Europe de l'Est musulmans (document en anglais)

West: Europe East Muslims

Science and Islam: The Power of Doubt and Civilization: is the west history? are two contrasting vision of the world of the 17th and 18th century, the first highlights the achievements of Arab savants and link them to the roots of the scientific advancements that appeared during the renaissance, while the second accentuate the importance of the role played by the west all as being the pioneers in different scientific fields and were the main actors in building the world as we know it today.

Shallow, patronizing and chauvinistic are three adjectives that came to my mind while watching Niall Ferguson Documentary. I also believe that he is fully of triumphalistic . All along the documentary I eagerly awaited for a clear and concise explanation as to why China closed down in the 15th century or why did the Arab world “collapsed”. I felt that he had no objectively oriented argument concerning the decline of the Muslim advancement in science and during the whole 59 mins all he did was praising the west and admire how THEY broke through to modernity and created the modern world and not the East. Even the title of the documentary is offensive without talking about the book “the west and the rest”, that clearly shows his over Eurocentric and biased view on the history

Al khalili on the other hand, a physicist and teacher who describes himself as atheist, sees the past from another point of view, he precise in the introduction that investigating the role islam played in science interests him as much as the achievements of Galileo, Newton and Einstein and that the film will also be considering the east discoveries. But in contrary to Ferguson he proves how the west achievements were shaped by the Arab scientists’ researches and books. He transcribe what Coopernic for example mentioned in his book and how he was inspired by Al Battani’s, a Syrian astronomer, previous works. Through the film, I sometimes found that the west completely plagiarized the Muslim’s work, the tolsey couple is a very obvious example for instance. In other words I don’t think that Al-Khlaili is islamocentric as Niall Ferguson is Eurocentric, since his arguments were less personal and he had better proofs concerning the origins of some theories and how they were copied by western scientists.

This point also brings to why the western were often reluctant in adopting some of the eastern practices in medicines or science in general, it feels like the west have always been proud and considered the east inferior, a bad competition have always been orensent although they could have admitted the advancement of the Arab world in different fields. The example of inoculation is one of many, and had been refused simply because, and it stil the case today, it comes from “the other world” and this is somehow fueled by the image the east reflect to the rest of the world, and even the arab sometimes tend to be on the western side ( general consumption, universities…) they knew if the accepted the arab knowledge they could not impose their notoriety and spread their globalization, the east world has always been seen as the imperialistic territories and lands,

In addition, as I looked up the two narrators on Google, Jim is more diversified in his topics, while Niall Ferguson keeps clashing the west and the east with his biased comparisons.

To give my own point

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