Islam: The Liberator of the Mind

Islam The Liberator of the Mind

1990 12 December 19-23 Islam: The Liberator of the Mind (1562) In ancient times, an intellectual climate dominated by polytheism tended to encourage the spread of superstition throughout the world. Such an atmosphere was necessarily unfavorable to the emergence of scientific ideas. That is why there was no country during that period in which learning and science could progress. It was only when the Islamic revolution put an end to this age-old harnessing of the intellect to polytheism that attitudes began, effectively, to change.

Ancient Greece

The greatest influence on the ancient Greek mind was that of mythology. (Greek mythology is such a vast subject that whole volumes have been devoted to it, and there is even an “Encyclopaedia of Greek Mythology.”) This mythology is composed of innumerable legends concerning gods, goddesses and superhuman heroes of whom the Greeks remained in great awe. They thought of them as historical realities although surrounding their origines and deeds with an awe of mysticism. In such an atmosphere it was simply impossible for any genuine science to make progress. While the Greek myths exercised a strong influence over poets and artists, who flourished in great numbers, they did little to help those who were engaged in scientific enquiry. Scientists, in the modern sense of the word, could not thrive in such an ambience.

In ancient Greece, every object had a god or goddess associated with it and mystical concepts abounded. That is why the atmosphere favoured the progress only of the arts and literature.

Greek mythology formed the staple of most Greek poetry and drama. It also influenced the thoughts of philosophers and historians to a marked degree.

“Through the medium of Latin, Greek myth influenced medieval poets ... nearly all the major English poets from Shakespeare to Robert Bridges turned for inspiration to Greek mythology.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 8, pp. 405-406).

The civilization of the Greeks was the most illustrious of ancient times. But it did nothing to set in motion the processes of scientific thinking, which came much later to Europe. If scientific thought reached Europe, it was entirely due to the stimulus given to it by the Muslims, for up to that point, the concept of polytheism had acted as a deterrent to progress. The concept of monotheism, on the contrary, ushered in a whole new era of intellectual liberty.

Roman Civilization

The Encyclopaedia Britannica writes:

Towards the close of the pre-Christian period, the Roman Empire achieved dominance over the entire Mediterranean world. Rome presents a paradox to historians of science. This civilization, so sophisticated and apparently modern in its politics and personalities, very strong in the learned disciplines of the law, very progressive in the state technologies of warfare and public hygiene, with direct access to the corpus of Greek science, nevertheless failed to produce a single scientist (16/367).

The article goes on to say that historians, attempting to explain the Romans’ utter failure in science, suggest that “perhaps the social structure of Rome, combined with it long adherence to gross forms of magic, left no place for an appreciation of that peculiar commitment to the hard and hazardous road to knowledge and wisdom that lies through disciplined enquiry into isolated aspects of the natural world. Indeed, when one considers how few have been the cultures in which science has flourished, one may reverse the question and consider Rome as the normal, and classical Greece as the surprising phenomenon to be explained” (16/367).

The historians have failed to produce any convincing answer to this question. But the answer becomes obvious when we take into account the fact that the Romans were polytheists. It was actually polytheism and idol worship which had stood in the way of their carrying out research and investigation in the field of science. The concept of the sanctity of all natural objects had prevented them from making an intellectual conquest of them.

The Dawn of the Scientific Age

The Encyclodaedia Britannica states under the heading of “History of Science” that “the present way of comprehending the natural world is a very recent development. It was possible for great civilizations of the past to achieve highly developed technologies and religious and legal systems in the complete absence of a conception of science as it is now understood. Such were the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and the western Hemisphere. Even the Hebrews, people whose religion forms a large part of the basis of European civilization, were indifferent to science. Although some two and a half millennia ago the Greeks created a system of thought that was similar to the scientific, in succeeding centuries there was little progress beyond their achievement and little comprehension of it. The great power of science and its pervasive influence on all aspects of life are thus very recent developments.

The dawn of European science has traditionally been located among the philosophers of the Greek city states on the coast and islands of the eastern Mediterranean, in the later 6th and 5th centuries BC. Their work is known only through fragments, references, and brief quotations made by authors who came later, perhaps by hundreds of years (16/366).

These brief references are actually very misleading. For example, the saying of the earliest known philosopher, Thales, “All is water,’ would appear to be a scientific sentence. But when taken as a whole – “All is water, and world is full of gods” (16/366) it assumes a superstitious character. (Thales was a philosopher who lived in the 6th century B.C. one of the writings or contemporary source materials survive. His name is included in the canon of the legendary seven wise men).

The truth is that for both Greeks and Romans, there was only one barrier obstructing the path of science, and that was their polytheistic thinking. This indeed was what had robbed them of the realistic bent of mind which is so essential to scientific investigation. There was therefore no question of their ever making any progress in this field.

Journey Towards Progress

Many great scientific minds were born in ancient times in the European country of Greece, one of them being Archimedes, who made great strides in hydrostatics, even inventing a simple machine – the 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. Archimedes himself was struck down, while pondering over geometrical problems in the sand, by the sword of a Roman soldier.

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 the work of 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, however, due to the unpropitious circumstances of the times, could not advance in this way. It shone forth momentarily, then disappeared from the scene. Then in the seventh century Hijrah, when the Islamic revolution had put an end to the age of superstition, many favourable opportunities presented themselves to scientific progress. Now scientific research was carried on in an unbroken line right up to modern times.

Due to the earlier unfavourable atmosphere, the Greek scholars confined their work largely to the field of theory. They did not carry out practical experiments. For instance, Aristotle wrote treatises on physics, but, throughout his entire life, he did not carry out a single experiment. While the Greek scholars contributed greatly to the field of logic, they made no worthwhile contribution in the field of empirical science. The real beginning of science was made when the spirit of free enquiry was created in man. In ancient times, this spirit manifested itself sporadically on the part of individuals, but due to the hostile environment, this could not develop on a large scale.

An environment truly conducive to free enquiry emerged only after the monotheistic revolution of Islam. The Islamic revolution instantly changed the whole atmosphere, paving the way for the work of investigation to go on unhampered. This scientific way of thinking had its beginnings in Mecca. Then it spread to Medina and Damascus, from where it went on to make Baghdad a great centre of innovative thought. From Baghdad, if found its way to Spain, Sicily and Italy, finally spreading all over Europe. It went on spreading, ultimately changing the universal mind.

This evolutionary journey of learning had not been possible before the Islamic revolution. Prior to this, scientific thinking had taken place only at the individual level, or in isolated places and, due to the adversarial atmosphere, it failed to flourish. Islam, for the first time, gave to the world an atmosphere which actively fostered scientific progress.