THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING YOUR HISTORY
Global Politician, NY
Oct 16 2007
Europe, 480 BC: "Come and take them!" Leonidas, King of Sparta, to
the vastly more numerous Persian forces calling for the Greeks to
lay down their arms during the battle of Thermopylae. Leonidas and
his men died in battle after holding their ground for three days,
but bought the Greek city-states enough time to defeat the Persians
and permanently end Persian inroads into Europe.
Europe, 2004 AD: "We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and
Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us."
Jens Orback, Minister for Democracy, Metropolitan Affairs, Integration
and Gender Equality from the Swedish Social Democratic Party during
a debate in Swedish radio.
Europe, 2006 AD:
You stone your mothers Flog your sisters Mutilate your daughters
Behind veils But I want to be your friend
Norwegian singer Åge Aleksandersen in his song "Æ vil vær din venn"
("I want to be your friend") about his relationship with Muslims. No
irony was intended in the lyrics.
Henry Ford once famously said that "History is bunk." Personally,
I subscribe more to the view of Edmund Burke: "People will not look
forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."
Knowing your people’s history is crucially important when you want
to shape your future. Unfortunately, especially in my native Europe,
we are either suffering from a deliberate historical amnesia or are
being spoon-fed a mixture of half-truths and outright lies.
One of the most persistent myths so eagerly promoted by Eurabians is
that of the "shared Greco-Roman heritage" between Europeans and Arabs,
which is now going to lay the foundations for a new Euro-Mediterranean
entity, Eurabia. It is true that countries such as Egypt, Syria,
Jordan and Algeria were just as much a part of the Roman Empire as
were England or France. However, the Arab conquerors later rejected
many elements of this Greco-Roman era once they invaded these nations.
As British philosopher Roger Scruton has explained, one of the most
important legacies of the Roman Empire was the idea of secular laws,
which were unconcerned with a person’s religious affiliations as
long as he accepted the political authority of the Roman state. This
left a major impact on Christian Europe, but was neglected in the
Arab Middle East because it clashed fundamentally with the basic
principles of sharia, the law of Allah. Scruton calls this "the
greatest of all Roman achievements, which was the universal system
of law as a means for the resolution of conflicts." The Roman law was
secular and "could change in response to changing circumstances. That
conception of law is perhaps the most important force in the emergence
of European forms of sovereignty."
Likewise, it is true that Arabs translated some Greek classics,
but they were highly particular about which ones to include or exclude.
Historian Bernard Lewis writes in his book What Went Wrong?, page 139:
"In the vast bibliography of works translated in the Middle Ages
from Greek into Arabic, we find no poets, no dramatists, not even
historians. These were not useful and they were of no interest;
they did not figure in the translation programs. This was clearly
a cultural rejection: you take what is useful from the infidel; but
you don’t need to look at his absurd ideas or to try and understand
his inferior literature, or to study his meaningless history."
Iranian intellectual Amir Taheri agrees:
"To understand a civilisation it is important to understand its
vocabulary. If it was not on their tongues it is likely that it was
not on their minds either. There was no word in any of the Muslim
languages for democracy until the 1890s. Even then the Greek word
democracy entered Muslim languages with little change: democrasi in
Persian, dimokraytiyah in Arabic, demokratio in Turkish. (…) It
is no accident that early Muslims translated numerous ancient Greek
texts but never those related to political matters. The great Avicenna
himself translated Aristotle’s Poetics. But there was no translation
of Aristotle’s Politics in Persian until 1963."
In other words: There was a great deal of Greek knowledge that could
never have been "transferred" to Europeans by Arabs, as is frequently
claimed by Western Multiculturalists, because many Greek works had
never been translated into Arabic in the first place. Arabs especially
turned down political texts, since these included descriptions of
systems in which men ruled themselves according to their own laws. This
was considered blasphemous by Muslims, as laws are made by Allah and
rule belongs to his representatives.
Lars Hedegaard, president of the Danish Free Press Society,
believes that economic progress hinges on free speech. In the 1760s,
a scientific expedition financed by the king of Denmark set out from
Copenhagen destined for Egypt, today’s Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Persia,
Mesopotamia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey. The objective
was to study all aspects of these lands, their culture, history and
peoples. Only one participant survived, the German Carsten Niebuhr,
whose notes have left us with important information from this period.
Notice that this expedition was partly arranged due to Western
intellectual curiosity. Ibn Warraq has severely criticized Edward Said
and his book Orientalism for ignoring what has been a hallmark of
Western civilization: the seeking after knowledge for its own sake:
"The Greek word, historia, from which we get our ‘history,’ means
‘research’ or ‘inquiry,’ and Herodotus believed his work was the
outcome of research: what he had seen, heard, and read but supplemented
and verified by inquiry."
This part of the Greek heritage was, again, carefully ignored by
Muslims. Carsten Niebuhr’s writings leave a powerful impression of
a region that was primitive underdeveloped and steeped in Islamic
fatalism. This was prior to European colonialism in the area and
before the United States had even been created. Western influences
thus had nothing had to do with it; the backwardness was caused by
local cultural factors.
About Mesopotamia (Iraq), Niebuhr had this to say: "In Cairo there is
at least still a store where the Muhammedans can buy old books. In
Baghdad one will not find that sort of thing. If one collects books
here, and is neither prepared to copy them oneself nor to let others
copy them, one must wait till somebody dies and his books and clothes
are carried to the bazar, where they are offered for sale by a crier.
A European who wants to buy Arabian, Turkish or Persian manuscripts
will find no better opportunity than in Constantinople for here
at least there is a sort of bookstore where Christians – at least
Oriental Christians – can buy books" (Niebuhr, Vol. 2, p. 305)
Printing had not been adopted in the Muslim Middle East due to
religious resistance. Three centuries after Gutenberg had invented
the movable type printing press in 15th century Europe, and a thousand
years after the earliest versions of printing were invented in China,
books were still rare in Muslim countries and could be bought most
easily when somebody died.
Printing was reinvented in Europe at exactly the same time as the
last vestige of the ancient Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire
(Constantinople), fell to Turkish Muslims. It was a major stroke of
historical luck that the classical texts that had been preserved by
the Byzantines for a thousand years could now be rescued forever by
printing instead of quietly disappearing. It was printing, introduced
during the later stages of the Renaissance, that ensured that the
Renaissance marked a permanent infusion of Greek knowledge into
Western thought, not just a temporary one.
According to historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein and her celebrated
book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, page 220:
"The classical editions, dictionaries, grammars and reference guides
issued from print shops made it possible to achieve an unprecedented
mastery of Alexandrian learning even while laying the basis for a
new kind of permanent Greek revival in the West. (…) We now tend to
take for granted that the study of Greek would continue to flourish
after the main Greek manuscript centers had fallen into alien hands
[Constantinople in 1453] and hence fail to appreciate how remarkable
it was to find that Homer and Plato had not been buried anew but had,
on the contrary, been disinterred forever more. Surely Ottoman advances
would have been catastrophic before the advent of printing.
Texts and scholars scattered in nearby regions might have prolonged
the study of Greek but only in a temporary way."
Eisenstein also points out that printing greatly facilitated the
Scientific Revolution in the West. Young students could rely on the
wide diffusion of works by earlier masters, and could thus bypass
their own teachers and educate themselves. The young Sir Isaac Newton
took full advantage of available libraries, learned by himself from
mathematicians, modern and ancient, and astronomers such as Galileo,
Copernicus and Kepler in order to develop his ideas about gravity
into his 1687 treatise Principia.
In the notes from his travels, Carsten Niebuhr wrote about the state
of the desert around the Syrian town of Aleppo: "Under the Muhammedan
and especially Turkish administration the most beautiful areas have
been turned into wastelands. This despotic government does not protect
the inhabitants bordering the desert provinces against the Arabs,
Kurds or Turkomen, who live under tents and wander about with their
cattle and who like to reap what they have not sown.. …
Unconcerned whether the peasant is robbed of his grain or his cattle,
they let the taxes be collected with all possible severity; little by
little the peasants leave their ancestral dwellings where they can
no longer secure their livelihood; the fields are no longer plowed
but abandoned to wandering bands of people and thus the limits of
the desert are expanding more and more" (Niebuhr, Vol. 2, p. 457).
The famous 14th century Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta visited Cairo,
Egypt, and gave this description of the Great Pyramids: "The pyramid
is an edifice of solid hewn stone, of immense height and circular
plan, broad at the base and narrow at the top, like the figure of
a cone." This grossly incorrect description of them as circular
strongly indicates that he never actually saw them, possibly because
he as a devout Muslim didn’t find such infidel monuments worthy of
attention. His attitude is indicative of the general view of many
Muslims, who were at best uninterested in non-Muslim cultures, past
or present, at worst actively hostile.
Saladin or Salah al-Din, the twelfth century general loved by Muslims
for his victories against the Crusaders, is renowned even in Western
history for his supposedly tolerant nature. Very few seem to remember
that his son Al-Aziz Uthman, the second sultan of the Ayyubid Dynasty
founded by Saladin and presumably influenced by his father’s religious
convictions, actually tried to demolish the Great Pyramids of Giza
only three years after his father’s death in 1193. The reason why we
can still visit them today is because the task at hand was so big
that he eventually gave up the attempt. He did, however, manage to
inflict significant damage to Menkaure’s Pyramid, the smallest of
the Great Pyramids, which contains scars clearly visible to this day.
It is tempting to view this as a continuation of his father’s Jihad
against non-Muslims:
"When king Al-Aziz Othman, son of [Saladdin] succeeded his father,
he let himself be persuaded by some people from his Court, who were
devoid of good sense, to demolish the pyramids. One started with
the red pyramid, which is the third of the great pyramids, and the
smallest. (…) They brought there a large number of workmen from all
around, and supported them at great cost. They stayed there for eight
whole months (…) This happened in the year 593 [ i.e. 1196 AD)."
Such vandalism has been a recurring feature of Islamic nations
throughout the ages. Guarding the pyramids at the Giza Plateau
is the Great Sphinx. However, sphinxes in ancient times usually
appeared in pairs, and there are indications in both classical and
medieval sources that the Sphinx used to have a twin. According to
archaeologist Michael Poe, there was another sphinx facing the famous
one on the other side of the Nile, but it was damaged during a Nile
flood, and then completely dismantled by Muslims using it as a quarry
for their villages.
The legend that the missing nose of the Great Sphinx was removed by
Napoleon Bonaparte’s artillery during the French expedition to Egypt
1798-1801 is not only factually incorrect, it’s ludicrous to anyone
with even the most rudimentary knowledge of history. Sketches indicate
that the nose was gone long before this. The Egyptian fifteenth century
historian al-Maqrizi attributes the act to Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr,
a Sufi Muslim. According to al-Maqrizi, in the fourteenth century,
upon discovering that local peasants made offerings to the Sphinx
to bless their harvest, al-Dahr became furious at their idolatry and
decided to destroy the statue, managing only to break off its nose. It
is hard to confirm whether this story is accurate, but if it is, it
demonstrates that Sufis are not always the soft and tolerant Muslims
they are made out to be.
Far from damaging the Sphinx, the French expedition brought large
numbers of scientists to Egypt to catalog the ancient monuments, thus
founding modern Egyptology. The trilingual Rosetta Stone, discovered
by the French in 1799, was employed by philologist Jean-Francois
Champollion to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822. In this
task, Champollion made extensive use of the Coptic language, which in
modern times survives only as the liturgical language of the Coptic
Orthodox Church. Coptic is a direct descendant of the language spoken
in ancient Egypt, and might have been understood by pharaohs such as
Tutankhamun or Ramses II, although they would no doubt have considered
it a rather strange and difficult dialect.
Arab Muslims had controlled Egypt for more than a thousand years,
yet never managed to decipher the hieroglyphs nor for the most part
displayed much interest in doing so. Westerners did so in a single
generation after they reappeared in force in Egypt. So much for "Arab
science." And they did so with the help of the language of the Copts,
the Egyptian Christians, the only remnant of ancient Egypt that the
Arab invaders hadn’t managed to completely eradicate.
According to Andrew G. Bostom, editor of The Legacy of Jihad, the
contrast between jihad and British imperialism was equally pronounced
on the Indian subcontinent. Lord Curzon, who served as Viceroy and
Governor-General of India from 1898-1905, stated:
"If there be any one who says to me that there is no duty devolving
upon a Christian Government to preserve the monuments of pagan
art or the sanctuaries of an alien faith, I cannot pause to argue
with such a man. Art and beauty, and the reverence that is owing to
all that has evoked human genius or has inspired human faith, are
independent of creeds, and, in so far as they touch the sphere of
religion, are embraced by the common religion of all mankind. Viewed
from this standpoint, the rock temple of the Brahmans stands on
precisely the same footing as the Buddhist Vihara, and the Mohammedan
Musjid as the Christian Cathedral…To us the relics of Hindu and
Mohammedan, of Buddhist, Brahmin, and Jain are, from the antiquarian,
the historical, and the artistic point of view, equally interesting
and equally sacred. One does not excite a more vivid and the other a
weaker emotion. Each represents the glories or the faith of a branch
of the human family. Each fills a chapter in Indian history."
As Hugh Fitzgerald writes, "One opens ‘The World of Islam’ by Ernst
J. Grube and finds on p. 165 a picture of the ‘Kutb Mosque (Quwaat
al-Islam) Delhi’ shown and described: ‘Built by Kutb al-din Aibak
in his fortress of Lallkot near Old Delhi in 1193. This mosque is
the earliest extant monument of Islamic architecture in India and its
combination of local, pre-Muslim traditions and imported architectural
forms is typical of the earliest period. The mosque is built on the
ruins of a Jain temple.’ So the earliest ‘extant monument of Islamic
architecture in India’ was ‘built on the ruins of a Jain temple.’"
Sita Ram Goel and other writers have tracked this massive cultural
vandalism in the book Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them.
Infidels would be well-advised not to believe that such cultural Jihad
is a thing of the past. In the early 21st century, a religiously
motivated attack on statues at a museum in Cairo by a veiled woman
screaming, "Infidels, infidels!" shocked the outside world. She had
been inspired by Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, who quoted a saying of the
prophet Muhammad that sculptors will be among those receiving the
harshest punishment on Judgment Day. The influential Sheikh Youssef Al
Qaradawi agreed that "Islam prohibits statues and three-dimensional
figures of living creatures" and concluded that "the statues of
ancient Egyptians are prohibited."
Within a few years, thousands of churches have been destroyed in
Indonesia, and many more Serb Orthodox churches and monasteries have
been damaged or destroyed by Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia. Saudi
hardliners are even wiping out their own heritage in cities such as
Mecca and Medina. The motive behind the destruction is supposedly
Wahhabist fears that places of historical interest could give rise
to idolatry, although critics might also suspect that they don’t want
researchers to dig too deep into the early history of Islam, in case
this might turn out to deviate from the traditional version of it.
The great Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan were demolished by the
Taliban regime in 2001, who decreed that they would destroy images
deemed "offensive to Islam" and that the statues had been used as
idols before. Mawlawi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi, who was the Taliban’s
governor of Bamiyan province when the fifth-century Buddha statues
were blown up, was elected the Afghan parliament in 2005.
The Taliban Information Minister Qudratullah Jamal in 2001 complained
that "The destruction work is not as easy as people would think. You
can’t knock down the statues by dynamite or shelling as both of them
have been carved in a cliff. They are firmly attached to the mountain."
In fact, the statues, 53 meters and 36 meters tall, the tallest
standing Buddha statues in the world, turned out to be so hard
to destroy that the Taliban needed help from Pakistani and Saudi
engineers to finish the job. Finally, after almost a month of non-stop
bombardment with dynamite and artillery, they succeeded.
Aurangzeb, the Mughal emperor notorious for his Islamic religious
zeal and his persecution of non-Muslims in India, had attempted to
achieve the same thing centuries earlier, but failed.
Indeed, judging from the experiences with the Bamiyan Buddhas, it
is tempting to conclude that the only reason why the Great Pyramids
of Egypt have survived to this day is because they were so big that
it proved too complicated, costly and time-consuming for Muslims
to destroy them. Had Saladin’s son Al-Aziz had modern technology
and engineers at his disposal, they might well have ended up like
countless Hindu temples in India or Buddhist statues in Central Asia.
As a European, I read about this and fear for the future of the
Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Rijksmuseum
in Amsterdam and Michelangelo’s figurative paintings in the Sistine
Chapel in Rome. There is every reason to believe that they will end up
the same way as the Bamiyan Buddhas if we continue to allow Muslims
to settle in our lands. Some would say that this is not just likely,
but inevitable. Although it may not happen today, tomorrow or even
the day after tomorrow, sooner or later, groups of pious Muslims will
burn these works of art, and doubtlessly consider it their sacred duty.
The official reason given by many Muslims for why non-Muslims are
not allowed to visit the cities of Mecca and Medina is because they
might damage or destroy the Islamic Holy Sites. But since Muslims have
a proven track record of more than a thousand years, from Malaysia
to Armenia, of destroying non-Muslim places of worship or works of
art, perhaps we should then, in return, be entitled to keep Muslims
permanently away from our cultural treasures?
According to military historian Victor Davis Hanson, 2,500 years ago,
almost every society in the ancient Mediterranean world had slaves,
yet "only in Greece was there a constant tradition of unfettered
expression and self-criticism. Aristophanes, Sophocles and Plato
questioned the subordinate position of women. Alcidamas lamented
the notion of slavery. Such openness was found nowhere else in the
ancient Mediterranean world. That freedom of expression explains why
we rightly consider the ancient Greeks as the founders of our present
Western civilization."
That freedom of expression is, and long has been, totally lacking
in the Islamic world. Europeans, not Muslims, are the true heirs
of the Greek heritage. Maybe saying so makes me a bigot, but if so,
I think I can live with that.
Fjordman is a noted Norwegian blogger who has written for many
conservative web sites. He used to have his own Fjordman Blog in the
past, but it is no longer active.
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