How did they do this? Incredible though it may seem to any uninitiated student of history, these Arabs not only changed their way of thinking but also their view of the world and their role in it. Having begun with a tabula rasa, they achieved an astonishing advancement in their social, political and intellectual life within a very short time. By harnessing their latent physical and spiritual power, the Arabs somehow reconstructed their own lives. The march of the Arabs from darkness to light is one of the conundrums of history and few historians have adequately explained the phenomena. It is hard to see how such a primitive people could emerge from centuries of backwardness to a level of culture. On the whole the Arabian environment did not encourage the growth of civilized values. It was only during the pilgrimage season to Makkah that fighting was abandoned by common consent. Nevertheless, most of the population of Arabia were pastoralists who often quarrelled among themselves. Among them were members of the Quraysh tribe and it was they who brought foreign influences into Arabian trading centres. A handful of traders were familiar with reading and writing of one sort or another. However, an elite group of traders who travelled from such towns as Makkah, Yathrib, Khaybar and from Yemen to the centres of ancient civilizations, including Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt, were open to outside influences. This article is part of Essays on the Origins of Islamic Civilization, available from Kube Publishing Ltd., Markfield, Ratby Lane, Leicestershire, LE 67 9SY, UK (ISBN 0954188292).Īt the beginning of the 7th century CE, very few Arabs could read, write or calculate.
Unity of Knowledge: Religious, Rational and Experimental The Islamic Background to Intellectual ActivityĢ.3. The Rise of Islam and the Early Intellectual FertilisationĢ.2. Islam as a Source of Inspiration for Science and Knowledge (‘Ilm)Ģ.1. Various influences in Pre-Islamic ArabiaĢ. Afterwards, in the second part, the author surveys some key contributions of the scientists of Islam in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, and medicine.ġ.4.
In this first part, he depicts in details the impact of Islamic principle in shaping the contours of the early scientific activity in the Muslim civilisation. In the following well documented article Dr Muhammad Abdul Jabbar Beg surveys the origins of Islamic science, with a special focus on its interaction with the previous intellectual traditions of the ancient world as well as a survey of the beginnings of scientific activity in Arabic.
0 kommentar(er)
