For my second installment in this series, Adre Servier. You almost certainly have not heard of him, and that is not an accident. Very wealthy and dangerous men have been working hard to make sure that his magnum opus Islam and the Psychology of the Musulman remains out of print.
Thanks to the Internet, however, you can read his book online.
You have probably heard all of the whining following Richard Dawkins pointing out that the Islamic world has fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College at Cambridge. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the believers are fine with acknowledging this, they just get upset when we kaffirs do so.
Servier’s work is a crate of dynamite underneath the ridiculous pretensions of the “Islamic golden age”, or of the “contributions of Islamic science”. As he shows, the opposite is true. The golden age was nothing of the sort; it was the dimming glow of the pre-Islamic civilizations that still had great vigour and mental energy. As Servier puts it:
“Islam was not a torch, as has been claimed, but an extinguisher. Conceived in a barbarous brain for the use of a barbarous people, it was—and it remains—incapable of adapting itself to civilization. Wherever it has dominated, it has broken the impulse towards progress and checked the evolution of society.”
Quite. The early empires were predominantly non-Muslim, and the Muslims were predominantly non-faithful (Ibn Warraq refers to an Ummayad caliph, tired of the bullying and hectoring tone of the Qur’an, sticking it on a sick and shooting it apart with arrows). As time turned, Islam dug in, wiping out the previous mental vigour and ability.
Here is Servier again:
Jules Lemaitre was once called upon to introduce to the public the work of a young Egyptian writer on Arab poetry. The author, a novice, declared with fine assurance that Arab literature was the richest and the most brilliant of all known literatures, and that Arab civilization was the highest and the most splendid. Jules Lemaitre, who in his judgments resembled Sainte-Beuve in his preference for moderate opinions, felt some reluctance to countersign such a statement. On the other hand the obligations of courtesy prevented him from laying too much stress upon the poverty and bareness of Arab literature. He got out of the difficulty very cleverly by the following somewhat reserved statement:
“It is difficult to understand how a civilization so noble, so brilliant, whose manifestations have never lost their charm, and which in times past had so remarkable a power of expansion, seems to have lost its virtue in these latter days. It is one of the sorrows and mysteries of history.”
As the observation of a subtle mind, accustomed never to accept blindly current opinions as such, this is perfectly justified. For if we admit all the qualities that are habitually attributed to Arab civilization, if we are ready to bow in pious awe before the fascinating splendour with which poets and historians have adorned it, then it is indeed difficult to explain how the Empire of the Caliphs can have fallen into the state of decrepitude in which we see it today, dragging downward in its fall nations who, under other governance, had shown unquestionable aptitudes for civilization.
How is it that the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Berbers, as soon as they became Islamized, lost the energy, the intelligence and the spirit of initiative they exhibited under the domination of Greece and Rome? How has it come about that the Arabs themselves, who, according to the historians, were the professors of science and philosophy in the West, can have forgotten all their brilliant accomplishments and have sunk into a state of ignorance that today relegates them to the barbarous nations?
Notice two things – the unsparing logic, and the universality and internationalism. North Africa and the Middle East were part of Western civilization for thirteen hundred years before the Islamic conquest – far earlier than much of Europe. Had it not been for the Islamic conquests, all of those would be flourishing first-world. Or is it really credible that, were it not for the mind-destroying doctrines of Mohamed, that two small, damp towns in a rain-soaked archipelago would dwarf the scientific and cultural output of Alexandria and Constantinople?
Read Servier.
