The Lost Enlightenment

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Clive
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The Lost Enlightenment

Post by Clive »

I wonder if there is a huge Persian shaped gap in our understanding of the monotheisms, for example the founder Zoroastrianism seems to have been, like Trotsky, air brushed out of history!
At first the Arabs had deceived themselves into thinking that the conquest of Central Asia would be easy. Their smooth entry into Khurusan and the success of their early raids across the Oxus for booty had led them to undertake more ambitious campaigns. But these efforts ended in disaster. Worse, they prompted both dissident members of the Arab administration and indigenous leaders from Central Asia once more to take up arms against the Caliphate.
[...]
Such fears led to the appointment in 705 of a new viceroy for the region, a hardened general named Qutayba.
[...]
Qutayba was a master at the technical use of terror. In his early campaign against Paykand, for example, he slaughtered the entire force of defenders and took all the women and children into captivity. When he finally broke into Samarkand after laying siege to it over four years, he took thirty-nine thousand people as slaves.
[...]
Qutayba tore down the main Zoroastrian temple at Samarkand and melted down its treasure, repeating the process in other cities.
[...]
Of more lasting consequence was Qutayba's systematic destruction of books and religious literature. In Bukhara he destroyed an important library, but in Kath, the capital of Khwarazm (near the Aral Sea in present-day Uzbekistan), he succeeded in wiping out an entire literature in the Khwarazmian language, including works on astronomy, history, mathematics, genealogy, and literature. Writing in the eleventh century, the great scientist Biruni rued this destruction as a crime against an ancient culture. Qutayba's special animus was directed against Zoroastrianism. Besides killing various writers from this faith, he obliterated much of the corpus of Zoroastrian theology and letters, a tragic loss to civilisation
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10064.html
In this sweeping and richly illustrated history, S. Frederick Starr tells the fascinating but largely unknown story of Central Asia's medieval enlightenment through the eventful lives and astonishing accomplishments of its greatest minds--remarkable figures who built a bridge to the modern world. Because nearly all of these figures wrote in Arabic, they were long assumed to have been Arabs. In fact, they were from Central Asia--drawn from the Persianate and Turkic peoples of a region that today extends from Kazakhstan southward through Afghanistan, and from the easternmost province of Iran through Xinjiang, China.

Lost Enlightenment recounts how, between the years 800 and 1200, Central Asia led the world in trade and economic development, the size and sophistication of its cities, the refinement of its arts, and, above all, in the advancement of knowledge in many fields. Central Asians achieved signal breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics, geology, medicine, chemistry, music, social science, philosophy, and theology, among other subjects. They gave algebra its name, calculated the earth's diameter with unprecedented precision, wrote the books that later defined European medicine, and penned some of the world's greatest poetry. One scholar, working in Afghanistan, even predicted the existence of North and South America--five centuries before Columbus. Rarely in history has a more impressive group of polymaths appeared at one place and time. No wonder that their writings influenced European culture from the time of St. Thomas Aquinas down to the scientific revolution, and had a similarly deep impact in India and much of Asia.

Lost Enlightenment chronicles this forgotten age of achievement, seeks to explain its rise, and explores the competing theories about the cause of its eventual demise. Informed by the latest scholarship yet written in a lively and accessible style, this is a book that will surprise general readers and specialists alike.

S. Frederick Starr is founding chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, a research and policy center affiliated with the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm. A past president of Oberlin College and the Aspen Institute, he began his career in classical archaeology, excavating at Gordium in modern Turkey and mapping the Persian Royal Road.

Review:

"Lost Enlightenment is a remarkable and accessible scholarly tour de force."--David Morgan, Times Literary Supplement

"Starr argues rightly that the region's brilliant culture rested on a highly cosmopolitan mix of ethnic groups, languages and religions; a long, rich pre-Islamic intellectual tradition (mainly Buddhist); and prosperity. . . . Starr shines in his core chapters, where he presents the great achievements of the Central Asian philosopher-scientists at a time when their homeland was the creative intellectual capital of the world."--Nature

"Starr is that rare scholar with the horsepower to write about the medieval culture of this vast region that is bounded by Persia to the west, and China to the east, and India to the southeast. . . . An indispensable title for scholars, this lively study should prove equally compelling to serious lay readers with an interest in Arabic and medieval thought."--Library Journal, starred review

"In this graceful, luxuriant history, Starr recovers the stunning contributions of Central Asia scientists, architects, artists, engineers, and historians during the four centuries that began just before the Arab onslaught of the eight century and lasted until the Mongol siege in the thirteenth century. . . . The book offers a lucid exploration of the era's intricate philosophical and theological debates and a succinct depiction of its poetry and art, enhanced by many illustrations."--Foreign Affairs
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Clive
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Re: The Lost Enlightenment

Post by Clive »

From an Amazon reviewer
Syncretism allowed a renewed analysis of scientific and philosophical questions that had remained dormant since the Greek Enlightenment. The border between philosophy and theology was explored, defining their respective contents as the study progressed. Great minds emerged, and argued. Where these two disciplines separate, or was there a ranking, and if so, which was to lead, which one was to adapt? The matter was never resolved. Meanwhile it all came to naught, and Central Asia somehow disappeared from the map, only to be discovered by intellectual archeologists in the last few decades.

Why so? The author puts much of the blame on emergent Islamic fundamentalism, which found its strident voice in Ghazali. He is certainly right in this. A culture of conformity dampens curiosity by creating negative stereotypes. The threat of death (for committing apostasy by questioning the Koran) was potent inhibitor (we've seen this kind of threaat with Giordano Bruno and Galileo).

On page 429 the author also conjectures a reduced supply of "rising geniuses." May be the author is right. My hunch is somewhat different (albeit not incompatible). The wisdom of a scientist lies in asking questions for which he can find an answer. At the end of the period, all questions that could have been answered with the technologies of the day had been resolved. The niche had been explored. Latecomers were condemned to be epigones.

Reading Biruni's achievement in astronomy one realizes that given extant observational capacities, he had come to the end of the line. There simply were no "adjacent possibles" at hand, or the combination of conceptual framework and tools needed for further advance. Kashi's later work in Samarkand was solid, but broke new ground. Nor could it have done so. One had to await the invention of the telescope to move beyond what the naked eye could see, and settle open questions or discover new ones. The question is, of course, why Central Asia did not invent the telescope - it had all the components. My guess: practice precedes science. In Europe it probably had practical use at sea (in Holland) before it was adapted for astronomy.

Another area where I may part (gently) with the author's conclusions is in the role of the Islamic religion. Rome was a republic well before it became an empire, and the state structure in China goes back to Lord Shang, well before the Yellow Emperor. They expanded from a core, never deserting it, like Islam did. The tragedy of Islam may have been to have succeeded too fast, never having had the time to create proper state structures. The Arab term for bureaucracy is diwan - originally simply the roster of the army. This is little to go on, when building a state. So the mighty ship of the Arab empire may have slipped into the water and drifted out to sea without proper instruments to steer it. Islam was jury-rigged device: it prevented the ship from foundering, but no more. Take away religion tomorrow, and still the ship of state would be rudderless.
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Clive
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Re: The Lost Enlightenment

Post by Clive »

INTRODUCTION

Central Eurasia1 is the vast, largely landlocked area in between Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia,2 and the sub-Arctic and Arctic taïgatundra zone. It is one of the six major constituent world areas of the Eurasian continent.

Because geographical boundaries change along with human cultural and political change, the regions included within Central Eurasia have changed over time. From High Antiquity to the Roman conquests by Julius Caesar and his successors, and again from the fall of the Roman Empire to the end of the Early Middle Ages, Central Eurasia generally included most of Europe north of the Mediterranean zone. Culturally speaking, Central Eurasia was thus a horizontal band from the Atlantic to the Pacific between the warmer peripheral regions to the south and the Arctic to the north. Its approximate limits after the Early Middle Ages (when Central Eurasia was actually at its height and reached its greatest extent) exclude Europe west of the Danube, the Near or Middle East (the Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, western and southern Iran, and the Caucasus), South and Southeast Asia, East Asia (Japan, Korea, and China proper), and Arctic and sub-Arctic Northern Eurasia. There are of course no fixed boundaries between any of these regions or areas—all change gradually and imperceptibly into one other—but the central points of each of the peripheral regions are distinctive and clearly non–Central Eurasian. This traditional Central Eurasia has shrunk further with the Europeanization of the Slavs in the Western Steppe during the Middle Ages3 and the settlement of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia by Chinese in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

What may be called “traditional Central Eurasia” after the Early Middle Ages thus included the temperate zone roughly between the lower Danube River region in the west and the Yalu River region in the east, and between the sub-Arctic taïga forest zone in the north4 and the Himalayas in the south. It included the Western (Pontic) Steppe and North Caucasus Steppe (now Ukraine and south Russia); the Central Steppe and Western Central Asia, also known together as West Turkistan (now Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kirghizstan); Southern Central Asia (now Afghanistan and northeastern Iran); Jungharia and Eastern Central Asia or the Tarim Basin, also known together as East Turkistan (now Xinjiang); Tibet; the Eastern Steppe (now Mongolia and Inner Mongolia); and Manchuria. Of these regions, most of the Western Steppe, Inner Mongolia, and Manchuria are no longer culturally part of Central Eurasia.

Central Eurasian peoples made fundamental, crucial contributions to the formation of world civilization, to the extent that understanding Eurasian history is impossible without including the relationship between Central Eurasians and the peoples around them. A history of Central Eurasia therefore necessarily also treats to some degree the great peripheral civilizations of Eurasia—Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia— which were once deeply involved in Central Eurasian history.

Traditional Central Eurasia was coterminous with the ancient continental internal economy and international trade system misleadingly conceptualized and labeled as the Silk Road. It has often been distinguished from the Littoral zone maritime trade network, which also existed in some sense from prehistoric times and steadily increased in importance throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but the sources make no such distinction. The continental and maritime trade routes were all integral parts of what must be considered to have been a single international trade system. That system was resoundingly, overwhelmingly, oriented to the Eurasian continental economy (and its local economies) based in the great political entities of Eurasia, all of which were focused not on the sea but on Central Eurasia. The Littoral System, as a distinctive economy of major significance, developed only after the Western European establishment of regular open-sea trade between Europe and South, Southeast, and East Asia, as discussed in chapter 10; it became completely separate from the Silk Road only when the latter no longer existed.

The cultural-geographical area of Central Eurasia must be distinguished from the Central Eurasian peoples and from Central Eurasian languages, all of which have been variously defined. While the topic of this book is the history of Central Eurasia, it is really about the Central Eurasian peoples. It therefore includes the history of Central Eurasians who left their homeland for one of the other regions, carrying with them their Central Eurasian languages and the Central Eurasian Culture Complex (on which see the prologue). To some extent, the history of Eurasia as a whole from its beginnings to the present day can be viewed as the successive movements of Central Eurasians and Central Eurasian cultures into the periphery and of peripheral peoples and their cultures into Central Eurasia.

Modern scholars have done much to correct some of the earlier misconceptions about Central Eurasia and Central Eurasians, and they have added significantly to the store of data concerning the area and its peoples. Unfortunately, the corrections that have been made have not been adopted by most historians, and very many fundamental points have not been noticed, let alone corrected. In particular, the general view of Central Eurasians and their role in the history of Eurasia, even in studies by Central Eurasianists, contains a significant number of unrecognized cultural misperceptions and biases. Some of them are recent, but others are inherited from the Renaissance, and still others—especially the idea of the barbarian—go back to Antiquity. The following is only a brief summary of some of the main points, which are discussed in detail in the epilogue.

Most modern historians have implicitly accepted the largely negative views about Central Eurasians expressed in peripheral peoples’ historical and other literary sources without taking into serious consideration the positive views about Central Eurasians expressed in the very same peripheral culture sources, not to speak of the views held by Central Eurasians about the peripheral peoples. Although works by peripheral peoples provide more or less our only surviving record of many Central Eurasians until well into the Middle Ages, when sources in local Central Eurasian languages began to be written, most works by peripheral peoples are not by any means as one-sided as historians have generally made them out to be. The antipathy felt by Central Eurasians for the peripheral peoples is noted by historians and travelers from the periphery as well as by the Central Eurasians themselves in cases where sources in their languages are preserved—for example, by the Scythians for the Greeks and Persians, by the Hsiung-nu for the Chinese, and by the Turks for both the Chinese and the Greeks. The sensationalistic descriptions by Herodotus and other early historians should long ago have been corrected through the positive evaluations given by Greeks, Chinese, and others living among Central Eurasians as well as by the substantial amount of neutral, purely descriptive information provided by travelers and the same early writers themselves.

The received view of premodern Central Eurasia is almost exclusively a ste reotype based on a misconstruing of only one segment of Central Eurasian society: the peoples of the steppe zone who have been widely believed to be “pure” nomads, distinct and isolated from settled Central Eurasians. Leaving aside the very serious problem that, ethnolinguistically speaking, the nomads cannot be clearly distinguished historically or archaeologically from urbanite and agriculturalist Central Eurasians,5 it is important to recognize and understand the stereotypes and misconceptions that fill the modern view of the Central Eurasian nomads:6

The Central Eurasian nomads were warlike—fierce and cruel natural warriors—due to their harsh environment and difficult way of life. This natural ability was much aided by their skills in horseback riding and hunting with bow and arrow, which were easily translated into military skills.
The Central Eurasian nomads’ life-style left them poor, because their production was insufficient for their needs. They therefore robbed the rich peripheral agricultural peoples to get what they needed or wanted. This “needy nomad” theory is related to the “extortion and booty” model and “greedy barbarian” model of Central Eurasian relations with the peripheral states.
Because Central Eurasians were natural warriors—and, as nomads, constantly moving—they were hard to defeat. They were a permanent military threat to the peripheral peoples, whom they regularly attacked and defeated. Central Eurasians thus dominated Eurasia militarily down to early modern times.
Despite some comments found in historical sources that appear to support these ideas, careful reading of the same sources flatly contradicts them. The falseness of these views is also demonstrated by simple examination of uncontested historical fact. They are ultimately all direct descendants, little changed, of the constituent elements of the ancient Graeco-Roman idea, or fantasy, of the barbarian. Pastoral nomadic Central Eurasians were no more “natural warriors” than urban Central Eurasians were “natural merchants,” or agricultural Central Eurasians were “natural farmers.” Both nomad-founded states and those founded by sedentary peoples were complex societies. Although most people in the nomad sector of the former type of state were typically skilled at riding and hunting—a fact that never failed to impress non-nomadic peoples, who comment on it repeatedly—the far more populous and rich peripheral sedentary societies included very many people who were professional soldiers trained exclusively for war. This gave them the advantage over Central Eurasians in most conflicts.

The nomads also were not poor. To be precise, some nomads were rich, some were poor, and most were somewhere in between, just as in any other culture zone, but the rank- and-file nomads were much better off in every way than their counterparts in the peripheral agricultural regions, who were slaves or treated little better than slaves. The nomads did want very much to trade with their neighbors, whoever they were, and generally reacted violently when they were met with violence or contempt, as one might expect most people anywhere to do. The biggest myth of all—that Central Eurasians were an unusually serious military threat to the peripheral states— is pure fiction. In short, neither Central Eurasia nor Central Eurasian history has anything to do with the fantasy of the barbarian or the modern covert version of it discussed at length in the epilogue.

Central Eurasian history concerns many different peoples who practiced several different ways of life. Each Central Eurasian culture consisted of countless individuals, each of whom had a distinct personality, just as in the rest of the world. Central Eurasians were strong and weak, enlightened and depraved, and everything in between, exactly like people of any other area or culture. Practically everything one can say about Central Eurasians, as people, can be said about every other people in Eurasia. It is necessary to at least attempt to be neutral in writing history.

But what about the barbarians? If the historical record actually tells us Central Eurasians were not barbarians, what were they? They were dynamic, creative people. Central Eurasia was the home of the Indo-Europeans, who expanded across Eurasia from sea to sea and established the foundations of what has become world civilization. Central Asia in the Middle Ages was the economic, cultural, and intellectual center of the world, and Central Asians are responsible for essential elements of modern science, technology, and the arts. The historical record unambiguously shows that Central Eurasians were people who fought against overwhelming—indeed, hopeless— odds, defending their homelands, their families, and their way of life from relentless encroachment and ruthless invasion by the peripheral peoples of Eurasia. The Central Eurasians lost almost everything, eventually, but they fought the good fight. This book is thus ultimately about the continent-wide struggle between the Central Eurasians and the peripheral peoples,7 leading to the victory of the latter, the destruction of the Central Eurasian states, and the reduction of Central Eurasian peoples to extreme poverty and near extinction before their miraculous rebirth, in the nick of time, at the end of the twentieth century.

One may still wish to ask, was not the history of Central Eurasia, dominated by states founded by nomadic or partly nomadic people, unique in its tendencies and outcomes? No. The struggle of the vastly outnumbered nations of Central Eurasia against the inexorable expansion of their peripheral neighbors was paralleled by that of the American Indian nations against the Europeans and their ex-colonial clients, the European-American states, who pursued a policy of overt or covert genocide in most countries of the Americas. In North America, the Indians fought to save their lands, their nations, and their families, but they lost. Their fields of corn were burned, their families were massacred, and the few survivors were transported by force to desert lands where they were left to die. Up until a few decades ago, the Indians were condemned by the unjust, genocidal victors as “savages.” Finally, when they had almost disappeared, some among the victor peoples had a twinge of conscience and realized that the historical treatment of the Indians was exactly the reverse of the truth. Recognition of the struggles of the Central Eurasian peoples against the more than two-millennia-long mistreatment by their peripheral neighbors is long overdue. The warriors of Central Eurasia were not barbarians. They were heroes, and the epics of their peoples sing their undying fame.
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8882.html
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DCHindley
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Re: The Lost Enlightenment

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Ahh! I think I found that lost enlightenment behind the radiator! "My future's so bright, I gotta wear shades!" (© Timbuk3)
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Re: The Lost Enlightenment

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Fascinating Clive !!

Central Asia sounds like "MiddleEarth" :)
I wonder if there is a huge Persian shaped gap in our understanding of the monotheisms, for example the founder Zoroastrianism seems to have been, like Trotsky, air brushed out of history!
Which founder and when?

Zoroastrianism boasted a centralised monotheistic religious state a century before the Christians.
A "cobbler of fables" [Augustine]; "Leucius is the disciple of the devil" [Decretum Gelasianum]; and his books "should be utterly swept away and burned" [Pope Leo I]; they are the "source and mother of all heresy" [Photius]
Clive
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Re: The Lost Enlightenment

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Looks like a typo in my op! I think I meant Zoroastrianism has been airbrushed. But much more than that, a huge amount of thinking. I understand that Islam has extremely shaky foundations, if it has any, http://www.brill.com/products/book/isla ... c-contexts. My impression that a rewrite of the history of Asia is due.
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Leucius Charinus
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Re: The Lost Enlightenment

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Clive wrote:Looks like a typo in my op! I think I meant Zoroastrianism has been airbrushed. But much more than that, a huge amount of thinking.
Well yes. Airbrushing is happening as we speak. It's part of the Orwellian modus operandi of those who have Great political (and usually military) power. Zoroastrianism is ancient. It may have been first airbrushed by the Greeks who followed Alexander. In the 3rd century it attempted to throw off the Greek influence with the appearance of the King of Kings Ardashir I

  • Ardashir creates Zoroastrianism (c.224 CE)

    In the third century the Persian "King of Kings"
    Ardashir created a new State monotheistic religion
    which he actively promoted, organized, supported and
    protected, by legislation. He guaranteed its orthodoxy
    by the sword. It was characterised by a strong
    centralised power structure, centered on the King and
    his appointed Magi (ie: academic temple priests, and
    their chiefs)

    A gifted researcher and high cleric of this religion
    in the tradition named Tansar was ordered to gather
    the scattered "Avesta" of the Mazdeans from ancient
    sources, and to edit these in order to reproduce an
    authorised and canonical version of the "Avesta",
    the holy writ of Zoroastrianism. Finally the Sassanid
    state monotheistic church was characterised by widespread
    architectural replication of square fire-temples for
    the official religion throughout the major cities and
    provinces of the Sassanid Persian empire. This was a
    novel step.

    Epigraphic and monumental evidence suggests the pre-
    existence of the earlier religion of the Mazdeans in
    the epoch of the Parthian civilisation.


    Extracted from Cambridge Ancient History
    Volume XII
    The Imperial Crisis and Recovery (193 to 324 CE)
    Chapter 5: SASSANID PERSIA
    The Sassanian Empire: Political History

    p.109ff

And then there was the rise of Christianity followed by the rise of Islam. The Islamic "revolution" would have "airbrushed" the Zoroastrian influences.
I understand that Islam has extremely shaky foundations, if it has any, http://www.brill.com/products/book/isla ... c-contexts.

Ditto for Christianity IMO.


LC
A "cobbler of fables" [Augustine]; "Leucius is the disciple of the devil" [Decretum Gelasianum]; and his books "should be utterly swept away and burned" [Pope Leo I]; they are the "source and mother of all heresy" [Photius]
Clive
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Re: The Lost Enlightenment

Post by Clive »

DCHindley wrote:Ahh! I think I found that lost enlightenment behind the radiator! "My future's so bright, I gotta wear shades!" (© Timbuk3)
Que?
Qutayba was a master at the technical use of terror. In his early campaign against Paykand, for example, he slaughtered the entire force of defenders and took all the women and children into captivity. When he finally broke into Samarkand after laying siege to it over four years, he took thirty-nine thousand people as slaves.
[...]
Qutayba tore down the main Zoroastrian temple at Samarkand and melted down its treasure, repeating the process in other cities.
[...]
Of more lasting consequence was Qutayba's systematic destruction of books and religious literature. In Bukhara he destroyed an important library, but in Kath, the capital of Khwarazm (near the Aral Sea in present-day Uzbekistan), he succeeded in wiping out an entire literature in the Khwarazmian language, including works on astronomy, history, mathematics, genealogy, and literature. Writing in the eleventh century, the great scientist Biruni rued this destruction as a crime against an ancient culture. Qutayba's special animus was directed against Zoroastrianism. Besides killing various writers from this faith, he obliterated much of the corpus of Zoroastrian theology and letters, a tragic loss to civilisation
Are you arguing this did not happen and therefore we have a clear view of the history of Asia? That it was an Islamic Golden Age?
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Re: The Lost Enlightenment

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Clive wrote:
Qutayba was a master at the technical use of terror. In his early campaign against Paykand, for example, he slaughtered the entire force of defenders and took all the women and children into captivity. When he finally broke into Samarkand after laying siege to it over four years, he took thirty-nine thousand people as slaves.
[...]
Qutayba tore down the main Zoroastrian temple at Samarkand and melted down its treasure, repeating the process in other cities.
[...]
Of more lasting consequence was Qutayba's systematic destruction of books and religious literature. In Bukhara he destroyed an important library, but in Kath, the capital of Khwarazm (near the Aral Sea in present-day Uzbekistan), he succeeded in wiping out an entire literature in the Khwarazmian language, including works on astronomy, history, mathematics, genealogy, and literature. Writing in the eleventh century, the great scientist Biruni rued this destruction as a crime against an ancient culture. Qutayba's special animus was directed against Zoroastrianism. Besides killing various writers from this faith, he obliterated much of the corpus of Zoroastrian theology and letters, a tragic loss to civilisation

That it was an Islamic Golden Age?
Thanks for the quote.



LC
A "cobbler of fables" [Augustine]; "Leucius is the disciple of the devil" [Decretum Gelasianum]; and his books "should be utterly swept away and burned" [Pope Leo I]; they are the "source and mother of all heresy" [Photius]
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