Recently, the institution I work at was granted the "Muslim Journeys Bookshelf Collection. They even had a week of events on the culture of Islam to promote the collection. Although I was not able to attend any of these events, I was able to attend one event at Rutgers University as they also had been given the same grant. I was visiting for fun and then I had seen the ad on the event, it was very interesting. Yesterday I picked up two books from the collection
http://bridgingcultures.neh.gov/muslimjourneys/bookshelf
I am currently reading the following:
"The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance"
I have a side interest in Islamic history when the ummah was at what I like to term as "its high point". It makes you think to yourself what happen to us!?
Here are my favorite parts of the book so far and I am only upto chapter 3 !
"Yet in order to understand this sudden flourishing of scholarship, we must look back in time to see how Islam rose out of the Arabian desert two hundred years earlier. Why did the golden age of science take place during the reign of the Abbasids of Baghdad, when nothing of any real intellectual consequence had taken place in that part of the world since the decline of the Liberty of Alexandria hundreds of years before the arrival of Islam" (Al Khalili 17).
"The early thinkers were quite clear about their mission: the Quran required them to study alsamawat wal arth (the skies and the earth) to find proof of their faith. The Prophet himself had besought his disciples to seek knowledge no matter how far that search took them for, "he who travels in search of knowledge, travels along Allahs path to paradise". (Introduction).
"One cannot, therefore, understand Arabic science without considering the extent to which Islam influenced scientific and philosophical thought. Arabic science, was throughout its golden age, is linked to religion. Clearly the scientific revolution of the Abbasids would not have taken place if it were not for Islam..." (Al Khalili 33).
"It had taken a new Islamic Empire to achieve the necessary unity between difeernt peoples and cultures, but it was this empires multicultural and multifaith tolerance that fostered a real sense of expectancy and optimism, and this would usher in a golden age of enlightenment and intellectual progress" (Al Khalili 33).
"The rest of Arabia was inhabited mostly by nomadic Arab tribes. Long before the birth of Muhammad, however, these people were already beginning to develop a sense of cultural identity. Despite their wide range of different dialects, a common Arabic language had begun to develop, mainly through the reciting of poetry. The qasida or ode was an important feature of the cultural life of Arabia, otfen telling of lost love or tribal victory. Most of them were not written down but memorized. The Arabic script that was to be later used in the Quran still had some way to go before it would reach the level of maturity it has today, and its rules and grammatical nuances would take centuries to be established by scholars keen to remove any ambiguities of meaning from the Quran" (Al Khalili 19).
I found this section about the memorization of poetry very interesting because just this week during my Seerah Al Nabwi course, Sheikh Mohamed Moussa spoke about how we have so much clarity on the life of the Prophet, and how it is so beautiful that we have so much information and details on the Prophets life. The question the Sheikh posed is: What are the means that allowed all the details of the life of the Prophet to be available. You can look at the Prophets life from Salat Fajr to the next Salat Fajr in full detail subhanAllah. One of the means he mentioned was that someone was always around the Prophet. Whether his wives at home who gave us an inside look of what he did at home, or his friends outside who also taught us alot about the Prophet. The sheikh also mentioned how Arabs at the time did not know how to write, but they had amazing memory. They were able to memorize every detail, and the Prophets exact words.
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