Technological gap in the Islam-West conflict, the new interpretation in Elio Cadelo’s ‘The closed world’

The scientific and technological gap as the cause of the clash between Islam and the West. It is the new “historical interpretation, beyond myths and legends” that the writer Elio Cadelo gives, declining it in his new book ‘The closed world’ (Leg Edizioni) just released in bookstores. “Is there a moderate Islam? Why has terrorism taken root in Muslim countries? And above all, what has transformed the Islamic religion into a political creed? These are some of the questions I try to answer in my book which analyzes the ongoing conflict between Islam and the West in the light of today’s scientific and technological development “explains Cadelo. The history of relations between the West and the Islamic world, observes the essayist and scientific popularizer, for years the voice of the Giornale Radio Rai, “is a complex story, with a thousand facets and often indecipherable implications, deformed over time by commonplaces that have distorted the historical truth in favor of a narrative, often misleading. Italy, in fact, did not emerge from the Middle Ages thanks to the encounter with Arab culture; Greek science and philosophy did not come thanks to translations from Arabic of Greek texts and Humanism and the Renaissance did not sprout at all following the presence of Arab culture “. For the first time, the essay wants to bring to attention the so-called Arab Renaissance: “A very brief parenthesis – observes Cadelo – annihilated by the religious repression that shattered every form of freedom of thought in the bud, so much so that philosophers and scientists (such as Avempace, Averroè, Avicenna and others) were murdered, forced to flee, arrested or tortured “. “Nothing in common – adds Cadelo – with what was achieved in Italy by Humanism with Francesco Petrarca who rejected Muslim theology and philosophy”.