by Oui
Mon Jan 1st, 2024 at 10:02:25 PM EST
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The Cross and the Crescent: a review | 31 March 2006 |
At that time, the Arab world was the most open civilisation in the world. It was the time of the great scientists and philosophers Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Thanks to these (and many others) Arab philosophers, who studied and discussed the works of the Greek philosophers during the middle ages, the Greek philosophy was transmitted to Europe where it had been almost forgotten.
It was also the time of Omar Khayyam, the great poet who celebrated wine and love. look at his quatrains, The Rubaiyat.
by Melanchthon on Sat Apr 1st, 2006
Islamic Arts: Philosophy Averroës and Avicenna | Britannica |
Philosophy, medicine, and theology, all of which flourished in the Abbasid East, were also of importance in the Maghrib, and from there strong influences reached Medieval Europe. The influences often came through the mediation of the Jews, who, along with numerous Christians, were largely Arabized in their cultural and literary outlook. The eastern Muslim countries could boast of the first systematic writers in the field of philosophy, including al-Kindī (died c. 870), al-Fārābī (died 950), and especially A icenna (Ibn Sīnā; died 1037). Avicenna's work in philosophy, science, medicine was outstanding and was appreciated as such in Europe. He also composed religious treatises and tales with a mystical slant. One of his romances was reworked by the Maghribi philosopher Ibn Tufayl (died 1185/86) in his book Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān ("Alive Son of Awake"; Eng. trans. Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale). It is the story of a self-taught man who lived on a lonely island and who, in his maturity, attained the full knowledge taught by philosophers and prophets. This theme was elaborated often in later European literature.
The dominating figure in the kingdom of the Almohads, however, was the philosopher Averroës (Ibn Rushd; died 1198), court physician of the Amazigh (Berber) kings in Marrākush (Marrakech) and famous as the great Arab commentator on Aristotle. The importance of his frequently misinterpreted philosophy in the formation of medieval Christian thought is well known. Among his many other writings, especially notable is his merciless reply to an attack on philosophy made by al-Ghazālī (died 1111). Al-Ghazālī had called his attack Tahāfut al-falāsifah (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), while Averroës's equally famous reply was entitled Tahāfut tahāfut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence).
The Persian-born al-Ghazālī had, after giving up a splendid scholarly career, become the most influential representative of moderate Sufism.
Thinking Europe's "Muslim Question": On Trojan Horses and the Problematization of Muslims | UvA - 2022 |
By Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar
Abstract
Understanding the ways in which Muslims are turned into "a problem" requires an analytic incorporating the insights gained through the concepts of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism into a larger frame. The "Muslim Question" can provide such a frame by attending to the systematic character of this form of racism, explored here through biopolitics.
This article develops a conceptualization of Europe's "Muslim Question" along three lines. First, the "Muslim Question" emerges as an accusation of being an "alien body" to the nation, often expressed through the Trojan horse legend. Second, the "Muslim Question" is elaborated through demands of integration and assimilation, in which the production of difference entangles with calls and measures to regulate Muslims. And third, the "Muslim Question" is brought to life upon the terrain of gender and sexuality, as the imaginary of threat at the heart of the "Muslim Question" is a replacement conspiracy centered on birthrates.
Introduction: What's in a trope?
In the 2004 European elections, the Austrian politician Jörg Haider focused his campaign on the question of Turkey's membership to the EU, citing Muammar Gaddafi, who purportedly warned that Europe would be accepting a Trojan horse if Turkey became a member of the EU (Bunzl 2005). In a speech in the Dutch parliament in 2015, the politician Geert Wilders warned against the "Islamization" of the Netherlands, stating that "Islam is the Horse of Troy in Europe" (Wilders 2015). At a meeting with European leaders in Malta in 2017, Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lambasted the EU's refugee policy, in particular the EU responses toward the "refugee crisis" of 2015-2016. "Migration turned out to be the Trojan horse of terrorism," he declared, while raising alarm about how migration has been leading to "a dominant Muslim presence in western Europe in even the lifetime of our generation [since] the Left has a clear action plan to transform Europe. They want to let millions of Muslims in" (Orbán 2017).
A trope is haunting Europe, that of Islam as a Trojan horse at, or already within, the gates of Europe. During the last decades, various far-right discourses have elaborated the trope of the Islamic Trojan horse within the construction of Europe's enemy, the Muslim Other. In these elaborations, a fictional genealogy has been established (in which "the gates of Europe" connects contemporary imaginaries of Fortress Europe with imaginaries of 1529 and of the "Turks at the gates of Europe"), different categories have been collapsed into each other (Muslims, refugees, migrants, and terrorists), and an array of racial stereotypes of Muslims (notably terrorism, hypersexuality, and replacement fears) have been articulated with each other.
The trope, then, connects the dots between the movement of refugees, terrorism, and eventually the replacement of so-called native Europeans by Muslims. The Trojan horse legend is mobilized and exploited to recruit, entertain, and advance the fear of the Islamization of Western values, norms, ideas, and culture, and increasingly the fear of population replacement. The effectiveness of the Trojan horse legend resides in the way it recycles, reinscribes, and mobilizes an age-old narrative about unwittingly inviting an enemy into one's own secured place and deploys it to construct Muslims simultaneously as an alien body to the nation and as a group committed to destroying the West by means of infiltration. These racial fears are, as it were, folded into the familiar Trojan horse legend.
Understanding the Party for Freedom's Politicization of Islam | Brookings Institute - 24 July 2019 |
Great Replacement Ideology for Xenophobes
A deadly ideology: how the 'great replacement theory' went mainstream | The Guardian - 8 June 2022 |
