ISLAM: THE LIBERATOR OF THE MIND

~ 70 ~ water screw. But it is strange that these Greek scientific minds shone only temporarily, like meteors, and then disappeared. They failed to usher Europe, or even Greece itself, into the age of science and industry. A very long intellectual gap is found between the learning of the ancient Greeks and that of modern scientific Europe. While Archimedes had invented the water screw as early as 260 B.C., the first machine press was not invented until 1450, by Germany’s J. Gutenberg. The interval between the two is more than one thousand five hundred years. What was the reason for this gap? Why did ancient Greek science find no continuation either in Greece or elsewhere in Europe? The answer is that before the Islamic revolution, the atmosphere was totally opposed to scientific research being freely carried out. It was not until the revolution brought about by Islam, on the basis of monotheism, that all obstacles could be removed from the path of scientific progress. This was the first time in history that there had been such a liberation of the intellect. Scientific progress, to be effective, must be a continuous process. The work of the Greek scholars,