Can’t read a compass or map
Some 200 mosques in Islam’s holiest city, Mecca, point the wrong way for prayers, reports from Saudi Arabia say.
All mosques have a niche showing the direction of the most sacred Islamic site, the Kaaba, an ancient cube-like building in Mecca’s Grand Mosque. But people looking down from recently built high-rises in Mecca found the niches in many older mosques were not pointing directly towards the Kaaba.That’s the way guys, you keep working on the real problems of the world and us western folk will worry about the small stuff. You know science, maths, art, research and development, health, disease, transport……
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Kev
“science, maths, art,”
They may be having hassles aligning Mecca in 2009, but from about the ninth to the fourteenth century, Islamic mathematicians developed many of the principles and concepts modern maths and science is built on. ( See Mathematical Association of America website – article by Keith Devlin, Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University) –
http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_0708_02.html
And when it comes to art and architecture, there’s the Taj Mahal, the Mezquita of Cordoba (now a catholic cathedral – we ripped it off them in 1236, although it had originally been built as a Christian shrine), and the Alhambra.
Back then, my Celtic ancestors were running around with Brian Boru stoushing with the Vikings.
I’m very well aware of how great they were and of their contribution to life but it all stopped in about the 12 century.
Why?
Kev
Good question, and what I don’t know about the history of Islam would fill a library, but I know the golden age was around the last half of the first millenium and the first half of the second.
When I was a kid I used to think the crusades were responsible for the decline, but apparently the Mongols had more to do with the demise of the Caliphates than Christian knights.
The industrial revolution brought rapid changes to Europe but Islamic countries were left behind in the rush. The last example of an Islamic empire were the Ottomans, and they fizzled after backing Germany in WW1.
They’d also lost their capacity to project power offshore well before WW1, and their influence disolved in the face of western colonial expansion. They still left behind strong Islamic communities in North Africa, India, and Indonesia, and anywhere else the Arab traders went.
More relevant to this millenium is perhaps a yearning for past glories which has been used by a succession of pseudo leaders from Nasser through Saddam to Ahmadinejad.
The Caliphates were just as inclined to fight each other as to cooperate. Not much has changed with the advent of Islamic nation states – although the West has probably done more to unite them than at other any other time in recent history by our support of Israel. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying we shouldn’t continue to support Israel, but we do need to understand how this is viewed by most Muslims.
What has remained strong through all this time is the observance of their religion, although again, it is riddled by schisms. This is where they part company with the West, in that our preoccupation with personal freedom is counter to the basic understanding in Islam that the religion is about total submission to God. We’ve moved away from that towards materialism – they haven’t.
Many years ago, purely for the hell of it, I studied Islam as part of a course on comparative religion at U of Q. Admittedly, the focus of the course was on what the various beliefs had in common, rather than what was different, but the Islam I studied in 1972 is vastly different from how it’s characterized in the media today. I learned about a religion of peace and compassion.
So the question to ask is probably not only why they’re no longer world leaders in science, the arts and technology, but why we view them so differently since 11th Sept 2001.
Herein lies the tragedy…
The damage done on that day goes way beyond the loss of life in Washington and New York. What was damaged – perhaps irrevocably – was an understanding that what makes Christians and Muslims similar is greater than what separates them. This, of course, was OBL’s intention.
But the “why” questions are always the most productive. Asking them must be an an ex-military intelligence tendency.