Friday Ephemera (801)
How to warm your car, or possibly a friend’s. || Some might call it karma. || “When I’ve been pulled over before,” she said. || Fun with Goffin’s cockatoo. || The gentle touch. || Quit griping, they had it worse. || Engaging maximum girliness. || He also loves his girlhood. || Scenes of lively tilting. || An oddly tricky question. || On pharmaceutical sortedness, portable warehouses, and raving in Cramlington, 1993. || The thrill of candles, 1972. Or possibly Things To Come. || How the North Pole was thought to be, 1595. || Can you power your computer by typing? || This, and the quoted post. || An educator speaks. || She’s taken time out of her busy schedule to tell you how magic works. || Gradient horse. || Scenes of suboptimal ice clearing. || Intriguing baggage detected. || And finally, an influencer at large.
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I realize it’s a bit late to comment on this thread, so I’m not sure if anyone will see this, but I feel compelled to respond to Dicentra’s idiotic, ignorant, uninformed comment above.
As others have said, the myth of Iberia being a multi-cultural paradise under Islam is a long-discredited lie, one that actual facts have never supported. “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise” is just one of many scholarly works proving this absurd myth was never anything but propaganda. It does not speak well of you, Dicentra, that you fell for it.
Furthermore, the works of Ancient Greece were preserved by the Byzantine empire, which by its end was centered primarily around Greece, and whose noble class still spoke Greek as a primary language along with Latin. They fled to western Europe after the fall of the eastern Roman empire, bringing their books with them as they did. Furthermore, even the people who lived in Islamic-ruled areas who preserved these books were not Muslims, but religious minorities of Christians, Jews, and others who preserved these works in the fact of Islamic efforts to erase them. Just because someone lived under an Islamic caliphate, does not make them Muslim.
As for the so-called ‘Islamic Golden Age’, that too is a myth. The Muslims conquered two of the most advanced civilizations of their time, the Byzantine and Persian empires, and coasted for a while on the residual achievements of those two great civilizations. Of course, that couldn’t last forever, and eventually the influence of Islam eroded both civilizations, leading to the poverty and lack of scientific advancement that the Muslim world is now known for.
Literally everything you mentioned in your post is ignorant misinformation, and it’s pretty embarrassing for you that you fell for it to this degree. You are seriously approaching flat earther levels of delusion and ignorance here, Dicentra. Do better.