Discoveries Arabs Never Made

Islam's contribution to world culture in 1915
*See end note about this picture

The title of this post was going to be "The Culture of the West vs that of Islam". But then I thought: Culture? Islam has a culture"?

Saying "the culture of the West versus the culture of Islam suggests two cultures put on the same level, as if they were two parallel entities. Two realities of equal weight and value." (Oriana Fallaci)

In her book, The Rage and the Pride, famously known as "a sermon to the West", Oriana Fallaci says, "Behind our Western culture there is Homer, there is Pheidias, there is Socrates, there is Plato, there is Aristotle, there is Archimedes. There is ancient Greece with its divine sculpture and architecture and poetry and philosophy, with its principle of democracy. 

"There is Ancient Rome with all its grandeur, its universality, its concept of the Law, its palaces, its amphitheaters its aqueducts, its streets built all over the then known world. There is Jesus who died on the cross to teach us the concept of love and justice. There is also a Church...there is Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, Raffello, Lorenzo il Magnifico...There is also Erasmus, and Montaigne and Thomas More and Cartesius.

Islam's contribution to world culture in 2015 

"There is also the music of Mozart and Bach and Beethoven and Rossini and Donizetti up to Verdi and Puccini and company. (That music without which we cannot live and which in the Moslem culture or presumed culture is a shame, a great crime; woe betide those who whistle a song or hum a lullaby.) 

"Finally there is our science and the technology that derives from it. A science which in a few centuries has made breathtaking discoveries and changed the face of this planet. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein were not followers of the Prophet Muhammad, were they? 

"The motor, the telegraph, the light-bulb, the use of electricity, the photograph, the telephone, the radio, the television have not been invented by some mullahs or some ayatollahs. Have they? The train, the automobile, the airplane, the helicopter (that Leonardo da Vinci fancied and designed), the space crafts with which we have gone to to the Moon and Mars, the same, right? The heart and liver and eyes and lungs' transplant, the cures for cancer, the genomes disclosure as well. Wrong? 

In Islam there's no time for inventing things

because 5 times a day they're busy mooning

the world praying to their black rock in Mecca

"And let us not forget the standard of life that Western culture has achieved at every level of society. In the West we no longer die of starvation and curable diseases as they do in Moslem countries. Right or wrong? But even if all these were unimportant achievements (which I doubt) tell me: what are the conquests of the other "culture", the culture of the bigots with the beard and chador and burkah? 

"Look and search. Search and look, I can only find the Prophet with his "sacred" book that sounds preposterous even when it plagiarizes the Bible and Gospels and the Torah and the Hellenistic thinkers. I only find Averroe with his indisputable merits of scholarship, Omar Khayyam with his fine poetry, plus a few beautiful mosques. No other achievement in the field of art and in the garden of Thought. No accomplishment in the domain of science, of technology, of welfare.

"When I mention the truth, some object with the word mathematics....Let's clear this up once and for all. Islam did not  invent mathematics. Mathematics was invented more or less simultaneously by the Arabs, the Indians, the Greeks, the Myans, the Mesopotamians. Go and check. 

"Nor did Arabs invent numbers. They simply invented a new way of writing them. The way that we Infidels have adopted, thus facilitating and speeding the discoveries the Arabs never made. That invention is highly commendable, I agree. Undoubtedly meritorious. But it is also insufficient to define Islamic culture superior to Western culture...Apart from Averroe and some poets and some mosques and the way of writing numbers, Islam has substantially left a book, and that's all. That book is the Koran which for a thousand and four hundred years has tormented humanity.

"And for some reason the Left, especially the European Left, respect the Koran more than they used to respect Karl Marx's Das Kapital."

* The picture above is from a 1919 film depicting the cruelty meted upon a group of 19 teenage Armenian Christian girls who were gang raped by Muslim soldiers of the Ottoman state.

The movie did not however depict the gruesome killing as even for today's desensitized world of Internet gore, the gruesome murder of these young girls by Muslim soldiers will make any die hard gore viewer turn away in appalling disgust.

The actual narrative goes that these young girls, after suffering the most debased form of sexual torture and rape at the hands of Turkish Muslim soldiers, were later impaled on a cross and a spike driven into their private parts.

Death came slowly but painfully with the Muslim soldiers gleefully laughing at them.