Naturally, before Dr. Farhat Hussain finished his presentation, he took time to answer questions from the audience.
One of these questions was: “What happened? How did Islamic Civilization fall?”
The questioner was an Egyptian Muslim, who like Dr. Hussain, is interested in both archeology and history.
I thought to myself. It is good that Arabs, Muslims and Westerners are now once again taking time to explore both the fall of and importance of early Islamic Civilization.
For far too-long western-oriented universities and schools have focused too much on Western civilization—ignoring, for example, the fact that Greek medicine was much more a mix of science and superstitions when practiced in its heyday than was medicine at the height of the so-called Dark Ages in the learned centers (from Baghdad to Cordoba) and hospitals of Islam.
We, in the West, need to look at world history, especially Islamic history, to understand ourselves and our histories of tolerance and intolerance better.
Likewise, Islamic peoples and Arab peoples in the Middle East need to study earnestly
(a) their own histories,
(b) their own international histories, including Islamic and Arab relations with Europeans, Southeast Asian, Africans, and Chinese culture, and
(c) consider balancing their own histories more with histories from the perspective of the poor, disenfranchised, and non-Arab, non-Islamic peoples of the planet. Finally,
(d) more investment needs to be made into both recent and ancient archeology.
These educational expansions by Islamic and Arab societies would help reduce a lot of myths related to Islamic historiography in both the East and the West—both places where historiography is still too-dominated by extremists so often today.
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