wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Comments

• [1] XX from New York January 22, 2008 - 01:23PM

  Imagine a world before algebra. Roman numerals had no zero. The Muslim world brought so much culture from India and Persia to the west that enabled scientific and mathematical progress.

  
  
• [2] Maya from Brooklyn January 22, 2008 - 01:46PM

  Imagine if Ferdinand and Isabella had made a Edict of Tolerance instead of a Edict of Explusion?

  
  
• [3] AC from Queens January 22, 2008 - 01:48PM

  Muslims proselytizes more than Christians!!!

  How do you believe Christianity became the most numerous religion in the world? With out using such a practice of conversion is ridicules. The Leonard Lopate bigotry is on the march again!

  
  
• [4] Nicole from nyc January 22, 2008 - 01:56PM

  This sort of narrative history lacks any complexity. His description of Merovingian religious history goes against current scholarship. See Patrick Geary. His "overview" approach to history is passe. The conclusions he comes are superficial.

  
  
• [5] Maya from Brooklyn January 22, 2008 - 01:58PM

  Christianity became a dominate religion BY THE SWORD, not by door-to-door proselytizing.

  
  
• [6] James from New York January 22, 2008 - 02:14PM

  That there was a brief flowering of culture, science & mathematics in Islam and that the Islamic world was instrumental in passing on to the Europeans significant elements of classical civilization which were so critical to the European Renaissance which then laid the foundation for modernity is undeniable. But it is equally undeniable that it was the Europeans who brilliantly built on their rediscovered classical heritage to create a vibrant scientific & technological civilization which made possible the modern European (North Atlantic) civilization's power & prosperity in a way that the Islamic world did not. Islam read Aristotle first and put him aside. Europe then read him & built on his work to expand knowledge in a way Islam never did. Had Europe been 'lucky' enough to succumb to the Islamic onslaught of the early Middle Ages it's fate may have been to share in the subsequent stagnation of the Islamic world.