation-era term for the seating area for blacks in a theater. Wikipedia says “A peanut gallery was, in the days of vaudeville, a nickname for the cheapest (and ostensibly rowdiest) seats in the theater, the occupants of which were often known to heckle” and throw the cheap snack – peanuts – at actors. It says the popular comic strip Peanuts was named for this phrase. While Wikipedia doesn’t specifically mention a racial origin, todayifoundout says experts disagree on whether the phrase referred to race or economic class. I suspect the two overlap a great deal.
  • Sold Me Down the River referred to selling disruptive slaves deeper into the South where conditions were harder. NPR agrees, citing one writer who called such a sale a death sentience. Phrase Finder adds a literal use in print is in The Ohio Repository, May 1837; and the figurative meaning of betrayal by P. G. Wodehouse’s Small Bachelor, 1927.
  • Gypped, meaning cheated, referred to the supposed dishonesty of Romani (a ethnicity originating in India), called gypsies in Europe. NPR quotes the1899 Century Dictionary as tying the word to gypsies. Worldwidewords acknowledges the possibility but notes the word seems to have originated in America, where gypsies were few. “It may equally well come from the obsolete gippo, a menial kitchen servant; this once meant a man’s short tunic, from the obsolete French jupeau.”

I wonder if origins matter
If I want to communicate with people around me, I need to use words they understand. If I use the word “gyp,” launching into a monologue on why taking offense is ignorant sounds, well, offensive.

This isn’t “political correctness” to me. Words and symbols mean what the people you’re talking to think they mean. It may be a chore to stay current with the latest usage, but I don’t want to be a jerk.