I've been looking into this and it's legit.
The advances in science and type of culture that was growing was like the Renaissance but 500 years earlier.
What ultimatly ended it though as religious fundamentalism. The Mu'tazilites and people like Avicenna were already discovering Empiricism. They were putting rationalism and investigation above faith. Avicenna for instance denied that miracles can happen because they are not consistent with a naturalistic universe.
The conservative religious folk starting feeling threatened and sought to remove this new philosophy in favor of the Quaran being the final say on everything. We starting getting philosophy like al-Ghazālī that denied causality even existed and that every event in the universe is just Allah using his magic to make things happen (ie gravity isn't a natural force, it's just God pushing things down and it's just as conceivable God could push things up and have us fly)
>>401119
it seems like Islamic golden age is a misnomer
and then it was an Arabic golden age considering like you said above the religious officials put down those kinds of ideas and set the Islamic world back who knows how long
>>401119
Islamic fundamentalists hate Ash'arism and oppose al-Ghazali's teachings.
They follow Ibn Taymiyya, not al-Ghazali.
Also, Ash'arism is not anti-science. Science in the modern sense didn't exist at the time of al-Ghazali. It's anachronistic and foolish to conflate the non-empirical and mostly incorrect Aristotelian "natural philosophy" that al-Ghazali opposed with the scientific method.
Al-Ghazali barely even spoke on anything we would call science.
Islamic Golden Age dies with the Mongol conquests and the destruction of Baghdad, the cultural and intellectual capital of the world at that time.
Ash'arism was the dominant theological position among Muslims for well over a century before Imam al-Ghazali. Ash'arism also has no appreciable "anti-scientific" component. Ibn an-Nafis (who studied pulmonary circulation) was an Ash'ari.
The "Islamic Golden Age" was largely that due to material prosperity. It's a little harder for emirs to spend lavishly on intellectual projects when the Mongols are slaughtering everyone and the Islamic world is in constant internecine war.
Economic decline is where the age declines. Not religious "fervor", if it could even be described as such.
>>401119
>al-Ghazālī
You realize he was basically Hume, right?
>>401119
So basically the Abbasids kept the Islamic religion in a straight jacket while the Persians and other advanced subjects got back to what they had been doing before the muzzies interrupted
>>401365
Avicenna wasn't an arab. Neither was al-Ghazali, by the way.
>>401119
>discover rationalism
>golden age ends
Who would've thought
>>401398
was he an evil Hume? I'm getting the impression he just created a big form of skepticism about causality and than invited Allah to come in and fill the gap.
>>401396
I agree with what you're saying about al-Ghazali, but I think blaming the Mongols alone is too simplistic. They certainly did huge damage, but that doesn't explain why Islamic science died in the western Islamic world, nor why it didn't revive after the Islamic world recovered economically and politically. There was definitely a turn away from natural philosophy at some point in the Islamic world, as seen with the destruction of the observatories of Ulugh Beg and Taqi ad-Din. Education certainly became much more focused on religious matters than natural philosophy over time. In addition, Muslims became much more reluctant to borrow non-Islamic ideas like the printing press compared to before when they had no problem borrowing stuff paper-making from the Chinese or numerals from India.
>>401444
I haven't read any of his books fully, but I'm pretty sure that Ghazali was just a mystic saying that stuff because his point was that the terrenal visible world was irrelevant? You know, he was a sufi, rationalism didn't fit his objectives.
>>401444
>Al-Ghazâlî maintained this undecided position throughout his lifetime. Given the fact that neither observation nor any other means of knowing (including revelation) gives a decisive proof for the existence or non-existence of a connection between a cause and its effect, we must suspend our judgment on this matter.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/al-ghazali/#TwoDifConMod
The SEP article on him is quite good. He is a bit more nuanced than the broadview historical narratives make him out to be.
More like the Second Persian Golden Age--a disproportionate amount of Muslim thinkers were Iranian.
>>401544
>In at least three passages of the Incoherence al-Ghazâlî criticizes Avicenna's understanding of the modalities. Here he refers to another, closely related dispute, namely that for Avicenna the modalities exist in reality while for al-Ghazâlî they exist only as judgments in the minds of humans (al-Ghazâlî 2000, 42.2–5, 124.10–11, 207.4–14). He denies Avicenna's premise that possibility needs a substrate. This premise is Aristotelian—it is the basis to the principle of entelechy, namely that all things have potentialities and are driven to actualize them (Dutton 2001, 26–7) Al-Ghazâlî shifts, as Kukkonen (2000, 488–9) puts it, the locus of the presumption of a thing's actual existence from the plane of the actualized reality to the plane of mental conceivability.
Interesting, sounds like Ghazali had something closer to a "possible world" semantics than Avicenna, whereby possibility is just about alternate logical space, rather than looking at real beings and determining what their capacities are more or less empirically.
>>401396
To the west, al-andalus' cultural and intelectual output was slashed because the almoravids and later the almohads had taken over the region. And this because the almoravids and the almohads were ascetics who despised things such as poetry and music and encouraged religious fervor and literalism
>>401119
>I've been looking into this and it's legit.
Was there really anyone who ever seriously doubted it besides shitposters?
>What ultimatly ended it though as religious fundamentalism.
That's sort of the simplified version of it, but it was probably one of the biggest problems and the one that's most relatable to today. They were also suffering from a lot of internal instability towards the end.
>>401479
The key I think is to study why there were so many educated and innovative thinkers coming out of Eastern Iran/Khwarezm and Andalusia, and from what I've learned the downfall comes from a change in both culture and economics of the Muslim middle class after the 12th century, the decline of easy travel (and with it the decline of the rate of dissimulation of new knowledge), and the rise of the vigilante Muslim peasantry and their Sufi rabble-rousers on top of more obvious events such as the Spanish and Mongol conquest and destruction of the Maghreb and Central Asia.
In the 9th-11th centuries scholars living in Bukhara, Damascus, and Cordoba could all debate and write books arguing with one another within the span of a century, and any one of them could pack up everything and move to either of the two regions.
>>401620
if you read travelogues from the early modern era and the 19th century, the thing that sticks out as most different about the region is how incredibly dangerous traveling had become. getting robbed or enslaved by brigands was very common, and in order to go anywhere safely you pretty much needed a small army. even the big post-mongol empires like the Ottomans never really got this under control
>>401721
Ibn Battuta had nor problem traveling in the 14th century, and I don't see any reason it would have been any different during the Gunpowder Empires. It was only really the 18th century onward that saw political decline and travel becoming more dangerous.
>>401479
someone else described the sack of bagdad as the death blow to a declining culture
>>401119
>al-Ghazali didn't beliebe in science!
FUCK YOU NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON STICK TO ASTROPHYSICS REEEEEE
>>401559
>And this because the almoravids and the almohads were ascetics who despised things such as poetry and music and encouraged religious fervor and literalism
That's absolutely not true, ibn Khaldun speaks highly of the Andalusian literary salons culture of this time, which is also responsible for siring Ibn Arabi, who was opposite of someone who despised things such as poetry and music and encouraged religious fervor and literalism.
>>401548
when did the first one happen?
This one is a must watch, guys. Gives you a very good insight into the Islamic Golden age and just how crucial it was for our civilization.
https://youtu.be/JZDe9DCx7Wk
>>401396
>Islamic Golden Age dies with the Mongol conquests and the destruction of Baghdad, the cultural and intellectual capital of the world at that time.
Baghdad was already in decline long before the mongols showed up.
The Muslim rulers, often ruling over very diverse groups of people, used religion to justify their hegemony. This gave quite a bit of power to the learned interpreters of scripture, and the rulers were more inclined to support the mullah who preached least about changing things.
>>402049
Its technically the third. You had the first Persian Golden Age under Shapur II the Great in the first half of the Sassanid Empire, which coincided with the decline of the unified Roman Empire in the early 4th century.
The second occured during the reign of Khosrau Anushurivan/Khosrau I in the mid 6th century.
>>402107
yeah, but did they have as much scientific and cultural output?
I never hear about pre-Islamic Persian scholars, is that because Zoroastrians aren't as relevant as Muslims are right now?
>>402165
>but did they have as much scientific and cultural output
Yep. Look up things like the Academy of Gondishapur, the Grand School, and so on, mate.
>>402179
Why aren't those pushed as hard as the Islamic Golden age? Is it because there are no Zoroastrians blowing themselves up in the West?
>>402179
What did they actually produce though? What ideas or inventions did they contribute to the world?
>>402214
Because Western society isn't as familiar with Pre-Islamic Iranian culture or history.
>>402235
Plenty, just research it. Promotion of stuff from the East to the West like backgammon and chess as well as polo, continuation and conservation of pre-Christian European schools of thought like Noe-Platonism, and even early physicans who were identifying anti-bodies in human blood vessels.
Just a reminder that there is no actual archeological evidence of any "Islamic Golden Age".
We have tons of ruins of Rome and Greece, of Ancient Persia and Babylon, but nothing found in Córdoba, Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo or Harar fit the descriptions made in Islamic works.
Oh, and all the intellectual achievements of the time were made by cryptopagan Persians working on the translations of Greek authors made by Syriac Christians. Arab Muslims had no relevance at all.
>>402321
Also Cordoba's wealth and culture were due to the large Jewish population, not the Muslims.
>>402321
>>402364
>>402364
>>402235
>What did they actually produce though?
Nothing comparable to what came after except competent bureaucrats, which is what made it different from the later Caliphate era where schools, rather than being state academies for the propagation of a political elite, were ad hoc fraternities of teachers and students that created a merchant middle class. The academies of Sassanid Persia and the Byzantine Empire were well maintained schools, but their output was higher education rather than independent research.
>>402321
There are entire city complexes uncovered from this period. Plus, Notre Dame was built 500 years after the Al Aqsa, and after the 12th century Renaissance squarely past any 'Christian Dark Ages.'
If you had wanted a better meme image, you could have gone with one that made a better comparison, such as with Charlemagne's Aachen Cathedral.
>>402321
>Dome of the Rock
>691 AD
>Reims Cathedral
>1211-1275 AD
>actually thinking that architecture reflects intellectual development
>>402321
The Dome of the Rock was built several centuries before Europeans would be able to construct one of those Gothic cathedrals in your meme pic.
And even then, the quality of life and infrastructure varied greatly between Islamic cities (such as Baghdad or Samarra) and European Christian cities, which were prone to plague, squalor, lack of access to clean water, and generally unhygienic .
>>402321
>but nothing found in Córdoba, Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo or Harar fit the descriptions made in Islamic works.
We have the Grand Mosque of Cordoba and a lot of other architecture that was absorbed by the Spaniards.
Damascus and Baghdad were attacked by the Mongol hordes who left nothing behind of the civilization which preceded them.
Cairo has a bunch of architecture (mainly mosques and citadels) still intact from the Islamic Golden Age - dating back to the Fatimid Era in some cases.
tl;dr: you're an idiot
>>401119
>We starting getting philosophy like al-Ghazālī that denied causality even existed and that every event in the universe is just Allah using his magic to make things happen (ie gravity isn't a natural force, it's just God pushing things down and it's just as conceivable God could push things up and have us fly)
That's some Morrowind-tier shit tbqh
I honestly doubt that's what Ghazali actually said though
>>402321
You know when you post something this blantly false all it does is make the ancient islamics look awesome and the Christians look insecure.
As other people pointed out the bottem image isn't from the dark age, it's from 600 years ahead of the top one. And if you want to see what they did all you would need to do is read the first post.
But hey you're just an inferior Christian so you can't expect to understand this stuff.
