Intermezzo

I keep running into the question: what would Muhammad have had the Muslims do elsewise? Why can't a Muslim community live their Deen more healthily? Edward Dutton does get around to this, focusing on the House Of Wisdom so-called, under the Mutazilite 'Abbasids.

The later-/post-'Abbasid history raises up dozens if not hundreds of expert mathematicians (especially), which is exactly the g-loaded science which Dutton should elevate above all others. Although Dutton cites The Big Bang Theory which wonders if mathematicians exist on TOO high a level (PS: LOL).

Tannous would say, East-Syrian Christians helped out; and the Jews would likely add the Bavli community. We haven't even got into "Persianate" India. But it wasn't only "dhimmis" with the Muslims subsequently "stealing" their work. Dutton knows this. Instead, he suggests that the vast reaches of Islamic Empire widened the Islamic gene-pool. I would add, the 'Abbasid openness to interracial marriage under Islam. If the Arabs wanted to keep marrying their cousins, that was the Arabs' problem. The 'Abbasid caliphs, increasingly mixed-race as time went on, could leave 'em to rot. Ditto the Aryan Muslims over all those endogamous jati tribes across the Indus. Edward Dutton, in an inter-ethnic marriage himself, is no Madison Grant.

Thus: the "Lost Enlightenment", continuing what other literature calls the "Iranian Intermezzo". [MARKER 7/21/22: I have, on this day, almost a decade later than I should have done, read Lost Enlightenment - beyond just the reviews thereof. I am not changing the text of this poast. POASTCHANGE 4/7/23: Okay, this one paragraph...]

Could the Persian(ate) Muslims have kept this run, running? Well... history as such cannot tell us "what-if", only "what"; and in this case the answer was, "they didn't". But then, Orthodox Christianity also "didn't". The West by contrast "did".

But for how long? To paraphrase that possibly-apocryphal Chinese comment, is it too soon to tell?