So if you're feeling like it's taking value away from Persian history, instead, try to see it from the perspective that Persians are a large part of the reason why the Golden Age is even a thing :)
But I like your point of view.
Better to head to /r/askhistorians with those kinds of questions.
/s
You want to separate the scholarship. The problem is there really isn't enough historiographical work done here to meaningfully tease out the differences. Surviving primary sources often ended up in the hands of colonial governments which are loathe to open up access today or in the hands of estates of former colonial figures where they rot in a dark room somewhere.
Another large historiographic gap in the Islamic world around this time was the lifestyle of peasants. We have records of kings and lords because of the widespread practice of autobiographies. We also know the thoughts of philosophers based on their texts. But we lack a lot of knowledge about how peasants and other commoners lived around the time. If you think about it, that's the majority of the people living at any time.
A perfectly valid one i.e. nothing wrong with it. That is why "Historical Revisionism" (when done in the pursuit of Truth) is so very important.
They are foes. Not the people, but the political regimes. Iran is pretty clear about it.
A good parallel is the Mughal Empire in India. The rulers where Muslim but the population was not.
Fun fact: The word "Algorithm" comes from this guy's name!
I would disagree with it.
Imagine if, Islam was opposing to the idea of science, as the largest religion of that area (which not only included Iran, but many others), what would happen? Science would have been abolished, stopped immediately. Instead, Islam encouraged people to learn more science, even greek philosophers work was translated by hiring Christian people.
On the other hand, economic and political prosperity after conquering many places helped people to calm down and focus on science, helping other people, coming up with solutions for different issues.
I think Islam had direct impact to the science of that era.
Are you suggesting the biggest contribution was not getting in the way? I wouldn't call it a contribution.
> economic and political prosperity after conquering many places
That happened despite the invasion, not because of it. Iran was well prosperous before that and the fall of Persian empires eventually cleared the way for a destructive Mongol invasion which Iranians had held back for a long time before.
Most invaders in history did not violently impose their own philosphies and idealogies on day 1. Generally you let the conquered people keep their philosophy and religions to a big extent until the population has adopted it naturally through softer means, Islam specifically has a few verses around tolerance for "people of the book". Islam for example puts higher taxes on the non-muslims and people will then naturally gravitate towards Islam. Once the population has islamized to a higher percentage the islamic ideology will be implemented more deeply.
We don't have to imagine. A shunning of empiricism and natural philosophy is one of the reasons the Islamic Golden Age came to an end. Islam as a religion was never a monolith, and like in Christianity some movements embrace science more than others, and their rise and fall in prominence is reflected in the society.
But institutional support had already begun to wane as a consequence of a theological shift in Arabic Islam from Mu'tazilism to Ash'arism. Ash'arism is often described as pro-rationalism, but compared to Mu'tazilism it was a significant regression, especially in terms of the motivation for official, institutional support for the study of natural philosophy. Despite the sacking, Baghdad recovered relatively quickly, but institutional support for natural philosophy never did recover.
Work in mathematics, medicine, and natural philosophy in the Islamic world didn't end. But it found much less support, and often came from the periphery, further away from the now more theologically conservative Arab world, and fragmented. Proximity is everything, especially before the age of telecommunications. There were no fewer geniuses in the Islamic world, but now they were cut off from each other. It's much like the Dark Ages in Europe--there was no shortage of smart people doing smart things, but they lost networking benefits and enjoyed less patronage.
Peter Adamson, host of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast and author of the book series from the same project, devotes roughlythe first 20 minutes of his Google Talk about Islamic Philosophy to the matter of why "Islamic World" is in fact the most useful term to use, in contrast to alternatives such as "Arabic" (obviously inapplicable to Persia), "Islam" (fails to acknowledge the role of non-muslim religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc.).
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=_NKi-XRZ4KI>
As Adamson notes, it would be more accurate to call mediaeval European philosophy "Christian Philosophy" than to call the philosophical tradition of south-Western and south-Central Asia "Islamic Philosophy", as effectively all mediaeval European philosophers were Christian. Adamson also notes that philosophy of the Islamic World draws heavily on Greek and Roman philosophy (largely via the Byzantine empire) as well as Indian and African philosophical traditions.
"Islamic" refers to not merely the religious foundation, but the greater cultural, political, legal (Islamic jurisprudence is a major factor and influence), etc., etc. As with many other contexts, "dominant influence" does not mean "exlusive" or even "majority", but "that which has the greatest overall impact in a specific area". (Cue numerous tedious HN discussions over questions of "monopoly" or geographic applicability of toponyms such as "Silicon Valley" (contrast "Hollywood" or "Bollywood").
A small note, popularity (being generally recognized) is not a good indicator of the validity of any view point and it certainly does not mean we cannot challenge them.
> It's also more nuanced than hot takes suggest.
I believe as an Iranian and a history enthusiast, what I expressed was one of those these nuances which is presumably being labeled as hot take, or am I mistaken and you referring to something from somewhere else?
edit: fixed typo
"Islamic World" replaces several earlier-prevalent terms. Again, Adamson makes the case against several proposed alternatives.
On which point, what specifically is yours?
While his reasoning about his world view and consequently the name of the book is sound, he is not establishing a causal relationship between religion and anything outside the realm of philosophy. He argues that this is the best common trait for philosophical work of those people in that era in the region. It's also natural that he sees everything through a philosophical lens.
> "Islamic World" replaces several earlier-prevalent terms. Again, Adamson makes the case against several proposed alternatives.
We don't have to cover it under the same _umbrella_ term. In the clip (around 11:07) he shows the slide again and says "As an American, I am a born marketer". Imagine if we were to apply the same argument with a comparable time frame (important distinction) and call him a Christian European. Maybe being good at marketing does was not one of their traits. This is the missing nuance.
The burden of proof for "high impact" is heavy. I recommend reading some of the articles by the Inarah Institute <http://inarah.net/publications> on how shaky the dominant Islamic history narrative is.
You can make the same argument about Middle Ages Western Christian philosophy for what it's worth. While it originated in the erstwhile Roman Empire, the cultural and religious norms at the time were very much attuned to the various Germanic norms of the peoples that dominated the formerly Western Roman Empire rather than the joint Roman and Greek culture that constituted the Roman Empire during the founding of Christianity. Eastern Roman Empire viz Byzantine norms were codified in the Orthodox Church canon and philosophy in the region had a much larger overlap with "Islamic" and Greek cultures of the time.
If you try thinking of when was a "golden age" of the Near East, it becomes evidently a less sound idea.
So far as I'm aware and some quick online checks suggest likewise[1], it largely came into widespread usage in the 20th century and tends to refer to either the Olttoman Empire or the post-WWI nation-states of the roughly from present day Turkey to Egypt to Iran. Wikipedia gives origin of the term to roughly 1855, at which point it would have referred to the Ottoman Empire, as opposed to India, China, the East Indies, and Indochina).
"Near East" has since largely been replace by "Middle East", though that term largely refers to the post World War Two states in the same region. The Wikipedia article noted here gives criticisms of the term largely along the lines I've suggested.
And I'm not aware of either term ("Near..." or "Middle...") being used to apply to the period from the 8th - 13th centuries, a/k/a the Islamic Golden Age.[2]
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Notes:
1. Largely Wikipedia and Google's Ngram Viewer: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_East> <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Near+East&year...>
2. For Middle East: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East#Usage_and_criticis...> <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Middle%20East&...>
The Journal of Near Eastern Studies (https://www.jstor.org/journal/jneareaststud) is typical in defining its scope as the Near East, from the ancient times to pre-modern Near East. As I said, "Near East" is the standard term for referring to the history/archaeology of this cultural region in pre-modern times.
When you want to specify the pre-Islamic Near East, the standard term is "Ancient Near East", as this from the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History (https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/janeh/html?lang=en).
The Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History seeks to encourage and stimulate the study of the history of the ancient Near East, which is broadly defined to include areas from Iran to the western Anatolian coast and the Black Sea to Southern Arabia from its prehistoric foundations to the Late Antique period.
The Late Antique period is very roughly the 3rd-7th centuries.
Now if you go to physics and biology, oh well depending on the age you were born there is some risk of losing your head.
> In 1667, Newton became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,[11] making necessary his commitment to taking Holy Orders within seven years of completing his MA, which he did the following year. He was also required to take a vow of celibacy and recognize the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Isaac_Newto...
Indeed, there are plenty of examples of similarly reductionist terms used throughout history.
For example, until recently the western world marks the era of history in which we live as existing within the reign of our Lord, Jesus Christ [0]. We have now invented a backronym to work around this unpleasant detail, but we couldn't even get so far as to switch out the letters (so as to avoid upsetting people who we know are going to keep thinking in terms of "anno domini" regardless).
There's also the related "Christendom" [1] term which was in broad usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamization_of_Iran
Books by the Oxford Historian Peter Frankopan are a great read if you want to learn more about this.
[1] https://web.sas.upenn.edu/persian/2018/09/06/talk-two-centur...
[2] Since I've mentioned this, I need to add that the focus of my statement is the nature of such "invasion" and not a certain ethnicity. No malicious intent here. If you are an Arab and reading this, hello neighbors! with love from Iran :)