The role of Islam

Submitted by Anon (United States), Jul 19, 2022 at 16:41

Regarding "But this too is illogical: if Islam permitted Muslims successfully to borrow from other civilizations a millennium ago," - I don't think the argument is whether Islam permitted borrowing or not, it is opportunistic. When Muslims invaded foreign lands they appropriated whatever they liked and in many cases it wasn't possible to kill everybody (eg muslim invasions of a large country like India) but letting things continue as they found them was a lot more convenient. If, hypothetically, ISIS were to conquer the US today, it would be impossible for them to kill all the scientists and engineers and science and technology would go on in some capacity at a slower pace but the history books might very well show that science and technology "flourished" under ISIS.
We can get a glimpse of how advanced India, China, Persia etc already were prior to the Islamic invasions. Here is Panini who lived in 2500 BC in the Indian subcontinent. Here is a description of his work on a UK website about biographies of ancient mathematicians (link after excerpt):
"Panini should be thought of as the forerunner of the modern formal language theory used to specify computer languages. The Backus Normal Form was discovered independently by John Backus in 1959, but Panini's notation is equivalent in its power to that of Backus and has many similar properties. It is remarkable to think that concepts which are fundamental to today's theoretical computer science should have their origin with an Indian genius around 2500 years ago."

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Panini/

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