Why Did New Scientific Revolution Occur in Europe and not in the Muslim World? Role of Muslim Emperors under the control of Ulema and Fuqaha
By
Dr. Mohammad Ghitreef, New Age Islam
16 November
2022
Main
Points
This
essay looks into the question referred in the heading - Why Did New Scientific
Revolution Occur in Europe and not in the Muslim World? - from the historical
perspective, key points raised are:
1-
Why Muslims are lagging behind in scientific
development and rational temper, if Islam’s main sources prod its followers to
read, explore, investigate and invent?
2-
Having three big empires why Muslims couldn’t
proceed on the path of progress?
3-
Why they couldn’t follow up the European
renaissance while they themselves claimed to be once its chief instrument and
source?
4-
What was the role of Ulema and Fuqaha in
keeping Muslims intellectually handicapped, particularly after the invention of
Printing Press in Europe which led to a tremendous intellectual explosion worldwide.
5-
Ulema of the Osmania Khilafat did not allow the
Sultan to import printing press for close to four centuries, when the world had
started moving with great speed due to this one invention alone.
-----
The tricky
question of whether the Quran actually inspires us to reflect on the natural world
and prompts its followers to seek out, investigate, uncover, and create; the
virtues by which Muslims once led the world during the Umayyad and Abbasid
periods is one that we, as students of our great civilizational history,
encounter more frequently. What accounts for the current scientific revolution
taking place in Europe but not in the Muslim world?
When we
explore the question, we learn that the Ottoman Turks unsuccessfully besieged
Vienna in 1683. And from there, they started to retreat, and their countdown
started. Previously, Europe had been under their long-term attack, but now,
thanks to the reformation movement and the subsequent European Renaissance,
which began in 1500 CE and lasted until 1750 CE, Europe was forging ahead. It
all began in Toledo, Andalusia, where a group of intelligent, forward-thinking,
Christian intellectuals first translated Arabic works into Latin before moving
on to other European languages like French, English, German, etc. Florence,
which was a part of Italy then, was most affected by this new liberalism that
resulted from the reformation movement.
There were
many free thinkers, artists, and writers in Florence. So, it paved the path for
promoting arts, literature, and science soon escalated to other parts of
Europe. In that period of 250 years, they invented the printing press. Many new
lands, such as America, New Zealand, Mexico, and Australia, etc. were also
discovered and won. The indigenous people were completely uprooted when the
Spanish Christians firstly founded their colonies there, followed by other
European nations soon, suppressing the local civilizations. And in order to
establish their hegemony and supremacy, these Christian conquerors subjected
their poor victims to various forms of torture, tyranny, deception, betrayal,
and avarice in order to repress and wipe out the native states of the Inca and
the Aztec. They were setting new benchmarks for brutality, savagery, and mass
murder. All of the supposed Christian morals were horribly disregarded in the
process.
Yuval Noah
Harari, the Israeli naturalist historian and futurologist, says in his book
“Homo Sapiens” that European explorers left their native countries in search of
fresh information, for search and research purposes, and in particular to
attempt to find solutions to various astronomical puzzles. His claim is false
and without foundation. He disregarded the fact that Europeans had not left for
a new world. They in fact set out in quest of a different marine route, which
should have brought them to India. The waterways between the Andalusian coast,
the Mediterranean Sea, and the Bosporus were under the control of the Turk
admiral Khairuddin Barbrosa and his crew. In the meanwhile, westerners were
fortunate to come across fresh, prosperous areas that they mistook for India
and gave the native people there the appellation "Red Indian."
A new
European renaissance had started in Florence in Italy during those times, and
Europeans had finally stripped away the last vestiges of religion as a result
of the ongoing religious sectarian bloodshed. This led to the French Revolution
of 1789, which violently and brutally toppled the centuries-old monarchy and
its allies. The unstoppable Renaissance and its enormous effects quickly spread
to other regions of Europe, including England, Holland, and the entire
peninsula of Southern Europe. The Church eventually had to go, so as the
proponents of democracy and the rebelling free thinkers succeed and replace the
old guard of monarchy, kingships, and emperors who were a symbol of oppression
and brutality. The capture of new lands and hegemony in new worlds opened new
possibilities, coupled with the Renaissance, thus awakening the whole of Europe
intellectually. Strong passions for investigations, research, and discovering and
inventing were at work. The Discovery of steam power and the invention of
machines and technology pushed them to exploit the horizons and human souls as
well. Railways made the transportation of goods easy. Printing press made the
dissemination of knowledge easy and fast. Soon they required new markets for
their manufactured goods, which was the leading cause of the departure of many
European imperial colonial forces, making inroads into Asia and Africa. In this
flow, a significant chunk of Muslim lands was a ripe morsel and easy prey for
the colonial troops at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The
question that arises is: why, with three Muslim empires existing in the
sixteenth century—the Safavid Empire in Iran, the Sunni Ottomans, and the
mighty Mughals in India — didn't any of these empires attempt to challenge
Europe in its drive for new lands? And why didn't they make an attempt to
conquer these recently discovered lands? And at least having large armies, why
did they simply kneel and submit to the onslaught of the Europeans without
defending their positions? Why did the three offer no opposition at all or very
little that was ineffective?
In response
to the first, I would suggest that the three were victimised by external and
internal court conspiracies, and familial power struggles on the one hand and
the other, deeply immersed in luxury, they were weakened. They failed, immersed in in their luxury as they were, to
foresee the changing picture of times to come. Politically though, they seemed to
hold their ground, yet because of their intellectual bankruptcy and due to
their pathetic apathy towards what was happening in their surroundings, they
miserably failed to grasp the rapidly changing times in the world.
Ibn
Khaldun, a luminary, proposed the idea of the rise and fall of nations in his
famous book مقدمة
(prologue). He claims that there are various stages in a nation's life, such as
youth, adulthood, middle age, and old age. Thus, just as a person actually passes
away after reaching old age, it is unlikely for a nation to recover and mature
gracefully after reaching old age and senility. It will eventually die, sooner
or later. For this reason, despite the three empires' good political standing,
we can see that they were all gravely affected by the same fatal senility
disease.
Furthermore,
these moth-eaten empires were stricken with a Sufism that teaches one to cut
off from the world and forsake active and productive participation in
civilizational activities. Since to it, worldly affairs are for low people
regarding mundane things like a dead dog. This conception of the world ended
the spirit of knowing, exploring, discovering, and rethinking in Muslim masses.
2-The
princes, the elite, and the elders all lived wicked lives. They were found most
of the times in prostitutes' homes. Music, dance, and singing were popular in
their houses and palaces. As is evidently the case in India, where vulgar Urdu
poets like Jurat, Rangeen, and Jafer Zatly etc produced the majority of the
folk literature. Novels like "Umrao Jan Ada" by Mirza Hadi Ruswa and
"Twilight in Delhi" by Ahmad Ali in English both accurately portray
the appalling conditions of Delhiwalas as well as of people of Awadh at the
period. William Dalrymple later confirmed Iqbal's description of the living
conditions of Muslim Indians when the British took control of the country in
one of his essays.
3-The
religious and Fiqhi attitude was so constrained, rigid, and petrified
that it viewed new discoveries with distrust, scorn, and contempt since, in its
opinion, they were the product of anti-Islamic conspiracies. For instance, the
choice of some former Ottoman sultans to enact beneficial reforms and rebuild
their armies along modern lines was met with strong criticism and a
disapproving fatwa from the Shaikh ul Islam. Some Najdi Ulama commented about
telephone when it was first introduced in the Gulf الشيطانة تتكلم فيه (The devil speaks in it). As we saw on the subcontinent when
Sir Syed's educational campaign was met with vitriolic comments and strong
fatwas against it, this was the attitude of Ulama, whether Arab or non-Arab for
new sciences and modern education as its ironical story had been told by Hali
in Hayat e Javed.
This had
the result that the "Quranic Tricks" talismans and juggling are based
on what the holy Quran teaches about the origin and signs of God in the
universe. Additionally Muslims turned a mindless reciting of the Quran into a
mechanism for rewarding people. Nowadays many people, particularly Ulama,
assert that they have never opposed English language instruction or
contemporary secular education. However, Abdul Haleem Sharar, an Urdu author
and one of the Sir Syed Ahmad Khan's contemporaries, noted that the academic
climate at the time was such that Ulama would frequently preach from religious
pulpits that religious knowledge only consists of the Quran, Hadees, and Fiqh,
and that anyone who reads or learns anything else would be destroyed.
That the
three Muslim empires due to their narrow mindedness, didn’t see the rapidly
changing times is a fact. Nonetheless, it is a pity that even today, the
wealthy Gulf countries are more or less in the same situation once again and
are so drunk in phenomenalism that they do not see the facts.
A ruler of
the Gulf is erecting the tallest Dubai Towers. The other satrap is constructing
a big mall spreading over miles wholly
air-conditioned. It is as if one of the signs of the day of resurrection
mentioned in a famous hades; Hadees-e-Jibreel, that:
“ You will
see close to Qayamat the hungry, barefooted people of this land who cannot
afford clothes and those who are poor today will be competing with each other
in constructing tallest buildings in the world tomorrow’’.
Now, this
scene is before our eyes— the Saudi crown prince, MB. Salman is currently
building a city in the style of Dubai that will be exempt from Saudi
regulations and guarantee promiscuity and openness in the Western style. All
indigenous Arab inhabitants of this area have been shifted to far off places.
These
Muslim rulers and satraps are unaware that a nation's civilization is produced
via its own efforts and endeavours rather than measured by buildings
constructed with rented or borrowed labour and outsourced skills!
---------
A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Dr.
Mohammad Ghitreef is a Research Associate with the Centre for Promotion of
Educational and Cultural Advancement of Muslims of India, AMU Aligarh.
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-science/scientific-revolution-europe-emperors-ulema-fuqaha/d/128414
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