"In
an old book by Paul Bairoch - Development blocked - (see Le Tiers-Monde
dans l'impasse. Le démarrage économique du XVIIIe au XXe siècle) we can
read that around the year 1000 the three great cultural civilizations
of the world of back then, the Arab-Islamic, the European-Christian and
the Sino-Confucian were roughly on the same level. Anyone who has been
to Cordoba, Granada and Spanish Andalusia has no difficulty in
recognizing the splendor and sophistication that the Muslims of Spain
had reached. Then, again in that time between the ninth and eleventh
centuries, something happened, and since then the three cultural
civilizations have begun to march according to their own directions and
speed. "
”The closure of the Muslim mind.
This
debate took place in the great centers of Muslim civilization -
Damascus, Baghdad and Córdoba -, and opposed two religious schools: the
Mu’tazilites and the Asciarites (Ash’arite Islam). The Mu’tazilite
current that in our language we could define as "liberal" and
"rationalist", influenced by Greek thought whose philosophical heritage
it wants to preserve, intends to combine faith and reason. The best
known exponents (for us) are Al Farhabi, Avicenna and Averroè, while on
the "traditionalist" and mystical Ash'arite side will be Ibn Hanbal (who
is still one of the reference figures in Saudi Arabia) and above all Al
Ghazali ( "Pivotal figure" and "the second most important person in
Islam immediately after Mohammed", defines him Reilly) who will be the
great triumph, the one who will stand compared to the Prophet like Paul
of Tarsus to Yehoshua / Jesus Christ.
The
center of the debate, galvanized by the first encounter with Greek
philosophy, will be that typical of every monotheistic religion: the
status of reason in relation to God's revelation and his omnipotence. In
what relationship does reason lie in man's encounter with God? Is there
a relationship between reason and divine revelation? And most
importantly: can reason know the truth?
The
closure occurred in two ways: one of denying reason the possibility of
knowing anything, the other of rejecting reality as unknowable.
Typically: reason cannot know, or, there is nothing to know. Both
approaches will suffice to make reality irrelevant, and both will become
dominant through the winning current, the Asharite one, in the Sunni
world. Radical voluntarism (God is pure will) and occasionalism (there
is no cause and effect relationship in the natural order) will therefore
be the tracks within which the recognition of reality by this
triumphant Islam is made. This will lead to the denial of the principle
of causality. In a nutshell, the theme of this work is that between the
ninth and twelfth centuries the views of certain theologians of the
Sunni Muslim world prevailed and "reality has become inaccessible".
I
was recently reading in the newspaper that in EGYPT, in Cairo, not in a
remote village in Afghanistan, and nowadays, not centuries ago, they
teach children in SCIENCE classes that the answer to all questions is
"IT'S BECAUSE ALLAH WANTS IT THAT WAY", proof of this is that in Arab
countries, where they float on truckloads of petrodollars, the level of
scientific production is close to ZERO... !!!!
