How can one connect the traditional story of a highly developed Arab civilization in the Middle Ages with what the Arab world has been like over the past 300 years of real history?
Is it possible that one and the same ethnic group
• before the 8th century was a horde of crude barbarians, alien to intellectual activity;
• in the 8th - 13th centuries turned into a locomotive of world science;
• and in the 14th century it again plunged into barbarism?
Answer: no.
An ethnic group is a biological community linked by a common origin and sharing a common biogenetics. The biogenetics of an ethnic group determines its physical, mental, and intellectual characteristics. Ethnic characteristics are characterized by constancy; otherwise, ethnic groups would not exist.
Intellectual characteristics include the ability to learn and be creative. If we are told that over the course of several hundred years the intellectual characteristics of the same ethnic group have changed to their opposites twice, then
1) either we are dealing with different ethnoses,
2) or they are trying to mislead us.
Chapter 13 of the book by the French orientalist Andre Servier shows that both factors were present:
1. The highly developed Arab civilization of the Middle Ages arose not in their native Arabia, where the Arabs remained in a state of barbarism until the 20th century, but in the territories of civilized peoples who, having been conquered by Islam, continued their creative activity despite persecution by the conquerors. This was the last flowering of the Greco-Latin civilization. But, ultimately, its light was extinguished by Arab barbarism and the dogmas of Islam.
2. The Arabic writings of the Middle Ages are distorted copies and compilations of the works of the authors of the Alexandrian school, as well as of Greek, Syrian, Persian and Indian authors of the pre-Islamic period. "These crude and distorted Arabic writings came into circulation in medieval Europe as the works of Arabic genius. Their true character was discovered later, when, during the Renaissance, the original Greek manuscripts were exhumed from ancient libraries and scholars were found capable of translating them."
MODERN RESEARCH CONFIRMS ANDRE SERVIER'S FINDINGS
In 2004, Claudia Ott, a German doctor of Arabic studies, published a study with Iraqi scholar Muhsin Mahdi that the collection of oriental tales, One Thousand and One Nights, was created in 18th-century France for commercial purposes.
The collection was first published by the French orientalist Antoine Galland in 1704. It was a resounding success, and by 1709 six more volumes had been published, and then four more, the last of which was published after Galland's death.
Another example is "The travels of Ibn Jubayr". This work astonishes with its developed, expressive language, characteristic of 19th-century French writers. Particularly striking is the artistic description of nature, which appeared in world literature only in the 19th century.
The Preface to the work states that "The travels of Ibn Jubayr became known in Europe in the mid-19th century. The Arabic text of the sections relating to Sicily and their French translation were published by M. Amari in 1845-46."
It's quite possible that "The travels of Ibn Jubayr" was created in 19th-century France, where the vogue for the Orient, which had begun in the 18th century, received a powerful boost from Napoleon's Eastern campaigns. Such works had less a scholarly than a commercial purpose-to satisfy the fashion for Eastern exotica.
Mikhail Postnikov's book "East and the Middle Ages" is a remarkable contribution to exposing the falsifications of medieval works. In the chapter "Islam and the Arabs", the author puts forward a well-reasoned theory of the European origin of the major works of the "Muslim Renaissance."
In conclusion, Postnikov writes:
"We have seen that the works of the leading representatives of the 'Muslim Renaissance' are unquestionably apocryphal. This proves the apocryphal nature of all other works of this period, as they are linked by a system of cross-references. (For example, the Sufi Catalogue and Biruni's Canon.)"
In particular, the works of the "Arab historians" of that time are also considered apocrypha. ... These works were discovered by European scholars relatively late. The work of the most famous Arab historian, Mas'udi, was published only between 1851 and 1877 in Paris, and the work of another historian, considered equally authoritative, Maqrizi, was published only in 1908 in Tübingen. These works were unknown to scholars of traditional Muslim scholarship before their "discovery" by Europeans."
LOW INTELLECTUAL ABILITY
A weighty argument in favor of the mythological nature of the history of the 'highly developed Arab civilization of the Middle Ages' is the extremely low level of intelligence of representatives of the Arab ethnic group.
• while the average IQ of Northern Europeans is 99.
Of course, the IQ test is not an absolute measure of intelligence, much less creativity. Therefore, to complete the picture, we will use another indicator - the number of Nobel Prize winners (excluding Peace Prize winners).
In 2022, the number of Arabs in the world was 465 million. This huge super-ethnos has given the world only two Nobel laureates: writer Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt) and chemist Ahmed Zewail (Egypt). On the other hand, Denmark, with a population of 5 million, has given the world 13 Nobel laureates.
LOW SELF-MANAGEMENT CAPACITY
Another factor that exposes the mythological nature of the story of the "greatness of the medieval Arabs" is the low capacity for self-government characteristic of Arab ethnic groups.
If the ethnic groups of Europe, during the 300-year period of development of capitalism, overcame the stage of the tribe and became peoples, and then nations, creating national states, then the ethnic groups of the Arab super-ethnos remain at the stage of the tribe to this day, and they owe their statehood to the Europeans.
The modern Arab nations are artificial, and the states created for them are failed, for example, the Lebanese Republic, the Syrian Arab Republic, the Republic of Iraq, the State of Libya, and the Republic of Yemen.
The artificiality of the nation and the failure of its state are manifested in intertribal and interfaith wars that flare up whenever the power of the ruling tribe or the dominant religious denomination weakens.