For anyone interested, Iran has some amazing examples of mind bending mosque decoration. If you're a fan of maths, tesselation, art or architecture, it's all there.
They have a style that I can only describe as 3D honeycomb stalactites.. they when viewed from a specific angle all align perfectly to make repeating patterns.
If you like that you should read up on Islamic gardens[0], which combine a philosophy similar to feng shui with geometry. An Islamic garden is intended to represent a slice of Paradise on Earth, a refuge from the generally dry and dusty locale of much of Dar al-Islam.
For instance, a proper Islamic garden should contain water features and be divided into quadrants to represent the four directions of the world, and further subdivided and structured in repeating and almost fractal designs.
Too bad they are all bad people and need to be banned from entering the USA... jk! jk! When I hear something positive around Islam in the US, it makes my mind spin and I have to check if I have been suddenly teleported to an alternate reality where people have an actual interest in appreciating the rich cultures and their nuances and history.
In case it's unclear, I believe people are down-voting you because you speak as though everyone in the US is anti-Islam. The Trump government and their supporters may well be, but more broadly the anti-Islam sentiment is a fiction, especially among the intellectually curious and doing-our-best-to-be-welcoming HN audience. I know you probably meant well with your comment, it just feels bad because this is such a sore spot.
I've never understood the Iran hate. Iranian culture is very distinct from Arab culture. It is truly one of the oldest and greatest human cultures, and it's a shame that more people don't get to experience it because of this irrational hatred and suspicion
The comment (puranjay) did not denigrate Arabic culture, just said it was 'very distinct' from Iranian culture, which is often not appreciated by many people in the West. I'm not sure what you mean by your analogy.
Irish language is much closer to Italian and Persian (and Hindi and Urdu), than any of them are to Arabic, because they are all distantly related through the Indo-European language group, spread by the steppe-living horse-domesticating chariot-riding war-mongering peoples from Central Asia. Ireland still has a strong tradition of horse breeding, trading and racing. Note that Celtic is not the indigenous language or culture of Ireland, but was brought by Indo-European invaders from what is now Germany, during the Iron Age.
Irish artistic culture is more closely analogous to Arabic culture - and Italian to Iranian - in the sense that Irish is primarily a tribal oral tradition of poetry, song and story-telling, with a geometric style of art in metalwork, textiles and illuminated manuscripts. Italian and Iranian are settled urban civilizations, with architecture, engineering, writing, banking, ... etc. Note that Ireland was not occupied by the Romans, and Dublin was founded by the Vikings, who are more usually associated with raiding, plundering and destruction (another exception for Viking founding of urban settlement might be Ukraine).
However, in religion, there are more analogies between Shia Islam (Iran) and Roman Catholicism (Ireland), as contrasted with more austere Protestant (Quaker, Methodist) and Sunni (Wahhabi) ends of the spectrum; the former:
- Recognize priestly leaders and interlocutors with God (Popes, Imams), as opposed to direct unmediated prayer.
- Favor rich adornment of places of worship, rather than plain undecorated rooms.
- Favor showy external displays of religious devotion, rather than (or perhaps, in addition to) extremely self-disciplined personal piety. For example: compare Sunni and Shia approaches to Ashura; or Catholic and Protestant approaches to personal wealth.
I sometimes see similarities between Irish and Polish cultures, as the two main Catholic countries (in Europe) that were not occupied by the Romans.
My question is not to you specifically, but to history-aware users of HN. How much of cultural sense came there from Islam and how much from the original culture before so-called Islamic revolutions, which happened almost yesterday? Why do we attribute the culture to specific religion, which wasn’t even at the core of specific nation until some time?
I know that counter-attitudes are strong, but simply image-googling “xyz before islamic revolution” shows undeniable contrast. How to resolve?
Yeah you see you paid for it so you /can't/ see it. I didn't so I can. Makes as much sense as anything in copyright nowadays.
Everything the BBC does and has it its archive should be freely available to brits who've paid their tax directly to the BBC in the form of a licensing fee. The fact they withhold anything from the people who paid, in full, whether they wanted to or not for it is morally repugnant.
But my understanding is that unlike the BBC stations, they do not take public funding via the license fee, they sell ad time. If this is true, the thesis that Britons should have free access to it because they paid is not valid.
I'm not in the UK, and I could watch it just fine. Probably because Channel 4 blocked access to it in the UK, where they made use of the laws available to them. These laws likely don't let them enforce worldwide.
I've been wanting to go to Iran for a long time! Did you go by yourself or with a tour agency? I feel like an organized tour would kill a lot of the allure but at the same time I think I would feel way too lost on my own.
"Citizens from the US, Canadia, US/American Samoa and U.K./B.O.T. are not allowed to travel to Iran independently and are required to travel on tours, either as part of a tour group or a tailor made individual tour." -- Wikitravel. But check if this has changed.
I went on my own, with an Australian passport. I don't think English is widely spoken. You can use couchsurfing, there are lots of enthusiastic hosts. I think this is the best way. You can also easily find inexpensive hotels if you want to take a break. The app 'psiphon' (who runs it?) lets you access all websites while visiting (ie facebook), alternatively tor usually works. The info on Iran on this page is good: http://www.travelindependent.info/middle-east.htm
his mnemotechnic devices and 'art of memory' (later to influence modern computation) derive from devices from the preceding islamic tradition in andalusia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zairja)
There are deep connections between the functions of geometry and geometry influenced aesthetics, the zairja tradition, and several other things.
If you are interested in a more mathematical method of generating Islamic patterns based on tilings, be sure to look at the work of Craig Kaplan, especially his Ph.D. thesis and related software tools, but perhaps start here:
Just as a heads up, if you try to run this program with your monitor in portrait mode, the program defaults to full screen mode, but assumes a landscape monitor. The parts that are cut off are critical to getting the program to do anything at all, since you have to start by clicking on a green window that is off the side of the screen. Nice music though...
I'm delighted to see some of the algs behind making these are strikingly accessible!
Dumb question though: Even though many of the operations appear to be composed of 2-3 superimposed harmonically-related sinusoidal functions, how come they don't appear to resemble the set of figures in spirographs? Is it due to specific sets of constants? The shading?
Knowledge is carried through generations and by interrupting that, you cause irreversible harm. That's effectively what the mongols did to the Islamic empire.
The mongol invasion of the Islamic empire had as an objective made an example out of any nation that did not agree to pay tribute to the mongols. They did this by razing the cities to the ground.
The Siege of Baghdad resulted in the death of many scholars, the destruction of the Great Library of Baghdad, etc.
Curiously enough, their most important cultural achievements have survived in our own culture, after the Spanish reconquista and the Latin translations of the 12th century in Toledo.
The European Reinassance was essentially the assimilation of the cultural wealth amassed by the Islamic empire. Once the Roman Catholic church was influenced by philosophy (e.g: Saint Thomas Aquinas, who studied from translated material), they stopped prosecuting science so severely.
The “Greeks” (Hellenistic scholars) were actually from Egypt, Asia Minor, Palestine, Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, Italy, Macedonia, etc. in addition to Greece.
There was a 1000 year period where Greek was the lingua franca of math/astronomy/engineering in the Mediterranean, from about 500 BCE to 500 CE. There was a lot of contemporaneous science done in Persia, with knowledge shared back and forth. But calling these “Greeks” is sort of like calling anyone publishing science in English in 1990 (including Chinese, Russians, Brazilians, ...) “Americans”.
Many of those “Greek” ideas were originally developed during the 3000 years prior, when the centers of mathematics and technical culture were Egypt and Mesopotamia, written in Egyptian, Sumerian, or Akkadian.
Then from about 500 CE to 1500 CE, the centers of scholarship were in India and throughout the Islamic World (Persia, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, ...). The first couple hundred years of Western European mathematics is basically republication of stuff that had been developed by the Arabs hundreds of years earlier.
At some point about 500 years ago Christian Western Europeans (Germans, French, English, Dutch, Italians, ..) got their mathematical shit together, and dominated science for about 400 years. More recently, science and technology happen around the world.
This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to go on about downvotes, or any votes— because it's tedious and the conclusions people jump to are imaginary.
I rephrased it to: "The European Reinassance was essentially the assimilation of the cultural wealth amassed by the Islamic empire."
This is more accurate. But I think their influence was much more far reaching than just passing on Greek literature:
- Before paper, parchments were used. A bible took 3000 sheep or goat to print.
- They adopted Indian numerals and adapted them to the form we use today. Imagine Copernicus calculating trajectories of planets with Roman numbers.
- Nicolaus Copernicus started his studies using almanacs and tables such as the Alfonsine tables, the tables were originally in Arabic and were collected/translated by Alfonso X of Castile in Toledo. They included observations ranging from the days of Ptolomy onwards.
- Many Western discoveries came from innovations in optics (e.g: telescope, microscope). The Islamic empire did great contributions to the field of optics. They experimented with reflection, refraction, lenses, etc... and that is original work with literature to support it.
For French speakers out there, I saw a great documentary called something like 'History of the world from a middle eastern point of view' in 2 parts that discusses the islamic golden age and its downfall to the mongols. Apparently Bagdad was the place to be before the Mongols destroyed it.
They have a style that I can only describe as 3D honeycomb stalactites.. they when viewed from a specific angle all align perfectly to make repeating patterns.
Ie: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/eb/3b/5a/eb3b5a6ad5751fa0276a...
Truly staggering works.