2001: A Crashed Odyssey?



Posted: Sunday, September 11, 2011

by Wilfred DeVoe

2001!

How long we'd awaited that year -- the beginning of a new century, and a new millenium.

Back in the Twentieth Century (how strange, still, it sounds to say that), great scientific discoveries and technological achievements were being made, and the rate at which they were being made was ever accellerating. We looked forward to the year AD 2001 as a benchmark of world civilization and human achievement, and among those of us who thought of the future beyond that, were people who imagined that we'd all look back on 2001 and see it as a prior benchmark of human progress, much as we look back to 1903 and the Wright Brothers' first airplane flight.

What we see instead, overshadowing all else, is a black mark late in the year, an attack on the United States that left thousands dead, by Islamo-fascists -- anti-modernists who make the old Luddites seem generously benevolent by comparison.

So now we can't look back at 2001 without seeing September 11 -- a date, as Frankie Roosevelt would have said, that will live on in infamy.

Remember the apes around the monolith in Stanley Kubrick's movie " 2001: A Space Odyssey"? They were spurred on in their evolution by the monolith, learning to use sticks and bones as clubs and imagining they were clubbing their prey to use as food. What if they were Islamo-Luddites?



It is such an irony, considering the contributions to science made in the Moslem world centuries ago. If not for the Hindu-Arabic numbering system with its convenient symbols and positional notation, the expression of mathematics would have been much clumsier, and our bean-counters would be "Ex-Chequeurs" using Roman numerals like their Medieval forerunners. The branch of mathematics called Algebra gets its name from the Arabic al-jabr. Some believe that had there not been enmity between "Christendom" and the Moors, Europe's Renaissance would have come centuries earlier. Western culture has simply built on the legacy of Moslem thinkers, as well as the legacies of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and yes, the Jews.

But these anti-westernists/anti-modernists with their dreams of past Moslem glories and their "Crusader" slurs against the multi-ethnic West are not the scholars, artists, and natural philosophers who'd made the Arabian, Persian, and Turkish people great. That they would identify themselves with the great Moslem thinkers of the past is as offensive as American political extremists who treat Thomas Jefferson and John F. Kennedy as their patron saints while embracing philosophies antithetical to those of these two good men.

The word "Jihad" is often used by some in the Arab/Moslem communities of the world; it means "struggle," or "Holy War." That masks the injustice or immorality of terrorist acts, making them appear positive. A better word might be "Hirabah," or " Unholy War." Non-Arabic-speaking people would do well to learn and remember that word, and to use it where appropriate.
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