Prove it. History is subjective.
Historians themselves debate from an objective standpoint. Otherwise, they would not be having a discussion or debate at all if history as you claim to be subjective.
Caliph Abu Jafar al-Mansur, the founder, built a great library in Baghdad, Lyons relates, modelled after those of the great Persian kings. Arab chroniclers later praised his mastery of logic and law and his interest in philosophy and astronomy, and gave him credit for directing translation into Arabic of numerous important works by Greek, Persian and Hindu philosophers and scientists. Data were gathered from across the widespread Islamic empire for development by Baghdadâs men of learning. His library was named The House of Wisdom.
Arabs adopted the efficient Hindu/Indian decimal system, with the nine numerals and zero we use today. On the basis of Euclidâs geometry and Ptolemyâs astronomy, the Arabs devised algebra and trigonometry and made astronomical observations of their own. At a time when the Christians of Europe believed the world was flat, found it difficult to fix the date of Easter and could not even tell the time of day, the Arabs, aided by a gadget called the astrolabe, made astronomical and terrestrial measurements to discover that our world is spherical and to calculate its size almost exactly. The astrolabe was also a valuable navigational instrument, determining latitude.
The Arabs made great progress in cartography, chemistry and medicine at a time when the Christian Church was telling adherents that diseases were divine punishments for human sins. Flagellation was one of the atonements for the Black Death.
In every discipline, Arab scholars were assisted by the manufacture of paper, while Europes relatively few literates were writing on cumbersome and expensive parchment. Libraries in Islam then contained hundreds of thousands of volumes, when books in Europe were very scarce.
Lyons traces the influences of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on the Arabs. Today many tend to see religion as the enemy of scientific progress, Lyons writes. Yet early Islam openly encouraged and nurtured intellectual inquiry of all kinds. Muhammad (s) himself said: Seek knowledge, even in China. In contrast with the Crusaders who rampaged through the Holy Land at the end of the 11th century, there were European scholars, such as Adelard of Bath and Michael Scot, who travelled to Islam and brought back Arabic texts for translation into Latin and beyond. Cultural go-betweens connecting East and West were helped by Muslims in Sicily and Spain to transmit knowledge.
