Mozart, Western Civilization, And Islam

[From article]
But a much older Western mental habit was also responsible for Mozart's rosy perspective on Islam: lacerating self-criticism, something no other civilization has indulged in. The form it often took was to attribute all virtue to the enemy and all vices to one’s own people. The habit has a long history. In 5th century B.C. Athens, audiences applauded Euripides’ prize-winning plays Hecuba and Trojan Woman. Both dramatize the cruelty of the Greeks to defenseless women and children in Troy following the capture of the city.
[. . .]
Ohio State historian Robert Davis has estimated that between 1530 and 1780 alone, some 1 to 1.25 million European Christians were captured and enslaved by Muslims. These were not just sailors and travelers. North African slavers repeatedly raided European territory. Even Iceland was not immune. During this period and earlier, as many as 3 million Slavs were captured in raids by Crimean Tatars, and tens of thousands of Christian children were seized in the Balkans in the annual “blood tax,” the devşirme. Islamic slavers, Arabs in this case, also captured as many as 18 million Africans before the British intervened to end the trade in the 19th century. There are about 10,000 to 20,000 descendants of these slaves in Turkey today. The 400,000 African slaves shipped to North America have 39 million descendants.
[. . .]
back in the Turkish Empire, the printing press had not even been introduced. The first one appeared only in 1727, imported by a Hungarian convert, and by 1815 a mere 63 titles had been published. (Gutenberg’s Bible dates from 1454 and some 30,000 titles had been printed in Europe by 1500.) Nearly two hundred years before the first press appeared in the Caliphate, the Qur’an, in Arabic, was printed in Venice (1530).
[. . .]
As Said puts it, “Every European, was a racist, imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”

[Comment by Jeanne+T. The Explorer •December 14, 2014]
Nothing of beauty emanates from Islam. Nothing. Islam never produced a Mozart, a Beethoven, or a Handel. Indeed, Islam never produced a Vermeer, a Rembrandt, or a Chagall. Islam never produced an Emily Dickenson, a Mark Twain, or a Geoffrey Chaucer. Islam never produced a Blaise Pascal, a Marie Curie, a Sir Isaac Newton, or an Albert Einstein. Islam will never produce any of these kinds of individuals. An incurious and apathetic mindset will never advance any culture.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/12/mozart_and_multiculturalism.html

December 14, 2014
Mozart and Multiculturalism
By Jeff Lipkes