What’s It Like to Be a Doctor in Afghanistan?
Nearly three decades of war and religious extremism have devastated medical libraries and crippled the educational system for doctors, nurses and other health professionals. Factions of the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, singled out medical texts for destruction, military medical personnel say, because anatomical depictions of the human body were considered blasphemous.
“They not only burned the books, but they sent monitors into the classroom to make sure there were no drawings of the human body on the blackboard,” said Valerie Walker, director of the Medical Alumni Association of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Full article on Operation Medical Libraries.
It’s so sad to see books burned. I don’t understand the mentality that would want to return to the dark ages.
It is hard to fathom an ideology exists that is so backward that it would destroy medical textbooks because of the anatomical depictions of the human body.
In the Western tradition, which modern medicine emerged out of, the world was understood to begin rationally. Because man is also rational, he could understand the world rather than being mystified by it. In the Muslim tradition, the world proceeds from divine will. Man does not have access through reason to this will because the divine and the human do not have this in common. Man cannot understand the world rationally, but only by faith.
In the former, the world is the way it is not just because the divine willed it to be that way, but for some rational purpose. In the latter, the world is the way it is only because the divine wills it; it could have been any other way if that was the divine will.
Books take up their role on the heels of these beliefs; each is backwards to the other.
Thomas, for a significant period of time it was the Muslim world that hosted mankind’s development of math and science. We call them Arabic Numerals for a good reason. Even today we see Taliban like objections to stem cell research and evolution in our country. It’s not a issue of Muslim vs Western, it’s an issue of groups that think all knowledge stems from holy texts that can’t be challenged vs what was learned during the enlightenment, everything can be challenged.
You are very good at saying anything.
Yes, the hosting you talk about did occur, but you ought to read Al-Farabi, Averroes or Avicenna to see what that hosting was like before you imply that it was just as fruitful as what was produced in Europe. As for your dogmatic faith in the power of “challenging everything,” read Nietzsche, then look at subsequent German history. Or read Marx, then look at subsequent Russian history.
Thomas, thank you for proving Godwin’s law, that when you run out of logic, you bring up Hitler.
…you forgot to read…