[Athena]

As in other religions there are divisions in Islam. I am afraid The Genius follows the divide I can follow, while the favorable things I say of Islam are because of the influence of Hellenism on the religion and the realy Islamic receptivity to this. Within Islam is the path of reason and then the path of later theologians building on myth and mysticism. If The Genius would return to the earlier path, and question the rightness of a more self serving path of theologenians, we would more agreement. One path relies on science and indepentent judgement, while the other makes people dependent on religious leaders, and this is where the problem comes in.

Sketches in the History of Western Philosophy After the death of the Prophet Muh.ammad in 632, Arab armies rapidly overran Syria and Palestine (638), Egypt (642), the entire Persian Empire (646), and later North Africa (696) and Spain (711). When the Caliphate was established at Baghdad (763), stability, prosperity, and Persian cultural influence led to a great intellectual revival. The Caliph al-Ma'mûn (813-833) became interested in philosophy and mathematics and founded the Dâr al-H.ikmah, or "House of Wisdom," as a center for translation and study. Greek philosophy, medicine, and mathematics were translated into Arabic..... Although the Islamic philosophers in the Greek tradition did very substantial work, some of the more original ideas are found in Islamic theology, called Kalâm ("Talk"). The theologians (mutakallimûn) were not tied to Greek ideas and were concerned to achieve characteristically Islamic answers to traditional religious questions. Kalâm, to be sure, started with a Hellenizing and even Christianizing tendency in the form of the Mu'tazilite school, which defended human free will and regarded God in the Greek sense as reasonable, just, and good. Although this appealed even to the great Caliph al-Ma'mûn, it did not last long. The Caliph al-Mutawakkil (847-861) turned against such Christianizing doctrines. Islamic orthodoxy became the systematization of the omnipotence of God, which eliminated free will [11] and produced novel doctrines like what has been called Islamic "Occasionalism": the idea that every event in the world, including our own acts, and the world itself at every moment in time, is directly caused and created by the agency of God.