Quote:
Originally Posted by rifleman
Seems that Mohammad stopped everything aimed at true enlightenment. "Allah and intellectual repression be praised!" yes?
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At the very least that is not a fair presentation of what the first video says. DeGrasse Tyson places the blame not on Muhammad, and Tyson is a solidly non-theistic man so he would have reason to do so, but on the influence of Al-Ghazali. This is a common, if somewhat controversial, claim. The idea being that Islam was, despite objections of it I'm sure he has, relatively enlightened in the period of the Mu'tazili and philosophes. You had people from Al-Farabi to Avicenna who were both well-versed in Islam and science or Greek philosophy. (Sometimes the two merged in their world) You also had Christians and Jews doing science while being ruled by a Caliphate or something like it.
The Mu'tazili are, essentially, dead so far as I know. Still all Islam everywhere is not anti-science or anti-enlightenment. Ironically many of the first Salafis were modernistic-leaning people like Muhammad Abduh and Jamal Afghani who wanted to reconcile the Qur'an with modern thought. That didn't work out, but there are enlightened Muslims in many places. Senegal, India, and so forth. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim and Fatima Mernissi are two I've read. And although they're not a forward-looking regime the Iranians are generally pro-science, more or less.
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