Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Islam and Economics (1)

Man has always had to wrestle with the task of exploiting nature's resources to extract his livelihoodtherefrom . In the primitive centuries, as Aristotle said, lifeorganised itself socially "to make it possible to live: and continued, to make it possible to live well." In the last four centuries a "science of economics" has been deduced from the statutes regulating human relations and the exchange ofgoods which developed through this socialorganisation . Faced with the vast expansion of a technology and affluence, this "science" has broken into two opposing camps.

On the oneside "Capitalism" or "free enterprise" believes that nature should take its course in economics, so that an enlightened self-interest causes the genius of some finally to level out to the benefit of all.This is the doctrine for which the Western bloc stands .

On the otherside "Communism" holds that the means of production must be controlled by a proletariat state, so that a just and equal sharing of all the benefits of humanendeavour is imposed on society.

The rivalry for absolute power between these two ideologies hangs over the modern world with a menace like the sword of Damocles.

We must ask Marxists whether their "classless society"can be ensured by the single measure of making the means of production joint property and abolishing a moneyed class, when in fact a diversity of classes exists arising from other than economic causes. While in Soviet Socialist Republics no bourgeois propertied class exists, other classes distinguished by occupational and environmental differences do exist: e.g.

factory-workers , agriculturalists, civil servants, clerks, party officials and numberless others. Do physician and nurse receive equal pay?Or navy and engineer?

There are yet other differences amongstpeople which exist in reality- Lenin's "reality in which we have to orient ourselves." People differ in age, sex, inclinations, tastes, physical strength, appearance, reasoning powers,ideas and outlooks.

A Soviet economist recently wrote ("Economics" Vol. 2, p.216): "It is impracticable to impose absolute equality right across the board. If we were to pay professors, thinkers,politicians and inventors exactly the same as manual workers, the only end-result would be the abolition of all incentives to brainwork of any kind."

Capitalism claims that only by private enterprise and personal propertycan an economy be achieved such that the standard of living of all classes constantly rises and the difference between rich and poor constantly diminishes. Against this claim must be set the report of an enquiry arranged by Walter Reuther, President of the U.S.A.

United Auto Workers Union, in his capacity aschairman of the "American Society to Combat Hunger." This committee affirms that ten million Americans suffer from undernourishment; and asks the president of the republic to declare a state of emergency in 256 cities, situated in 20 of the states, where the danger is most grave.

As causes of this undernourishment, the committee cited the aftermath of World War II coupled with a number of defects in America's internal economy The Secretary of Agriculture took extreme measures to purchase from abroad and commandeer from within all foodstuffs he could lay hands on to fill the gap (UP).

We are bound to ask, therefore, how far any regime, whatever its claims, has succeeded inequalising the classes, eliminating differences and building a sound and just society?

Both Socialist and Capitalist regimes base their systems ontheories which are reverenced without any regard to moral and spiritual values. The aim of each is to increase affluence, and nothing more.

Islam's philosophy reverences the whole man in his world setting. It orders society's materialbehaviour and benefits, while at the same time legislating for moral virtues, spiritual perfections, and a higher standard of living. By this it means, not simply the material, but the mental, the spiritual, the moral, the altruistic, the philanthropicstandards which enable all men to live each for all and all for each.

Western law supports property-rights and gives preference to those of capitalists over those of workers. Soviet law, in their own words, exists to strip the individual of all property rights and to extirpate capital as a personal possession, giving preference to the workers' group throughout. Both systemsare grounded in human reasoning and judgment.

But Islam's law is grounded in Divine Revelation. Its legislation is not a human expedient. It does not set class against class; but helps each group to respect the excellence of other groups. Dictated by the Lord of all creatures for the general good and for the good of all, it permits no class to lord it over others nor allows injustice to break in.

A ruler is in it only an ordinary person with a particular set of duties, himself under law, wielding power solely to ensure that the Divine commandmentsare obeyed in society. Sinceconfidence reigns that God's Law is sovereign, peace and quiet obtain.

Islam on the one hand opposes Capitalism's doctrine that the rights of property-ownership lie outside the limits of state control, and its permitting "free enterprise" to exercise aggression and tyranny of the stronger over the weaker in an exaltation of the rights of the individual to the detriment of the rights of society as a whole: and, on the other hand, does regard the sanctity of property as a fundamental.

Prosperity is the stone on which independence and freedomare built within a social order. The common good must be the regulating principle governing personal ownership of property.Islam therefore equally opposes the Communist total rejection of private enterprise and property, which entrusts the key of bounty to the state, reducing the individual to so subordinate a position that he is left with no intrinsic value in himself as a person, being regarded as a state tool - a stomach for the state to fill and thereafter exploit, as a farmer does his horses and cattle.

Communists hold that private property is not natural to man. They aver, without advancing evidence to support the thesis, that the first communities of primitive man held all things in common in cooperation, love andbrotherhood , neither did any man say that aught that he had was his own. The human "community" started as communist with everything in common and parted to each as his need required. The claim to personal ownership of anything, they contend, only developed by slow degrees until it reached the terrifying excesses it manifests in today's world.

Their utopian "Golden Age" is, alas, a pipe-dream : for the facts show that personal ownership is not a result of the development of acquisitive tendencies in a particular environment. Property is coeval with the appearance of man on earth: it is as germane to human nature as all the other innate urges, and no more tobe denied than they are.

Modern economists say that the universal sense of ownership of property, whichis found in every tribe on earth and in every epoch, can only be explained if it is a primal instinct. Man wants to be the sole master of the goods that minister to his needs, in order to feel truly free and independent. Further, a man feels thatgoods which owe their existence to the hard work of his hands are in a way an extension of himself, deserving of the same respect as he demands for the integrity of his personality.

Finally, he feels the inner urge to build up a store to ensure his future and that of his family, developing thereby a thrift andeconomy which make him lay up a provision against a rainy day: This store he thereafter guards jealously as "his own".

The community's wealth grows with the increase in private property and productivity, for a social unit subsists by the industry of its individual members. The incentive to hard work lies in its rewards in personal ownership and in increased ease of living. Wherefore society must concede to the individual the right to own what his toil has created, since society's own welfare is itself a product of that toil.

Islam, with its practical and realistic approach to man as he is,recognises the importance of the urge to own as a creative factor for all social progress; and therefore legislates to secure a man possession of all that his hand has won for him by proper and lawful means, regarding his productivity as the guarantee of his right to ownership.

Islam rejects the contention that oppression,exploitation and violence are inevitable concomitants of private ownership; for they only appear where the legislative power is held by the richest class, and by them, as in Western lands, directed solely to the protection of their own interests.

Since Islamic Law derives solely from the supreme overarching Authority of God, it is whollyimpartial : so no law can be devised by it with the aim of protecting the rich or injuring the poor. From its inception, Islam hasrecognised private property, but always only under such conditions that violence and oppressionare ruled out of court.

Islam holds that it is wrong to wrest factories out of the hands of those who founded them and who, by patient endurance of hardship and toil, built them up to givelabour to many, goods to society, and, ofcourse, also profit to themselves. For Islamholds that such resort to violence in removing the means of production from the hands of men of initiative is injurious to social security and to respect for the rights of the individual.

It discourages the spirit of invention and initiative and enterprise.Nonetheless the government can and should so control the administration of great industries and the establishment of factories that social justice, equity in profit, public benefits and the government's own finances are properly cared for.

In sum, Islamic economics gives joint primacy to both individual and community. It equably balances the interests and rights of these two elements by guaranteeing a free economy while safeguarding the freedom of the individual member and the benefit of the whole community simultaneously by certain reasonable and necessary regulations on private ownership.

The urge for such ownership itrecognises as innate, and therefore germane to human nature, so that the onlylimits which may be imposed upon it are those dictated by the general interests of the whole society, which of course contains the best interests of each single member.

Islam regards the instinct to possess as an incentive divinely implanted to inspire men to hard work for the improvement of the means of livelihood and of their increased production: yet regulates the expression of this incentive with conditions that obviate violence, oppression, exploitation, extortion and other forms of misuse of freedom.

These conditions safeguard the interests of society and are limits on individual independence in no way injurious to liberty, since both communal living and individual freedom must impose those limits onbehaviour which will guarantee the survival of both individual and community.and must therefore outlaw profiteering, embezzlement,malversation , hoarding, miserliness, avarice, usury, forcible seizure of other people's property and all similar criminal and anti-social methods of amassing capital.

Islam and Economics (2)

Economic historians tell us that at its inception the capitalist system was simple andbeneficent : but that the habit of granting loans at interest step by step grew to its present harmful excess. With this came the bankrupting of small concerns and their amalgamation into huge complex companies and financial structures. Islam labels such usury '"sin", as it does also the crises of boom and slump inseparable from the system.

Islam has legislated for a payment of "Zakat " (the Poor Rate) of 20% on capital gains by the rich for the support of the indigent. This helps to level out differences, to draw economic extremes closer together and to curb excessive piling up of wealth. Another Islamic regulation with the same aim and same results is the government's right to tax wealth for national finances, since Islam holds that God has put His good gifts into this world for the benefit of all, as may be seen by the forests,reedbeds , pastures, desert lands, mountain ranges,mines.up

Estates, too, become public either through the intestacy of a deceased owner or because they are paid as fines in restitution; so that they are as much the property of all as God meant all things to be. Islam's testamentary laws also curb undue accumulation of property in the hands of one family from generation to generation.

The conditions, therefore, by which Islam limits its respect for the rights of private ownership, arethose which are dictated by the need to assure that the individual's privileges never menace the wellbeing of the Islamic community. Therefore, in emergency or disorder, the just Islamic government can employ the legal powers put at its disposal both to avertdangers which threaten the future and also so to administer society as to meet the needs of the Muslim masses, any time it sees fit.

A country's land may not fall into the possession of a small handful of proprietors. Indigence and malnutrition of the massesmay not be ignored . These pointsare fixed principles, frankly and firmly, faithfully and forcefully, propounded by Islam . The Faith condemns the injurious intrusion of modem capitalist practices into the Muslim world and bans the greed andavarice which lead to enslavement, war and imperialism.

In theQur'an it is written (Sura 59-"Al-Heshr "-"The Gathering of Troops" verse 7 in part):

"The dispositions we have revealed for the distribution ofproperty . are ordained that capital may not merely circulate round the group of capitalists amongst you." In addition to the legalenactments which ensure the correct use of finances and resources by punishing transgressions, Islam also brings entirely new motives to bear, as ourQur'anic quotation hints, by directing men's aspirations towards God.

It therefore streamlines their conduct within the confines of the road that leads to Him. This road has moral fences on either side over which the aspirant desires not to stray. The road is paved with philanthropy, affection, and sentiments of charity and self-sacrifice, which mean that no Muslim will voluntarily be a party to courses ofaction which lead to injustice to others.Thus the individual's conscience refuses to pile up excessive capital, and the employer refuses to use tyranny or oppression to compel his workers to produce.

This lofty spiritual challenge, directed towards helping the individual come toa knowledge of God and so to love of hisneighbour , is deeply planted within the conscience, so that a man finds his pleasures and his treasures in pleasing his Creator; and these excel all other values for him.

Intruth it is the decline of faith today, and the diminution of belief in doomsday and judgment, which led to the greed and cupidity andmaleficence and the forms of injustice and oppression which we see around us. Unless men's relationships are right with God, their relationships will not be right with one another. A revolution of conscience produces a revolution in the soul, in society, and in the world. Such is the lesson of history in practice, as well as the doctrine of religion.

The same considerations apply to the ideology of Communism, and itwill be readily seen that Islamic lore is superior to both the Western and Eastern materialist excesses.

Modern philosophers like William James, Harold Laski, John Strachey, Walter Lippmann,criticise Communists' total abrogation of personal and social affairs infavour of the state authority, saying that the individual's personality and initiativeare suffocated in such an ambience. While on theother hand capitalist democracy over-emphasises individual freedom to the detriment of social progress.

This creates an oligarchy of the rich, making them masters of the means of production and turning all men into slaves of economics. From opposingangles they come to a common conclusion that individuals must impose an inner discipline on themselves if they are to enjoy true freedom, contradictory as that may seem, and that the welfare of society depends upon the responsible exercise by its members of that self-disciplined freedom.

What is their conclusion other than a restatement of thedoctrine which Islam has been preaching for 14 centuries? It is time that the lessons of history, the conclusions of the philosophers and the doctrines of religionwere made the guidelines for the conduct of men and communities everywhere.

In AD1951 the Paris College of Law devoted a week to the study of.the Islamic "Feqh " (Canon Law). They called in experts from Islamic lands round the world for elucidation of particular points, e.g.:

1. Islamic Canon Law on property;

2. Conditions for filing deeds of exchange on property to preserve the welfare of society and the public;

3. Criminal responsibility;

4. The reciprocal influence of Islamic faith and Canon Law on each other.

The head of the Parisian Lawyers' Society chaired the conference and summed up at the endthus: "Whatever our earlier ideas about Islamic law and its rigidity or incompetence in documenting transactions, we have been compelled to revise them in this conference. Letme sum up the new insights - new I think to most of us - the conference has given us, in this week devoted particularly to theFeqh , Islamic Canon Law.

We saw in it a depth of rock-bottom principle and ofparticularised care which embraces mankind in its universality and is thus able to give an answer to all the emergencies and events of this age.

In our finalcommunique we say. 'Islam's Canon Law should be made one of the formative elements of all new international legislation to meet present-day conditions, since it possesses a legal treasure of stable universal value which fits itsFeqh , amongst the modern welter of religious views and pronouncements, to cope with the exigencies imposed by the new forms of living arising in the modern environment'."

* The aridsunbaked expanses of the Islamic belt ofterritory which stretches from the Mauritanian Atlantic coast nearly 6,000 miles through the Soviet Muslim Republics of the Western Gobi, can support only a scant human population, while the paucity of vegetation forces a nomad migratory way of life upon livestock-owners, if they are to find pasturage.

Hence our author's list of the publicly owned benefits of God'sgifts : while his omission of sunlight and rain.which are natural in the thought of Westerners as free for all, are not mentioned because that belt has always too much sunshine and too little rainfall (Translator's note).

Islam and Intellectual Advance

Most Westerners are ignorant of the debt theircivilisation owes to Islam, even for modern industrial transformation, scientificadvance and philosophical enterprise.

Islam came into the world in the bosom of one of the most backward of peoples. In a very shorttime it had raised those tribes to pre-eminence in every field.

Its greatest miracle was its appearance as afullgrown adult of the spirit in so degraded and poverty -stricken an environment.

Its second miracle was the raising of that environment, by sheer force of inspiration, without any extraneous aids, to an unmatched destiny. Its third was to create a cultural focus from which strong waves radiated, stimulating renascence in other peoples of every background throughout the world.

The changes it wrought compose history's greatest revolution so far, a revolution in sense and sensibility, in thought and intellect, in relations of individuals and communities, and indeed in every department of human life.

By the end of its firstmillennium Islam stretched from the Atlantic coast of Africa in the west to the Great Wall of China in the east, from the Mediterranean to the Sahara in Africa. InSpain its troops took first Andalusia, then all Spain up to the Pyrenees, and even penetrated the south of France as far north as Tours. All the "Jezirat-ul ' Arab" was of course Muslim. From Muslim Iran andAfghanistan other troops took Sind, the Punjab and the Gobi - and this within a few short centuries.

In all itsdominions the principles worked out in the Arab homeland were applied to the new societies under its sway. Inparticular its justice, equality and brotherhood, humane fruits of its meticulous care for the individual and his place in society, which are the distinguishing marks of Islam, set their stamp on the communities over this entire vast area.

The first task was the overthrow of tyrannies : the second was the establishment of sound Islamic rule and respect for human rights : the third was the illumination of intellect, research and thought: the fourth was the propagating of the faith by its calm appeal to reason and logic and by its profundity and breadth of vision: the fifth - and perhaps the most glorious because the most anonymous-was the infection of other nations, of all creeds and none, with its own superior moral, mental and spiritual outlook.

This last achievement not merely raised the general level of peoples of every religion throughout the world, but also drew many proselytes to itself from the idolaters of Arabia, the animists of Africa, theMagians and Zoroastrians of Iran, and the Christians of Egypt and Syria.

Pre-Muslim Arabia had no trace of culture, no science, no erudition, no economics; for geographical reasons Arabs lived in penury and squalor, the prey of superstitions, isolated from world currents. Islam changed all that, and went on to open the hearts and brains of men everywhere to new possibilities.

In far-off Andalusia a school of scholars, writers, mathematicians, scientific researchers and philosophers arose, inspired by Islam to revive the level of thought reached by the Greeks 1500 years earlier, and to move on up from there to heights never before touched by man.

Modern scholars in every country,. even those whose prejudices would make them prefer to maintain a critical and hostile attitude to Islam, more and more draw attention to the speed of the spread of the Muslim faith, to its beneficent results for mankind's prowess in thought and study, and the progressiveness of the ideas which it brought to other stagnantcivilisations .

It should be noted by all our "progressives" everywhere, that this brilliant advance for all humanity was the concomitant of a moral self-discipline, of an eschewing of the dissipation which follows upon loosing the reins of passion, and of a deliberate control of the creative instincts, whichchannelled them into works of artistic, intellectual, and social creativity worthy of mature human beings.

This inner discipline, which man needs, promotes the inner freedom he desires; and it is one cause ofIslam' s wide dominion over the minds of men of the early Middle Ages. For it offered not merely sounder outward forms of living but reassurance to the inner core of the spirit. It abolished the wild persecutions brought about by purblind bigotry and by narrow-minded fanaticism.

It was for this reason that the SultanKemal-ul-Mulk , nephew ofSaladdin , talked asman to man , and as scion of the same spirit, to Francis of Assisi when the Saint crossed the lines from the camp of the Crusaders under King Louis, whom the Muslims had halted before Damietta. It was the same universalhumanity which caused the vast contrast between Omar's merciful treatment of the Christians in Jerusalem when he conquered it,

and the barbarous massacre of Jerusalem's Muslim inhabitants by the European Crusaders who took it back for a brief period 300 years later. Islam replaced such savagery with a constitutional rule, a humanely regulated society, an overarching philosophy embracing allmankind.

In Europe's Dark Ages, while the Church established its power over the different nationalities, and fettered them in restraining bonds in a status quo, Islam was building up a many-sidedculture which laid the basis for that flowering of science, knowledge, and artistic and technological creativity which is called the "Renaissance".

This was while the Church was condemning Galileo for confirming Copernicus' theory of the orbiting of the earth round the sun, and forcing him to his famous recantation: "I, GalileoGalilei , in the 70th year of my age (1633 AD), on my knees before your Reverences (the Pope and Bishops) with the Holy Scriptures before my eyes, take them in my hands and kiss them while repenting and denying the foolish claim that the earth moves, and regard that claim as a hateful heresy," even while he muttered rebelliously sotto voce "Eppure si muove ".

Yet 500 years previously our own great astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyam ofNishapur (floruit 2nd half of 11th century AD, when William the Bastard was conquering England) had provided Iran with theJalali Calendar which to this day enables us to start our new year not merely on the day, but on the exact hour, minute, and second that the earth terminates one orbit and starts another round the sun at the vernal equinox!

How few Westerners know this! They think of him as a poet, though he was an indifferent one, but do notrealise that if they had picked up his wisdom they might have avoided all their Gregorian alterations of the Julian calendar, and the loss of their "11 days"!

Roger Bacon (1214-1292 AD) the Franciscans' "Doctor mirabilis", was in the reign of Edward I of England compelled to give up the experimental research into science to which his lectures in Paris on Aristotle's works and in particular on the "Liber deCausis " had led him', and was driven out from Oxford back to Paris to be kept under the Church's eye-an eye too narrow and bigoted to see the wealth of the scientific treasures he was offering them.

He was arraigned as a dabbler in devilish and satanic alchemy: and the mob was incited to yell for this sorcerer's hand to be cut off and this Muslim' (!) to be exiled."

Nowadays European and American historians and scholars allrecognise and relate the fundamental contributions made by Islam to all modern advances in science, mathematics, technology, philosophy, in many ways of which this brief chapter has only been able to touch the fringe.

Cultural Revolution

No better evidence of the passion of Islam for the spread of erudition, from its very inception, can be given than the words of the Prophet himself who said, after the battle ofBadr and the Muslims' victory, to the huge crowds whom they had taken prisoner, that any of them who wished to buy their freedom but had no cash for a ransom could employ their literacy as their resources; and any polytheist who trained ten Muslims to read and write should win freedom. His pronouncementwas put into practice; and it was thus that a large number of his original adherents were started on the road of education.

His nephew and successor, Imam Ali, onwhom be blessing, declared that the spreading of science and knowledge and culture and intellectual ability was one of the merits to be coveted and achieved by every Muslim government. In the record of hiswords it is reported that he said: "O people!I have rights over you and you have rights over me. Your right overme is to insist that I shall always give you guidance and counsel.and seek your welfare, and improve the public funds and all your livelihoods, and help raise you from ignorance and illiteracy to heights of knowledge, learning, culture, social manners and good conduct."

215 years after theHejra the Abbasid CaliphMa'amoun founded a "House of Wisdom" in Baghdad to be a centre of science, and furnished it with an astronomical observatory and a public library for which he set aside 200,000 dinars (the equivalent of some 7 million dollars). Hegathered together a large number of learned men who were acquainted with foreign languages and different disciplines,

likeHonain andBakht-eeshoo ' andIbn Tariq andlbn Muqafa ' andHajaj binMatar andSirgis Ra'asi , and others too numerous to mention, and set aside a large sum for them, dispatching many of them to all the different countries of the world to collect books on science, medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and fine literature, in Hindi,Pahlevi , Chaldean,Syriac , Greek, Latin and Farsi. Itis said that the vast collections they sent to Baghdad exceeded 100 camel loads!

Europe had not one university or cultural centre to show for itself in those centuries when Islamic lands had large numbers staffed by experts and specialists in all branches of knowledge. These Islamiccentres were beginning to radiate waves of brilliant new thinking to the world at the very moment when the Crusadeswere launched .

In fact it might be said that it was the new learning fostered by Islam which itself furnished the Europeans with some of their new thinking that made possible whatever prowess they achieved in those disastrous wars and fired the passion of jealousy and cupidity which made the West wish to seize for itself the treasures which they saw Islam bringing to the nations under its sway.

Dr.Gustave Le Bon writes on page 329 of volume III of his "History of Islamic and ArabCivilisation ". "In those days when books and libraries meant nothing to Europeans, many Islamic lands had books and libraries in plenty. Indeed, in Baghdad's 'House of Wisdom' there were four million volumes ; and in Cairo'sSultanic Library one million; and in the library of Syrian Tripoli three million volumes; while in Spain alone under Muslim rule there was an annual publication of between 70 and 80 thousand volumes."

G.l'Estrange in his "Legacy of Islam" page 230 writes: "TheMustansariyya University was furnished with equipment and built in a huge campus with college edifices of suchsplendour that its peer exists neither in the Muslim world nor elsewhere. Its four law-colleges, each with 75 students and a professor who taught the pupils gratis, paid its professor a monthly salary, while each of the 300 students was given a gold dinar a month.

A college kitchen provided the daily meals.Ibn -el-Farat says that the library contained priceless and unique volumes, on many branches of science, for any student to borrow. Pens and paperwere provided for the notes anyone might wish to take.

The university hadhammams (baths) and infirmaries. Its doctors conducted a daily inspection of the colleges, and wrote prescriptions for any who were ill. The college stores were able to dispense drugs prescribed, immediately.All this at the beginning of the 13th century AD!"

Dr. Max Meyerhofwrites: "InIstambul the mosques possess between them more than 80 libraries, with tens of thousands of books and ancient manuscripts. In Cairo, Damascus, Mosul, Baghdad, and in cities of Iran and of India there are other great libraries full of treasures. A proper catalogue of the precious volumes in all thesehas not yet been published complete in print.

Moreover the Escorial library in the Iberian Peninsula contains a huge section filled with books and manuscripts produced by the Islamic scholars of the West, which also awaits completion of its cataloguing."

Dr.Gustave Le Bon writes on pages 55778 of his "Islamic and ArabCivilisation ". "The Muslims pursued the sciences with profound application. In any town they took, their first act was to build a mosque and thereafter a college. This led to the production of majestic institutions of learning in a vast number of cities.

Benjamin Toole (ob. 1173 AD) said that in Alexandria he found more than 20 colleges at work. Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova, and other places all had great universities with laboratories, observatories, hugelibraries and all the other requirements for tackling intellectual problems. In Andalusiaalone there were 70 public libraries.

The library of Al-Hakem II in Cordova contained 600,000 volumes and it took 44 volumes to catalogue thelibrary' s contents. When Charles the Just, four centuries later, founded theBibliotheque Nationale of Paris he was only able to assemble a total of 900 volumes, and that after greatlabours , while one-third of that 900 were books on religion."

The same author on page 562adds : "The Muslims launched science on the road of exactitude, experiment and forward-looking discovery by hypothesis, with a particular enthusiasm, while producing books and treatises and high schools that spread their intellectual prowess to all corners of the world. They thereby opened for Europe the road to its renaissance.

So it is with justification that the title of "Europe's Professor' is given to the newly-arisen Islamic power, since it was through them that the treasures of ancient Greek and Roman science were rediscovered and enhanced and given back to Europe as she began to emerge from the Dark Ages."

Josef MarcKapp writes, concerning the first centuries of Islam's progress in culture, in his book '"MuslimSplendour in Spain" (p.170). "Even the lowest classes in society were athirst to learn to read; and humble workers limited their expenditure on food and clothing and spent their lastsou on buying books. One worker collected such a library that men of learning flocked to him. Freed slaves and the children of slaves entered the ranks of the learned; and men like Vafyat-ul -A'iyan lbn Khalkan laid the foundations for great progress".

Nehru wrote concerning the benefits conferred on social progress and the cultural revolution of the Muslims in Andalusia in his book "A Glimpse at World History" (p.413): "Cordova had over a million inhabitants, a magnificent public park of about 20kilometres and suburbs stretching40kilometres , with 6,000 palaces, mansions and great houses, 200,000 smaller houses of beauty, 70,000 stores and small shops, 300 mosques, 700hammams with hot and cold baths for public use.

There were innumerable libraries of which the most comprehensive and important was the Royal Library, which contained 400,000 volumes. Cordova University was famous throughout Europe and in western Asia. At the sametime education was provided for the poor. Indeed one of their contemporary historians writes that nearly everyone in Spain in those days could read and write,

while in the rest of Christian Europe, apart from the monks and clearly persons who were educated through religious houses, no one, including the highest members of the nobility,

thought it worth his while even to attempt to master basic arts of reading." To illustrate these claims I append eight extremely brief chapters, each on a different branch of science or culture; my debt I gladly acknowledge to Arnold and Guillaume's ." Legacy of Islam" (publ. O U.P. 1931) to whichI refer any reader who wishes to extend his information.

Medical Science

Dr. Meyerhof writes in "The Legacy of Islam" (p.132). "Muslim doctors laughed at the Crusaders' medical attendants for their clumsy and elementary efforts. The Europeans had not the advantage of the books of Avicenna,Jaber , Hassan binHaytham ,Rhazes .However they finally had them translated into Latin. These translations exist still, without the translators' names. In the 16th century the books of Averroes (Ibn Rushd ) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina ) were put out in Latin translation in Italy and used as the basis of instruction in the Italian and French universities."

Onpage 116 of the same work he writes that afterRhazes ' death the works of Avicenna (AD 980-1037) were taken up. His influence on thought and philosophy and general science was profound, and his medical works (based on the works ofGalen which he had found in the Samarqand library in Arabic translation) had a sensational outreach.

Other scientists followed -Abu'l-Qais of Andalusia;lbn-Zahr of Andalusia;Abbas theIrani ; Aliibn-Rezvan of Egypt;Ibn Butlan of Baghdad-Abu MansurMuwaffaq of Herat.Ibn Wafeed of Spain;Masooya of Baghdad; AliIbn -Esau of Baghdad;Ammar of Mosul;Ibn-Rushd (Averroes) of Andalusia. whose works translated to Latin were used in European universities.

Europe knew nothing of the cholera bacterium when Islam entered Spain, and the people there regarded the disease as a punishment sent from heaven to exact the penalty ofsins : but Muslim physicians had already proved that even the bubonic plague was a contagious disease and nothing else.

Dr. Meyerhof writes of Avicenna's book "The Canon" that it is a masterpiece of medical science which proved its worth by being printed in a series of 16 editions in the closing years of the 15th century AD, 15 Latin and one Arabic. In the 16thcentury more than a score of further editions were published, because of its value as a scientific work. Its use continued throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, so that it became the most widely known.of all medical treatises. Itis still consulted in medical schools.

Will Durantwrites that Mohammadibn ZachariahRazi (Rhazes ) was one of Islam's most progressive physicians, author of 200 treatises and books well worth studying today.in particular his 1. "Smallpox and Measles" (published in Latin and other European tongues in 40 editions between 1497 and 1866), and2 .

"The Great Encyclopedia" 20 volumes mostly unobtainable nowadays: five volumes were devoted to optics; translated into Latin AD 1279. printed in five editions in 1542 alone; known as the most authoritative work on the eye and its ailments and treatment for centuries; one of the nine basic works on which Paris University composed its medical course in 1394 AD.

Surgery made similar progress in the hands of Islamic practitioners, who even usedanaesthetics , though theseare assumed to be of modern origin. They employed a henbane base.

AmongRhazes ' innovations was the use of cold water to treat persistent fever, ofdry-cupping for apoplexy, of mercury ointment and animal gut for wound sutures, and many others. Further information on Islamic medicinecan be sought from the many books on the subject. The diagnosis of tuberculosis from the fingernails, the cure of jaundice,

the use of cold water to prevent hemorrhage, the crushing of stones in bladder and kidney to facilitate their removal, and surgery for hernia are among advances too numerous to mention in detail.

The greatest of Islamic surgeons wasAbu'l-Qasem of Andalusia, affectionately calledAbu'l-Qays , and sometimesAbu'l-Qasees ,floruit 11th century AD inventor of very many surgical instruments and author of books to describe them and their uses - books translated and printed in innumerable editions in Latin and used all over Europe, the last such edition being in 1816.

Pharmacology

Gustave le Bon writes : "Besides the use of cold water to treat typhoid cases - a treatment later abandoned, though Europe is taking this Muslim invention up again in modern times after a lapse of centuries-Muslims invented the art of mixing chemical medicaments in pills and solutions, many of which are in use to this day,

though some of them are claimed as wholly new inventions of our present century by chemists unaware of their distinguished history. Islam had dispensaries which filled prescriptions for patients gratis, and in parts of countries where no hospitals were reachable, physicians paid regular visits with all the tools of their trade to look after public health."

Georgi Zeidan writes: "Modern European pharmacologists who have studied the history of their profession find that Muslim doctors launched many of the modern beneficial specifics centuries ago, made a science of pharmacology and compound cures, and set up the first pharmacies on the modern model.

So that Baghdad alone had 60 chemists' shops dispensing prescriptions regularly at the charges of the Caliph. Evidence of these facts can be seen in the names given in Europe to quite a number of medicines and herbs which betray their Arabic, Indian or Persian origin." Such are "alcohol, alkali,alkaner , apricot, arsenic," to quote some 'a's alone.