The Impact Of Islam Scott Emmet by Scott Emmet 9780988477889, 0988477882 instant download after payment.

The work that follows is a survey and an evaluation of the impact that Islam as a faith and a civilization had upon Europe during the High Middle Ages, from the late tenth through to the fifteenth or sixteenth century. It is also, to some degree, an examination of how that impact has been viewed by Western academics over the past century. These, as we shall see, have tended to present a sanitized and frankly disingenuous view of Islamic civilization and have fostered a series of myths which are currently causing much mischief in academic and government circles throughout the Western world. The source of this “Islamophilic” viewpoint is a frankly anti-Christian mindset which first appeared during the Enlightenment and thereafter spread inexorably throughout Europe and the Americas. This anti-Christian bias has now become the default mode of thought in academic circles in the West: As Christianity was “talked down” so it became, as the twentieth century progressed, more and more the custom to “talk up” Islam. Take for example the following quote from Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle Eastern studies at Princeton, whose 2001 book What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, looked at the decline of the Islamic world vis à vis the Christian, from the Middle Ages onwards:

  “It is often said that Islam is an egalitarian religion. There is much truth in this assertion. If we compare Islam at the time of its advent with the societies that surrounded it – the stratified feudalism of Iran and the caste system of India to the east, the privileged aristocracies of both Byzantine and Latin Europe to the West – the Islamic dispensation does indeed bring a message of equality. Not only does Islam not endorse such systems of social differentiation; it explicitly and absolutely rejects them. The actions and utterances of the Prophet, the honored precedents of the early rulers of Islam as preserved by tradition, are overwhelmingly ag