Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

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Ibrahim
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Ibrahim »

Marcus wrote:When did (?) Persia become Muslim?
The Sassanid dynasty, supporter of the state religion of Zoroastrianism, fell in 651CE, after a war of about 20 years, and following a long draining war with the Byzantine empire. Conversions were reportedly rapid (as in Byzantine territory) as Islamic laws and taxation were gentler than the Persian (and Byzantine) ones they replaced.

The de facto founder of Shiism, Hussein idn Ali, lived through this exact same period, though the incidents which led to the schism are not related to the Persian conquest, but the struggle over whether or not the family of the Prophet (the Ahl al-Bayt) or an appointed caliph would rule the Islamic community-turned-empire. It was essentially an Arab political dispute.

Drawing on Persian influence, both Shia and Sunni Muslims would adopt a hereditary monarchical style of imperial governance, so in many ways the original purpose of the conflict was made redundant.
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Marcus »

Ibrahim wrote:. . the incidents which led to the schism are not related to the Persian conquest, but the struggle over whether or not the family of the Prophet (the Ahl al-Bayt) or an appointed caliph would rule the Islamic community-turned-empire. . .
Thanks.

Would the struggle have been similar in nature to the Papal Revolution of the 11th and 12th centuries as the Western Church (Roman Catholic) sought to establish itself institutionally, free from secular power?
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Jnalum Persicum »

Last edited by Jnalum Persicum on Sun Sep 30, 2012 2:14 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Ibrahim »

Marcus wrote:
Ibrahim wrote:. . the incidents which led to the schism are not related to the Persian conquest, but the struggle over whether or not the family of the Prophet (the Ahl al-Bayt) or an appointed caliph would rule the Islamic community-turned-empire. . .
Thanks.

Would the struggle have been similar in nature to the Papal Revolution of the 11th and 12th centuries as the Western Church (Roman Catholic) sought to establish itself institutionally, free from secular power?
No, I don't think they are similar at all. The investiture controversy has no parallel in Islam, due to the absence of a church hierarchy, and moreover there were no competing secular and church power centers.
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Marcus »

"History, therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy. It deserves to be accounted a branch of it." —Ibn Kahldun, The Prolegomenon

Very astute observation, very true . . . what is one's theory of history except one's philosophy applied to time . .
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Farcus »

Marcus wrote:"History, therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy. It deserves to be accounted a branch of it." —Ibn Kahldun, The Prolegomenon

Very astute observation, very true . . . what is one's theory of history except one's philosophy applied to time . .

The lack of a question mark in that statement is revealing. However, historians don't operate in vaccuums as much as they used to, and it gets harder and harder to get away the kind of inaccuracies that make it easy to adapt the past to whatever one chooses to presuppose for the present.
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Ibrahim »

Farcus wrote:
Marcus wrote:"History, therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy. It deserves to be accounted a branch of it." —Ibn Kahldun, The Prolegomenon

Very astute observation, very true . . . what is one's theory of history except one's philosophy applied to time . .

The lack of a question mark in that statement is revealing. However, historians don't operate in vaccuums as much as they used to, and it gets harder and harder to get away the kind of inaccuracies that make it easy to adapt the past to whatever one chooses to presuppose for the present.
The modern conception of "history" as a discipline is only a century or two old. Previously, and this is both in the "Eastern" and "Western" worlds, a historian would literally try to describe the entire world as they knew it. So, in the case of something like "The History of the Church in England" by Bede, the first book is an account of creation, and then chapter two starts with post-Roman Britain etc. Ibn Khaldun is operating in the same manner, essentially trying to describe the entire world at that time. As such history is necessarily mingled in with philosophy and any number of aspects that we now have distinct disciplines for, but which was not yet separated out into specializations at that time.

Naturally historians of the past were more rooted in their own context, but also more openly so. Ibn Khaldun writes with overt prejudices about the truth of his own religion and worldview. Modern historians are simultaneously more objective, but less ambitious. At the same time they will claim to write in an objective vacuum, with varying degrees of success.
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Farcus »

Ibrahim wrote:
Farcus wrote:
Marcus wrote:"History, therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy. It deserves to be accounted a branch of it." —Ibn Kahldun, The Prolegomenon

Very astute observation, very true . . . what is one's theory of history except one's philosophy applied to time . .

The lack of a question mark in that statement is revealing. However, historians don't operate in vaccuums as much as they used to, and it gets harder and harder to get away the kind of inaccuracies that make it easy to adapt the past to whatever one chooses to presuppose for the present.
The modern conception of "history" as a discipline is only a century or two old. Previously, and this is both in the "Eastern" and "Western" worlds, a historian would literally try to describe the entire world as they knew it. So, in the case of something like "The History of the Church in England" by Bede, the first book is an account of creation, and then chapter two starts with post-Roman Britain etc. Ibn Khaldun is operating in the same manner, essentially trying to describe the entire world at that time. As such history is necessarily mingled in with philosophy and any number of aspects that we now have distinct disciplines for, but which was not yet separated out into specializations at that time.
I do recall rather practical and disciplined Chinese historiographies from before the current era. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War limits itself. Rome, as another example, reckoned dates by historical milestones like "ad urbe condita", or "In the 3rd year of Emperor Philippus Arabs".
It may be more a case that like epic poetry, histories with ambitious scopes imprint themselves on a culture and become great if the author actually pulls it off. History as art.

What I appreciate about Ibn Kahldun is that he founded a school of historical criticism by establishing an approach based on standards of rationality and honesty.
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Ibrahim »

Farcus wrote:
Ibrahim wrote:
Farcus wrote:
Marcus wrote:"History, therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy. It deserves to be accounted a branch of it." —Ibn Kahldun, The Prolegomenon

Very astute observation, very true . . . what is one's theory of history except one's philosophy applied to time . .

The lack of a question mark in that statement is revealing. However, historians don't operate in vaccuums as much as they used to, and it gets harder and harder to get away the kind of inaccuracies that make it easy to adapt the past to whatever one chooses to presuppose for the present.
The modern conception of "history" as a discipline is only a century or two old. Previously, and this is both in the "Eastern" and "Western" worlds, a historian would literally try to describe the entire world as they knew it. So, in the case of something like "The History of the Church in England" by Bede, the first book is an account of creation, and then chapter two starts with post-Roman Britain etc. Ibn Khaldun is operating in the same manner, essentially trying to describe the entire world at that time. As such history is necessarily mingled in with philosophy and any number of aspects that we now have distinct disciplines for, but which was not yet separated out into specializations at that time.

I do recall rather practical and disciplined Chinese historiographies from before the current era. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War limits itself. Rome, as another example, reckoned dates by historical milestones like "ad urbe condita", or "In the 3rd year of Emperor Philippus Arabs".
It may be more a case that like epic poetry, histories with ambitious scopes imprint themselves on a culture and become great if the author actually pulls it off. History as art.

What I appreciate about Ibn Kahldun is that he founded a school of historical criticism by establishing an approach based on standards of rationality and honesty.
Chinese histories are very specific to Han prejudices and conceptions of the world, but you are on to something with Thucydides or, say, Polybius. Perhaps I should have confined my comments to histories from monotheistic cultures.
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Presuppositions noted by Khaldun . . .

Post by Marcus »

Another pregnant observation by Khaldun:
". . if the soul is infected with partisanship for a particular opinion or sect, it accepts without a moment's hesitation the information that is agreeable to it. Prejudice and partisanship obscure the critical faculty and preclude critical investigation. The result is that falsehoods are accepted and transmitted."

—Ibn Khaldun, Prolegomenon
Thank heaven we have no one here on these fora whose souls are infected with partisanship for opinion or sect . . . ;)

Nothin' new under the sun . . .
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Marcus »

In my reading tonight, I was mildly surprised that Khaldun could state with certainty, about 1400, that the earth was a sphere.

I was amazed that he knew civilized life ended at about 65˚north, which is roughly the Arctic Circle.

Those old timers got around a bit it would seem . . ;)
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Hans Bulvai »

How did he conclude that the world was a sphere?
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Marcus »

Hans Bulvai wrote:How did he conclude that the world was a sphere?
From the book:
In the books of the philosophers, who speculated about the condition of the world, it has been explained that the earth has a spherical shape . .
Others, better read than I, have told me that that the earth was a globe was common knowledge at that time. What wasn't understood was how large it was. Thus Columbus thought he could reach the Orient by sailing west out of Spain.

What especially impressed me about Khaldun was his knowledge that civilization ended at about 65˚ north. Consider:
“Man, as an animal, is indeed, a tropical animal. But man, as distinguished from animals, is not at his best in the tropics or very near them. His fight upward in civilization has coincided in part at least with his march northward over the earth into a cooler, clearer, more bracing air....

“Men at every period of history have been generally of the opinion that the ultimate limit of the northward spread of civilization had then at length been reached.

“...Tacitus probably knew as much as any of his contemporaries about the lands beyond the Alps, and was merely voicing the general opinion of his time and countrymen when he said that nobody could conceive that any one, unless forced by the stern necessity of war, would willingly leave the fertile shore of Africa or the plains of Italy for the country north of the Alps where the climate is as disagreeable as the soil is sterile. This was undoubtedly a truism of his time; but it is a fact of our time that many people live Paris and other parts of France by choice....

“It is human nature that we undervalue the distant and exaggerate the difficulties of the unknown...

“To the peoples of the centers of civilization the uncolonized North has been more or less remote geographically and almost infinitely remote from a cultural and historical point of view...

“On the basis of distance and misinformation the North has always been supposed to be dreadful and devoid of resources...

“...Tacitus was wrong when he said people would never by choice live as far north as France; the Moors of the Middle Ages were short-sighted when they undervalued the possibilities of Britain; it is strange that as astute a man as Franklin thought a small tropic isle like Guadaloupe commercially more valuable than Canada; Seward was wise in buying Alaska and Gladstone a simpleton to want to renounce Spitzbergen. But surely there must be somewhere the limit to Northward progress...

“We have not come to the northward limit of commercial progress...Corner lots in Rome were precious when the banks of the Thames had no value; the products of Canada were little beyond furs and fish when the British and French agreed in preferring Guadaloupe. ...But...times have changed. ...There is no northern boundary beyond which productive enterprise cannot go till North meets North on opposite shores of the Arctic Ocean as East has met West on the Pacific.

“If the average American...has ten ideas about the North, nine of them are wrong.

“...the most fundamentally wrong idea about the North is that...the polar regions are far colder in the coldest part of winter than any countries that are now inhabited by the average civilized European or American.

“A complement of the idea that the North is dreadfully cold in winter is the notion that it is also cold through the entire summer. It is possible to maintain that the winters are dreadfully cold, but only by agreeing that the winters of northern Vermont and Saranac Lake and Minnesota and Montana are also dreadfully cold. ...Five miles from the ocean at Point Barrow the temperature probably seldom if ever rises above 75º in the shade, which is ten degrees colder than the similar record for Fort Bragg, California, both places being at sea level and near the sea. But fifty miles inland in California gives you a temperature of 110º in the shade, and a hundred miles inland in Alaska will give a temperature approaching 100º in the shade....

“...we come next to a consideration of the length of the seasons. It is true, generally speaking, that the farther north you go in the northern hemisphere the longer the winter and the shorter the summer. ...A Sicilian may think that a winter of three months’ length is intolerable and if he insists that is is intolerable you can’t very well argue with him, but you can at least prove to him that numerous prosperous people live in a climate where there are three months of winter. ...in Winnipeg you will in turn meet people who say that while five or six months of winter is no serious handicap to economic development, nine months of winter would be...intolerable. ...The argument is of the same nature and is its essence no more tenable than that of the Sicilian who thinks that even the shortest winter is unbearable. ...

“That the ground in the polar regions is always covered with snow...is another of the widely-spread wrong notions. ... Even in the tropics there is permanent snow on the mountain tops if the mountains are high, and even in the remotest arctic regions the snow all disappears from the land in summer.
“A corollary of the idea that the North is covered with snow even in summer is the one that it is a region of heavy snowfall. This is far from being true.
“...In the development of the (north) country these (false notions) will prove a drawback... China’s wall of masonry was never a very efficient barrier. A wall of misinformation is more effective, more difficult to tear down."

—excerpted from The Northward Course of Empire, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Macmillan, 1924
"The jawbone of an ass is just as dangerous a weapon today as in Sampson's time."
--- Richard Nixon
******************
"I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels."
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Jnalum Persicum »

Hans Bulvai wrote:.

How did he conclude that the world was a sphere ?

.

Hans ,

Good sources for who were the pioneer in "Real scientific Astronomy" (and not magic) to look into
are :


Astronomy in medieval Islam


Science and technology in Iran

.
Many of today's concepts in science including the Helio-Centric model of solar system, finite speed of light, and gravity were first proposed by Persian scientists . .
.

Bīrūnī

.
In his major extant astronomical work, the Mas'ud Canon, he regards heliocentric and geocentric hypotheses as mathematically equivalent but heliocentrism as physically impossible, yet approves of the theory that the earth rotates on its axis. He utilizes his observational data to disprove Ptolemy's immobile solar apogee. More recently, Biruni's eclipse data was used by Dunthorne in 1749 to help determine the acceleration of the moon and his observational data has entered the larger astronomical historical record and is still used today in geophysics and astronomy.

[..]

Biruni contributed to the introduction of the experimental scientific method to mechanics, unified statics and dynamics into the science of mechanics, and combined the fields of hydrostatics with dynamics to create hydrodynamics.
.

ibn Sīnā


Tusi

.

The Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) considered Tusi to be the greatest of the later Persian scholars.

For his planetary models, he invented a geometrical technique called a Tusi-couple, which generates linear motion from the sum of two circular motions. He used this technique to replace Ptolemy's problematic equant[10] for many planets, but was unable to find a solution to Mercury, which was solved later by Ibn al-Shatir as well as Ali Qushji[11]. The Tusi couple was later employed in Ibn al-Shatir's geocentric model and Nicolaus Copernicus' heliocentric Copernican model[12]. He also calculated the value for the annual precession of the equinoxes and contributed to the construction and usage of some astronomical instruments including the astrolabe.

.

"Maragha Revolution"

.

The "Maragha Revolution" refers to the Maragheh school's revolution against Ptolemaic astronomy. The "Maragha school" was an astronomical tradition beginning in the Maragheh observatory and continuing with astronomers from the Damascus mosque and Samarkand observatory. The Maragha astronomers attempted to solve the equant problem and produce alternative configurations to the Ptolemaic model. They were more successful than previous astronomers in producing non-Ptolemaic configurations which eliminated the equant and eccentrics, were more accurate than the Ptolemaic model in numerically predicting planetary positions, and were in better agreement with empirical observations.[5]

.


.
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Ibrahim »

Marcus wrote:In my reading tonight, I was mildly surprised that Khaldun could state with certainty, about 1400, that the earth was a sphere.

I was amazed that he knew civilized life ended at about 65˚north, which is roughly the Arctic Circle.

Those old timers got around a bit it would seem . . ;)
Islamic astronomy was advanced, but a relatively accurate measurement of a spherical Earth has been made by Ptolemy in ancient Greece, and Islamic (and, after the crusades, European) scholars would have read the Classics as well, and been aware of this theory and measurement. IIRC Ptolemy made his measurement by checking the movement of shadows in wells throughout the day.

A professor of mine back in my undergrad days used to rage at the idea that any educated person ever thought the Earth was flat, and that tacking that detail onto the Columbus or Drake narratives was nonsense.
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Book Report Going Astray...

Post by Farcus »

Marcus wrote:
Hans Bulvai wrote:How did he conclude that the world was a sphere?
From the book:
In the books of the philosophers, who speculated about the condition of the world, it has been explained that the earth has a spherical shape . .
The reason "he could state it with certainty the earth was a sphere" was because he read it in a book? Great.




What especially impressed me about Khaldun was his knowledge that civilization ended at about 65˚ north. Consider:
“Man, as an animal, is indeed, a tropical animal. But man, as distinguished from animals, is not at his best in the tropics or very near them. His fight upward in civilization has coincided in part at least with his march northward over the earth into a cooler, clearer, more bracing air....

“Men at every period of history have been generally of the opinion that the ultimate limit of the northward spread of civilization had then at length been reached.

“...Tacitus probably knew as much as any of his contemporaries about the lands beyond the Alps, and was merely voicing the general opinion of his time and countrymen when he said that nobody could conceive that any one, unless forced by the stern necessity of war, would willingly leave the fertile shore of Africa or the plains of Italy for the country north of the Alps where the climate is as disagreeable as the soil is sterile. This was undoubtedly a truism of his time; but it is a fact of our time that many people live Paris and other parts of France by choice....

“It is human nature that we undervalue the distant and exaggerate the difficulties of the unknown...

“To the peoples of the centers of civilization the uncolonized North has been more or less remote geographically and almost infinitely remote from a cultural and historical point of view...

“On the basis of distance and misinformation the North has always been supposed to be dreadful and devoid of resources...

“...Tacitus was wrong when he said people would never by choice live as far north as France; the Moors of the Middle Ages were short-sighted when they undervalued the possibilities of Britain; it is strange that as astute a man as Franklin thought a small tropic isle like Guadaloupe commercially more valuable than Canada; Seward was wise in buying Alaska and Gladstone a simpleton to want to renounce Spitzbergen. But surely there must be somewhere the limit to Northward progress...

“We have not come to the northward limit of commercial progress...Corner lots in Rome were precious when the banks of the Thames had no value; the products of Canada were little beyond furs and fish when the British and French agreed in preferring Guadaloupe. ...But...times have changed. ...There is no northern boundary beyond which productive enterprise cannot go till North meets North on opposite shores of the Arctic Ocean as East has met West on the Pacific.

“If the average American...has ten ideas about the North, nine of them are wrong.

“...the most fundamentally wrong idea about the North is that...the polar regions are far colder in the coldest part of winter than any countries that are now inhabited by the average civilized European or American.

“A complement of the idea that the North is dreadfully cold in winter is the notion that it is also cold through the entire summer. It is possible to maintain that the winters are dreadfully cold, but only by agreeing that the winters of northern Vermont and Saranac Lake and Minnesota and Montana are also dreadfully cold. ...Five miles from the ocean at Point Barrow the temperature probably seldom if ever rises above 75º in the shade, which is ten degrees colder than the similar record for Fort Bragg, California, both places being at sea level and near the sea. But fifty miles inland in California gives you a temperature of 110º in the shade, and a hundred miles inland in Alaska will give a temperature approaching 100º in the shade....

“...we come next to a consideration of the length of the seasons. It is true, generally speaking, that the farther north you go in the northern hemisphere the longer the winter and the shorter the summer. ...A Sicilian may think that a winter of three months’ length is intolerable and if he insists that is is intolerable you can’t very well argue with him, but you can at least prove to him that numerous prosperous people live in a climate where there are three months of winter. ...in Winnipeg you will in turn meet people who say that while five or six months of winter is no serious handicap to economic development, nine months of winter would be...intolerable. ...The argument is of the same nature and is its essence no more tenable than that of the Sicilian who thinks that even the shortest winter is unbearable. ...

“That the ground in the polar regions is always covered with snow...is another of the widely-spread wrong notions. ... Even in the tropics there is permanent snow on the mountain tops if the mountains are high, and even in the remotest arctic regions the snow all disappears from the land in summer.
“A corollary of the idea that the North is covered with snow even in summer is the one that it is a region of heavy snowfall. This is far from being true.
“...In the development of the (north) country these (false notions) will prove a drawback... China’s wall of masonry was never a very efficient barrier. A wall of misinformation is more effective, more difficult to tear down."

—excerpted from The Northward Course of Empire, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Macmillan, 1924



What does any of this have to do with Ibn Khaldun, or your assertion that Ibn Khaldun "knew" something about the northerly extent of "civilization"??
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Re: Prolegomenon: Islamic history of the world . .

Post by Typhoon »

Farcus wrote:
Ibrahim wrote:
Farcus wrote:
Marcus wrote:"History, therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy. It deserves to be accounted a branch of it." —Ibn Kahldun, The Prolegomenon

Very astute observation, very true . . . what is one's theory of history except one's philosophy applied to time . .

The lack of a question mark in that statement is revealing. However, historians don't operate in vaccuums as much as they used to, and it gets harder and harder to get away the kind of inaccuracies that make it easy to adapt the past to whatever one chooses to presuppose for the present.
The modern conception of "history" as a discipline is only a century or two old. Previously, and this is both in the "Eastern" and "Western" worlds, a historian would literally try to describe the entire world as they knew it. So, in the case of something like "The History of the Church in England" by Bede, the first book is an account of creation, and then chapter two starts with post-Roman Britain etc. Ibn Khaldun is operating in the same manner, essentially trying to describe the entire world at that time. As such history is necessarily mingled in with philosophy and any number of aspects that we now have distinct disciplines for, but which was not yet separated out into specializations at that time.
I do recall rather practical and disciplined Chinese historiographies from before the current era. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War limits itself. Rome, as another example, reckoned dates by historical milestones like "ad urbe condita", or "In the 3rd year of Emperor Philippus Arabs".
It may be more a case that like epic poetry, histories with ambitious scopes imprint themselves on a culture and become great if the author actually pulls it off. History as art.

What I appreciate about Ibn Kahldun is that he founded a school of historical criticism by establishing an approach based on standards of rationality and honesty.
I have described nothing but what I saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry.
~ Thucydides. Peloponnesian War
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