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Modern World Of The Islamic And Arabic World : A Bit Of A Hero Complex Essay

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Centuries of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and global policing has given the European world, particularly the Anglosphere, a bit of a hero-complex. There is an all too common way of thinking that, within the past couple of decades or so, European and American political, cultural, and military forces have just begun a cultural infiltration of the previously isolated and primitive Middle East. It is believed by many that western entities are modernizing the Middle East. The veracity, utility, and morality of such actions will not be discussed here. What will be discussed is that the inverse of that assumption is true: it is as a result of centuries of progress in the Islamic and Arabic world that modern global society as a whole exists today. It is common knowledge that it is the European Renaissance to which we owe our modern understanding of science, mathematics, and medicine, as well as the technology that makes our lives possible today. This “rebirth”, so to speak, was inspired by a multitude a factors, but a key catalyst was the reintroduction and study of classical Greek texts. As such, there is a common cut-and-dry view of the history of knowledge as having sprung from Hellenic Greece, having laid dormant after the fall of Rome, and suddenly reemerging in Europe in the fourteenth century (Van Ness Meyers). There are many problems with this mode of thinking (the first being that western thought did not spontaneously arise in Greece, but may have originated in Ancient

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