Islamic civilization by the numbers

Dr. Mohamed Elmasry

During his 1868 - 1871 lecture series, Introduction to the Study of History, Swiss historian Prof. Jacob Burchardt explained his thesis that there are “three powers” in history - the state, religion and culture.

Burchardt, whose book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy became a classic, went on to define culture in general as “the realm of the spontaneous,” including such elements as social intercourse, technologies, arts, literature and sciences.

Muslim Spain. View of Alhambra from the Science Park of Granada

Ruins of the city Medinat Az-Zahra

He then gave examples of ‘culture determined by the state’ as happened, for example, in Ancient Egypt, Mexico and Peru; ‘the state determined by culture’ as illustrated notably by the ancient Greek polis; and ‘culture determined by religion’ as in the case of Islam.

One can also argue however, that in the case of Islamic civilization, culture is determined by religion and the state is determined by culture, thus illustrating how three pivotal factors uniquely intertwine.

The foundation of Islamic civilization was a set of Qur'anic ideals which include family values, good governance, social justice, and human rights.

And, much as in the modern sense, human rights in the Qur'anic conception included: freedom of religion; law and order; the equality of all citizens before the law; international relations based on mutual respect and fair trade; a strong defense system; encouragement of and access to scholarship in every field; respect for knowledge; a pluralism embracing religious and ethnic differences. And, importantly, the maintenance of a strong welfare state, providing to the utmost extent possible; free education; free health care; free old age pensions and social assistance to the poor, the needy ,the disabled and the unemployed.

This comprehensive package of Qur'anic ideals was included in the Divine Message received and taught by Prophet Muhammad (570 - 632 AD) in a world fraught with uncivilized behaviour among people and nations. In fact, such brutal and callous behaviour was the norm during the dark pre-Islamic ages: wars, death, destruction and aggressive empire-building were widespread, while the powerless and marginalized ‘others’ were enslaved physically, economically, mentally, and spiritually.

The Qur'anic principles taught by the Prophet were not aimed at building a vast empire, either politically or culturally, but rather to build an ideal commonwealth for the benefit of all humanity - a family of nations and states working together to foster advances in the sciences, arts ,literature, medicine, music, philosophy, religion, and spirituality.

To outside observers, the final product at the height of Islamic expansion might have looked and felt like an empire, complete with economic, military and political power, but the fundamentals underpinning this wave of Muslim influence were totally different.

For 23 years, the Prophet's mission was not only to teach, but also to apply in practice the Qur'anic ideals revealed by God. Yet while the seed of a new civilization was planted during Muhammad's lifetime, the application and nurture of it was also passed to succeeding generations of Muslims who sometimes retarded its growth by neglecting Divine guidance. By contrast, during periods when Muslim societies worked consciously to apply Qur'anic precepts, their religiously based culture made major advances on the way to an ideal civilization.

In spite of periodic setbacks, the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad took hold and the building of a new civilization worthy of the world to emulate started during Muhammad's lifetime and continued after his death in 632 AD. Historians agree that this civilization reached its zenith around 1500 AD, thus benefiting the ancient world by nearly 1,000 years of positive development.

To see the ‘big picture’ of Islamic civilization as a cultural pattern, however, one can take the year 632 AD (the Prophet's death) as a starting point and mark the year 1300 AD as the peak of achievement, or 100 percent Islamic civilization. After that, the next 300 years can be seen as an era of cultural maintenance. Thus, we can see a continuum or span of some 1,000 years which can be divided into periods that reveal either accelerated or interrupted progress on the way to reaching the highest level of development.

From the beginning, Muslim historians were conscious of the fact that the political leaders of the Muslim Ummah (nation) must adhere to Qur'anic ideals in their daily decisions and governance; the name Khulafa-ul- Rashidun (Rightly Guided Caliphs) was given only to those who faithfully adhered to these ideals throughout their tenure as rulers.

For nearly 30 years after the Prophet's death (632 - 661 AD), four of his Companions or school of close followers, were put in charge of political leadership for the Muslim Ummah. But 58 years later, the Egyptian-born Umayyad Caliph, Omar-Ibn-Abdulaziz -- who was Caliph in Damascus for only 30 months, 719-721 AD - was also considered a Rightly Guided One for his faithfulness in applying Qur'anic ideals during his brief rule.

If the year 1300 AD is accepted as the point of 100 percent development of Islamic civilization, then I believe that the four Khulafa-ul-Rashidun who took up the Prophet's cause during the first 29 years after his death managed to achieve a good 40 percent of that progress. Had they been able to continue in the same vein, the peak of Islamic civilization would have been reached in only 72 years.

Unfortunately, the Umayyad Dynasty (661 - 750 AD) that ruled for nearly a century from Damascus were less committed to Qur'anic ideals in their governance and therefore reduced the rate of progress by a factor of 10, adding only 20 percent to the development of peak Islamic culture during their 89 years of influence.

But worse was yet to come. The rule of the Abbasid Dynasty (750 - 1258 AD), the subsequent fragmentation of the Ummah, the destructive and fanatical invasions of the Crusaders (1096 - 1250 AD), and the sacking of Baghdad by invading Mongols (1258 AD) all drastically slowed down the achievements of Islamic culture.

Yet for some 300 years after the 1300s, leaders of the Ottoman Dynasty strove to maintain the level of previous Muslim contributions to world civilization. And they achieved and preserved a great deal, but gradually it was not possible to sustain this gargantuan effort. Sadly, many Muslim leaders who came after their era of glory seemed to have forgotten the foundational Qur'anic ideals and how to put them into practice.

Nevertheless, from 756 - 1492 AD, Muslims established a thriving independent state in what are now today's Spain and Portugal, and this state enlarged and enlivened all of Medieval Europe, especially during the period of 1000 - 1500 AD.

But from the 1500s onward, European powers rejected the Qur'anic ideals that had brought such prosperity and advancement to Andalusia and the southern Iberian Peninsula. Instead, they used their military power as a blunt instrument to enslave and exploit millions in Africa and Asia and through both war and imperialism to destroy the lives of millions more, namely the native peoples of the Americas. It was not the legacy of the Prophet.

Dr. Mohamed Elmasry - national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress.

Origins of ideas prejudicial to Islam

Muhammad Asad

When it comes to Islam - Western equanimity is almost invariably disturbed by an emotional bias. Is it perhaps, I sometimes wonder, because the values of Islam are close enough to those of the West to constitute a potential challenge to many Western concepts of spiritual and social life?’

And I went on to tell him (non-Muslim friend of Muhammad Asad) of a theory which I had conceived some years ago - a theory that might perhaps help one to understand better the deep-seated prejudice against Islam so often to be found in Western literature and contemporary thought. ‘To find a truly convincing explanation of this prejudice I said, ‘one has to look far backward into history and try to comprehend the psychological background of the earliest relations between the Western and the Muslim worlds. What Occidentals think and feel about Islam today is rooted in impressions that were born during the Crusades.’

‘The Crusades!’ exclaimed my friend. ‘You don't mean to say that what happened nearly a thousand years ago could still have an effect on people of the twentieth century?’

‘But it does! I know it sounds incredible; but don't you remember the incredulity which greeted the early discoveries of the psychoanalysts when they tried to show that much of the emotional life of a mature person and most of those seemingly unaccountable leanings, tastes and prejudices comprised in the term “idiosyncrasiesÓ- can be traced back to the experiences of his most formative age, his early childhood? Well, are nations and civilizations anything but collective individuals? Their development also is bound up with the experiences of their early childhood. As with children, those experiences may have been pleasant or unpleasant; they may have been perfectly rational or, alternatively, due to the child's naive misinterpretation of an event: the moulding effect of every such experience depends primarily on its original intensity. The century immediately preceding the Crusades, that is, the end of the first millennium of the Christian era, might well be described as the early childhood of Western civilization . . .’

I proceeded to remind my friend - himself an historian - that this had been the age when, for the first time since the dark centuries that followed the breakup of Imperial Rome, Europe was beginning to see its own cultural way. Independently of the almost forgotten Roman heritage, new literatures were just then coming into existence in the European vernaculars; inspired by the religious experience of Western Christianity, fine arts were slowly awakening from the lethargy caused by the warlike migrations of the Goths, Huns and Avars; out of the crude conditions of the early Middle Ages, a new cultural world was emerging. It was at that critical, extremely sensitive stage of its development that Europe received its most formidable shock - in modern parlance, a ‘trauma’ - in the shape of the Crusades.

The Crusades were the strongest collective impression on a civilization that had just begun to be conscious of itself. Historically speaking, they represented Europe's earliest - and entirely successful - attempt to view itself under the aspect of cultural unity. Nothing that Europe has experienced before or after could compare with the enthusiasm which the First Crusade brought into being. A wave of intoxication swept over the Continent, an elation which for the first time overstepped the barriers between states and tribes and classes. Before then, there had been Franks and Saxons and Germans, Burgundians and Sicilians, Normans and Lombards - a medley of tribes and races with scarcely anything in common but the fact that most of their feudal kingdoms and principalities were remnants of the Roman Empire.

The traumatic experience of the Crusades gave Europe its cultural awareness and its unity; but this same experience was destined henceforth also to provide the false colour in which Islam was to appear to some Western eyes. Not simply because the Crusades meant war and bloodshed.

So many wars have been waged between nations and subsequently forgotten, and so many animosities which in their time seemed ineradicable have later turned into friendships. The damage caused by the Crusades was not restricted to a clash of weapons: it was, first and foremost, an intellectual damage - the poisoning of the Western mind against the Muslim world through a deliberate misrepresentation of the teachings and ideals of Islam.

The age when the spirit of independent inquiry could raise its head was as yet far distant in Europe; it was easy for the powers-that-were to sow the dark seeds of hatred for a religion and civilization that was so different from the religion and civilization of the West.

Thus it was no accident that the fiery Chanson da Roland, which describes the legendary victory of Christendom over the Muslim ‘heathen’ in southern France, was composed not at the time of those battles but three centuries later-to wit, shortly before the First Crusade - immediately to become a kind of ‘national anthem’ of Europe, and it is no accident, either, that this warlike epic marks the beginning of a European literature, as distinct from the earlier, localized literatures: for hostility toward Islam stood over the cradle of European civilization.

It would seem an irony of history that the age-old resentment against Islam,among some which was religious in origin, should still persist subconsciously at a time when religion has lost most of its hold on the imagination of Western man. This, however is not really surprising. We know that a person may completely lose the religious beliefs imparted to him in his childhood while, nevertheless, some particular emotion connected with those beliefs remains, irrationally, in force throughout his later life ‘-and this,’ I concluded, ‘is precisely what happened to that collective personality, Western civilization. The shadow of the Crusades hovers over the West to this day; and all its reaction toward Islam and the Muslim world bear distinct traces of that die-hard ghost...’ My friend remained silent for a long time. I can still see his tall, lanky figure pacing up and down the room, his hands in his coat pockets, shaking his head as if puzzled, and finally saying: ‘There may be something in what you say . .. indeed, there may be, although I am not in a position to judge your “theory” offhand ... But in any case, in the light of what you yourself have just told me, don't you realize that your life, which to you seems so very simple and uncomplicated, must appear very strange and unusual to Westerners? Could you not perhaps share some of your own experiences with them? Why don't you write your autobiography? I am sure it would make fascinating reading!’

Laughingly I replied: ‘Well, I might perhaps let myself be persuaded to leave the Foreign Service and write such a book. After all, writing is my original profession.

In the following weeks and months my joking response imperceptibly lost the aspect of a joke. I began to think seriously about setting down the story of my life and thus helping, in however small a measure, to lift the heavy veil which separates Islam and its culture from the Occidental mind. My way to Islam had been in many respects unique: I had not become a Muslim because I had lived for a long time among Muslims - on the contrary, I decided to live among them because I had embraced Islam.

Might I not, by communicating my very personal experiences to Western readers, contribute more to a mutual understanding between the Islamic and Western worlds than I could by continuing in a diplomatic position which might be filled equally well by other countrymen of mine? After all, any intelligent man could be Pakistan's Minister to the United Nations - but how many men were able to talk to Westerners about Islam as I could? I was a Muslim - but I was also of Western origin: and thus I could speak the intellectual languages of both Islam and the West...

Holy Quran and global recovery

Irshad Mahmood

The World is going through a great turbulence of global recession, and global poverty is on the rise. Rich are becoming extremely rich and poor are becoming severely poor and are about to die. Perhaps what we have seen so far could be like the tip of an iceberg and the rest would come later, since the world didn’t take true guidance from the Holy Quran to balance Global System to save humanity (to build a Whole New World).

There are over 85,000 registered charity Organizations in Canada alone as of June this year which is alarmingly extremely high, therefore we need a new Multitier System to Change Our World with LOVE like a severely ill cancer patient may have to go through Surgery, Radiation, Chemotherapy as well as Stem Cells for his/her survival. It is an emergency to join together as Global Family where we are all Global Brothers and Global Sisters to fix our Global World.

The road to recovery of the world may not be a simple step to take. Multi-Faith Forums/Dialogues are the key things to understand each other and bring brilliant ideas to save our world. On case by case method, we need to re-analyze each and every verse for the Holy Books to find which thing/idea will help us save our world, along with many other ideas from non-religious groups as well as from modern science and technology etc., which will help us discover new global economics.

We Muslims believe that we must take guidance from the Quran (true book of guidance for the mankind) to save the Global World. We need to keep Key points in our mind to build a Global Model for Global Recovery and it must be based on true humanitarian ground without any extra luxury as a Global Charity.

In the beginning we might need help from those who can afford it on volunteer bases or perhaps get old technologies to train people etc., but our direction must be not to be burden on anyone.

War is not an option in which economy dies again and again, BUT Love is, which starts from forgiveness as mentioned in the Quran.

(Ref: Al Quran 041:035)

Moral system of Islam

Islam has laid down some universal fundamental rights for humanity as a whole, which are to be observed and respected under all circumstances.

To achieve these rights Islam provides not only legal safeguards but also a very effective moral system. Thus whatever leads to the welfare of the individual or the society is morally good in Islam and whatever is injurious is morally bad. Islam attaches so much importance to the love of God and love of man that it warns against too much of formalism.

We are given a beautiful description of the righteous and God-conscious man in these verses. He should obey salutary regulations, but he should fix his gaze on the love of God and the love of his fellow men.

We are given four leads:

a) Our faith should be true and sincere.

b) We must be prepared to show it in deeds of charity to our fellow men.

c) We must be good citizens, supporting social organizations.

d) Our own individual soul must be firm and unshaken in all circumstances.

This is the standard by which a particular mode of conduct is judged and classified as good or bad. This standard of judgment provides the nucleus around which the whole moral conduct should revolve.

Before laying down any moral injunctions Islam seeks to firmly implant in man’s heart the conviction that his dealings are with God who sees him at all times and in all places.

To be continued