Actually, there isn’t one guy who made up the Islamic Golden Age. It is a myth that has been floating around at least since the middle of the nineteenth century, when the British tried to blunt popular resistance to their alliance with the Ottoman Turks against the Russians in the Crimean War by spreading the falsehoods that Islam was a religion of peace and that Muslims had originated a great deal of what we think of as the modern world.
There is one guy, however, who has been carrying the ball for these fictions and fantasies in a big way at Wikipedia, the far-left propaganda site that masquerades as a handy online encyclopedia. Wikipedia might be of some value if you need to know when the Roman Emperor Philip the Arab reigned, or how many electoral votes Wendell Wilkie got in 1940, but if you’re looking for information on anything or anyone remotely controversial, expect Wikipedia to give you a far-left perspective, without regard for the facts of the matter. And now, this one energetic editor has been bringing his biases into even non-controversial areas.
A fellow calling himself Cremieux exposed this in a delightful entry at his Substack on Wednesday, entitled “The Invention of Islamic Invention.” In it, he exposes “the invention of many of the inventions credited to the so-called Islamic Golden Age by a rogue Wikipedia editor.”
It seems that this rogue editor, Jagged 85, has made, according to Wikipedia’s own discussion of this fiasco, “over 87,000 article edits since 2005. It has been found that many edits involve the undue promotion of Islamic and other non-European scholarship and achievements. In addition, there has been a severe misuse of sources: misrepresenting what a source has asserted; reporting only one side from a source; quoting out of context; inventing claims using a source related to the topic but which does not verify the claim.”
Cremieux lists some of the false claims that Jagged 85 managed to insert into various Wikipedia entries:
- Muslims invented funnels and sieves
- Al-Razi invented dissolving substances and sublimation
- Jabir ibn Hayyan invented cheese glue
- Ibn Sahl first described the parabolic mirror
- An Islamic water clock from the 12th century had the earliest copper pipes
- Avicenna formulated momentum as weight times velocity
- The Brethren of Purity proposed a heliocentric universe in the 10th century
- Darwin drew on Ibn Miskawayh’s work to develop the theory of evolution
- Al-Ghazali directly influenced Descartes’ later philosophical work
There are many other claims I could add to this list: Taqi al-Din invented the telescope sometime in the 1570s; Avicenna discovered microorganisms; Muhammad ibn Musa discovered gravity between planets; Al-Biruni discovered elliptical planetary orbits; Al-Jazari invented flow regulators and feedback control; Raqqa had a major glass factory where 300 different glass recipes were used, or—most amazingly—Al-Battani discovered relativity a millennium before Einstein.
All this (and there is much more) would be impressive if it were even close to being true, but it isn’t. And even if all of it were absolutely true, it wouldn’t accomplish what Jagged 85 is clearly trying to accomplish: making people impressed with the glories of Islam so that they convert.
All these fictional Islamic achievements also have exactly the opposite of their intended effect: they only make the Islamic world of today look worse, not better. If Muslims once led the world in intellectual, scientific, and technological innovation, where did it all go? Why are Muslim countries generally mired in poverty unless they happened to have struck oil?
Related: Actress Criticizes Islam, Loses Her Career
Even worse, why is there so much anti-intellectualism in the Islamic world? There is an old story about the caliph Umar burning down the library of Alexandria. When someone asked him why he would do such a thing, he answered: “If the books in it agreed with the Qur’an, they were superfluous. If they disagreed with the Qur’an, they were heretical.” The story may be apocryphal, but the attitude isn’t, and can be found in the Islamic world throughout the ages.
Jagged 85’s dream palace of fictional Islamic achievements at Wikipedia has come tumbling down. Unfortunately, these myths and fantasies still persist elsewhere, often with Western entities (yes, of course the UN) energetically pushing them. But there was no genuine Islamic Golden Age, and if Islam succeeds in gaining hegemony in Europe and North America in the near future, its rule will be anything but golden.
