selune07 t1_iuihlki wrote
Reply to comment by jhalh in TIL university of bologna in Italy is the world's oldest continuous operating university, founded in 1088. It was the first university in Europe and was founded as a school of law by four famous legal scholars by mankls3
I definitely understand your point about schools in the Islamic world teaching religion first, but European schools also taught religion as the primary means by which we could understand the world. It was not until the 1700s that Europeans and Arab scholars alike started taking religion out of science. European universities were run by religious scholars and were just as much influenced by religion as Islamic schools at the time. Both Christians and Muslims used holy texts to understand the natural world until Enlightenment thought started moving education in a more secular direction. Even today, many western universities are still influenced by and even run by religious groups, just look at the many Christian universities in the US that require classes on Christianity as part of their curriculum. I just feel it's unfair to dismiss Al-Qarawiyyin on the basis of it focusing on religion when most European universities did the same for centuries. I teach AP world history and even as the curriculum has changed over the years to be more inclusive of non-western civilizations, it's still very much biased in favor of Western civilizations, which have also influenced how history is taught in the places they have colonized.
jhalh t1_iuilj7a wrote
I agree with almost everything you just said, but there is an important distinction here - Islam and Christianity have very different views on how to approach other knowledge to be adopted. Islam by its nature has no distinction between personal and public belief, it has only been within the last century that some Muslim majority countries have allowed their governments to function secularly and separate from the personal religious belief. While Europe at the time suffered from religious dogmatism, there is ample proof that there where institutions that delved deeply into many different subjects and even if the Catholic Church always found ways to make any accepted knowledge fit within its canon Islamic nations where and have since been far more rigid in keeping all studies under a more narrow umbrella that could not deviate from the established Islamic teachings of the Quran. One of the things that Muslims claim as proof that Islam must be more true than Christianity is the fact that Christianity has always adapted and changed the meaning further and further from the more literal interpretations while the Muslim world has remained steadfast in the rejection to any schools of thought which challenge the established meaning and teachings. The Muslim world has had little choice to adapt more within the last century given the advancements that the world has seen, and some Muslims will now accept things like evolution. The Catholic Church time and time again did push back against teachings that went contrary to what the church said before giving in, but the teaching still actually took place, that was simply not the case in the Muslim world because they would have been called apostates and killed; while there are plenty of examples of that happening in Europe, it was not even close to the same way that took, and in some places, still takes places in the Muslim world. While schools around a millennium ago in Muslim nations did dabble in mathematics and slightly the sciences, they did not have the same variety of subjects and varied schools of thought as those in Europe.
Western academia has certainly put a western twist on much of history, and that obviously bothers someone like me (an Arab born into a family made up of mostly Muslims), but I accept when there are clear differences that should be acknowledged. Our history is just as Dark as that of white Europeans, we pioneered the African slave trade and left the shambled continent ripe for Europeans to exploit, we colonized areas of Asia and Africa, we waged war and conquest of vast swathes of land. Like you being bothered by the Western academia putting their western twist on things, which also bugs me, I also acknowledge that that is something all cultures do as if you were to have a discussion about history with many Arabs they would put their twist on it as well. My goal is to avoid that as much as possible and look at timelines and facts in order to be as objective as possible, and part of that is accepting the importance of using specific words for specific things and learning the nuances involved in so many of these issues.
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