Islamic Scholarship Quotes
This is a very important point as most Muslims believe that the actual wording of the Sharia—Islamic Law—comes from the Prophet directly and are not the words of various legal scholars which is just what they are. Needless to say, there are many differences and even contradictions depending on time and the particular scholar. Islam however has no authority that religiously is higher than any other. In that respect, it is like Judaism. There is not a recognized religious hierarchy as there is in Christian churches.
In early Islam, scholarship and science was encouraged in all fields and in most areas the Muslims state of knowledge was greater than that of Christian Europe. However, over time the fundamentalists restricted the concept of knowledge to the Koran under the theory that anything worth knowing was in the Koran and that which was not should not be studied. In modern times Islamic nations, holding this very narrow view of education and learning, have intellectually stagnated—especially in modern science, technology, politics and philosophy. Most Islamic universities and madrasses teach only theological subjects and Koranic prescriptions of life and law and the few exceptions tend to be in strongly secular countries like Turkey.
The Messenger is Muhammed, founder of Islam. The Hadith are his sayings which have been compiled but are not in the Koran.
Many Muslims did not want science and technology to fall into the hands of the heathens. Even today America limits the information and technological products that can be exported to the Islamic nations. At the time it was the case that some Christian and Jewish Scholars translated Islamic scientific treatises and promoted them under their own name, but most of the translations were published and labeled as such .The reason was that at that time Europe was emerging from the Dark Ages and was scientifically relatively ignorant whereas the Muslims had the best scientists and mathematicians in the world. It was more prestigious and credible to attribute science material to Muslims. At the same time, a good bit of the Islamic science texts were translations of the great Greek scientists and some Muslims offered it as their own. Most however translated the Greek works and labeled it as such. Ibn Abdun quotations are very important because he wrote many of the Islamic legal opinions that governed Muslim Spain and influenced the Arabs of North Africa.
This quote is significant for several reasons. First, it illustrates the theological dimension of the Saudi Arabian kingdom where the Royal Family maintains its position by always accommodating and financing the Wahabi fundamentalist version of Islam. Second, it shows how difficult it is for modern science to be taught and understood in fundamentalist Islamic societies. Third, it illustrates a historically classic repressive logic: He who disagrees with the current religious orthodoxy is disagreeing with the espousers of that religion. And if the espousers are wrong, they are lying. Therefore the dissenter is accusing God and his prophets of being liars. That is blasphemy and an insult to all believers. Last, it illustrates the parallel between Islam and Christianity in development. The latter is 700 years older than Islam, and about that long ago, the Roman Catholic Church repressed Galileo for claiming that the Earth was not the center of the universe.
Soon after individual inquiry and interpretation was discouraged and then made illegal and punished just as with the Christian Church at the time. Thereafter, the Islamic societies were intellectually closed and deteriorated resembling the Christian state of intellectuality. The Christians began to slowly liberalize and the Protestant Reformation spurred new thinking and Christianity was reinvented by both Catholics and Protestants and Christian intellectual, political, and economic development thrived. Islam has not yet had a reformation but there are modernist Muslims trying. See {623580} .
