The Motivating Factor

I am very much impressed with the attitude of the early Muslims towards knowledge and their scholarly accomplishment in terms of its breadth and scope. However, the same vigor is noticeably absent today among Muslims and Muslim countries. This may be due to alienating the real purpose of knowledge and education. Here's the reflection of what transpired then.

The Muslim intellectual and scientific traditions will always remain as the Muslim foremost and invaluable heritage and legacy. These rich traditions have not only fascinated and benefited the Muslims but others as well though seldom acknowledged. Right from the first verse, the Muslims of the pioneer generation were being furnished with the worldview of Islam, which after a series of stages, commencing with the early period in Makkah; the latter period; and then the period in Madinah; the Muslims had grasped and acquired sufficient vocabularies enough to form the Islamic knowledge structure. The latter in turn provided the Islamic scientific framework for the Muslims to embark on their intellectual and scientific activities, which after a series of expansion and enrichment by the later generations of Muslims; we inherit their rich and sometimes unsurpassed intellectual legacy. A number of them displayed originality of thoughts whilst some others brilliantly appropriated sources from other than their own. To top it all, they set a precedent in many fields of scholarship. It is from this fountain of intellectual and scientific traditions that the Europeans in the renaissance period quenched their thirst and inherited the Muslim legacy, which served as basis of their intellectual awakening.

It is important to note that ‘certain worldviews cannot lead to the rise of sciences’ and thus generate the unprecedented intellectual vigor and scholarly activities as exemplified by the Muslims of the formative period; the Graeco-Arabic translation movement period ; and the assimilation and transmission period . This is attested by the fact that, although Greek sciences were prevalent during the Roman Byzantine period among its subjects, and yet books, schools, and scholars were met with much indifference or hostilities, apart from the whole of Greek legacy becoming obsolete. In retrospective, it is therefore amazing that Muslim civilization of the past provided fertile ground for a staggering number of erudite figures of cosmopolitan background to engage seriously in knowledge, virtually covering all that of their time, whose treatment by two selected personalities, al-Biruni and Ibn Battuta, becomes the interest of my study.