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.

Oriana Fallaci's "Sermon for the West" on Islam

"My soldier's weapon is the TRUTH. From Afghanistan to Sudan, from Palestine to Pakistan, from Malaysia to Iran, from Egypt to Iraq, from Algiers to Senegal, from Syria to Kenya, from Libya to Chad, from Lebanon to Morocco, from Indonesia to Yemen, from Saudi Arabia to Somalia the hate for the West swells like a fire fed by the wind. 

And the followers of Islamic fundamentalism multiply like the protozoa of a cell which splits to become two cells, then four, then eight, and sixteen and thirty-two to infinity. ... The clash between us and them is not a military clash. It is a cultural one. A religious one." Oriana Fallaci