Islam and western Education

Islam is not merely a creed, it is a way of life, a life to be lived. There is nothing intrinsic to Islam which for birds its adherents to acquire knowledge of any sort whether art, Science, technology or theology. What we find instead is that, all over the pages of the Holy Quran, there are verses and hadith which enjoin Muslims to seek Knowledge, even form china, ostensibly because China was of the farthest part of the then known world with Mecca as the center. This injunction made many of the earliest Muslims travel to various part of the world in search of knowledge, and these men were to establish the foundation of our present day civilization.
In Islam, man is free to investigate not only the things on earth but explore the regions in space. A Quranic verse reminds the Muslim that a He (Allah) had made subservient to thee whatever is in the Heavens and whatever is in the earth's. Even in the Surah-Fatihah, which is regarded as the mother of the Quran, reference is made to Allah as "Lord of the Heaven" in chapter 11 verse 190, the Quran sites "the sun and the moon follow a reckoning and the herbs do obeys" an expression of a basic geographical phenomenon which anecdotes its discovery in the west by several centuries.
These and other verses of the Quran clearly show, if nothing else, that there is no conflict between Islam and philosophy (from the latter sprung most of the modem branches of knowledge).
Several passages can be cited in the Holy turban which show that, besides making it obligatory on the Muslim to seek knowledge, the Holy Quran itself contains, the gems of all branches of science, man must explore and reflect on the phenomena of nature. The Quran offers rudimentary explanations of such phenomena as the creation of the heavens and the earth, the change of the seasons, the rotation of the earth and its consequences, the nature and composition of the sun, the moon. Star, clouds, the winds, the seas and the sun and the laws of nature they obey. The Muslim must reflect on the mysteries of life - death and birth, growth and decay : the changes in weather, sunset and sunrise, heat and cold. The Quran offers explanations for the observed behavior of these natural phenomena explanations which, in modern parlance, could be referred to as hypothesis. Hypotheses are not meant to be taken for granted. It is therefore, the duty of the Muslim to use the 'bounties' bestowed on him, his knowledge and his 'power' to search the underlying dynamics of these phenomena. But the Quran sounds a note of warning :
O ye collective body of jinns and the Men! If you can penetrate the regions of the Heavens and the rotatory earth then do pass through. You will not be able to penetrate except by means of authority (Power or knowledge) Quran 55:33.
This 'power' takes the form of technology today and man has in fact been able to penetrate the 'heaven' by means of precision instruments, such as the rocket. The American scientists have landed on the moon, landed scientific instrument on the mars and are on their way to Saturn.
Following the death of the Prophet of Islam, Muslim rulers and scholars began a wave of expansion and scholastic activities on which our present day civilization largely rests. Muslims dominated the world of academic scholarship. A handful of scholars contend with threat, they argue that there is nothing original in the literature of the scholars the Muslim leaders patronized. Besides, they add, the philosophical work of the Greeks and their works of medical, physical sciences were translated from Greek to Arabic not by Muslim scholars but by Syrian Christians. The scholars who argue like this are primitive about the development of scientific knowledge even our present scientific development has to be developed by past knowledge to what we have today. However there is a general consensus among a majority of scholars that it was indeed the Muslims scholars who, partly through their own ingenuity, but more through their contact with the past, made available to the western world most of the raw materials of the Renaissance. They learned, translated and published the philosophy and literature of Plato, the logic of Aristotle, the medical works of Hippocrates etc. They translated, interpreted and elaborated works in Sanskrit which were largely on mathematics, medicine, astronomy and literature. The success of these scholars was owning greatly to the 'Royal patronage' they enjoyed from the Muslim rulers, particularly those of the Umayyad period and later the abased. During the rule of Yizid the second Umayyad Caliph, his son patronized the translation of Hellenic works on Chemistry and Astronomy. Caliph Harun is said to have founded a college and an academy of science in Baghdad. It was at this Bayt-al-Hikmah (House of Philosophy) that most of the earliest studies and research by Muslim scholars were carried out.
The contribution of the Muslims in the field of science and Philosophy, then, is tremendous. In the field of astronomy, the works of Yahya b. Mansur, Sanad b. Ali and Umar Khayyam were remarkable. Mohammed b. Musa al-Khwarzani(d.850) is regarded as the father of Algebra. The numerical systems now widely used all over the western world owe their origin to Muslim scholars. Some scholars have pointed out that words like alcohol, alembic, and Alkali are of Arabic origin, and that these, together with a number of chemicals (such as sulphuric add, nitric acid, potassium ammonia salt, etc.) are discoveries of Muslims scholars. The works of Razi (notably the "container") and the well- known lbn Sina or Avicenna (whose 'Canon' is still a rich source of Scientific lore) are considered advanced works even by contemporary standards. bn Zohr of Muslim Andalusia (Spain) is said to have, in the 12th century A.D., Introduced a method of scienffic observation in medicine surgery and pharmacology. Ibn Baytar is regarded as one of the foremost botanists of the Muslim era of glory. He lived in Malaca (a city in Andalusia) where he wrote his two great works on Bot-my. As is generally conceded by western scholars it was through the writing of Muslim historians and travellers that much of the interior of Africa was known. The foremost of them were Ibn Babel and Hassan b. Mohammed al-wazza al-zayyati, re-named Leo Africans by the Venicians. Now, what can we bring out of all this rather lengthy historical exercise from the above? The point is that there is in Islam, nothing that militates against philosophical inquiry - using the term in its traditional, per " 20th-century sense to accommodate all branches of knowledge. In fact, in Islam, as Albert Einstein is quoted as once saying (obviously in different context) "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind". This is the view of Islam, in Islam there wasn't, nor should there now be any controversy of the sort that welcomed the publication of J. Darwin's Origin of the Species' a controversy that still rages between the western scientist and the western theologian. In fact, the Darwinian theory of the evolution of man and animal accords in its fundamentals with what Islam believes.
The only difference is that Islam believes that there is a divine purpose that governs our existence and that the 'Vital Force' has a say in the survival, selection, and evolution of man or animal. There is no doubt that the image of Christianity as portrayed by the Church with in suppression of science and its persecution of scientist created a big conflict in intellectuals in Europe out of which many have emerged with this solution: to choose the |lesser'' of the two evils atheism. There is in Islam, no such dilemma between the spiritual and the scientific which puzzles the mind. But unfortunately, the Christian world until recently refused or neglected to study Islamic view and regarded all religions as the same. This is an injustice to Islam on all views, the only view that is Islamic is the content of the Holy Quran.