What did in the Ottomans was the Columbian exchange.

Don’t forget Vasco da Gama too, who closed the trap around the Ummah by setting in motion the Portuguese blockade of the Indian Ocean…

Regardless of who and when it was invented, I think there is a consensus that the croissant is meant to resemble a crescent (a symbol associated with Muslims and Islam).

1 Love your blog

2 What did in the Ottomans was the Columbian exchange. Very quickly the rediscovery of the Americas wildly shifted the center of power and trade away from the silk road and the Mediterranean. Plus the Americas introduced whole new products and food stuffs to the world. One example the humble spud.

No seriously the Potato is perfect example. It helped fuel the industrial revolution by expanding the agricultural base. European populations exploded thanks to calories and nutrients provided by this Andean import. While Islamic scholars scratched their beards trying to figure out whether this tuber was halal or haraam Europe gabbed the spud and ran with it.

So it went with Maize and Tobacco and other items. The Americas became part of the European world. All that trade, all those products, all those people eventually shifted the world away from the Ottomans.

By the 19th Century the Ottomans were a shell of their former selves. The Sultans barely controlled their own palaces, never mind their former possessions. The European Imperialists were hungrily looking at the Sultan’s domains as their next meal. As the sultans were unable to rise to the defense of the empire; the Young Turks did. They made the mistake of backing the wrong horse in WWI. But even that may be a canard. The real failure was the Ottomans response to the challenge of modernity that the Columbian exchange started.

What would the Pacific east look like? Would all of Indonesia be a Hindu polity? Would Buddhism rule over Afghanistan? What would the subcontinent look like without Mogul rule? Would Tibetan Buddhism eventually become the dominate religion in Central Asia or would the Mongols remain pagans? Would the holy cities of Mecca and Medina find god via the Jews in their midst or would the people of Arabia still slumber in polytheism?

What is called Western Civilization owes so much to Islam, especially the glorious flower of 12th Century Islam. What the Irish monks failed to save, the people of Muslim Spain preserved. Hiding in nooks of the great Cathedrals of Chartres and Notre Dame de Paris are Islamic inventions of Architecture.

Even that great European misadventure of the Crusades has roots in Islam. What is Papal dispensation other than a perverted form of Jihad? Before Islam struck Christendom there were no forms of Militant Christianity. Look at the Knights Templar, the Teutonic Knights, the Knights of St John, etc., etc., etc. Lest we forget the Orders founded in Spain that founded the Reconquista in Spain and Portugal. Not to get too Hegelian here but the push of Islam, the push of the Prophet armed, lead to the shove of the Christian Military Orders. Before Islam Spain was a collection of heretical Visogothic small states. After the Reconquista Spain was more Catholic than the Pope.

It is really hard to imagine Charlemagne without the clear and present danger of Muslim Spain. Would the Pope be so desirous of the creation of a New Rome if it wasn’t for the threat of Damascus? And it was Charlemagne that set up the kingdoms that eventually became the great European states of France, Germany and Italy.

We forget that Islam and Christendom not only conflicted they also cross pollinated. It was the Ottomans who pushed the Europeans out of the warm confines of the Mediterranean and into the harsh Atlantic. Think about it, the crazed idea of Columbus was to bypass the Ottoman control of the spice and silk trade a go directly to the source. I say crazed because his notion of the world was literally too small. Lucky for him there was a whole continent where the Greeks thought there was open ocean. Australia is an English speaking, European culture because of Ottoman domination in the 15th century.

Don’t forget the more prosaic gifts of Islam, where would we be without the Islamic transmission of paper to the Western world? Islam has acted as a transmission belt between Asia and Christendom long before Alan Watts first drew breath.

These kind of what-ifs really drive historians to drink or at least hair pulling for tea-totalers. Europe might still be wallowing in mystical ignorance if not for Islam. A weird, debased, possibly gnostic Christianity would occupy most of the now Muslim maghreb. This could have penetrated father south creating and even more bizarre and heretical mish mash of African Polytheism and Gnostic / Manichean Christology. Muslims forget how inventive Christians can be in their ideology.

Islamic knowledge and logic curbed Christian enthusiasm for Platonic excess. Islam re-introduced Aristotle and other hard-headed Greeks to Christendom. Islam re-introduced the scientific method to Europe. It is impossible to say that Europe could have rediscovered these things without Islam providing a scholarly nudge in the right direction. The glory that was and is the Alhambra has echoes in so much of what is called the Gothic in Europe. Even the Troubadours of France and the great art of courtly romance they created may have its roots in Al-Andalus. With out Islam we might be bereft of Arthur and his Knights. Remember much of the story of Arthur rest in the stories and songs of the Troubadours. Odd to think of something seen as so typically British may actually have part of its roots in the harems of Al-Andalus. But that is what happens when you really try to think of a world without Islam, it is like pulling a thread from a sweater, if your not careful you might end up with a rather small wool potholder.

as-salaamu ‘alaikum. Antish wrote something quite interesting, however I would like to take it a bit further in another direction. He wrote,

“…there are now NO states recognised as valid by a billion Muslims, chaos and violence isn’t surprising.”

The Ottomans whom ruled correctly for approximately 700 years held together the Caliphate to which Antish is referring. With the emergence of the Young Turks and developing European interests in the Middle East the stage was set for the destabilization of the Sultans hold over the Caliphate. The Sultan was undermined and the Caliphate was toppled. This could never have occurred without convincing the Ottoman citizens that it was in their best interest. All one has to do in order to see and understand the present state of affairs is look 100 years back, around the time many of our Grandparents were being born to understand exactly what went wrong with respect to the front runners of the Allied States and Muslims. Why do people make it more complicated than it really is?

A second thought relating to the lead statement of the citation was quite disturbing. The author wrote,

“Imagine, if you will, a world without Islam—admittedly an almost inconceivable state of affairs given its charged centrality in our daily news headlines.”

But when I actually though about this deeply, I realized that if this were the case, I most likely would not exist. In fact my entire ethnic group, The Fula People… Peul or Fulbe, would not exist. Because ultimately our ancestry is the result of ethnic mixing during the Western Campaign of Hazreti Muawiyah (RA). And as it stands according to our history it was ‘Ubah ibn Amir who established a friendly exchange of religion culture and intermarriage with Futa Jallon and Futa Touro during the Military expeditions to Tripoli and eventually Italy.

-Saifuddin

To be even more fair, it could also be said that Arabs invented the concept of modern hospitals. Arabs that happened to be Muslim. Could the technology have emerged in the same area had Islam not existed? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t remember reading any instructions about modern medicine in the Qu’ran. I could be wrong since I can’t read Arabic, though. I had to make do with a paltry English translation which may have mistranslated or misconstrued the relevant passages.