Originally Posted by tribu
so wala kang problema sa hadith na yan? You just want to use it to prove that There is really no Allah.
sorry sir but its not a strong argument. To prove that there is no Allah who commanded The Prophet,you really need to provide a better evidence.
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Thread: Second Look on Islam
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11-04-2008, 08:04 AM #471
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11-04-2008, 08:07 AM #472Sorry sir i cant provide you an answer to this because i am not a member of that group. Originally Posted by tribu
and i think this post must be in politics and issue thread.
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11-04-2008, 09:45 AM #473
How Islamic investors changed the world...
How Islamic inventors changed the world - Science, News - The Independent
read the whole thing.
Alhamdullilah Rabbil allameen.
para sa mga tamad mag click let me copy paste a part of it...
How Islamic inventors changed the world
From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given us many innovations that we take for granted in daily life. As a new exhibition opens, Paul Vallely nominates 20 of the most influential- and identifies the men of genius behind them
1 The story goes that an Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in the Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia, when he noticed his animals became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries to make the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is of beans exported from Ethiopia to Yemen where Sufis drank it to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th century it had arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in 1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Turk named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London. The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve then the Italian caffé and then English coffee.
2 The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser, which enabled us to see. The first person to realise that light enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was the 10th-century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haitham. He invented the first pin-hole camera after noticing the way light came through a hole in window shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the picture, he worked out, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room). He is also credited with being the first man to shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one.
3 A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was developed into the form we know it today in Persia. From there it spread westward to Europe - where it was introduced by the Moors in Spain in the 10th century - and eastward as far as Japan. The word rook comes from the Persian rukh, which means chariot.
4 A thousand years before the Wright brothers a Muslim poet, astronomer, musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made several attempts to construct a flying machine. In 852 he jumped from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba using a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts. He hoped to glide like a bird. He didn't. But the cloak slowed his fall, creating what is thought to be the first parachute, and leaving him with only minor injuries. In 875, aged 70, having perfected a machine of silk and eagles' feathers he tried again, jumping from a mountain. He flew to a significant height and stayed aloft for ten minutes but crashed on landing - concluding, correctly, that it was because he had not given his device a tail so it would stall on landing. Baghdad international airport and a crater on the Moon are named after him.
5 Washing and bathing are religious requirements for Muslims, which is perhaps why they perfected the recipe for soap which we still use today. The ancient Egyptians had soap of a kind, as did the Romans who used it more as a pomade. But it was the Arabs who combined vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme oil. One of the Crusaders' most striking characteristics, to Arab nostrils, was that they did not wash. Shampoo was introduced to England by a Muslim who opened Mahomed's Indian Vapour Baths on Brighton seafront in 1759 and was appointed Shampooing Surgeon to Kings George IV and William IV.
6 Distillation, the means of separating liquids through differences in their boiling points, was invented around the year 800 by Islam's foremost scientist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and apparatus still in use today - liquefaction, crystallisation, distillation, purification, oxidisation, evaporation and filtration. As well as discovering sulphuric and nitric acid, he invented the alembic still, giving the world intense rosewater and other perfumes and alcoholic spirits (although drinking them is haram, or forbidden, in Islam). Ibn Hayyan emphasised systematic experimentation and was the founder of modern chemistry.
7 The crank-shaft is a device which translates rotary into linear motion and is central to much of the machinery in the modern world, not least the internal combustion engine. One of the most important mechanical inventions in the history of humankind, it was created by an ingenious Muslim engineer called al-Jazari to raise water for irrigation. His 1206 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices shows he also invented or refined the use of valves and pistons, devised some of the first mechanical clocks driven by water and weights, and was the father of robotics. Among his 50 other inventions was the combination lock.
8 Quilting is a method of sewing or tying two layers of cloth with a layer of insulating material in between. It is not clear whether it was invented in the Muslim world or whether it was imported there from India or China. But it certainly came to the West via the Crusaders. They saw it used by Saracen warriors, who wore straw-filled quilted canvas shirts instead of armour. As well as a form of protection, it proved an effective guard against the chafing of the Crusaders' metal armour and was an effective form of insulation - so much so that it became a cottage industry back home in colder climates such as Britain and Holland.
9 The pointed arch so characteristic of Europe's Gothic cathedrals was an invention borrowed from Islamic architecture. It was much stronger than the rounded arch used by the Romans and Normans, thus allowing the building of bigger, higher, more complex and grander buildings. Other borrowings from Muslim genius included ribbed vaulting, rose windows and dome-building techniques. Europe's castles were also adapted to copy the Islamic world's - with arrow slits, battlements, a barbican and parapets. Square towers and keeps gave way to more easily defended round ones. Henry V's castle architect was a Muslim.
10 Many modern surgical instruments are of exactly the same design as those devised in the 10th century by a Muslim surgeon called al-Zahrawi. His scalpels, bone saws, forceps, fine scissors for eye surgery and many of the 200 instruments he devised are recognisable to a modern surgeon. It was he who discovered that catgut used for internal stitches dissolves away naturally (a discovery he made when his monkey ate his lute strings) and that it can be also used to make medicine capsules. In the 13th century, another Muslim medic named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years before William Harvey discovered it. Muslims doctors also invented anaesthetics of opium and alcohol mixes and developed hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes in a technique still used today.
11 The windmill was invented in 634 for a Persian caliph and was used to grind corn and draw up water for irrigation. In the vast deserts of Arabia, when the seasonal streams ran dry, the only source of power was the wind which blew steadily from one direction for months. Mills had six or 12 sails covered in fabric or palm leaves. It was 500 years before the first windmill was seen in Europe.
12 The technique of inoculation was not invented by Jenner and Pasteur but was devised in the Muslim world and brought to Europe from Turkey by the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul in 1724. Children in Turkey were vaccinated with cowpox to fight the deadly smallpox at least 50 years before the West discovered it.
13 The fountain pen was invented for the Sultan of Egypt in 953 after he demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes. It held ink in a reservoir and, as with modern pens, fed ink to the nib by a combination of gravity and capillary action.
14 The system of numbering in use all round the world is probably Indian in origin but the style of the numerals is Arabic and first appears in print in the work of the Muslim mathematicians al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi around 825. Algebra was named after al-Khwarizmi's book, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, much of whose contents are still in use. The work of Muslim maths scholars was imported into Europe 300 years later by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci. Algorithms and much of the theory of trigonometry came from the Muslim world. And Al-Kindi's discovery of frequency analysis rendered all the codes of the ancient world soluble and created the basis of modern cryptology.
15 Ali ibn Nafi, known by his nickname of Ziryab (Blackbird) came from Iraq to Cordoba in the 9th century and brought with him the concept of the three-course meal - soup, followed by fish or meat, then fruit and nuts. He also introduced crystal glasses (which had been invented after experiments with rock crystal by Abbas ibn Firnas - see No 4).
16 Carpets were regarded as part of Paradise by medieval Muslims, thanks to their advanced weaving techniques, new tinctures from Islamic chemistry and highly developed sense of pattern and arabesque which were the basis of Islam's non-representational art. In contrast, Europe's floors were distinctly earthly, not to say earthy, until Arabian and Persian carpets were introduced. In England, as Erasmus recorded, floors were "covered in rushes, occasionally renewed, but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for 20 years, harbouring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of fish, and other abominations not fit to be mentioned". Carpets, unsurprisingly, caught on quickly.
17 The modern cheque comes from the Arabic saqq, a written vow to pay for goods when they were delivered, to avoid money having to be transported across dangerous terrain. In the 9th century, a Muslim businessman could cash a cheque in China drawn on his bank in Baghdad.
18 By the 9th century, many Muslim scholars took it for granted that the Earth was a sphere. The proof, said astronomer Ibn Hazm, "is that the Sun is always vertical to a particular spot on Earth". It was 500 years before that realisation dawned on Galileo. The calculations of Muslim astronomers were so accurate that in the 9th century they reckoned the Earth's circumference to be 40,253.4km - less than 200km out. The scholar al-Idrisi took a globe depicting the world to the court of King Roger of Sicily in 1139.
19 Though the Chinese invented saltpetre gunpowder, and used it in their fireworks, it was the Arabs who worked out that it could be purified using potassium nitrate for military use. Muslim incendiary devices terrified the Crusaders. By the 15th century they had invented both a rocket, which they called a "self-moving and combusting egg", and a torpedo - a self-propelled pear-shaped bomb with a spear at the front which impaled itself in enemy ships and then blew up.
20 Medieval Europe had kitchen and herb gardens, but it was the Arabs who developed the idea of the garden as a place of beauty and meditation. The first royal pleasure gardens in Europe were opened in 11th-century Muslim Spain. Flowers which originated in Muslim gardens include the carnation and the tulip.
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11-04-2008, 10:09 AM #474Junior Member
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Islam Watch - "Nostalgia of Islamic Golden Age vs. History of Science" by Syed Kamran Mirza
...Of course, Muslim-born scientists did some improvement or improvisation to that ancient science. In modern time, Japanese are known to be a practitioner of that policy. Another interesting point is most of those renowned Muslim scientists were non-Arab. Such as: Al-Khwarizmi (Uzbekistan); Al-Razi (Tehran); Al-Ghazzali (Khorman, Iran); Al-Tabari (Tabristan); Al-Farabi (Turkistan); Al-Biruni (Khwarizm, Uzbekistan); Ibn Sina (Bukhara, Central Asia); Ibn Rushd (Cordoba, Spain) and so on. All those scientists/philosophers happened to be sons of Muslim. None of them were a Mullah or Maolana, and none of them ever claimed that they got scientific theory by reading Qur'an or gobbling the Hadiths. Then, why do all those Islamists bring religion in the field of science? Is there any ulterior motive?
Religion of any type (Christian, Jews, Islam, Hinduism etc.) can never claim Science as their own property. Similarly, religion should never claim any credit whatsoever, for the advancement of any science. Galileo was a great scientist by his knowledge not because he was a son of Christian. In the same vein, Ibn Sina was a scientist by virtue of his quality and not because he was a son of Muslim. Einstein was a great scientist because of his intellect and acuity, not because of his knowledge in Torah. Today, almost 95% of world's leading scientists are the sons of Christians. Should we then consider that Christian religion/Bible are the storehouse of all science? Does the world history support this? Or, should we say that ancient Hindu Kafirs got science of mathematics (numerals) from Rada krishna?
Islamists frequently claim that the Koran is full of exhortation to the believers to study nature and to find the signs of God in the phenomena of nature. But I did not find any Qur'anic verse that asked people to study the nature in the scientific point of view, rather Allah tried to show those nature (Sky, Earth, Sun, Moon, Stars, etc.) as the evidence that Allah is really very powerful who can create all those naturally impossible things. Now, do we have to believe that, before the arrival of Qur'an mankind never saw the sky (heaven), earth, sun, moon and stars? What Qur'an told about the nature, even cave peoples could have seen them very well by their own bare eyes. Yes, Qur'an repeatedly talked about heaven, earth, sun, moon, stars, etc., just to exhibit the strength (threat) and might of Allah and repeatedly told human being to think about this miracle of placing sky as the canopy without pillars (which is ridiculous), making stars to shoot the Satan, placing mountain to make the earth immovable, created thunder to shoot the sinners, created earthquake to punish the kafirs, revolving poor sun daily to make day and night, making wide and flat earth, etc. and a whole slue of other things to reel your head...
in other words, it's not about the inventions of the sons of muslims who did not invent things but improved on something that was already previously invented. it's all about what the muslim sacred book is teaching us.
it's all about this...
how good could a god be for permiting a more than 50years old man to have *** with a 10year old child. he must be a very good god who is so merciful. he can change the revelations and give humanity this new revelation "daw" which you called the "quran" but he can't even tell muhamad to make it unlawful to marry a 10 year old child out of mercy because a child is a child and ought to be cared for and loved and not abused and have *** with.
the statement above is what needed an answer.
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11-04-2008, 04:20 PM #475 Originally Posted by tribu
Oh yes the Islamic golden Age is so real,
watch what you just copy pasted....it says there "muslims". Besides this is a sweeping statemnt made by an anti-muslim site.
Oh yes they improve on something already invented but they also invented something. Read it again sir,the one i posted above w/c contain data of invention made by muslims.
The point here by the way sir is to point out to the readers here that Muslims have contributed much to civilization and society. The post in bold letters above the one which contain science were not meant to prove something concerning our discussion.
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11-04-2008, 04:50 PM #476Banned User
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the muslims of long ago inspired a golden age in astronomical and technological advancement. but today, it is sad to say that there are a lot of misguided muslims who harbor hate and spread terrorism. not only muslims, but christians and jews alike.
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11-04-2008, 07:04 PM #477C.I.A.
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in Islam, what happens if you dont submit to the will of God? Originally Posted by Malic
What is Islam?
Islam is an Arabic word that means 'submission', and derives from a word meaning 'peace'. In a religious context it means complete submission to the will of God. What is the will of God? that we should follow the path of modesty and have a successful life, and to be successful means to live a peaceful and happy life w/ our family and friends.
This is a nice start.
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11-04-2008, 09:12 PM #478Junior Member
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The problem with turning this list of intellectual achievements into a convincing "Islamic" golden age is that whatever flourished, did so not by reason of Islam but in spite of Islam. Moslems overran societies (Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, Syrian, Jewish) that possessed intellectual sophistication in their own right and failed to completely destroy their cultures. To give it the credit for what the remnants of these cultures achieved is like crediting the Red Army for the survival of Chopin in Warsaw in 1970! Islam per se never encouraged science, in the sense of disinterested enquiry, because the only knowledge it accepts is religious knowledge. Originally Posted by Hellblazer 2.1
As Bernard Lewis explains in his book What Went Wrong? the Moslem Empire inherited "the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle east, of Greece and of Persia, it added to them new and important innovations from outside, such as the manufacture of paper from China and decimal positional numbering from India." The decimal numbers were thus transmitted to the West, where they are still mistakenly known as "Arabic" numbers, honoring not their inventors but their transmitters.
Furthermore, the intellectual achievements of Islam’s "golden age" were of limited value. There was a lot of speculation and very little application, be it in technology or politics. At the present day, for almost a thousand years even speculation has stopped, and the bounds of what is considered orthodox Islam have frozen, except when they have even contracted, as in the case of Wahabism. Those who try to push the fundamentals of Moslem thought any further into the light of modernity frequently pay for it with their lives. The fundamentalists who ruled Afghanistan until recently and still rule in Iran hold up their supposed golden age as a model for their people and as a justification for their tyranny. Westerners should know better.
The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth | EuropeNews
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11-05-2008, 03:59 PM #479 Originally Posted by Hellblazer 2.1
I agree to every point you said to the very dot sir.
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11-05-2008, 04:22 PM #480 Originally Posted by tribu
"During the Golden Age Muslim scholars also made important and original contributions to mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and chemistry. They collected and corrected previous astronomical data, built the world's first observatory, and developed the astrolabe, an instrument that was once called "a mathematical jewel." In medicine they experimented with diet, drugs, surgery, and anatomy, and in chemistry, an outgrowth of alchemy, isolated and studied a wide variety of minerals and compounds."
"Important advances in agriculture were also made in the Golden Age. The 'Abbasids preserved and improved the ancient network of wells, underground canals, and waterwheels, introduced new breeds of livestock, hastened the spread of cotton, and, from the Chinese, learned the art of making paper, a key to the revival of learning in Europe in the Middle Ages.
The Golden Age also, little by little, transformed the diet of medieval Europe by introducing such plants as plums, artichokes, apricots, cauliflower, celery, fennel, squash, pumpkins, and eggplant, as well as rice, sorghum, new strains of wheat, the date palm, and sugarcane."
quoted from Islam and Islamic History in Arabia and The Middle East
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THE GOLDEN AGE OF ISLAM
By Dr Zachariah Matthews
Presented at the Australian New Muslim Association (ANMA) Fundraising Dinner, Bankstown, Friday 1 October 2004.
SALAM Magazine, salam Sep-Oct 2004
Islam, the youngest of all the world's religions emerged on the world scene in 622 CE (Current Era) with the Hijra (migration), of Prophet Muhammad (s) and his small band of followers, from Mecca to Medina in northwest Arabia. One hundred fifty years later the Muslim government where Allah is the ultimate authority had become the Islamic Empire, encircling the Mediterranean Sea from Syria and the Tigris and Euphrates Valley east to southern China and western India, south through what had been the Persian Empire and Saudi Arabia, west through Egypt and across North Africa, and north through Spain to the Pyrenees. With the founding of the city of Baghdad and the establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate (Muslim religious/political leaders, successors of the Prophet) in the mid-8th century, Islam's golden age began to emerge. For 400 years, from the mid-9th century until the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1256, Muslim culture was unparalleled in its splendor and learning.
A number of fortunate circumstances came together to make this golden age possible. Perhaps most significant was the creation of a vast empire without internal political boundaries, largely free from external attack. Trade began to flow freely across the Asian continent and beyond. The wisdom of India and China mingled with that of Persia, ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt. In most cases civilizations conquered by Islam remained administratively and intellectually intact, unlike those overrun by northern barbarians. Thanks in part to Prophet Muhammad's assertion that "the ink of scholars is more precious than the blood of martyrs," Islamic leaders valued -- in fact, sought out -- the intellectual treasures of their subject provinces. Further, the Muslim use of Arabic, the language of the Quran, led to its standardization throughout the empire as the language of faith and power, and likewise of theology, philosophy, and the arts and sciences.
Unification under one faith and language alone, however, did not produce the explosion of literacy and learning experienced by the Islamic Empire. In the mid-8th century, Chinese paper-making technology arrived in Samarkand, on the eastern border of the empire. Suddenly, the labour-intensive processing of hides and papyrus was replaced by mass-production of paper from pulped rags, hemp, and bark; large personal libraries -- as well as public ones -- became commonplace. At about the same time, the so-called "Arabic" numerals (imported from India) began to replace cumbersome Roman numerals, and introduced the concept of zero for the first time. Public education, also mandated by the Prophet (s), spread rapidly.
The Golden Age was a period of unrivalled intellectual activity in the field of literature (as a result of intensive study of the Islamic faith) - particularly biography, history, and linguistics. Scholars, for example, in collecting and re-examining the hadith, or "traditions" - the sayings and actions of the Prophet - compiled immense biographical detail about the Prophet and other information, historic and linguistic, about the Prophet's era. This led to such monumental works as Sirat Rasul Allah, the "Life of the Messenger of Allah," by Ibn Ishaq, later revised by Ibn Hisham; one of the earliest Arabic historical works, it was a key source of information about the Prophet's life and also a model for other important works of history such as al-Tabari's Annals of the Apostles and the Kings and his massive commentary on the Quran.
The accomplishments of Islam's Golden Age are too numerous to mention. Massive translation and copying projects made Greek, Roman, and Sanskrit knowledge available to Arabic-speaking scholars across the empire. Medieval Europe received the Hellenic classics that made the Renaissance possible mostly through Arabic translations. Building on Hellenic, Persian, and Hindu sources, physicians within the Islamic Empire advanced medical knowledge enormously. Perhaps their most significant single achievement was the establishment of medicine as a science based on observation and experimentation, rather than on conjecture. Islamic scientists developed the rudiments of what would later be called the scientific method.
Seventy-five years after the death of Prophet Muhammad (s), the first of many free public hospitals was opened in Damascus. Asylums were maintained throughout the empire for the care of the mentally ill. In the early 10th century, Spanish physician Abu Bakr al-Razi introduced the use of antiseptics in cleaning wounds, and also made the connection between bacteria and infection. Al-Hasan published a definitive study on optics (the science of light and vision) in 965. Thirteenth-century Muslim physician Ibn al-Nafis discovered and accurately described the functioning of the human circulatory system. Islamic veterinary science led the field for centuries, particularly in the study and treatment of horses.
Muslim alchemists (early forerunners of modern chemists) in the 10th to 14th centuries, inspired by ancient chemical formulas from China and India, are famous for the endless experiments they performed in their laboratories. Their goals ranged from pursuit of a chemical elixir bestowing enhanced life, to the transformation of base metals to gold. Although they never succeeded in their ultimate goals, they did make numerous valuable discoveries -- among them the distillation of petroleum and the forging of steel.
Roman techniques of manufacturing glass lenses stimulated Al-Hasan's breakthrough in the field of optics (the science of light and vision), which demolished Aristotle's theory that vision was the result of a ray emanating from the eye, encompassing an object, and bringing it back to the soul. Al-Hasan's Book of Optics, published in 965, was first to document sight as visual images entering the eye, made perceptible by adequate light. This book remained the pre-eminent text in its field until 1610, when the work of European Johannes Kepler surpassed it.
Islamic mathematicians refined algebra from its beginnings in Greece and Egypt, and developed trigonometry in pursuit of accurate ways to measure objects at a distance. Muslim scholars also made important and original contributions to astronomy. They collected and corrected previous astronomical data, built the world's first observatory, and developed the astrolabe, an instrument that was once called "a mathematical jewel."
Islamic architects borrowed heavily from the Byzantine Empire which used domes and arches extensively throughout their cities. An example of this use can be seen in the Dome of the Rock, a famous mosque in Jerusalem.
Avid students of both the heavens and the earth, Muslim scholars made detailed and accurate maps of both. Muslim mapmakers to accurately map distances around the earth refined longitude and latitude. Twelfth-century Persian Omar Khayyam developed a calendar so reliable that over 500 years it was off by only one day. The list goes on and on.
Religious Tolerance
When Islam was laying the foundations of its civilisation; it did not adopt a narrow-minded attitude to other religions. The behaviour toward other religions was in keeping with the principles laid down in the Quran:
"Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from error… (Al-Baqarah 256)
"If it had been your Lord's Will, they would all have believed, all who are on earth! Will you then compel people, against their will, to believe!" (Yunus 10:99)
Say: "We believe in Allah, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Isma'il, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that given to (all) Prophets from their Lord: we make no difference between any of them: and we submit to Allah (in Islam)." (Q2:136)
"…Had not Allah checked one set of people by means of another there would surely have been pulled down monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, in which the name of Allah is commemorated in abundant measure…" (Al-Hajj 22:40)
The well known American writer, Draper, wrote: "During the period of the caliphs, the learned men of the Christians and the Jews were not only held in high esteem but were appointed to posts of great responsibility, and were promoted to high ranking positions in government. Haroon Rasheed appointed John the son of Maswaih, the Director of Public Instruction and all the schools and colleges were placed under his charge. He (Haroon) never considered to which country a learned person belonged nor his faith and belief, but only his excellence in the field of learning."
Sir Mark Syce, writing on the qualities of Muslim rule during the period of Haroon Rasheed said: "The Christians, the idolaters, the Jews and the Muslims as workers running the Islamic State were at work with equal zeal."
Liefy Brutistal wrote in his book: "Spain of the Tenth Century: So often the scribe writing out the terms of a treaty was a Jew or a Christian. Just as many Jews and Christians were holding charge of important posts in the State. And they were vested with authority in the administrative departments, even in matters of war and peace. And there were several Jews who acted as the ambassadors of the Caliph in European countries."
Islam’s Golden Age has many lessons to teach the greedy and terrorized world of today.
Why did it all end?
Why did Islam's Golden Age come to an end? What forces shifted both political power and learning from the Islamic Empire to Christian Europe? Like all historical trends, the explanations are complex; yet some broad outlines may be identified, both within and without Muslim lands. With the end of the Abbasid Caliphate and the beginning of the Turkish Seljuk Caliphate in 1057 CE, the centralized power of the empire began to shatter. Religious differences resulted in splinter groups, charges of heresy, and assassinations. Aristotelian logic, adopted early on as a framework upon which to build science and philosophy, appeared to be undermining the beliefs of educated Muslims. Orthodox faith was in decline and skepticism on the rise.
The appeal by some erring theologians turned the tide back, declaring reason and its entire works to be bankrupt. They declared that experience and reason that grew out of it were not to be trusted. As a result, free scientific investigation and philosophical and religious toleration were phenomena of the past. Schools limited their teaching to theology. Scientific progress came to a halt.
During this same period, the European Crusades (1097-1291) assailed Islam militarily from without. Cordoba fell to Spanish Christians in 1236. When the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1256 (or 125
the Islamic Empire never recovered. Trade routes became unsafe. Urban life broke down. Individual communities drew in upon themselves in feudal isolation. Science and philosophy survived for a while in scattered pockets, but the Golden Age of Islam was at an end.
Conclusion
Muslims rose to the height of civilisation in a period of four decades. For more than 1,000 years the Islamic Civilisation remained the most advanced and progressive in the world. This is because Islam stressed the importance of and held great respect for learning, forbade destruction, developed discipline and respect for authority, and stressed tolerance for other religions. The Muslims recognised excellence and hungered intellectually. The teachings of the Qur'an and Sunnah drove many Muslims to their accomplishments in all disciplines of knowledge.
Muslims of today must apply those same principles of success in order to rectify the current state of decay. May Allah (swt) grant us the strength and wisdom to accomplish just that!
References:
1. Tapestry: The Institute for Philosophy, Religion, and the Life Sciences, Inc. http://www.stormwind.com/common/islam.html
2. Islamic History in Arabia and Middle East
3. Jeffery Watkins: (1999-2003) Oswego City School District Regents Exam Prep Center [Regents Prep Global History] Golden Ages: Golden Age of Islam
4. Dr. Ibrahim B. Syed, PhD: 2001, IRFI - Islamic Research Foundation International, Inc. and X International Islamic Free University - by Dr. Ibrahim B. Syed, Ph.D
5. Some glittering aspects of the Islamic civilisation, Dr Mustafa Siba’i, (p69-91).
from: THE GOLDEN AGE OF ISLAM
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