Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

« Previous Post | Next Post »
« Previous post in category | Next post in category »

History: Nestorians and Islam

In his recent God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, Rodney Stark challenges the conventional notion that Islamic civilization was more advanced than Christendom’s in the early middle ages.   One part of his case is to show that much of Islamic civilization depended on the contributions of Jewish and Christian dhimmis.  Nestorian Christians in Syria and elsewhere, for instance, “acquired a reputation with the Arabs for being excellent accountants, architects, astrologers, bankers, doctors, merchants, philosophers, scientists, scribes and teachers.  In fact, prior to the ninth century, nearly all the learned scholars in the [Islamic areas] were Nestorian Christians.”

Stark also argues that when the Muslims took up the culture of conquered peoples, they often misused it.  They read Aristotle the way the read the Qur’an, as an infallible text: “This eventually led the philosopher Averroes and his followers to impose the position that Aristotle’s physics was complete and infallible, and if actual observations were inconsistent with one of Aristotle’s teachings, those observations were either in error or an illusion.”

He runs through a number of technical areas – transport, military technology, agriculture – and shows that the early medieval West was far more innovative than early medieval Islam. Most startling is his observation that “following the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the rest of North Africa, and Spain, the wheel disappeared from the whole area!” – replaced by camels, donkeys and horses.