Not applicable in the Cheerful News thread

He just did that? :astonished_face: I thought he was dead. :roll_eyes:

1 Like

He was in his 40s when they started dissolving the monasteries, he’d spent all the loot laid up by that old loather Henry VII thanks I think to Morton, he of Morton’s fork.
Edited to add that I haven’t done any fact-checking so may be completely wrong, both here and in what I said just before.

1 Like

I’d have thought western education is based on Roman and Greek systems just as much as religious ones, and those antedate Islam by some centuries seeing Islam starts in 622 CE.
It is true obv that madrassas existed from the 11th century but they were theological colleges where you learnt the Qur’an (off by heart this becoming a Hafiz), fiqh and hadith and silsila for hadith etcetc and jurisprudence according to one if the 4 schools of law.
The first proper madrassas were set up by my hero Nizam ul-Mulk, a marvellous and fascinating person for all sorts of reasons. I love him just as much as my other hero Frederick II (Stupor Mundi) Hohenstaufen.
Edited to add the fabulous Mahmud of Ghazna who is pretty solid too.

Don’t overlook other institutions such as the early mediaeval medical schools, which although located in Islamic countries, weren’t particularly religious. Instead they incorporated knowledge from earlier Greek and Middle Eastern cultures, such as Hippocrates and humoral medicine, as well new scientific discoveries made by Islamic surgeons. This sort of medical education entered southern Europe about 1000 years ago and was dominant for centuries until revisionists rejected many Islamic medical innovations in favour of a return to Greek humoral medicine.

1 Like

Muslim countries have Muslim institutions, fervent or less so, there is no notion of separation of religion and state and it isn’t organised in the same way - the word for population and the congregation of a mosque are the same, for example. Religious rules and social rules are the same and actually minus preexisting tribal stuff quite progressive for the 7th C CE.
An awful lot of Greek and Aramaic documents were translated into Arabic and it’s thanks only to that that we have them now. There’s not even that much translated from Arabic or Persian originals even nowadays, considering how much literature/ history/ philosophy there is. Obv you’ve got Farid ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds, Ibn Battuta’s Rihla etc - but practically none of the historical, political or literary texts we worked on when I was an undergraduate had already been translated. They were intensely literate societies, as you can see when you travel anywhere and look at the vast quantities of writing on buildings etc for all to read.

Edited to add it was very common to have a Greek Dr in the levant at the time of the crusades, eg Usama ibn Munqidh, a Syrian gentleman whose wonderfully written diaries you can read now, had one. And obv lots of Muslim drs too.

3 Likes

In the case of medical texts, the translation wasn’t just word based because many Greek recipes contained ingredients that were unknown in the Arab world or made mention of plants that were not found there and so there was also a creative element as local knowledge was added to that of the Greeks. A further contribution was the development of new surgical techniques that had been unknown in the Classical world.

En passant, it’s also worth mentioning the essentially humanist arts academy that originated in Renaissance Florence and led to the creation of many academic hierarchies that are still around today.