As the Islamic state expanded, a growing flood of slaves were captured as booty, and sold in the slave markets. Many of these were young women who were incorporated into Muslim households as concubines. Slave women were required to expose the head, arms, legs, and upper parts of the chest, and to enhance their value slave merchants ensured that they were well versed in singing, dancing, music and poetry—necessary skills for the arts of seduction and love. In the face of this challenge the supposedly respectable women retreated into the sanctity of the home. By the twelfth century Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1149-1209), one of the most renowned and influential of Quranic commentators was arguing that the freeborn believing woman must be fully covered. “A free woman’s entire body is a shameful nakedness in itself,” he wrote. Razi’s reasoning was commercial: Quranic writings on modesty did not apply to slaves because they were items of property whose purchase or sale required “an investigative and careful inspection.”
Something felt a bit fishy about that. I haven't looked it up personally but a few people i asked my sister included said that the rise of the veil happened before the rise of the Islamic empire, so that whole auction block image with naked slaves was not the reason for the rise of the veil. I don't have a source on that so I wont quote it as gospel yet.
But what I do have a logical reason for is the following;
Its an article about the future of publishing, but what I want to bring your attention to is this quote;
Gutenberg's technology was the sine qua non for the rebirth of the West, as if literacy, scientific method, and constitutional government had been implicit all along, awaiting only Gutenberg to throw the switch. Within fifty years presses were operating from one end of Europe to the other, halting only at the borders of Islam, which shunned the press. Perhaps from the same fear of disruptive literacy that alarmed Islam, China ignored a phonetic transcription of its ideographs, attributed to a Korean emperor, that might have permitted the use of movable type.
The reason that the printing press was not taken up in the Islamic empire was not a reactionary fear of knowledge, but rather the fact that Arabic script (the official language of the empire, and its broken pieces even to this day) is not able to be made into movable type due to the inherent nature of its flowing lines. There are no specific letters that can be be made, each word has a different way of writing the letters in it. So obviously the movable type printing press wouldn't work.
Also, why would china which had been fighting with Korea for hundreds (if not thousands) of years up to this point agree to using a Korean script? it would be like America adopting Arabic as the national language.
But no NYbooks, you're right, Muslims are violent illiterate oppressors of freedoms, and china is a stubborn power unwilling to give cheap books to its Masses.
