In short, the victors of colonialization-era wrote modern world history for nearly the entire most-recent 2 or 3 centuries of global .
These scholars and eventually shapers-of-politics looked not at China nor to the Islamic histories, but instead created a myth of classical education that biased has continued to politicians, religionists, and scholars in the west. Many of these elites, leaders, and media moguls today are, starting from their years of education and training, incapable of perceiving the need to reform the current lapses in historical memory and cross-cultural education by revising educational curricula and creating a system of training that would enable present and future generations to comprehend civilization and its development in a more balanced manner.
ISLAM’S COMPLICITY
The other major reason for the lack of appreciation for the contributions of Islam to the West has to do with Islamic historians and educator’s approaches to teaching history.
That is, Islamic scholars, too, have been guilty of ignoring the links of Islamic civilization with non-Muslim civilization historically.
This hyper-focus on teaching history through the eye of Islamic politics and religion have left many in the Islamic world (and in the non-Islamic world) ignorant of historical contacts and cross-cultural contributions & aspects of tolerance.
This hyper-Islamic bias in historiography leaves out vast important and positive histories of trade and technological sharing/borrowing with China, Southeast Asia, the far-reaches-of Africa, and many parts of the European continent.
For example, Tunisians had direct representation in Imperial Rome but the Anglo in England didn’t have such a right. Is this distinction in our culture’s pre-civilization history clarified any where in Islamic states concerning either courses on Western Civilization, on Roman history or even in Islamic history classes? In short, Islamic histories are often blind to many realities and pre-conditions to their own civilization.
In contrast to the West, though, Islamic Arabia has at times seen itself historically as rooted in Persian, Indian, and Greek cultural empires.
However, a continuing antagonism towards memory of pre-Islamic history is prominent in the Arab world (and Islamic world).
This bias is partially likely due to recent anti-colonial movements & ideologies leading towards Arab-nationalism and pan-Arabism in North Africa and the Middle East. These movements and ideologies in historical narration have sought to define Islamic and Arab history in terms of a break-the-chains of colonialism narration—as well as in a sometimes over-glorious and biased history of local leadership.
Further, extremist Islamist movements, including the Wahabi cult dominating most of the Arab peninsula today, seek to deny pre-Islamic archaeology a proper place in the memory of Arab and Islamic communities around the region. For example, Kuwait University, which has over 30,000 students does not even have an archeology department.
[NOTE: Over many decades, pre-Islamic places of animistic and Hindu worship on Failaka Island, Kuwait have either been destroyed or left un-investigated for decades.
Likewise, Christian influence and other ancient histories in the region are also often covered up—literally.
Two years ago, a construction project in the Kuwaiti Free Zone northwest of Kuwait University unearthed a large Christian church from three centuries earlier. No one knows what the history of the church was or what happened to it. The findings have since been covered back up and ignored.]
WHAT HAPPENED TO ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION?
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