Chapter 9
With how much we discuss Islam and Muslim people in the media today, it seems that the general public knows very little about its history, its original beliefs and intents, and what the majority of Muslim people believe and how they practice. Every time I study it, I learn something new and seemingly contradictory to what I have been conditioned to believe based on recent global history. When people I know want to get into a heated political discussion about Islam, I begin by asking them if they know the original, fundamental differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and that the Quran has many different meanings based on different Sharia views, they typically do not. These point, coupled with the reminder of all that Islamic scholars and scientists did to accelerate the base of human knowledge, puts the discussion into a decidedly more positive light and larger scope. Reading in this chapter about how Islam was adapted and adopted, or not, into the societies it conquered was the most interesting point. It seems obvious, in hindsight, that it would be easier to integrate the religion and Arabic culture into a society with an existing population of predominantly monotheistic believers. The way that it was viewed in India to Hindu believers was a point I had never been exposed to before. It was mentioned several times how it could be an economically beneficial religion, that it was helpful in making one's way up in business, but never really explained how so. Was it simply because Islam does not allow charging interest? As an economic benefit, I understand that, but I am curious to research further how this was practiced and what made it true.
Chapter 11
For the bad publicity, or lack thereof, the Mongols receive in revisited history, it seems from this text that the modern world might look a bit different without them. So many trade routes, technologies, and cultures were opened up as a direct result of their conquests, which shaped the development of the third-wave civilizations and they way they viewed and interacted with the world. Even if the Mongols didn't share their religion or languages around the world, their horsemanship changed the way people around the world fought and carried trade goods. Along these now expanded trade routes, societies from different continents were exposed to each other, for better or worse, which set into effect a chain reaction of cultural and scientific globalization. Along with these great things, the worst things were also spread, including the plague. Had Afroeurasia not encountered the plague, who knows how cultures would have continued to develop. It was this interruption that was a catalyst for change and innovation in later years. The population would have hit much higher numbers while still being governed the old ways. It would be interesting to know how these old leaderships would have handled those populations, and which cultures would have survived and which would not have. Of all of this, one of the most striking things was the way that women were valued in the Mongol society, reminiscent of how we believe neolithic people to have been. This seems to show, once again, that it is civilization that begins the mistreatment of women, for in all of the cultures they conquered, all of them remained baffled by their respect for women, and didn't attempt to emulate it, but simply commented on it in a negative light in their written histories of this time governed by the Mongol people.
Chapter 12
In reading about the civilizations and pastoral and agricultural people of the Americas, I am struck by how little history we know of our own continent. We are not instructed in the validity and importance of those societies, we simply get teasers to what life was like before Columbus arrived. We know so much about the Ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean, but so much less about our own continent's history, presumably because so many American historians trace their roots back to Europe, making that the official history of our society. Either way, it seems that we should be emphasizing traveling on our own continent to study the ruins of these people, instead of traveling halfway around the world to study those sites.
China's maritime history was also surprising to me. The "what if" at the end of the chapter mentioned explicitly what I had been thinking...Why did they stop? What if they hadn't? Would Europe have been able to accomplish any of what it did if China had continued? How different would world history be now?
I am so looking forward to reading the next part of the text, simply because of the amount of time that it captures, and how that is such a different time span lumped together than students normally get to study. Seeing how the last 500 years led us directly to where we are now will be a fun read, if not humbling, as today we do like to think of ourselves as so beyond any of our history in terms of what we know, what we do, and how we interact. It will be nice to see how recently things were much different, astonishingly recent, in terms of the world's history, as this text presents it.
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