Yep

The Secret

I found an interesting piece of sarcasm recently.  I am trying to cut back on sarcasm, too often it is only funny to myself, so I will let you find it yourself.  Consider it a quest.  When I found it, it was the top customer review for the book “The Secret” in hardcover on amazon.com.  Over 6,000 people found it useful, so I assume it will stay on top for a while.  I wasn’t planning on buying the book myself, but I was looking for some insight into what it was about.  I have been on my own quest for the secret most of my life and I am always fascinated by the latest popular claim to know it. 

I’ll save you the $17.49 and tell you that there is no secret, and the paradox is, that is the secret.  The book frames it along the lines of attracting good things by having thoughts, but that’s just another way of saying that you get out of life what you put into it.  You might also want to look at the companion DVD about Abraham, some kind of channelled spirit that helped write the book.  That is the point I knew I was not going to put anything in my cart.

I don’t expect that your life will change, or that you will experience enlightment from what I just said, but I have read the so-called secrets of many cultures and philosophers throughout history, and that’s pretty much it.  I have never personally created that experience for someone else, but I would suggest some much better sources than this one if it’s what you are looking for.  In the end it is a personal experience.  You may be wondering why I’m bothering to write this.  The reason is, I find books like “The Secret” not just a waste of $17.49, but harmful.  They go from something that can be dismissed to soemthing dangerous when they explain how the secret works, then go on to point out what is wrong with you that keeps the secret from working. 

I have had my own ah-ha experiences.  Those moments when everything came together, made sense, and I knew what was next for me.  Usually any attempt to write it down or explain it was futile.  Sometimes, I realized after a while that I wasn’t so sure.  When I was nearing the end of my college years, I went for an early morning walk in a park near my home.  I was in a hollow and I stopped and looked up and saw the most beautiful cascade of water coming down one side of the hollow, it dripped off the moss and skimmed around the rocks. It was caught by the filtered sunlight giving it the look of gold and copper and diamonds.  I was mesmerized.  I saw my whole life before me, I knew my future mission and felt the confidence of having done everything I needed to in the past.  I knew everything and at the same time knew that I knew nothing.  It felt as if the water in my body emptied out of me and this water was filling me again.  My life was over, and it was just starting.

I would like to take you there and give you that experience, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t do much good.  I have been back myself and it has never looked like that or felt like that again.  It’s really more of a drainage ditch coming off of a golf course than it is a hollow.  If I could simply tell you the location, and have it work for you, I would gladly do it.  To discover your own mission, you need to go on your own quest. 

What is unfortunate about books like “The Secret” is that they actually do work for some.  If you are unfamiliar with the concepts in the book, they seem very logical, and they are.  If you apply them, you might be successful, and the author deserves some credit for that.  If you have some success, then some failure, you might come back to that author looking for the DVD version, or the new workbook to refresh you, and that’s when it gets dangerous.  From the reviews, it appears this author is aware of that phenomenon, and plays on it very well. 

I don’t know if there is a name for this phenomenon, but I suspect there is, possibly in psychology.  When someone has an experience like the one I described, one that is difficult to explain, it is natural to associate it with a place, or perhaps a book.  For me, that little crack in the limestone with the cascading water is sacred, for others that place is just a parking spot, or a place where they lost their golf ball.  There was something there that tipped me into that sacred space, but I would have never got there without a lot of friends, a lot of effort, and many failures.  

Before you go off on a quest of your own, I hope I haven’t made it sound like it has to be a big struggle.  My college years were actually pretty easy.  There is no one way to go about it, and it doesn’t even require leaving home, although living in your parent’s basement until your 30 may not be the best place to start.  Important factors to include are a desire to learn, considering all viewpoints, pushing your limits, nothing shocking here I hope.  Some reading may be involved, but please skip books like “The Secret”.  I highly recommend “Siddhartha” by Herman Hesse.  For younger readers “The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream” by Paulo Coelho is quite good.

I hope no one is getting from this that I am recommending that each one of you needs to pull yourself by your own bootstraps and get out and figure this out for yourself.  We need groups of people watching out for each other and helping us to go beyond what we think our limitations are, and sometimes telling us to pull back.  If you have a group like that organized just because you live near each other, then you are lucky.  If you are doing well maybe it’s you who should start the organizing and find someone who needs a little help.  If you want to get together with people who have interest in the same book you do, that’s great. 

Some of you may be seeing some similarities with something else and I want to address that.  Some of you may want to quit reading at this point, I understand.  I recently came across another piece on the Internet, actually it was on You-Tube.  It started very slow, with classical music, using typed words, no voice.  It said that it was about to tell me something that would change my life.  It said I might experience feelings of great peace as I read the words that were coming.  Many of you would have moved on to the American Idol or UFO video, but this is my hobby.  It took a few more minutes, but eventually it told the story of Christ’s death and resurrection.  My only experience was disappointment.

The parallels here are that many people have had positive experiences with the New Testament.  Many of them organize groups based on those books, or join existing groups.  Some of them turn to that book whenever something goes wrong, looking for an answer.  Some of them want to convince everybody that this book is the only one with the right answer.  Some of them figure out that they can make a lot of money off the previous two groups just mentioned.  Some people think going to see the places referenced in the Bible is what they need.  Some claim to have seen visions of people from the Bible. 

The person who made the You-Tube felt that I only needed to hear the story and I would get the same experience they had.  I have never known that to work.  Any conversion story I have heard always began with a story of falling deep into a hole of degradation or egocentrism, or addiction to money.  Only then do they see the statue of the Virgin Mary crying or something else to shake them out of it.  There are of course many other paths to the same conclusion that are less dramatic.

Despite all that, I recommend leaving the Bible on your reading list.  I have heard a lot of bad things said about religion, but I have never heard someone complain about a criminal who found Jesus while in prison and now has a steady job and healthy children.  Unless of course his job involved coming to your house and trying to get you saved.  The difference between “The Secret” and the Bible is that it is only the interpreters that want to frighten you into putting their book above others.

A lot of people believe that the Bible tells them that they must get other people to believe.  I haven’t found that part.  I found something that says it’s a good idea to share the source of that which has helped you.  So, my work is done.  A lot of people believe that the Bible tells them if they don’t believe it, bad things will happen to them.  I found some things about seeking good things and good things will come to you, but also some stories about how that doesn’t always work out, and what’s really important is that you keep seeking the truth and living that truth. A lot of people believe that you have to believe all the miracles in the Bible or you don’t really have faith.  I can’t find that anywhere, in fact it seems like you need the faith first for the miracles to happen, or if you are lucky enough to witness a miracle that will help you get some faith.

A lot of people believe that God has a certain name and a definite schedule and you had better get on that schedule.

There is a preacher on TV who reads from the Bible and interprets as he reads.  He talks about the Hebrew translations and the meaning words had in the context of thousands of years ago.  Every now and then he stops and tilts the Bible up to the camera and says, “the answer is in here, if you just read it, have you read it?”  I have read it, and I have come up with much different answers from him, and I have read works by Bishops, priests and scholars that agree with me.  The TV preacher talks as if he wants me to study for myself and form my own conclusions but if I told him about those answers, I’m sure he would say, “well, you need to read it again”.

The Common Era - Modern Science

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Although I prefer to focus on the cultural matters, sometimes the things that history books spend most of their time on, Kings, Queens and military conquests, really do matter. One of those items that I have omitted so far in this story is the Mongol invasion. It is peripheral to my discussion, but played a central role in shaping the 13^th century.

Covering more territory than either Islam or Western Europe, the Mongols were conquering the Far East with rapid precision. Their military tactics were far in advance of anyone in the rest of the world at that time. Genghis Kahn had little interest in nation building or new technology, only conquering.

By 1240, his armies had reached Europe. He had come near Islam, but went over it to the north instead of through it. Whether or not he could have taken all of Europe remains one of those interesting questions for historians to ponder. Polish armies were on the run after the Battle of Leignitz, but then the Mongol invaders suddenly packed up and returned home, a 6,000 mile journey. This was not from fear, but from a decree by the Kahn himself. Upon his death, a new leader must be chosen, and that must be done back in Mongolia.

After that process, battles continued, but infighting weakened their armies. They began to integrate with the countries they had come to rather than dominate. Unfortunately for Islam, one of their last advances was into Baghdad. In 1263, the city was sacked and rivers ran black with the ink of the books that were thrown into it. Both of these empires had spread themselves too thin and both were now in decline. Unfortunately they were able to inflict a lot of damage on the good that had come out of their rising.

Western Europe was just getting its act together and now it had a lot less to worry about. The problems on the western edge of the Islamic empire, in Al-Andalus would get no help from Baghdad. As Christians conquered Spain and Jerusalem they claimed that they were taking back what was rightfully theirs. But they did more than take back land that was once Roman territory, they found riches of knowledge. It was based on Greek texts, so they claimed that as theirs also, ignoring what had been done with them over the last 1,500 years.

I began this search with the question of why did science thrive in Western Europe and nowhere else. The Chinese have many inventions, Baghdad was a center of learning for centuries, but Europe gave us telescopes, the printing press, the crossbow and eyeglasses.

The answer is, it didn’t. The roots of science are nowhere near Western Europe. It was NOT the sense of a universe with a creator and immutable laws, or the concept of free will, or a tightly administered university system that gave rise to science. It was a spirit of openness and willingness to doubt. It required a tolerance of other cultures and a recognition that intelligence is widespread and not related to a particular worldview. It required contributions from entire known world brought together under one roof. And it required a financial commitment from the highest levels.

The reason we believe science came from Europe is that’s what the history books say. In this case, the adage is true, history is written by the victors. Europeans copied from Middle Easterners and Northern Africans who had gathered knowledge from the Far East. They stole their homework and called it theirs. Then they beat them up and took their lunch money. When their money ran out, they found some new kids and took theirs too. There is no one person to blame for this, but speaking metaphorically, Western Europe was the bully of the world.

They had successfully created a system that had all of the appearances of a system of checks and balances. The military needed the authority of the nobility and nobility was crowned by those who knew the word of God. God had come down to earth, humbled himself and declared himself one with all of us. According to this myth, the meek had inherited the earth. Dominion over all the earth would soon be achieved and 1,000 years of peace were at hand. Right after a few more savages were killed off.

Even learning had become an expression of the Almighty. Making sacrifices was primitive, but God was all knowing. Learning about nature was a path to understanding the glory of creation. God still had a plan, now it could be discerned not just by prayer, but by reading signs in nature. If nature seemed to be contradicting something in the Bible, it was best to consult the theologians. Once they had spoken, you could get back to your test tubes and telescopes.

It doesn’t help that science at the time was primitive. Some of what Galileo did during his lifetime has been labeled alchemy. The ideas of peer review and repeating experiments were not established. Early science was performed by people who had the time, money and resources, often funded by the Church or for the purposes of military expansion. You got published if you could afford to fund the publishing, not based on the merits of your discovery. Accusations of this continue to the present, and too often they are true.

The authority of science is often questioned and compared to the authority of the Bible as if they are equal. Ironically, questioning authority is a value of science. Scientific teaching, when done correctly, tells you what is unknown and tells you the weak points of its arguments. Scientists, if they are doing it right, acknowledge the discovery of new information and welcome changes to their understanding. That some scientists and some teachers get it wrong, does not make the scientific method wrong.

Like the Buddha said, “Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings - that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.”

I know of no other religious leader who says this and truly means it and means it to apply even to their self. It can’t be called a belief system because it is telling you not to believe, but to question. Only after examination do you take what you have found as a guide. Even then, if new information is discovered, examine again. That’s the modern world view that will solve the problems that the old world view got us into to.

The Commone Era - Tusi's Couple

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Tracing philosophy, like I did last week, is fairly easy. Commentators build on each other and reference each other. Tracing how science moved around the world in the Middle Ages is not so easy. The idea of a copyright did not exist yet. There were no international scientific publications.

Recent historical research into this has been much like detective work. If you look at De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (go ahead, grab your copy, I’ll wait) written in 1543 by Nicholas Copernicus and compare it to Al-Tusi’s Tahrir al-Majisti (Amazon.com might carry it), you will see diagrams of Tusi’s couple that are almost identical. Maybe Copernicus arrived at this independently, but it seems unlikely to me. And even though the work and data from the 9^th century Muslim, Al-Battani, is mentioned by Copernicus in that same work, that fact is rarely mentioned in history or science classes.

In case you have forgotten, Copernicus came before Galileo. He published his ideas about the earth rotating around the sun late in his life because he knew it could cause trouble for him with the Pope. He is often credited with beginning the scientific revolution. More often, I am seeing this credit come with the qualification “in the West”, but this is a recent phenomena and even when used, no mention of where else in the world scientific ideas came from. Sometimes there will be a vague reference made to translations of Greek works by Arabic scholars. The growth of the university system is also credited without mentioning where they got their books.

Why have we lost this connection? There is at least one technical reason. The Arabic language is very ornate. When written, a slightly more or less pronounced curl of a symbol can carry meaning. This does not lend itself well to being reproduced with movable type. Invented around 1439, Queen Isabella funded the increased use of the printing press. It could also have something to do with the over 1 million Arabic books that were burned after Spain was “reconquered” in 1492.

Even before gaining back the territory of Granada, the last Muslim Kingdom in Spain, rules were in place to enforce the conversion of everyone to Catholicism. The most famously brutal leader of the Spanish Inquisition, Tomas de Torquemada was appointed Grand Inquisitor in 1483. It was common for Jews and Muslims to fake their conversions to Catholicism. It was the job of the inquisition to insure they were authentic and expel, torture or kill them if they did not comply.

1492 is famous of course in the Americas because that is when Columbus arrived. Whether he was the first European there or just the last one to make a big deal out of it is not my concern here. More important is that he claimed a land that was already inhabited by the Lucayans, Tainos and Arawaks for his God and his country, thinking nothing of taking seven of them back to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand and having them baptized. Immediately the Spanish and Portuguese began to draw lines on the map, with their authority secured by the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, laying claim to these new worlds that they barely understood.

On his second voyage, Columbus was escorted by an Apostolic Delegate and missionaries with clear orders to evangelize. In 1494, Columbus sent 500 slaves to the Queen but she refused them and continued to advocate for good treatment of the natives. This did not slow the pace of conquest and did not stop Columbus from enslaving the natives to work in mines and plantations on Hispaniola. By 1496, Columbus’ brother Diego had secured the port of Santo Domingo. In 1510, Balboa founded Santa Maria la Antigua del Darien on continental America. By 1515, the conquest of Cuba was complete and other Caribbean islands were under Spanish control. The wealth that came from these adventures shifted the focus of Europe from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.

Throughout, it was important that these conquerors had official authority behind them. It seems unlikely that those authorities were not aware of the mistreatment of people in the New World. They were most likely more concerned about the gold, timber and cotton flowing to them. Ferdinand and Isabella were always careful to receive a Papal Bull that authorized their claims. This idea of the rulers of the people having the blessing of the religious leaders had been fermenting for centuries. Two centuries earlier, Thomas Aquinas had revisited the work of Augustine of Hippo to create justifications for war.

Augustine had said, "The commandment forbidding killing was not broken by those who have waged wars on the authority of God, or those who have imposed the death-penalty on criminals when representing the authority of the state, the justest and most reasonable source of power"

So, if it was criminal to be anything but a Christian, then killing people who refused to convert was not a problem. It is doubtful that this was Augustine’s intention, but over the centuries the Church had increased in power and figured out what they could say to their followers and what they could get away with. 900 years later, Aquinas clarified and added criteria for when killing was justified:

• First, war must occur for a good and just purpose rather than for self-gain (for example, "in the nation's interest" is not just) or as an exercise of power.
• Second, just war must be waged by a properly instituted authority such as the state.
• Third, peace must be a central motive even in the midst of violence.

Again, leaving much open to interpretation. If the Pope says it is good and just to bring Christ to the New World, nearly anything is acceptable. The motive of peace can be claimed when any kind of conflict arises. Simply claim that you are the one who is going to bring peace, as soon as you kill off a few of the non-peaceful ones, and your actions are just in the eyes of the Lord. Go wherever you want, as long as you carry the right flag with you, you are justified.

With these rules in place, the acquisition of knowledge from one declining empire and the acquisition of resources from a much weaker tribal culture, the pattern for the development of the Americas was set in motion.

Regardless of what was officially stated, it seems clear that all were aware of what was happening in these far off conquests. Even after Columbus was arrested by Francisco De Bobadilla and sent back to Spain in chains for his mistreatment of the Arawaks, his punishment only lasted a couple months and he was returned. Conquest and mistreatment of natives was not limited to Columbus or the rulers of Spain. The patterns that began here would last for centuries.

The Common Era - Toward Western Europe

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A little timeline just to get things in perspective. I know I have been covering the Islamic empire quite a bit, so a little review of the Christians is in order. The Roman Empire did not begin as a Christian one, so it has a different flavor than the Islamic empire. Both had considerable fighting within their boundaries, but the Christians had more trouble over who was actually the King and what brand of Christianity they were worshipping.

475 – Rome falls. Or at least that is the most common date used. At the time, it was just one more piece of bad news. The Western Emperor had been deposed by the Barbarians. Many Romans still felt that there was an Empire and that it would return to its former glory.

Dec 25, 800 Charlemagne is crowned Holy Roman Emperor. This was the beginning of a somewhat reunited Europe, although fighting continued. The tradition of the Pope crowning the King would last for 1,000 years.

Nov 27, 1095 – The First Crusade. Pope Urban combines the ideas of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with that of waging war. He says, “The West must march to the defense of the East.” By 1099 they had captured Jerusalem, killing many Jews along the way and brutally murdering Muslims in the battle.

1088 – Establishment of the University of Bologna, Italy. This and other universities grew out of the Christian cathedral and monastic schools. With the wars of conquest going on both in the East as well as in Spain, Western Europe was increasingly exposed to the ancient writings of Plato and Aristotle and the advances in math and science coming out of Baghdad.

1210 – Teachings of Aristotle were condemned. This was only effective in the University of Paris.

1277 – Broader condemnations were made. Some specific works of Thomas Aquinas were included; particularly those that were attempting to reconcile the pantheistic ideas of the Islamic philosopher Averroes with the dogmas of Christianity.

1323 – Pope John XXII pronounces Thomas Aquinas a saint. The Church continues to claim the final word on God’s powers and the truth of miracles, but methods of analyzing cause and effect in nature are taking hold throughout Christendom. Depending on whom you read, this was an era of oppression of knowledge by the church, or the inspiration for the beginnings of science in the West.

The Christian kingdoms of Leon and Castile were gaining power and consolidating in Spain at this time, but I’m going to skip those details for now and catch up with Ferdinand and Isabella later. The histories of the crusades and inquisitions that were prevalent at this time are well documented elsewhere, so I don’t think it is necessary to rehash those.

Two major figures that were instrumental in transferring the knowledge that had accumulated across the Islamic empire were Maimonides and Averroes. Maimonides is a well known Jewish scholar throughout the west and east today. Averroes was a Muslim scholar and is not so well known. But he was acknowledged by Thomas Aquinas who is famous for attempting to reconcile Christianity with rationalism.

Maimonides

Maimonides, was a Jewish philosopher, born in Cordoba in 1135. He died in Egypt 12/12/1204. He is one of the foremost rabbinical philosophers in Jewish history. He wrote the14 volume Mishneh Torah, still an authority as a codification of Talmudic law. He was well read in the Greek philosophies (in the Arabic language) and in Islamic science.

In 1148, the Almohads abolished the dhimma status that protected the life and wealth of Jews within Islamic rule. Under the new laws Jews now had to wear identifying clothing. Given the choices of conversion, death or exile, he chose exile. He moved around southern Spain for ten years then settled in Fes, Morocco. He studied in University of Al-Karaouine then went to Fostat, Egypt in 1168. Although exiled from Muslim Al-Andalus, staying within the Islamic empire was still preferable to Christianized Europe.

In fact Maimonides was working against the forces of European expansion. Christians were taking Jews captive and Maimonides took part in rescuing them from King Amalric’s siege of the Egyptian town of Bilbays. After the unfortunate loss of his brother, along with the family fortune, he became court physician to the Grand Vizier Al Qadi al Fadil, and later to Sultan Saladin.

One of his better known works is The Guide to the Perplexed; supposedly a long answer to a young man who was having difficulty holding on to his faith in the miracles of the Bible while also learning about the laws of nature and how unlikely it was that those miracles could have actually happened. I began reading it when I was myself perplexed and did not find it to be much of a guide at all.

In the guide, Maimonides grants that parts of the Bible are allegorical. He does not allow for God being anything but real and presents arguments for its existence. These are somewhat complex arguments, similar to the cosmological argument or teleological argument, both can be easily googled, and both can be shown to be logically unsound. He goes on to analyze some Biblical stories, leaving much open to interpretation. In fact philosophers, Jews and even Kabballists have claimed he supports them.

Of course at the time his arguments were new and the Internet was quite a ways off, so it is easy for me to sit here and be critical of his work. I include him here to acknowledge his contribution to furthering the conversation of modernization and note that we have progressed quite a bit since then.

Averroes

It was not just Judaism that was under attack by the Moors, philosophy itself, even from a Muslim perspective was ridiculed. The Ash’ari theology had spread rapidly. It looked only to Allah as the source of wisdom. To look to knowledge for the sake of knowledge was considered arrogant and counter to Islamic teaching. Al-Ghazali wrote The Incoherence of the Philosophers and in response, Averroes wrote The Incoherence of the Incoherence.

Averroes, or Ibn Rushd, excelled in medicine and law and one day, his mentor handed him many of the works of Aristotle, telling him that the Commander of the Faithful (as the ruler was called at the time) was complaining about the disjointedness of Aristotle’s expressions, or perhaps the trouble was with the translations that they had. He felt that if anyone could summarize and clarify those works, Averroes could. He devoted 30 years of his life to doing just that.

His rationalist line of thinking did not always play well with the increasingly fundamentalist rulers. Although the reasons are unclear, we know his political career ended abruptly with criticisms from Islamic jurists. After his death, a contemporary, Abdelwahid al-Marrakushi wrote that the secret reason for his ordeal was that he wrote, “And I saw the Giraffe at the garden of the king of the Berbers.”

Seemingly innocent, and possibly not intentional, this reference was to a king and it was not done with proper protocols. Jealous, competing enemies took it out of context and brought it to the attention of the Caliph Yaqub al-Manur. Averroes was exiled and many of his books were burned. We know of him mostly today through the translations that survived in Europe. He was allowed to return shortly before his death in 1198.

His philosophy ranged from Plato’s paternalistic and authoritarian ideas of absolute monarchy supported by coercion and indoctrination of the young, to the acceptance of women’s equality. He defended philosophy and said it could exist alongside religion.

Conclusions

If you were to read their actual philosophies, you might not find them impressive. Their arguments would probably seem elementary. They wouldn’t seem like anything new. That could be because they are almost 1,000 years old. At the time however, people were still struggling with the earth being round. They might not have thought that the sun was carried across the sky in a golden chariot, but they still didn’t have any idea what it actually was. They were being told by a powerful tradition that God was responsible for everything, but they could see people taking command of how crops grew and where water went and the health and well being of their loved ones. These things needed to be reconciled.

I highlight these two men, but there were many who had their same ideas. We know of these two because they were literate and eloquent. Also, they worked well within the confines of their traditions, enough to gain respect, but challenged that tradition just enough to be considered great thinkers of the ages. I’m sure there were many others that challenged tradition considerably more but we don’t know of them because they were marginalized, not given an education, or their writings were destroyed, or perhaps their heads removed.

The Common Era - Iberia

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I covered some of the early milestones in the discovery ofthe modern scientific method in my earlier timeline and blogs, so I’m going to skip over to the Iberian Peninsula for the next chapter. History and science are not everybody’s favorite subjects but I blame text books for that, as well as limitations put on teachers to keep them from being too controversial. For school boards and principles, it is easier to deal with, and by that I mean suppress, a few wild card teachers than it is to deal with the variety of parental concerns that arise when you stray from a narrow, boring, middle of the road, watered down version of history.

That’s unfortunate, because there are some juicy stories out there. The one I’ll relate here looks at just why we call Spain, Spain. The “Iberian Peninsula” is more generic, although even that name has Greek roots.

The Iberian Peninsula was inhabited before Rome or Greece but was eventually part of that empire. It was influenced by the Celts, the Phoenicains and the Tartessians. It also came under Germanic control for a while, which included Christians. In 711 CE, some Muslims started moving in. 781 years later it would be “re-conquered”. This has come to be known as The Reconquista, mainly because they were the last ones to win and the culture that won has more or less survived.

One area that held off the influence of the Muslims for a long time was Murcia. The region had been built in the early part of the 9^th century. At that time, it was inhabited by two rival tribes at the time, the Yemenies and the Midaries. One day, a Yemeni decided to help himself to the some grapes growing along the water’s edge. The grapes were owned by a Midare who saw him and was insulted by his transgression. They fought and the Yemeni was killed and a war followed.

War is bad for commerce, so troops were sent from Cordoba to keep the peace. While the rest of the continent wallowed in tribal wars between feudal kingdoms, Cordoba was a clean city with beautiful mosques and a well fed populous, surrounded by well managed agriculture. One of its strengths was tolerance of religious practices. While the crusades were creating rivers of blood in Jerusalem, Jews, Christians and Muslims worked together in Spain.

But Spain was not yet “Spain”. Under Islamic rule it was called Al-Andalus and it continued to be a collection of kingdoms. Under the rule of Islam, these were called Taifa Kingdoms. Muhammad Ibn Mardaniś rose to be its King in 1147. He came from a Hispanic family but converted to Islam. His troops were also of mixed heritage and with them he expanded his Kingdom into Valencia. He successfully defended Murcia from the advances of the new family of Muslim conquerors, the Almoravids, until his death in 1172. His was the last Kingdom to hold off their advances. His sons gave in and became a vassal kingdom of these Moorish conquerors.

The Almoravids did not care for the lack of piety shown by these multi-cultural kingdoms and attempted to regulate art and architecture. However looking at mosques in Algiers and Fez today, it seems that some of that art did eventually influence them. When the Almohads took over, mosques, mansions and palaces were built throughout the empire. The 100 meter minaret in Giralda still stands in Seville. The Alhambra in Cordoba also survived the destructive forces of the Reconquista. It remains as an iconic image of Moorish influence on the area.

But their rule became unpopular. Perhaps it was their intolerance for the Jewish and Christian communities that weakened them. Either way, they never could expand into the Christian nations to the North. The Kingdoms of Aragon, Castile, Leon and Portugal expanded and became Christian Kingdoms. To understand the battle to come, I’ll take a look at those kingdoms in more detail next week. 

The Common Era - The Fundamentals

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You can continue to follow my commentary on Tony Jones’ series on “Questions that Haunt Christians” if you’d like, although I understand if you don’t want to continue to torture yourself with that. I’m finally getting back to my historical research on the beginnings of science. I’m finding more and more interesting tails from the 13^th century and surrounding eras about how knowledge moved around the Medieval world and was claimed by various political and religious forces. Each one wants to take credit for the work of a few courageous individuals who crossed political and religious barriers to discover what we all needed to advance ourselves as a species.

Today, the major force against science is fundamentalism. The word is often associated with Muslims but also has Christian roots. It was a Christian document from the turn of that last century that was titled “The Fundamentals”. It was, as the word implies, an examination of what essential beliefs were required to define an individual as a Christian. It has since come to be associated with more than defining that for yourself, but forcing it on others, or at least claiming that those who don’t believe like you will suffer punishment. The most problematic version of fundamentalism is when people who are alive now believe it is their duty to enforce those beliefs and do the punishing.

For Christianity, although it was not called “fundamentalism”, this began a long time ago.

We can see by writings in the Bible that Christianity had very humble roots. It was denigrated by the government and the religious establishment of the day. That is the basis of the crucifixion story. You don’t need to accept any of the Bible as historically accurate to verify this. There are just a few references to the Christian movement outside of the Bible. Documents of the early church are scant. The actual authorship of the gospels and the dates of their writing are in dispute. Discussions of this by Christians can be found easily, even in the footnotes of some study Bibles.

Christianity was practiced by a variety of sects for 300 years after the historical time of Christ. This was a problem for an emperor. Emperors don’t like fighting among groups in their kingdoms. Especially when they decide that they want to be a member of one of those groups. This is the reason Emperor Constantine called a council of those sects to work it out. It was called the First Council of Nicea. Christians don’t talk about it much. New Age writers like to make up all sorts of things about it. Its direct impact can be argued, but it can’t be argued that the Catholic Church fared much better from then on.

When a group goes from being illegal to an official group of a powerful government, that’s gotta be a good thing for them. This was not just some symbolic statement either. Constantine was declared the enforcer of the doctrine. He continued to support traditional Roman temples for a while, but eventually he pillaged them and tore them down. He used public money to copy Bibles. He rebuilt Jerusalem with a focus on the Christian aspects.

But it was more than just support of a religion that he loved. The word “catholic” means “universal” and that is the faith Constantine wanted, one church, with him at the top. Constantine mastered the concept of combining Church and State. Ceremony and costume surrounded him. He was “God’s agent on Earth” and an audience with him was the next best thing to talking to God. As he fomented civil wars and conquered kingdoms he set military and religious leaders in charge with the lines of authority between the two blurred.

Such a power hungry system does not end with the death of its leader. Constantine’s sons continued to battle, including with each other. Both died in their fight. Constantine’s nephew Julian assumed the throne and was assassinated by the Persians. This only deepened the resolve to fight. At the end of the 4^th century, laws prohibiting non-Christian beliefs were enacted. Heresy was equal to treason, a capital offense. Temples were destroyed, libraries were burned, and philosophers were murdered.

http://www.romanarmy.net/constantine.htm

Many people fled. Many to the East, to kingdoms of Persia and Arabia.Tribal warfare existed there too, but religious persecution on the order of Constantinople did not. According to legend, Muhammad was born in 570 CE. He initially gained fame as a diplomat between the warring tribes. He eventually became a leader of an army, and leaders that followed continued to conquer and expand the Islamic nation.

What they didn’t do was to expel people from their nation based on religion. That would come much later. They integrated with those cultures. In Northern Africa, people weren’t too happy with the leaders they had, so being conquered by someone who let you practice your traditions was not so bad.

They did tax people they conquered. They did give Muslims advantages in politics. Caliphs had to be Muslims. However merchants, teachers, philosophers, researchers of all kinds could draw from any culture or tradition they cared to. In fact it was encouraged. This allowed them to build much cleaner cities and better feed their citizens than the kingdoms in Europe. They brought paper making from the Far East and disseminated their knowledge quickly across a vast empire.

In Europe, we call this time the Dark Ages while the Islamic world was experiencing a Golden Age.

Empires don’t last forever. In the east, a new form of the Muslim religion began to take hold in the universities and the power structures were weakened. Eventually in 1263, Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols. In the west, African tribes, who had converted to Islam, were trying to consolidate the smaller kingdoms in the Iberian peninsula. As they did, they instituted laws that required Jews and Christians to convert to Islam. This was the beginning of fundamentalism in the Muslim world, and where our story will begin, next week.