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Oct. 31 - Nov. 7, 2004 |
18 - The Warrior Prophet
Islam present in Europe’s cultural roots and Mohammed proclaims one God
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2004-09-19
There is a mixture of hostility, intolerance, and fear in the European attitude towards the Arabs. It’s the result of the Crusades, which left behind a long wake of rancour.
Arabs did not forgive the Christians for invading their lands, massacring and pillaging under the pretext of freeing the Holy Sepulchre from the infidels, and reciprocated with their own invasions, massacres and pillaging. East and West fought for centuries, and are still fighting, a war with ancient roots that won’t end unless the contenders recognize their respective wrongdoings, past and present, which are grave and recurring.
Yet, these implacable enemies are indebted to each other. Greek philosophy, for instance, (especially Aristotle and Plato) smoothed some of the harshest tracts of Islam, which in turn must be credited for saving it from oblivion after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, when that beacon of Western civilization risked being lost.
Europe’s cultural roots contain much more Islam than the Europeans are ready to admit. For too many centuries they’ve been busy repelling the Arabs from European lands and leaving their mark. Merely examining Sicilian or Spanish – or even Austrian or Hungarian – architecture is enough to note it. Paying a little attention allows us to find Arabic words, idioms and ways all over the Old World; looking at the origin of things to discover how the Arabs handed us some surprising inventions and discoveries: zero (“sifr”) in mathematics, the alembic (“al-ambiq”) in chemistry, and general anaesthesia, which they applied methodically since 709, when they opened in Damascus the world’s first real hospital. A few decades later, the Arabic schools in Palermo taught that the Earth was spherical and its centre was equidistant from the four cardinal points. In those same years, the Europeans were dogmatically convinced that the Earth was flat.
The Westerners have acquired these achievements without considering their origin; but they did come to us from the East, just like the rational cultivation of mines and land, selective horse breeding, rice and silkworms, cotton and sugar cane, and peaches, dates, asparagus, pepper, spinach, grapefruit.
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