Islam and European knighthood, part 2 The Inner Saracen There is a quite popular plot in some scholastic treatises and different chivalric proses of XIV-XV centuries. Saladin, in that plot, becomes seriously curious about Christianity, even considering to convert to it (or initially with a different purpose), he travels to the West in a company of his former captive, Hugh[Read More…]
Once I came across a YouTube video, representing a selection of engravings by Gustave Dore on King Arthur’s legends on the background of the overture from Wagner’s “Parsifal” — nice artistic work, I really liked it. What grabbed my attention were the comments below: “And now, all this great European culture is been destroyed by Muslims”, declared one; the other[Read More…]
Crisis of European culture is a very relevant subject to everyone, who feels so in one way or another. The fact, that after certain time the beau monde of Europe was ruled by people, who culturally and spiritually never belonged to it, is a phenomenon that must provide lots of food for thought for Muslims from those territories. How did[Read More…]
Reflecting on common culture codes of Europe, a number of literary works, with no doubt, formed the character of previous European. If, Odysseus represents an archetype of a traveller, pioneer and conqueror, then, Faust — an active-minded and restless intellectual. Likewise, one of the most famous warrior archetypes is represented by Roland, one of Charlemagne’s (Carl the Great) knights, the hero of the[Read More…]
M. R. Menocal, a scholar on medieval history and culture, says: “Many Spaniards and many Hispanists, following their lead, have wished to view the eight hundred years of Islamic presence as a negative period in their history, a moment of alien intrusion that, if it cannot be erased, can at least be made to disappear in our historiographical fictions.”1 It[Read More…]
One Step Away From Islam The Value of Pre-Islamic Arab Poetry Studying Arabic classics was an essential part of Islamic traditional education until very recently. Today’s Muslim cannot always reason with this fact, and often times opinions like ‘why do we need to study the writing of kufr,’ could be heard. With this logic, similar understanding expands to the entire[Read More…]
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