Quote:
Originally Posted by ah123
You can thank, in part anyway, Saudi Arabia for that - the house of Saud (current royal family) adopted a very conservative view of Islam (Wahabi or Salafi) and have the money & influence to export that view by building schools and mosques in the rest of the world, and especially the developing world.
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This is partly true, but the days of Islamic dominance in science, philosophy, and language were already long in the eclipse before the Saudi family came to prominence. They certainly played a large role in the exportation of this current brand of
modern Islamic extremism, though, but I would also blame the theologian that acted as their tool to power and whose family continues to to this day:
Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of modern Salafism. That being said, though, the practice of a fundamentalist and charismatic Islamic preacher helping sweep away an old and tired regime and replacing it with a new one on the back of a back-to-basics religious ideology is something that isn't at all new, and has gone on in cycles throughout Islamic history since its very beginning.
A lot of people point at
Al-Ghazali as the beginning of the end of original Islamic thinking. He rejected the teachings of the ancients (the rationalism of Aristotle, etc.) on the basis of them being unbelievers. Interesting reading, if one is so inclined. The works of the Islamic falasifah, in particular, if you enjoy philosophy, are enlightening. They searched for the specific aspects of religion that were common the world over. The peculiarities of religions that (so they thought) were the products of the societies and climates that gave rise to them could not as a result be aspects of the "true" religion (paraphrasing), and therefore must be false (this included Islam itself). The "true" religion would be exposed only when they were able to find the aspects common to religions the world over.