Minimalist

mountainman

Religion and humour


In relation to despots and military supremacists Mel Brooks put it like this




εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Huon

In the 5th century, the Quraysh took control of Mecca, and became skilled merchants and traders. In the 6th century they joined the lucrative spice trade as well, since battles in other parts of the world were causing trade routes to divert from the dangerous sea routes to the more secure overland routes. The Byzantine Empire had previously controlled the Red Sea, but piracy had been on the increase. Another previous route that ran through the Persian Gulf via the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was also being threatened by exploitations from the Sassanid Empire, as well as being disrupted by the Lakhmids, the Ghassanids, and the Roman–Persian Wars. Mecca's prominence as a trading center also surpassed the cities of Petra and Palmyra.
Some time in the 5th century CE, the Kaaba was a place of worship for the deities of Arabia's pagan tribes. Mecca's most important pagan deity was Hubal, which had been placed there by the ruling Quraysh tribe and remained until the 7th century CE.

Clivedurdle

Tom Holland casts serious doubt on the existence of Mecca and proposes the real scene for these stories is near the stone of Lot's wife at the Dead Sea.

steve_bnk

There was a PBS show on transfer of knowledge in science from the Arabs/Persians to Europe.


The poInt of the show was science always follows the money. Before the rise o European science Persia and the Arabs was the place to be for science.

Newton used Persian astronomical data for his work. All if the basic principles of Newton's mechanics and calculus existed in the Islamic world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maragha_observatory

The show looked at an old Venetian book on how to do business in the Islamic world, such as beards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spice_trade

'...The Spice trade refers to the trade between historic civilizations in Asia, Northeast Africa and Europe. Spices such as cinnamon, cassia, cardamom, ginger, and turmeric were known, and used for commerce, in the Eastern World well into antiquity.[1] These spices found their way into the Middle East before the beginning of the Christian Era, where the true sources of these spices was withheld by the traders, and associated with fantastic tales.[2] In the middle of the first millennium, the sea routes to India and Sri Lanka (the Roman - Taprobane) were controlled by the Indians and Ethiopians that became the maritime trading power of the Red Sea. The Kingdom of Axum (ca 5th-century BC–AD 11th century) had pioneered the Red Sea route before the 1st century AD. By mid-7th century AD the rise of Islam closed off the overland caravan routes through Egypt and the Suez, and sundered the European trade community from Axum and India.

Arab traders eventually took over conveying goods via the Levant and Venetian merchants to Europe until the rise of the Ottoman Turks cut the route again by 1453. Overland routes helped the spice trade initially, but maritime trade routes led to tremendous growth in commercial activities.[1] During the high and late medieval periods Muslim traders dominated maritime spice trading routes throughout the Indian Ocean, tapping source regions in the Far East and shipping spices from trading emporiums in India westward to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, from which overland routes led to Europe....'

Huon

What are his sources?

Clivedurdle

What I find very puzzling about "it came from the Islamic World" is that there was another source of knowledge and power - Constantinople. Maybe escapees from the fall of Constantinople to Islamic forces took books with them?

Oh and Archimedes had cracked Calculus.

Duvduv

Huon, you still haven't substantively addressed the list of questions from the OP.

Maybe you would like to start from the questionable origins of the Shia sect(s) themselves, that legend claims go back to Ali ibn Taleb (who is not mentioned in the Quran anyway) without any substantive evidence that the Shia sect existed widely before the emergence of the Safavid dynasty in Persia in the 16th century. Ironically, the first king, Ismael I, received his Shia religion from "teachers" from Lebanon (Jabel Amal). This would strongly suggest (if true) that a pre-existing Imamist religion morphed into Islam in Persia.

(Non-Muhammadan) Imamists seemed to have included the precursors of the Druze, Alawites (all assorted people who revered someone named Ali who the Abbasid Caliphate brought into Islam as the nephew of the Prophet), Twelvers and others.

steve_bnk

The principles of area as summation of infinitesimal areas and the tangent as a limit of infinitesimal differences appeared in several places in the history of math. The Egyptians understood it/.Newton put it all together with a notational system.

It might be a but if a derail. My point triggered by the question on trade is that the Islamic cultures were important certainly in the history of science. The Europeans built on it, the point of the PBS show. European science did nbt appear from nothing.

Huon

First answer, a list of 8 unrelated questions in only one thread is not a very good idea. You could have opened 8 different threads.

Second answer, are you sure that I am deeply interested by your questions ?

Third answer. If the discussion is centered about the person of Muhammad (Mohammed, Mahomet in old french literature), we shall be confronted with a lot of mythology mixed with some history.