Neil deGrasse Tyson Lecture @ UW 5/12/2011 FULL
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Published: Tue Sep 17 2013
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Islam is a tribalistic system.
In such a system any action or thought is divided into categories of permissability.
In Islam there are five of these: Fard (compulsory), mustahabb (recommended), halal (allowed), makruh (disliked), haram (forbidden).
It is likely that this cleric was asked how to categorise mathematics and since he could see no possible use for it in praising god it would be a distraction and therefore haram.
Wasn't there a cleric recently who declared selfies with cats to be haram? Same principle.
This is why Islam is such an incredibly bad idea. It is a very rigid system where the only path to permissable action is if it is in the service of Allah. Under Islam no innovation, no invention can be possible. Not in the social sense and not in the scientific sense.
there was no golden age of islam. there is only, the time after islam destroyed the cultured world and spread it's beliefs through war and proceeded to destroy 90% of the worlds literature and were heralded and praised for the 10% that they kept.
It truly was a golden age. After destroying what was left of the roman-byzantine empire, destroying all infrastructure and killing anyone who had opposing beliefs to them, the muslim world truly did flourish.
NDT is awesome, but on this matter of history, he is incorrect.
Al-Ghazali was the medieval Arabic equivalent of Bill O'Reilly today. I.e., he represented a regressive and mindless point of view, and he had a lot of followers, but he made very little impression on actual Arabic thinkers of the time. The key document he wrote on this is was something like "Against the philosophers". He was eviscerated by Averroes (a thinker who had considerably more sway) a few years later who wrote a reply: "Against against the philosophers".
NDT also has the timeline wrong. The Arabic golden era did not end with Al-Ghazali. Uleh Beg, Al-Tusi, Urdi, Al-shatir, and Al-Khafri were all great astronomers who came after Al-Ghazali. The Arabic golden era essentially faded away with the rise of the Ottoman Empire. It's not that the Ottomans didn't appreciate the sciences. It's just that they were unwilling to pay for them and inadvertently hampered them by rescinding Arabic as the lingua franca of the Empire.
For people here who are posting that the "Islamic Golden era didn't exist" you are wrong. The only thing mythical about the Islamic Golden Era is that it was fundamentally Islamic. It wasn't, which is why I prefer the term "Arabic golden era". At the time, the Caliphates were actually quite multicultural. Jews and Christians (usually of the Eastern, or Nestorian variety) lived freely in the Arabic empires. Islam was the official religion of the Empire, which meant they had preferential treatment. However, there was no deliberate policy of persecution against other religions within their territories. Besides the ruling class being entirely Muslim, the most major religion-base policy was that non-Muslims had to pay a higher tax rate in exchange for not being part of the army.
There was also nothing fictional about their discoveries and inventions. There are people who exaggerate and misunderstand their history (like the "1001 inventions" nonsense) but this is just poor scholarship, unrelated to the truth of the matter. The simple fact is that the Arabs invented algebra, the scientific method, and made fundamental contributions to chemistry, medicine, and astronomy. And very importantly, the Arabs are the ones who pulled the Europeans out of the dark ages (a very real thing, despite the modern denials among pseudo-intellectuals) even if indirectly (it had to do with the Spanish Reconquest in the 11-13th centuries).
Golden age of islam is a myth.
That so called golden age was marked by rape/murder, genocide and pedophilia commited by muslims vs christians and everyone else.
To call it golden age is like calling 1930-1945 Germany as the golden age of our germanic friends.
... Well, he's not wrong ... have you tried derivative calculus? /s
In retrospect, it was a subpar decision.
I thought it was Alexander the Great...
Probably saw Algebra for the first time.
I found titled statement or what NDT said not only nonsensical but also amusing.
The misconception roots in AlGhazali’s skepticism against Aristotelian based philosophy and related sciences. He at no point outwardly rejected Aristotle, Plato or philosopher belonging to same school, but only argued that one must not take this philosophers as ‘aql-e-qul’ (having knowledge of everything) and thoughtlessly follow their every word just because of their particular achievements in a specific field of science but rather should be able to differentiate between what to take from them and what to reject based over individual merit. I find this argument very enlightening, as no one holds the epitome of all-knowledge including Aristotle.
Here is what Al-Ghazali precisely said.
And where we stand today we find Al-Ghazali to be way more on the right side than Aristotle, I don’t think I need to mention here how much Aristotle absurdly got wrong from how women are immoral beings to how some people deserve to be slaves and way ahead. But in no way here I refer to Aristotle as imprudent, he holds my and many others reverence for at least giving a thought to complex subjects which he did, in the times when nobody else might have. But this proves, nobody, no scientist can be taken as the final word over the world, for e.g. NDT here, what a great scientist but see how he got Al-Ghazali wrong totally. Humans and human errors.
Just to wrap up my argument here is AL-GHAZALI LAYING EMPHASIS OVER STUDYING MATHEMATICS and related sciences.
He here clearly warns against rejecting these sciences including mathematics by making a point that one should not intermix the both. Both should be studied and both should be applied in their own context. Hence, what he said or preached is nowhere even near to what NDT or the tiles of this thread claims.