The cave of Hira where the Prophet had his first revelation.  The Muslim Times has the best collection of articles about the Muslim heritage and the prophet Muhammad, may peace be on him

Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

Abstract

An honest study of the causes of the Dark Ages and European renaissance will lead to the inevitable conclusion that Muhammad, may peace be on him, was the light for the Dark Ages.

John Davenport writes in, An apology for Mohammed and the Koran: “It is in the compositions of Friar Bacon, who was born in 1214, and who learned the Oriental languages, that we discover the most extensive acquaintance with the Arabian authors. He quotes Albumazar, Thabet-Ebu-Corah, Ali Alhacer, Alkandi, Alfraganus and Arzakeb; and seems to have been as familiar with them as with the Greek and Latin classics, especially with Avicenna, whom he calls ‘the chief and prince of philosophy.’ The great Lord Bacon, it is well known, imbibed and borrowed the first principles of his famous experimental philosophy from his predecessor and namesake Roger Bacon, a fact which indisputably establishes the derivation of the Baconian philosophical system from the descendants of Ishmael and disciples of Mohammed.” In a short paragraph, John Davenport has very precisely identified all the links in the human intellectual evolution. Additionally, his book, which is available in Google books, is a master piece in the defense of the Prophet Muhammad, may peace be on him. Read his two page Preface and he is standing shoulder to shoulder with other great defenders of the Prophet Muhammad in the Western world, like Thomas Carlyle. Unfortunately, some Western scientists and historians propose the European science to be some sort of magical wand and what preceded it as not good enough or label it as pre-science or mystical science etc.!

My task here is twofold, first to show that European science was built on the Latin translations of the works of the great Muslim pioneers and secondly that the Muslim learning from 8th-12th centuries was heavily influenced by the teachings of the Holy Quran, the literal word of God, revealed to the Holy Prophet Muhammad, may peace be on him.

The mosque of Medina first built by the prophet himself in the first year after his migration to Medina

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“If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and outstanding results are the three criteria of human genius, who could dare to compare any great man in modern history with Muhammad?” Alphonse de Lamartine, Foreign Minister of France, 1848

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Alhambra in Granada Spain

Mark Graham is the Edgar award-winning author of ‘Black Maria,’ third in a series of historical novels which have been translated into several languages. He studied medieval history and religious studies at Connecticut College and has a master’s degree in English literature from Kutztown University. He writes in How Islam Created the Modern World:

This is how the tale is still often told in the West, from grade school through college. The rise of Islam is mentioned just long enough to explain why there are so many Muslims in the world. After that Islam fades from the historical record until the Franks encounter the ‘Saracens’ in the l090s. The success of the First Crusade is recounted with pride, while later failures are quickly glossed over. With the Renaissance wrapping up the account, one might safely conclude that the Europeans could do what the Muslims could not: turn Greek wis­dom into something useful.

This is the story of the Middle Ages, the one that every school kid learns. It is the story of how the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome were lost for a time but found again-how Europe wandered in the wilderness for forty years (actually more like six or seven hundred) but eventually redeemed itself by throwing out the superstitious world­view of the Catholic Church and embracing the humanistic ideals of the Greek philosophers. What may come as a surprise to the millions of people of all generations who have been forced to learn this version of events is that it is sheer myth.

After all, what could be more mythological than the idea of a hero (Europe), the son of Gods (Greece and Rome), discovering its birthright (civilization and power), after going through a quest (the Crusades) and fighting various monsters (Muslims) who have been hoarding the treas­ure (philosophy, science, mathematics) for ages? Read it in Ovid, the Nibelungenlied, or J. R. R. Tolkien. But if you really want your heroic fantasy straight up, all you have to do is read a social studies textbook.

Looking through the pages of a standard high school text on Western civilization (or world cultures or whatever other euphe­mism), you will be hard pressed to find mention of any Muslim other than Muhammad. Perhaps you will come across the names of Saladin or Suleiman the Magnificent, brilliant rulers who, it is begrudgingly admitted, actually defeated the West from time to time. But after that.. .nothing. No mention of scientists, writers, artists, philosophers-in short, no reference to anyone or anything that would lead you to believe that the Islamic world ever had any culture worth speaking about.

Truth, unlike myth, is frequently what we do not want to hear. And perhaps the most heretical thing to say is that Europe ever had anything to learn from Islam. But learn it did, sitting at the foot of its Muslim teachers for half a millennium. Far from being incubators or preservers, Muslims were all the things those textbooks deny them being: artists, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, chemists, astronomers, physicists. In short, they were civilized at a time when Europe was wallowing in barbarism. Muslim civilization was the greatest in size and technology that the world had ever seen. And far from existing in a vacuum, it directly impinged on the creation of Europe as a cultural entity and as a scientific and political power. As much as some are loathe to admit it, the Islamic world is the giant on whose shoulders the European Renaissance stood.[2]

What was wrong with the Middle or the Dark ages

In medieval Europe, whatever medical knowledge had survived from the Roman era was largely forgotten. Hospitals as we conceive of them did not exist. If you had money you could hire the servic­es of a barber-surgeon and his bottle of leeches. If you were hopeless and homeless, you wound up in a monastery, nursed by well-meaning monks. Some monasteries devoted themselves to caring for victims of specific incurable diseases like St. Anthony’s fire, leprosy or blindness.

Caring, however, did not mean curing. The compassionate monks were merely nurses of the divine Doctor. Their primary duty, as always, was to pray for others, imploring God to grant them better health. Surgery, banned by the church in the seventh century, was not even an option. Most often the monastic ‘hospitals’ were convenient places for indigent people to die in relative dignity and comfort.

Things might have been different if Christian monarchs had continued their support of Greek and Roman learning. But two events within one hundred years of each other effectively doomed Europe to medical ignorance for half a millennium. The first was the closing of Edessa’s school of Hippocratic medicine in 489 by the Byzantine emper­or Zeno. Next came the Academy of Athens, founded by Plato himself Its faculty of Neoplatonists was devoted to a mystical and philosophical search for truth that challenged church doctrine. This was a threat to orthodoxy that could not be tolerated. The Emperor Justinian closed the Academy in 529.

With the champions of Christendom effectively putting an end to learning in the West, scholars headed for the only other great empire available: Sassanian Persia. Here, at Jundishapur, Nestorian Christian doctors and Neoplatonist philosophers laid the foundation for the Islamic revolution in medicine.

Contrary to popular conception, Greek learning was not ‘lost’ by the Europeans. It was deliberately exiled due to religious fundamental­ism. And, not too surprisingly, it was heartily welcomed by Muslims. For the next two hundred years, the Islamic world sat at the feet of Plato’s last disciples. By the time Hunayn ibn Ishaq’s translations of Galen were completed, Muslims had made Greek and Roman medicine their own.[4]

Charlemagne’s most demanding military undertaking pitted him against the Saxons, longtime adversaries of the Franks whose conquest required more than 30 years of campaigning (772 to 804). This long struggle, which led to the annexation of a large block of territory between the Rhine and the Elbe rivers, was marked by pillaging, broken truces, hostage taking, mass killings, deportation of rebellious Saxons, draconian measures to compel acceptance of Christianity, and occasional Frankish defeats. The Frisians, Saxon allies living along the North Sea east of the Rhine, were also forced into submission.[5]

The process of forming a new historical and cultural identity took place in a fully conscious manner under the reign of Charlemagne, when the ancient name of Europe returned to circulation, but with a new meaning. It came to define the kingdom of Charlemagne and to express an awareness of both the continuity and the novelty of this new aggregate of states, which appeared as a force that had a great future.  A great future because it could be perceived as a continuation of a world history that until then had been rooted in the permanent.  The awareness of a definitive nature and of a mission was expressed through emerging sense of self-consciousness.[6]

A history channel documentary about Dark ages gives us a fairly insightful account of this period. It suggests that during the Crusades that were fought over eight generations countless Crusaders brought back with them the books from the Muslims in the Holy land in Jerusalem. That is what kick started the Renaissance.

More than a hundred years after the Treaty of Jerusalem was signed by Hadhrat Umar, Charlemagne was converting populations of his neighboring countries on the point of sword to Christianity. This is not only outlined clearly in the documentary but also in the Wikipedia which records: “He also campaigned against the peoples to his east, especially the Saxons, and after a protracted war subjected them to his rule. By forcibly converting them to Christianity, he integrated them into his realm and thus paved the way for the later Ottonian dynasty.”

Charlemagne, Carolus Magnus or Karolus Magnus, meaning Charles the Great was King of the Franks from 768 AD to his death in 814 AD. He expanded the Frankish kingdoms into a Frankish Empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned Imperator Augustus by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800 as a rival of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. Today he is regarded not only as the founding father of both French and German monarchies, but also as the father of Europe: his empire united most of Western Europe for the first time since the Romans. The documentary Dark Ages, says about him, “Over the course of 46 year reign, Charlemagne would launch more than 50 military campaigns, designed to expand his empire and save souls.  As his armies seized countless new territories, they gave the conquered a simple choice, embrace the Christian God or meet that God immediately.”  Watch the full History channel documentary above for details.

What was going on during those same centuries in the Islamic Empire is beautifully encapsulated in this short 10 minute documentary

The responsibility of the Dark Ages lay on the Catholic Church, if not wholly, at least partially.  In the words of Encyclopedia Britannica:

“After the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the idea arose of Europe as one large church-state, called Christendom. Christendom was thought to consist of two distinct groups of functionaries: the sacerdotium, or ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the imperium, or secular leaders. In theory, these two groups complemented each other, attending to people’s spiritual and temporal needs, respectively. Supreme authority was wielded by the pope in the first of these areas and by the emperor in the second. In practice, the two institutions were constantly sparring, disagreeing, or openly warring with each other. The emperors often tried to regulate church activities by claiming the right to appoint church officials and to intervene in doctrinal matters. The church, in turn, not only owned cities and armies but often attempted to regulate affairs of state.”[7]

The blame of Dark Ages should be placed squarely on the irrationality and coercion preached by the Church, as is stated, “The only force capable of providing a basis for social unity was the Roman Catholic Church.”[8]

And We (Allah) have made the night and the day two Signs, and the Sign of night We have made dark, and the Sign of day We have made sight giving, that you may seek bounty from your Lord, and that you may know the computation of years and the science of reckoning and mathematics. And everything We have explained with a detailed explanation.  (Al Quran 17:13)

The ancients made no clear distinction between these two fields. They studied the heavens to try to understand what was likely to happen on Earth.

Some of the greatest astronomers, including Johannes Kepler were also astrologers. Kepler’s work in both astronomy and astrology would lay the foundations for much of the development of calculus.

This lack of distinction between astronomers and astrologers carried over to mathematicians. The emperor Tiberius is said to have banished all ‘mathematicians’ from Rome. In fact he banished the astrologers, who were predicting his downfall.

Some of this confusion stems from the fact that important advances in mathematics came directly out of astronomy. By looking at the heavens, mathematicians were able to pick out patterns in much purer form than they could in the world around them.[9]

A major impetus for the flowering of mathematics as well as astronomy in medieval Islam came from religious observances, which presented an assortment of problems in astronomy and mathematics, specifically in trigonometry, spherical geometry, algebra and arithmetic. The Islamic law of inheritance served as an impetus behind the development of algebra (derived from the Arabic al-jabr) by Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī and other medieval Islamic mathematicians. Al-Khwārizmī’s Hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala devoted a chapter on the solution to the Islamic law of inheritance using algebra. He formulated the rules of inheritance as linear equations, hence his knowledge of quadratic equations was not required. Later mathematicians who specialized in the Islamic law of inheritance included Al-Hassār, who developed the modern symbolic mathematical notation for fractions in the 12th century.[11]

Mathematics for renaissance

Throughout the Middle Ages, Europe used Roman numerals. Like the Greeks before them, Romans based their numerical system on letters. It was a relatively small stock of symbols, seven in total: I, V, X, L, C, D, M, representing 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1000. Despite its simplicity, some problems remained. Writing out larger numbers could be cumbersome. For example, 1938 is MCMXXXVI­II. In multiplication it was even worse: 57 X 38 = 2166 becomes LVII by XXXVIII = MMCLXVI. This unwieldy system made calculation of large numbers a tedious and time-consuming affair. Arithmetic was largely left to a few specialists who had plenty of time on their hands.

That was until Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi joined the House of Wisdom in the early ninth century. A great astronomer who also created an early table cataloguing the latitude and longitude of over 2,000 cities, al-Khwarizmi is primarily known today as one of the most influential mathematicians of all time. His seminal book Calculation of Integration and Equation changed mathematics forever.

If you’re wondering how, a clue is in the Arabic title: Hisab al-Jabr w-al-Muqabalah. Look closely and you’ll notice an English word hiding in there.

AI-jabr-or in English, algebra.

Al-Khwarizmi may not have invented algebra in the modern sense.

The credit goes to the Hindus for first practicing this mathematical art. But it was al- Khwarizmi who introduced algebra to the West. His style was so clear and authoritative that his volume became the standard mathematical text in Europe for four hundred years.

When the book was translated into Latin three hundred years later as Liber Algorismi, it made al-Khwarizmi’s Latinized name a household word synonymous with arithmetic itself .  Our English word “algorithm” is a tribute to this greatest of Muslim mathematicians.

Al-Khwarizmi was dazzled by Hindu mathematics. Seeing the vast potential of its numeric and decimal systems, he wrote several works that introduced Hindu math to Islam. The numbers were so easy to use that they soon became the standard throughout the Muslim world. With the publication of his Liber Algorismi in Europe these Hindu numerals became known as Arabic numerals, a gift of the Islamic world to Christendom.

The most astounding number the Arabs showed them was not a number at all, but the lack of one: zero. Muslim mathematicians represented this lack of number by a dot or small circle. They called it sifr, an empty object. This word was the source of the English ‘zero’ as well as “cipher.” Sift solved a lot of problems in mathematics. It allowed for the expression of difference between two equal quantities as well as positional notation, where the digit’s position has a value itself which, combining with the value of the digit, creates the number’s value. It was a bold new step in abstraction that led to the higher mathematics of the Renaissance.

Muslims’ contributions to science

From the second half of the eighth to the end of the eleventh century, Arabic was the scientific, the progressive language of mankind. …  It will suffice here to evoke a few glorious names without contemporary equivalents in the West: Jabir ibn Hayyan, al-Kindi, al-Khwarizmi, al-Farghani, al-Razi, Thabit ibn Qurra, al-Battani, Hunain ibn Ishaq,, al-Farabi, lbrahim ibn Sinan, al-Masudi, al Tabari, Abul-Wafa, Ali ibn Abbas, Abul-Qasim, Ibn al-Jazzar, al-Biruni, Ibn Sina, Ibn Yunus, al-Karkhi, Ibn al-Haytham, Ali ibn Isa, al-Ghazalli, al-Zarqali, Omar Khayyam !  … If anyone tells you that the Middle Ages were scientifically sterile, just quote these men to him, all of whom flourished within a relatively short period, between 750 and 1100.[12]

At its peak about one thousand years ago, the Muslim world made a remarkable contribution to science, notably mathematics and medicine. Baghdad in its heyday and southern Spain built universities to which thousands flocked. Rulers surrounded themselves with scientists and artists. A spirit of freedom allowed Jews, Christians, and Muslim to work side by side. Today all this is but a memory.[13]

For starters let me mention one of my other articles titled, the Constitution of Medina: the First written Constitution of the World.

“The breakup of feudal structures, the strengthening of city-states in Italy, and the emergence of national monarchies in Spain, France, and England, as well as such cultural developments as the rise of secular education, culminated in the birth of a self-consciously new age with a new spirit, one that looked all the way back to Classical learning for its inspiration and that came to be known as the Renaissance.”[14]

Muslims gave Western Christians their science, their medicine, their music, their food, their clothes, their poetry, their philosophy and their mathematics. They were the ones who thrust Europe out of the Dark Ages and into the Enlightenment. This is the terrible secret that the Renaissance myth tries to hide.

We must begin learning history by unlearning the cultural ‘truths’ we have been taught about Islam. These paradigms have nestled in the muck of our collective unconscious for centuries. Born of religious intolerance, they slowly cemented themselves as Islam became an increasing political and cultural threat. It was because Islam was so successful that our culture made it seem like a failure. It was because we owed Muslims so much that we pretended we owed them nothing. For without this myth of a superior religion and a superior culture, what did we have that we could call our own?

Only something far greater, far more complex and transcendent–a shared history of faith and culture. The Islamic world and the ‘West’ are (and always have been) an intricately-bound system of cultural and religious interaction. They are not separate entities as much as they are parts of an ongoing process of debate and exchange.

It is time for memory to triumph over collective amnesia. Islam belongs to the West as much as the Egyptians or the Greeks. We are the heirs of Ibn Rushd and al-Razi as much as we are the heirs of Plato and Hippocrates. And the West belongs to Islam, a rich part of its own history that has only begun to be written. It is in the writing of that new history that we might finally unlearn what has pulled us apart and learn anew what we share as children of Abraham and Aristotle.

According to Wikipedia in an article titled, Islamic contributions to Medieval Europe:

“Islamic contributions to Medieval Europe were numerous, affecting such varied areas as art, architecture, medicine, agriculture, music, language, education, law, and technology. From the 11th to the 13th century, Europe absorbed knowledge from the Islamic civilization. In the early 20th century the musicologist Henry George Farmer wrote that a ‘growing number of scholars … recognize(d) that the influence of the Muslim civilization as a whole on medieval Europe was enormous in such fields as science, philosophy, theology, literature, aesthetics, than has been recognized.’ For many historians the contributions from the Islamic world have had a considerable effect on the development of Western civilization and contributed to the achievements of the Renaissance. Their contributions included the rediscovery of ancient classic texts, notably the work of the Greek natural philosopher Aristotle, through retranslations and commentaries from Arabic.”[15]

“[Ibn Sina] possessed much clinical insight, and is given credit for the first description of several drugs and diseases, such as meningitis, which he was the first to describe correctly. But it is essentially for his penetration and for his understanding of the philosophical principles of medicine, on the one hand, and his mastery of the psychological treatment of physical ailments, or of ‘psychosomatic medicine’ as it is called today, on the other hand, that he is celebrated.”[16]

Sequel