Islam: The Creator of The Modern Age

~ 53 ~ Islamic revolution produced a favourable atmosphere, it unleashed a mighty flood of knowledge, which had been kept pent up for thousands of years by the dam of superstition. LEARNING AND ISLAM Ptolemy II, who became the ruler of Egypt after Alexander the Great in the third century B.C., was a great patron of learning, and founded a library in Alexandria, which contained about 500,000 books on different subjects. It is this collection, which is known in history as the great library of Alexandria. It has been alleged – wrongly, as it happens – that this library was burned down at the behest of the second caliph, ‘Umar Farooq. It had, in fact, been destroyed much earlier, in the fourth century A.D., long before the advent of Islam. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “The library survived the disintegration of Alexander’s empire (1st century B.C.) and continued to exist under Roman rule until the third century A.D ..”14 The truth is that one half of this library was burnt by Julius Caesar in 47 B.C. In the third century,