gabaston wrote:Rather then ethnically cleanse he wanted to diversify.
i'll bite my tongue.
That's true actually, Alexander was fascinated with cultural unity between the East and the Hellenistic World, most notably shown in his symbolic planting of a a tree from today's Greece in modern Iran to highlight this unity. He encouraged his generals and soldiers to marry foreign women. He respected the gods of other cultures (most notably in today's Egypt). He collected exotic life-forms including an elephant for his teacher, philosopher Aristotle, who he respected a lot. His whole pattern of founding new and great Cities was also in this tradition, he wanted to create a legacy bigger than that of borders and he believed that cultural unification was the way to do it.
Now let's look at the Muslim tolerance in regards to certain cultural issues:
"The city of Alexandria had wide long roads, monuments, other buildings of great architectural design, among them the Pharos (lighthouse), one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and became the center of commerce, culture, learning and research. But the greatest marvel of the city was its library. There was the first true research institute of the world. The scholars of the library studied the entire Cosmos, showing the interconnectedness of all things in it. The Alexandrian library was the first place where all human knowledge was first collected seriously and systematically.
There the best minds of antiquity established the foundations for the systematic study of mathematics, physics, biology, geography, medicine, religion, literature, astronomy, history and many more fields. Among them were Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Euclid, who once said to his king who was struggling over a mathematical problem "there is no royal road to geometry", Dionysius of Thrace known for his work in the speech by defining its parts, Hirophilus, a physiologist who established that the brain and not the heart is the seat of intelligence, Heron, the inventor of the steam engine and author of the first book on robots called Automata, Archimedes, the greatest mechanical genius until Leonardo da Vinci, Ptolemy who among other useful theories he also compiled much of what is today the pseudoscience of astrology, an example of how intellectual capacity is no guarantee against being dead wrong.
The library was constructed and supported by the Ptolemys, the Greek kings who inherited the Egyptian portion of the empire of Alexander the Great. It was created in the 3rd century BC and until its destruction almost 9 centuries later it was the heart and brain of the ancient world. The library contained ten large research halls, each devoted to a separate subject, fountains and colonnades, botanical gardens, a zoo, dissecting rooms, an observatory and a dining hall. Notice how the element of manual labor (experiment, observation) is present. But the heart of the library was its collection of books. The kings bought books from other cultures and places. Docking ships at the Alexandrian port were searched for books by the police. They were borrowed, copied and returned. It is said that half a million books were kept there."
- Alexander of Macedon356-323 B.C: A Historical Biography
Guess whom we have to thank for destroying the library?
"When a Christian called John informed the local Arab general that there existed in Alexandria a great Library preserving all the knowledge in the world he was perturbed. Eventually he sent word to Mecca where Caliph Omar ordered that all the books in the library should be destroyed because, as he said "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous." Therefore, the books and scrolls were taken out of the library and distributed as fuel to the many bathhouses of the city. So enormous was the volume of literature that it took six months for it all to be burnt to ashes heating the saunas of the conquerors."
Caliph Omar, so called light of Islamic Civilization. What he did was simply a crime against The pursuit Knowledge itself, this follows in later Muslim Civilizations, if something is 'Unislamic', there is no reasoning or compromise, it simply must be smashed to the ground in true barbarian fashion. How can anyone despise learning and Intellect so much as to commit such a vile crime against Civilization itself?
