Update 8/25/07 - At Pajamas Media, Robert Spencer has responded to Derb's review of Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't. Spencer offers an important rebuttal which shouldn't be missed. (HT: The Corner)
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It's amazing that a book like this had to be written, but such is the state of contemporary ignorance that politically correctness, blind as it is to obvious matters-of-fact, has to be answered with restatements of the truth. According to Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer's Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't provides such a required restatement and consequently has become essential reading.
Andrew Bostom's review offers a useful overview of the book. Short of reading the book itself, I think it would be a good idea to at least read Bostom's review. Much of what he wrote I expected the book to cover. But the review lists a lot of things that surprised me. For example, I hadn't previously questioned the widely accepted (and praised) distinctive historical Arab-Muslim cultural achievements, but Bostom does and writes:
Moreover, even notions about supposed Islamic contributions to pre-modern science and philosophy -- fostered by the triumphalism of the jihad conquests -- are purely mythical. Despite taking credit for the invention of algebra, the Arabs did no more than copy the
treatises of Diophantus of Alexandria, who lived in the fourth century. The numerals commonly referred to as Arabic, and the system of notation which bears the same name, derive from Hindustan. The Arabs themselves called arithmetic "Indian reckoning," and geometry "Indian science" (hendesya). Arab knowledge of botany was obtained either from the treatises of Dioscorides, or from Hindu and Persian works. In chemistry, or rather alchemy, they were the pupils of the Alexandrian school. Djeber and Rhazes, the latter an Islamized Persian, did no more than copy the works of Alexandrian Hermetism. There is the same absence of invention regarding medicine. Greek physicians, from the third century of the Christian era, made their way into Persia, where they founded a celebrated school which soon became the rival of Alexandria. But earlier it was especially at Alexandria that Greek medicine emerged from empiricism and assumed a truly scientific character. Aaron, a Christian priest who lived at Alexandria in the seventh century, compiled and translated into Syriac the treatises of Galen, under the name of Pandects of Medicine. This Syriac version was translated into Arabic in 685, becoming a major source used by Arab physicians, most notably Serapion, Avicenna, Albucasis, and Averroes-whose own Koullyat is merely a translation of Galen. Rhazes best known work, the Kanoun, is a compilation of the treatises of Galen, from the Syriac versions. And the Arabs left the doctrines of Aristotle (and of the Jewish and Christian philosophers) just as they were transmitted to them by various non-Muslims-reproduced, but neither invented nor improved.