Last week I took a trip down to Sudbury, Suffolk. A tiny little town sitting on the River Stour, smack bang on the border with Essex. Its a very quant little town with lots of Chocolate box houses. Well what’s special about Sudbury, well its where I spent my formative years, though I was born in Newcastle, making me a Geordie, I grew up and went to school in Sudbury.

I suppose that makes me an honouree Silly-Suffolk, Silly coming from the Angle word selige, which means holy, supposedly in reference to the many fine churches and the fact that the original patron saint of England, St Edmund came from Suffolk. Females from Suffolk are called Suffolk Fair-Maidens due to the supposed beauty of people born in the county, but don’t tell my baby sister or brother that, it might go to their head!

Sometimes I act like I hate Sudbury, its a quiet town with absolutely nothing to do, when I worked at Tesco there, we used to joke that on a weekend the only thing to do was to get so drunk you forgot everything so you would have something to do the next weekend! I do prefer the hustle and bustle of life in Newcastle, but sometimes I do yearn for the slower pace of life in Sudbury.

But there are a few good reasons to be proud to have lived in Sudbury, for one it was the birthplace of the great 18th century painter Thomas Gainsborough, and any child who goes to school in Sudbury will be intimately familiar with his paintings and indeed the house in which he was born! But that does give you an appreciation later in life for the sheet beauty of his works, today there is a statue of Sudbury’s greatest son stood in the middle of the market place.

Also originally the Woolsack in the House of lords was stuffed with wool from Sudbury because of the towns great wealth and influence, something it certainly doesn’t have today! After the original was damaged in World War II it was restuffed with wool from all of the nations of the Commonwealth to symbolise unity of the different nations of the Commonwealth, not a bad replacement by any means.

In the centre of Newcastle there is a great monument to Earl Grey, thanking him for the Great Reform act of 1835, which abolished the “Rotten Boroughs” and guess what, Sudbury was one of those Rotten Boroughs, though it wasn’t fully disenfranchised until 1844. In fact we were taught at school that Charles Dickens reported on the Sudbury election of 1835 for the Morning Chronicle, and it was the inspiration for the famous Eatanswill election in his novel Pickwick Papers.

One thing about Sudbury, which does make me very proud to have lived there is the fact that in 1841, Sudbury became the first parliamentary constituency to return a member from an ethnic minority. Sudbury elected the son of an Indian queen, David Dye Sombre, alas he didn’t take up his seat however as he was declared insane before he could, but the fact he was elected does make me proud to have lived there.

Have Fun

Michael

CNN did a very good article on the contribution of Muslim inventions that helped shape the world we know today.  I have also been playing Assassin Creed 2 on the Xbox 360, and both of these have got me thinking about the major influences that Islam has had specifically on European society, particularly in the Renaissance of the 15th century.

Islam has a surprisingly long history in Europe; for a nearly 800 years there was a major Islamic presence in the Iberian peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal), which at one point pretty much encompassed the whole peninsula as well as some parts of southern France. There was also an Islamic state in Sicily during the 9th – 11th Centuries.

When these areas were recaptured by Christians during the Reconquista in Iberia and the Norman conquest of Sicily, the introduction of many parts of medieval Islamic culture into European society lead to the Renaissance of the 12th century, which paved the way for the Renaissance of the 15th century

So I figured I would look at just three areas and explore how these were influenced by Islam. The preservation of classical texts, the Scientific method and agriculture.

The Preservation of Classical Texts

When the Roman Empire fell, Europe descended into what we now know as the dark ages, an awful lot of science and knowledge from classical antiquity was lost to Europe. As a result of the Islamic conquest of the former territories of the Byzantine Empire, the work of  Aristotle, Galen, and Plato (amongst others) were translated from the crumbling papyrus they were written on. This knowledge was persevered, studied,commentated on and expanded upon. As early as 832, there was a great library of these texts kept in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

As the Muslims conquered Iberia & Sicily, they brought these writings with them as well, reintroducing the ideas and concepts back into Europe. When they were driven out by the Christians these texts were left behind, and the ideas were translated into Latin and spread over Europe, meaning things like the Hippocratic oath came back into use.

The Scientific Method

In Greek science, a great deal of emphasis was placed upon rationality rather that experimentation however in Islamic science, the reverse was true. This may be down to the emphasis on empirical observation found in the Qur’an and Sunnah, but whatever it was, Islamic scientists combined precise observation, controlled experimentation and careful record keeping. Every A-Level science student will tell you that those things are the key to science as we know it. The use of controlled experiments to determine the correctness of a theory was ground breaking then. This is the same method that has carried on since and is still used all over the world today, from the smallest school science classroom to the most advanced university research labs.

Abū ʿAlī al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (in Europe we call him Alhazen), wrote the Book of Optics in 1021, and if you read it (and I highly recommended you do, my A-Level physics teacher made me and I am glad she did), you will see the beginning of all modern science. So influential is this book that Alhazen is often called the first scientist and many historians place it up there with Newton’s Principia Mathematica as the two most important scientific works ever.

If you look at Alhazan’s method you will recognise the heading and sections of any modern scientific reports. It basically consisted of the following headings:

1. Observation
2. Statement of problem
3. Formulation of hypothesis
4. Testing of hypothesis using experimentation
5. Analysis of experimental results
6. Interpretation of data and formulation of conclusion
7. Publication of findings

Familiar to any student and/or scientist all over the world!

Using this method, Islamic scientists even developed a theory of evolution by natural selection as far back as the 9th century, while we had to wait until the 19th for Darwin to figure it out!

In regards to science in general, in Europe there is a gap in scientific development of around 1000 years, and it was only due to the works of the Muslims that science was able to develop so quickly in Europe during the Renaissance.

Agriculture

The Muslim conquest of Iberia saw the introduction of some extremely important agricultural innovations, particularly crop rotation, where a different crop in planted in winter and summer, doubling the productivity of a field. Muslims also grew cash crops, crops which are not just for a farmers own subsidence, but are sold for profit. Muslim rulers also took a radically different approach to labour rights and land ownership, rewarding productive farmers, as opposed to the feudal system in Europe in which farmers were practically slaves with little hope of improvising their lot in life.

Until the Islamic rule in Iberia, most crops grown in Europe were wheats. The Muslims brought with them some fantastic crops to grow, including sugar cane, rice, lemons, oranges, apricots, cotton, artichokes, aubergines, bananas, and saffron. All of which we still use today and they are very yummy, except cotton which leaves your mouth kind of dry!

On the technology side, Islamic famers brought us irrigation, industrial milling, fertilizers and windmills. And all of this allowed for the development of towns and cities as fewer people were needed to grow the fod to feed society, so great scientists and artists were able to flourish, would Leonardo Da Vinci, have accomplished so much if he had to work the fields to feed himself?

Conclusion

So there are my thoughts on it, in my opinion we should really be thankful for Islam, without it, who knows what kind of world we would be living in, maybe we would never have gotten out of the dark ages!

Have Fun

Michael

Tomorrow our former Prime Minister, Tony Blair goes in front of the Iraq enquiry.

Now the war, in all honesty, is something that really worries me. I mean, I can’t put my hand on my heart and say that Iraq would be a better place with Saddam still in power. But at the same time war troubles me, war should only be an option as the very last resort.

As a great man once said, where there is a thought of war, it must be overcome with a more powerful thought of peace.

In my heart I detest the fact that there was a war, with the deaths of innocents and young men on both sides, who only wanted to serve their country. But when you look at the crimes committed by Saddam against his own people, I think, maybe there was a case for regime change.

We were taken to war on what turned out to be false information, was that the result of deception, I don’t know, I hope not. I think that Tony Blair is an honourable man who honestly believed he was doing the right thing.

I am not really making sense am I, well, I really don’t know how to sum it all up in my head. My dad said to me before we went to war, imagine if we had stood up to Hitler after Kristallnacht, and removed him from power, would that have saved 60 million lives?

I wonder if regime change can ever be right? Who would decide when a regime crosses the line, who has the right to police the world, and who would watch the watchmen?

Either way I don’t think I will ever reconcile the war in my own mind, best I can hope to do is pray that this never happens again. I guess this is for historians to judge and make sense of.

God bless,

Michael