Question: why was I taught History at school? I don’t know. But when I now read History books or ancient tales or poems I can easily notice that people have always been more important than their dwellings, mounts, money or anything else they might possess. Man has always been afraid of sickness, death, poverty, among other things. Man has always needed to feel reassured, protected, safe. Man has always made peace after the war ; he has always created courts to do justice; he has always built schools to educate future generations; he has always built cities and villages to enable men to feel close to each other, to create all kinds of healthy relationships, to join hands, to exchange services, even when personal relations or between immediate neighbours or clans are not perfect. At times man may suffer from the cold, heat, hunger, thirst, fatigue, fear, loss of loved ones... But then he would enjoy the pleasure of eating after hunger, the pleasure of drinking after thirst, the pleasure of rest after getting tired, the pleasure of love, etc.
In the past people brought knowledge -in their heads- from their old people, and then passed it on to the next generations. Each time new palaces, schools, roads, gardens, factories, etc, were built. Man’s knowledge of the world expanded. And each time there was a new kingdom, good or bad. The question is, why didn’t those "good" kingdoms last forever? Why were there "bad" kingdoms as well? That’s a hard one to answer. But, interestingly, History gives us some clues.
Many of the things we use today were invented by different peoples in different places at different times. Bronze, for example, was invented by the Chinese, glass by people in Mesopotamia, paper by the Egyptians, alphabet by Phoenicians, and so on. Each people learned from the other peoples and made their own inventions, thus expanding man’s knowledge of the world. This knowledge spread through trade and conquest. The conquerors inherited the knowledge of the vanquished people and took it home or spread it to other places. At the same time, the conquerors brought in their own way of life, their thoughts, their arts and their religion.
The interaction between so many powers, so many civilizations and so many ways of life made it necessary for each people to defend their own existence. Each people had to defend everything that was at stake for them. That included their culture. So those who happened to believe in a deity, any deity, had to defend their own faith by using all the tools available, including those that had been invented or developed by nations who did not necessarily share their faith. Such tools may have included Phoenicians’ alphabet and Greek logic. Thus all nations (I mean good or bad) were anything but "redundant". They were just as useful to one another.
It is also interesting to notice that most of those early interactions between various contending nations took place just in or around Palestine. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Hittites, the Greeks, the Romans, and many more in between -all had a foothold there at some point in history. And then came the Arabs, from Makkah. Those Arabs found themselves thrusting in every direction, going towards nations who had known impressive empires, and ended up building their own empire stretching across most of the then known world.
There followed a magnificent world interaction. The Arabs borrowed old, dormant knowledge from the Greeks, the Persians and other nations, and updated and enriched it, and then spread it in every direction. Baghdad emerged as the world capital of science. And in the West there was Cordoba, in Spain, where Arab science was passed on to Europe through translation. Averroes spoke to Muslims and non-Muslim Europeans of God using Aristotle’s logic.
Baghdad was destroyed, but Islamic knowledge survived. It survived because it was not only in the books that the Mongols threw into the Tigris River, but also in people’s hearts and minds. Like the destruction of the Alexandria Library in antiquity, the loss of Baghdad libraries could have been a much more awful tragedy had there not been what I called interactions. Marrakesh, which was built and made their capital by Morocco’s Almoravid dynasty, was deliberately and completely destroyed by their Almohad successors. These rebuilt the whole city in the most beautiful way possible, because they had already "received" the necessary knowledge from their predecessors.
Even the rebuilding of a whole nation is possible if there is the necessary knowledge and will. Europe made the best use of the early Muslims’ knowledge and rebuilt itself in a matter of generations because its own people had the will to do so.
In Europe the conflict between the Church and new scientists resulted in new thinking. Some clung to their religious beliefs, defending themselves by use of logic and philosophy. Others broke with the Church altogether and called their way "Secularism". They defended themselves by experimenting with their knowledge of the world, excluding any reference to the Unseen Realm.
The new knowledge of the world, based on experimentation, led to the Industrial Revolution. The boom in industry led to the spread of knowledge on a phenomenal scale.
Colonization made it possible for more people to go to more places. Africans "went" to America, taking with them their religions, including Islam. Other Muslims were taken into Europe, where they continued to practise their faith at a time when large numbers of Christians ceased to go to Church. Orientalists (from Europe) went to the Arab and Islamic world to "return" part of the Arabic and Islamic heritage to the newly awakening Arabs and Muslims.
Now that imported material is being re-exported with added value. It is done through the Internet and satellite TV stations. And so Islam has become the fastest growing religion in America. This was made possible by American technology and Arab oil money.
Arab oil money has contributed among other things, to the building of large mosques, big Islamic institutes and libraries, and to the printing of the Quran and other religious books in large quantities in many languages in many parts of the world.
Even within the poorest Islamic states Islam is growing as fast as demography. Wherever you go, there is a new mosque and a new school because there is a new village, town or suburb. Small towns are swelling into big cities, and so small mosques and schools are becoming bigger and bigger.
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