ISLAM—CREATOR OF THE MODERN AGE

In the Muslim world this revolution was brought about through the influence of religion. The western world, with its own particular circumstances, developed this revolution along different lines, separating secular science from religion. The moon journey is an obvious illustration. Just as nationalisation is an economic part of Marxist philosophy, modern science is a part of Islamic revolution which has been separated from its whole. This is true of all natural sciences. They were forbidden territory because of the polytheistic view of the sanctity of nature's phenomena. Monotheism opened the doors of research and investigation by displacing nature from its sacred pedestal. Thus began a new era of freedom to investigate nature. The slow, thousand-year process culminated (towards the end at an ever-accelerating pace) in modern science and technology. Modern science is wholly the gift of the Islamic revolution—directly in its initial stages and indirectly in its later stages. This truth has been generally acknowledged in one way or another. A number of books —The Scientific Achievement of the Arabs, The Muslim Contribution to Civilization, testify to its general acceptance. Scholars agree that modern industrial progress owes its existence to Arab-Muslim influences. A. Humboldt writes: “It is the Arabs who should be regarded as the real founders of physics.” Philip Hitti writes in his book, History of the Arabs (1970): “No people in the Middle Ages contributed to human progress so much as did the Arabians and the Arabic speaking peoples.” Historians generally accept that it was the science which reached Europe through the Arabs (who were of course Muslims) which finally brought about the renaissance (or the first awakening, to be more precise). Original works in Arabic written after the establishment of Bait al Hikmah in Baghdad in 832 CE, were translated into Latin. “This stream was diverted into Europe by the Arabs in Spain and Sicily which helped create the European Renaissance,” writes Professor Hitti. The history of science can no longer extol the achievements of just one nation, but shows science as a gift of the religion sent by God Almighty for the eternal guidance of all mankind.