Brian, Thank you for posting the review of Roger Scruton's book, "The West and the Rest" (see posting of 14:54 10/09/02 -0400). He has much that is useful to dwell on.
However, in contrasting Islam with the globalisation of western trade and culture, it would seem that Roger Scruton has not alighted on one of the supreme ironies of history. This is that, without Islam, it is doubtful whether the Renaissance, the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution would have ever started in the west -- or at least they would have been substantially delayed, perhaps for centuries. In its heyday, Islam rescued many of the great philosophical and scientific works of the early Greeks by translating them into Arabic -- in which form they were then introduced into Medieval Europe by the Moorish conquest. If this were not momentous enough, Islamic mathematicians also introduced the innovative concept of the digit "0" -- and the consequence of negative numbers -- without which both double-entry book-keeping (and thus Italian merchant banking) and modern scientific mathematics would never have got off the ground. In truth, the west owes great debts to Islam. More speculatively, America could easily have been an Islamic country by now if the Moors had not so willingly retreated from Spain in the 14th century, just at the time when merchants and discoverers were setting out to explore the world across the seas. At that time, the scope of the trading empire of the Muslim civilisation from the Mediterranean to the Far East greatly exceeded that of the puny merchants of the western seaboard of Europe. It was only an accident of history that Christopher Columbus and his successors were financed by Christendom and not the Moors. The book has yet to be written which attempts to describe those well-nigh invisible influences which allowed Islam to yield its great conceptual and commercial achievements to Western Europe. I'm sure that when such a book is written we might also begin to understand much more clearly the present legacy of resentment and hatred of Islam for western values. Keith Hudson ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
