Not Guilty! OK, Maybe Partly Guilty

https://quillette.com/2019/04/01/prescriptive-racialism-and-racial-exclusion

While this article makes an interesting point, It also makes a grievous intellectual error. I'm reposting this article because of the following comment:

> The Islamic philosopher Al Ghazali did the same when he railed against the Greek pagan influence during the Islamic Golden Age, and in doing so he extinguished the brilliant flame of scientific thought of his era. The Middle East has been dark ever since. <

In fairness to the author of this article, it has been a common belief, almost a universal belief, among philosophic scholars that her statement is accurate. But a look at Al Ghazal's actual philosophy and his statements indicate  a somewhat contrary reality.

While his positions are very complex, on the issue of scripture verses objective reality he clearly stated that there can be no such contradiction. Reality is reality whether observed through a religious or an empirical lens.  When a contradiction does appear, he insists that objective reality must be accepted as real and that religious scholars must then acknowledge that the Koran cannot be taken literally on that particular issue, but must instead be interpreted as symbolically true, not literally accurate.

This is the declaration of an individual who strongly supports science and its empirical, objective base. A  fair-minded person must acknowledge that Al Ghazali is not only innocent of the supposed offense but in fact is an exemplar of  the opposite position.  But equally in fairness, we can not ignore the fact that Al Ghazali was a religious extremist who also caused a great deal of harm to his culture and society.

In other words, he's not single-handedly guilty of destroying Islamic science but he did support and increase religious extremism. Which is to say he was a very mixed bag, like so many other human beings who tend to be regarded as exemplars of one particular trait but who are actually complex characters displaying both good and bad sides.

So who can be accused of single-handedly bringing down his own civilization? While it is very popular in the Middle East to blame the Crusades, there's no question it was an internal rot, a form of intellectual and spiritual cancer, which caused the destruction of the most highly advanced technological civilization on the planet, leaving it a desperately poor Third World entity to this day.

No one person was actually guilty of this offense, but one of the greatest contributors was Nizam al-Mulk. As visier, He established a highly influential set of madrasahs which firmly established the Islamic position of higher education as one of extreme religious fundamentalism.

These two highly influential men, living at the same time, did cause a great deal of harm and damage to their own society and civilization.  Still, I feel compelled to point out that Al Ghazali did not rail against science. Although he did contribute to the dominance of religious extremism and fundamentalism which led to the fall of the Islamic empire, he most certainly did not do it single-handedly nor did he do so by attacking science or objective reality. 

 Let me now note that I have previously stated over a period of decades that the anti-science movement founded in American religious fundamentalism constitutes an existential danger to our society. China was destroyed by turning inward into religious fundamentalism and away from science and objectivity, as was the great Islamic empire, as we will be if we do not reign in it's extremist excesses.