O sermão no sopé das pirâmides - III

Depois de termos considerado a grandeza de Al-Azhar e de termos escrutinado a atribuição feita por Obama aos muçulmanos de algumas invenções e descobertas no campo da ciência e da técnica, completemos esta missão rebatendo a alegada preponderância do Islão no que respeita à escrita e à impressão feita na infeliz frase do sermão, com informação já aflorada ontem:

It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.»

Ed Morrissey no Hot Air aprofunda a contestação anteriormente adiantada:

«“Mastery of pens” might be true, although pens themselves certainly came long before Islam — about 5,000 years before for the cruder reed pens, and 1,000 years before for quills. Arabic calligraphers created marvelous manuscripts, but then again, so did Christian monks, who began that work before Mohammed ever appeared on the scene, and pens and books predate both the Christian and Islamic period. In fact, the Christian monks spent their time copying the books of ancient Greece and Rome.

Printing, however, is another matter altogether. The Chinese developed block printing, which Marco Polo brought back on his travels. The Koreans invented movable type in the 13th century, using metal type a century later. Europe caught up in the 15th century. The Islamic states didn’t have anything to do with the development of printing, which makes this particular claim completely baffling.»

Addendum: num artigo publicado na National Review, Alex Alexiev faz a seguinte declaração a propósito da alegada contribuição do Islão para a evolução da impressão gráfica: «printing [was] regarded by the mullahs as the devil’s invention, and [was] not available to Muslims until three centuries after Gutenberg»