How Muslims Transmitted Hindu Wisdom to the West, Part 1
http://islam-watch.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=637:how-muslims-transmitted-hindu-wisdom-to-the-west-1&catid=73:brahmachari&Itemid=58
Muslims proudly claim that Islam gave a lot to the world in learning and science, but it's a lie. Islam or the Quran, or the Arabs for than matter had nothing to do with achievements of the Muslim world. Moreover, achievements of the ancient Greeks, Persians and Indians were passed as Islamic...
Islamic Lies
Allah has permitted Muslims to tell lies -- the Islamic “taqiyya” or holy deception -- for the benefit or glorification of Islam. President Barack Obama, allegedly an ex-Muslim, engaged in such deception when he told a gathering at the Cairo University on June 5, 2009:
“As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam. It was Islam at places like Al-Azhar that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's renaissance and enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities...
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. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires, timeless poetry and cherished music, elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”[1]
 Barack Obama speaking at Cairo |
While President Barack Hussain Obama claims to be Christian now, which many doubt (some 20% of Americans are convinced Obama is a Muslim) -- he nonetheless has failed to shed his old Islamic duty of taking recourse to taqiyya for the glorification of Islam. It's also noteworthy that Obama has not said a single word about why the golden era of Arab science declined so sharply? Why the contribution of Islamic world in science today is almost zero? For the past thousand years, their contribution to human civilization is nothing.
It should also be mentioned that the Islamic civilization, which Obama is so proud of, did not evolve from the Koran; the authors of that civilization were not Arabs. The authors of the so-called Islamic science, literature, astronomy, mathematics, architecture etc. were the kafirs, pagans and idolaters of India, Greece and China. Ancient India was a great center of knowledge for higher Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Astrology, philosophy, medicine and surgery etc. Seekers of knowledge from China, South East Asia, Central Asia, Iran and Middle East used to come to the centers of learning in India.
On the contrary, the Arabs did not have any scientific heritage and hence most of the torch-bearers of Arabic science were not ethnic Arabs. Abū al Wafā Būzjānī, al Farghānī, al Fazārī, al-Khwārizmī were Persians, al Bīrūnī was an Uzbek, Al Farabi was most probably an Afghan, Al Kindi, Hunayn ibn Ishaq were from Iraq, al Battānī was a Muslim astronomer, astrologer and mathematician from Harran near Urfa (Turkey). Only a few like al Farahidi and Ibn Ishaq etc. were ethnically Arabs.
Advancement in science, arts, literature or any branch of knowledge needs freedom of thought and its expression. But freedom of thought is a taboo in Islam: Muslims must think, write and speak according to the guideline ordained by Allah in the Koran or in the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, called Hadith. A violator of the guidelines of Allah is declared an apostate, worth being a punished with death. Undoubtedly, science cannot flourish in such a suffocating atmosphere. That was the reason that when Islamic orthodoxy got firmly rooted in Islamic societies through the work of Imam Ghazzali (d. 1111), Islamic science died a premature death. And for the same reason, creativity of the Islamic world today is almost zero.
To make science free from religious dogma and orthodoxy, a rationalist school, called Muatazilah, flourished in the cities of Basra and Baghdad in present-day Iraq during the 8-10th centuries. It is still adopted by some Muslim scholars and intellectuals today. The adherents of the school called Mutazili were at severe confrontation with other Sunni Muslim scholars. And ultimately, the Mutazilis had to surrender to orthodox religious schools and their unscientific dogmas.
Present state of Islamic science
A few examples may be narrated to highlight today's Muslim World's poor performance in the creative arena. In January 2006, the American Federation of Muslims of Indian Origin (AFMI) and the Talent Promotion Trust, a Bangalore based NGO, jointly held a panel discussion on “Emerging India and Development of Muslims” in Bangalore. Mr. Farooque Shaikh, a renowned film star, while addressing the gathering of Muslims intellectuals, said: “Muslims need to introspect as to why their situation has hit the present nadir and should give up blaming others for their dismal educational standard”. He also said that after analyzing the Muslim community he has come to the conclusion that … …religious discrimination, gender bias and other issues are plaguing them." (Islamic Voice: February, 2006).
On the new role Muslims of this country have to play in emerging India, Mr. Sadaqath Peeran, chairman of the Al-Ameen Education Society, said: “If Muslims had to be equal partners in emerging India, they had to break the shackle of poverty and illiteracy. English should be introduced in all Urdu schools, if we want to be equipped to face the challenges of this competitive world."
Mr. Maqbool Ahmed Siraj, secretary of the Talent Promotion Trust, said: “The present situation of the Muslims is very bleak all over the world. There is no encouragement and incentive for innovation and creativity in the Muslim world." Lamenting the low level of economic performance of the Muslim world, Mr. Siraj said: “The entire gross domestic product of the Muslim world is just half of what France produces every year." (Islamic Voice, Feb 2006).
On another occasion, in January 1998, Mr. Wasim Sajjad, President of the Islamabad-based Ministerial Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation (CONSTECH), told a press conference that countries belonging to the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), considering their share of world population, should have 4 million scientists and engineers, but in reality they had only 200,000, merely 5% of the expected figure. He also pointed out that Muslims account for 1.3 billion or nearly 32% of the world population, but scientific research papers they publish is negligible, below 1% of world’s total. And at the same time, they have little contribution in the high tech-areas like computer software and information technology etc. Lamenting the dearth of creativity and poor performance of the Muslims in modern science and technology, Mr. Sajjad complained that the Islamic countries, considering their share of the world population, should spend $ 4.7 million a year for higher education and research, but in reality they were spending as low as $ 130,000 a year.
The severe dearth of creativity in the Muslim world has been revealed in another study. In India and elsewhere in the world, Muslims, as a community, are most backward. They top the list in adult illiteracy, infant mortality and poverty. In February 2000, while addressing a seminar on ‘Islamic Heritage: Indian Dimension’ in Delhi, Hisamul Islam Siddiqi, president of the Delhi-based NGO Indian Islamic Council, said that nearly 36% of Indian Muslims were urban and almost all of them were slum-dwellers, living below the poverty line. The Rahat Welfare Trust, a Mumbai-based NGO, described the widespread ignorance and illiteracy among Muslims by saying: “This darkness makes a mockery of our freedom. … It is only the light of education that can banish this darkness created by ignorance." Sadatulla Khan, editor of the Bangalore-based monthly Islamic Voice, lamenting the lack of creativity and intellectual stagnation in the Muslim community in his editorial ‘Intellectual Stagnation and Its Remedy’, wrote: “Both individually and collectively, Muslims are victims of intellectual stagnation for the past several centuries and are painfully lagging behind in the race of civilization.” (To read more, see The World Community of Muslims: Shackled People Enslaved by the Koran by this author.)
Islam is a doctrine of destruction, not of creation
As a doctrine, Islam teaches destruction, not creation. After conquering Egypt, they burnt and destroyed the great library of Alexandria. Pre-Islamic India boasted of the world’s oldest university at Taxila (4th to 5th B.C.). There were other world famous seats of learning at Nalanda, Odantipur, Vidisha etc. All these universities were destroyed and libraries burnt by the barbaric Muslim invaders. Before Islamic invasion, both atheists and theists -- Hindu, Buddhist, Jain -- scientists and philosophers worked together and freely expressed their thoughts and views without fear of persecution in the name of religion. The result, Indian civilization turned into a paradise for scholars scientists. But the entire set-up was ravaged by the barbaric Muslim invaders.
Such widespread destruction and, at the same time, large-scale slaughter of the Hindus for refusing to accept Islam completely shattered social fabric of the Hindus which led to a sharp decline of the Hindu science. “From 1000A.D. Indian-subcontinent was shattered by frequent Islamic invasion with more than 80 millions were put to swords for their refusal to convert to Islam. The Islamic rule saw the destruction of the timeless proud legacy of learning and free thinking in this land of the ancients”, says a Youtube video.[3]
In India, the barbaric Muslim invaders also destroyed thousands of Hindu temples and raised mosques with the raw materials of destroyed temples. In many places, they converted the temples directly into mosques. A Muslim chronicler of that time said, “It is easy to convert a temple into a mosque by following three simple steps. Firstly, remove and destroy the idol. Secondly, make pulpit for the imam and thirdly raise a minaret.” The conquest of Iran, Iraq and India by the Muslims proves that a rich civilization could be conquered by the brutes, as Rome was destroyed by the Vandals. This large-scale destruction and massacring the non-Muslim was not confined to India, Iran, or Iraq. Such rampant destruction and large scale homicide went on throughout the vast area the Muslims conquered and established the Muslim or Arab Empire.
Islamic or Arab conquests
Conquering non-Arab countries and enslaving non-Arab peoples began after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Muhammad, through his barbaric creed called Islam, could establish a new unified polity in the Arabian Peninsula which under the subsequent Caliphs, particularly during the Umayyad Caliphate, saw a century of rapid expansion of Muslim power that stretched from the borders of China and India (Present day Pakistan), across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula, to the Pyrenees.
Muslim Empire during Umayyad Caliphates
Due to this Muslim conquest, the Sassanid Empire collapsed and brought about a great territorial loss for the Byzantine Empire. Most of the historians believe that the Sassanid Persian and Byzantine Roman empires were militarily and economically exhausted at that time from decades of fighting against each other. Later on, wars between the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad caliphates resulted in the Muslim conquest of the Greater Syria, Egypt, North Africa and Armenia. The estimates for the size of the Islamic Caliphate suggest it was more than thirteen million square kilometers (five million square miles), making it larger than all current states except the Russian Federation.
The conquest of Iraq and Iran, the two seats of ancient civilization and learning, and shift of seat of the Caliphate from Mecca to Baghdad, under the Abbasid caliphs, was a milestone for the Arab-Islamic science:
“Starting around 750 AD, science flourished under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad, gradually spreading its influence as far west as Spain and eastwards into Central Asia, over a period of more than 600 years.
By drawing on a variety of texts - Greek, Indian and Persian - and translating them into Arabic, the early scholars accumulated the greatest body of scientific knowledge in the world … and built on it through their own discoveries. Often, there was a practical Islamic relevance. Astronomy could be used to work out the direction of prayer. Mathematics was needed for dividing property according to the Islamic law of inheritance. Although science flourished under Arab-Islamic patronage, by no means all the important figures in science were Muslims, or even Arabs. The common factor, however, was the Arabic language, which for a time became the international language of science. It was only later, in the 12th and 13th centuries, when the Arabic works began to be translated into Latin, that such knowledge passed to the west”, says an author.” [4]
In fact, the Islamic state was formed in 622 C.E., when the Prophet moved from Mecca to Medina but within a century after his death (632 C.E.) a large part of the planet, from southern Europe throughout North Africa to Central Asia and on to India, was controlled by and/or influenced by the new Arab-Muslim Empire. In 711 C.E., Arab Muslims invaded southern Spain and a center of flourishing civilization (al-Andalus) was created and another center emerged in Baghdad from the Abbasids, who ruled part of the Islamic world during a historic period later characterized as the "Golden Age" (750 to 1258 C.E.).
Though the Islamic scholars claim many discoveries as Arabic origin, most of the achievements of the Islamic-Arabic Golden Age were based on previous initiatives taken by the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Hindus. The Abbasid Caliphate built a big library, commonly known as the House of Wisdom, in Baghdad where scholars used to meet to exchange their views. Translators flocked to Baghdad to translate Greek, Latin and Sanskrit texts. The result of their work was impressive progress in all sectors of science. The rulers of Islamic Spain also engaged a team of translators and recruited scholars who gathered knowledge (a few of them made some minor contributions) in science, medicine, technology, philosophy, and art.[5]
In this way, the Muslim (or Arab) empire acted as a bridge for transmitting the Eastern wisdom to the West. The most important Hindu discovery which the Arabs carried to the West was the Hindu Numerals or writing numbers infinitely large or infinitesimally small, using nine symbols, one zero and a decimal point. Unaware of its Indian origin, the Europeans took it for Arabic invention and called it the Arabic numerals even up to the recent past. But now it has been conclusively established that the real inventors were the Hindus of India, although some authors still mention it as the Indo-Arabic numerals. It has been mentioned earlier that the greatest scientist of the modern science, Albert Einstein, regarding this Hindu numerals, said, India "taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made." We hope to discuss this matter in the second part of this article.
References:
[1] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31102929/ns/politics-white_house/
[2] http://www.faithfreedom.org/articles/political-islam/conflict-of-conscience-between-muslim-
obama-and-president-obama-part-2-2/
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viR5g6qnv44
[4] http://www.al-bab.com/arab/science.htm
[5] http://www.fasebj.org/content/20/10/1581.full
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