QUOTATIONS ON ISLAMIC CIVILIZATIONS
By Dr. A. Zahoor
(Copyright 1992, 1997, All
Rights Reserved)
Napolean Bonaparte as Quoted
in Cherfils, ‘Bonaparte et Islam,’ Paris, France, pp. 105, 125.
"Moses has revealed the existence of God to his nation. Jesus
Christ to the Roman world, Muhammad to the old continent...
"Arabia was idolatrous when, six centuries after
Jesus, Muhammad introduced the worship of the God of Abraham, of Ishmael,
of Moses, and Jesus. The Ariyans and some other sects had disturbed the
tranquility of the east by agitating the question of the nature of the
Father, the son, and the Holy Ghost. Muhammad declared that there was none
but one God who had no father, no son and that the trinity imported the
idea of idolatry...
"I hope the time is not far off when I shall be able
to unite all the wise and educated men of all the countries and establish
a uniform regime based on the principles of Qur'an which alone are true
and which alone can lead men to happiness."
|
Sir George Bernard Shaw in
'The Genuine Islam,' Vol. 1, No. 8, 1936
"If any religion had the chance of ruling over England, nay Europe
within the next hundred years, it could be Islam."
"I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high
estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which
appears to me to possess that assimilating capacity to the changing phase
of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. I have studied
him - the wonderful man and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ,
he must be called the Savior of Humanity."
"I believe that if a man like him were to assume
the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems
in a way that would bring it the much needed peace and happiness: I have
prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the
Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of
today."
|
Bertrand Russel in ‘History
of Western Philosophy,’ London, 1948, p. 419.
"Our use of phrase 'The Dark ages' to cover the period
from 699 to 1,000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe...
"From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization
of Islam flourished. What was lost to christendom at this time was not
lost to civilization, but quite the contrary...
"To us it seems that West-European civilization is
civilization, but this is a narrow view."
|
H.G. Wells
"The Islamic teachings have left great traditions
for equitable and gentle dealings and behavior, and inspire people with
nobility and tolerance. These are human teachings of the highest order
and at the same time practicable. These teachings brought into existence
a society in which hard-heartedness and collective oppression and injustice
were the least as compared with all other societies preceding it....Islam
is replete with gentleness, courtesy, and fraternity."
|
Dr. William Draper in 'History
of Intellectual Development of Europe'
"During the period of the Caliphs the learned men
of the Christians and the Jews were not only held in great esteem but were
appointed to posts of great responsibility, and were promoted to the high
ranking job in the government....He (Caliph Haroon Rasheed) never considered
to which country a learned person belonged nor his faith and belief, but
only his excellence in the field of learning."
|
Edward Montet, 'La Propagande
Chretienne et ses Adversaries Musulmans,' Paris 1890. (Also in T.W. Arnold
in 'The Preaching of Islam,' London 1913.)
"Islam is a religion that is essentially rationalistic
in the widest sense of this term considered etymologically and historically....the
teachings of the Prophet, the Qur'an has invariably kept its place as the
fundamental starting point, and the dogma of unity of God has always been
proclaimed therein with a grandeur a majesty, an invariable purity and
with a note of sure conviction, which it is hard to find surpassed outside
the pale of Islam....A creed so precise, so stripped of all theological
complexities and consequently so accessible to the ordinary understanding
might be expected to possess and does indeed possess a marvelous power
of winning its way into the consciences of men."
|
Thomas Carlyle in ‘Heroes,
Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History,’ Lecture 2, Friday, 8th May 1840.
"As there is no danger of our becoming, any of us,
Mahometans (i.e. Muslim), I mean to say all the good of him I justly can...
"When Pococke inquired of Grotius, where the proof
was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's (Muhammad's)
ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there
was no proof!...
"A greater number of God's creatures believe in Mahomet's
word at this hour than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose that
it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which so many creatures
of the almighty have lived by and died by?...
"A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless
of what vulgar men toil for. Not a bad man, I should say; Something better
in him than hunger of any sort, -- or these wild arab men, fighting and
jostling three-and-twenty years at his hand, in close contact with him
always, would not revered him so! They were wild men bursting ever and
anon into quarrel, into all kinds of fierce sincerity; without right worth
and manhood, no man could have commanded them. They called him prophet
you say? Why he stood there face to face with them; bare, not enshrined
in any mystry; visibly clouting his own cloak, cobbling his own shoes;
fighting, counselling, ordering in the midst of them: they must have seen
what kind of man he was, let him be called what you like! No emperor with
his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own clouting. During
three-and-twenty years of rough actual trial. I find something of a veritable
Hero necessary for that, of itself...
"These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century,
- is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what proves
explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Granada! I said, the
Great man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited
for him like fuel, and then they too would flame..."
|
Simon Ockley in 'History of
the Saracens'.
“A rugged, strife-torn and mountaineering people...were
suddenly turned into an indomitable Arab force, which achieved a series
of splendid victories unparalleled in the history of nations, for in the
short space of ninety years that mighty range of Saracenic conquest embraced
a wider extent of territory than Rome had mastered in the course of eight
hundred.”
|
Phillip Hitti in 'Short History
of the Arabs.'
"During all the first part of the Middle Ages, no
other people made as important a contribution to human progress as did
the Arabs, if we take this term to mean all those whose mother-tongue was
Arabic, and not merely those living in the Arabian peninsula. For centuries,
Arabic was the language of learning, culture and intellectual progress
for the whole of the civilized world with the exception of the Far East.
From the IXth to the XIIth century there were more philosophical, medical,
historical, religiuos, astronomical and geographical works written in Arabic
than in any other human tongue."
|
Carra de Vaux in 'The Philosophers
of Islam,' Paris, 1921.
"Finally how can one forget that at the same time
the Mogul Empire of India (1526-1857 C.E.) was giving the world the Taj
Mahal (completed in 1648 C.E.) the architectural beauty of which has never
been surpassed, and the ‘Akbar Nameh’ of Abul Fazl: "That extraordinary
work full of life ideas and learning where every aspect of life is examined
listed and classified, and where progress continually dazzles the eye,
is a document of which Oriental civilization may justly be proud. The men
whose genius finds its expression in this book were far in advance of their
age in the practical art of government, and they were perhaps in advance
of it in their speculations about religious philosophy. Those poets those
philosophers knew how to deal with the world or matter. They observe, classify,
calculate and experiment. All the ideas that occur to them are tested against
facts. They express them with eloquence but they also support them with
statistics."...the principles of tolerance, justice and humanity which
prevailed during the long reign of Akbar."
|
Marcel Clerget in 'La Turquie,
Passe et Present,' Paris, 1938.
"Many proofs of high cultural level of the Ottoman
Empire during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent are to be found in
the development of science and law; in the flowering of literary works
in Arabic, Persian and Turkish; in the contemporary monuments in Istanbul,
Bursa, and Edirne; in the boom in luxury industries; in the sumptuous life
of the court and high dignitaries, and last but not least in its religious
tolerance. All the various influences - notably Turkish, Byzantine and
Italian mingle together and help to make this the most brilliant epoch
of the Ottomans."
|
Thomas Arnold in 'The Call
to Islam.'
"We have never heard about any attempt to compel
Non-Muslim parties to adopt Islam or about any organized persecution aiming
at exterminating Christianity. If the Caliphs had chosen one of these plans,
they would have wiped out Christianity as easily as what happened to Islam
during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain; by the same method
which Louis XIV followed to make Protestantism a creed whose followers
were to be sentenced to death; or with the same ease of keeping the Jews
away from Britain for a period of three hundred fifty years."
|
Michael the Elder (Great) as
Quoted in 'Michael the Elder, Chronique de Michael Syrien, Patriarche Jacobite
d’ Antioche,' J.B. Chabot, Editor, Vol. II, Paris, 1901.
"This is why the God of vengeance, who alone is all-powerful,
and changes the empire of mortals as He will, giving it to whomsoever He
will, and uplifting the humble beholding the wickedness of the Romans who
throughout their dominions, cruelly plundered our churches and our monasteries
and condemned us without pity, brought from the region of the south the
sons of Ishmael, to deliver us through them from the hands of the Romans.
And if in truth we have suffered some loss, because the Catholic churches,
that had been taken away from us and given to the Chalcedonians, remained
in their possession; for when the cities submitted to the Arabs, they assigned
to each denomination the churches which they found it to be in possession
of (and at that time the great churches of Emessa and that of Harran had
been taken away from us); nevertheless it was no slight advantage for us
to be delivered from the cruelty of the Romans, their wickedness, their
wrath and cruel zeal against us, and to find ourselves at people. (Michael
the Elder, Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch wrote this text in the latter
part of the twelfth century, after five centuries of Muslim rule in that
region. Click here for a relevant document sent to the monks of St. Catherine
Monastery in Mt. Sinai, 628 C.E.)
|
James Addison in 'The Christian
Approach to the Moslem,' p. 35.
"Despite the growth of antagonism, Moslem (Muslim)
rulers seldom made their Christian subjects suffer for the Crusades. When
the Saracens finally resumed the full control of Palestine the Christians
were given their former status as dhimmis. The Coptic Church, too had little
cause for complaint under Saladin's (Salahuddin) strong government, and
during the time of the earlier Mameluke sultans who succeeded him the Copts
experienced more enlightened justice than they had hitherto known. The
only effect of the Crusaders upon Egyptian Christians was to keep them
for a while from pilgrimage to Jerusalem, for as long as the Frank were
in charge heretics were forbidden access to the shrines. Not until the
Moslem victories could they enjoy their rights as Christians."
|
Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall
in his 1927 Lecture on 'Tolerance in Islam,' Madras, India.
"In the eyes of history, religious toleration is
the highest evidence of culture in a people....It was not until the Western
nations broke away from their religious law that they became more tolerant,
and it was only when the Muslims fell away from their religious law that
they declined in tolerance and other evidences of the highest culture.
Before the coming of Islam it (tolerance) had never been preached as an
essential part of religion...
"If Europe had known as much of Islam, as Muslims
knew of Christendom, in those days, those mad, adventurous, occasionally
chivalrous and heroic, but utterly fanatical outbreak known as the Crusades
could not have taken place, for they were based on a complete misapprehension...
"Innumerable monasteries, with a wealth of treasure
of which the worth has been calculated at not less than a hundred millions
sterling, enjoyed the benefit of the Holy Prophet's (Muhammad’s) Charter
to the monks of Sinai and were religiously respected by the Muslims. The
various sects of Christians were represented in the Council of the Empire
by their patriarchs, on the provincial and district council by their bishops,
in the village council by their priests, whose word was always taken without
question on things which were the sole concern of their community...
"The tolerance within the body of Islam was, and
is, something without parallel in history; class and race and color ceasing
altogether to be barriers."
|
Sir John Bagot Glubb
“Khalif (Caliph) Al-Ma'mun's period of rule (813
- 833 C.E.) may be considered the 'golden age' of science and learning.
He had always been devoted to books and to learned pursuits. His brilliant
mind was interested in every form of intellectual activity. Not only poetry
but also philosophy, theology, astronomy, medicine and law all occupied
his time.”
“By Mamun's time medical schools were extremely active
in Baghdad. The first free public hospital was opened in Baghdad during
the Caliphate of Haroon-ar-Rashid. As the system developed, physicians
and surgeons were appointed who gave lectures to medical students and issued
diplomas to those who were considered qualified to practice. The first
hospital in Egypt was opened in 872 AD and thereafter public hospitals
sprang up all over the empire from Spain and the Maghrib to Persia.”
On the Holocaust of Baghdad (1258 C.E.) Perpetrated
by Hulagu:
“The city was systematically looted, destroyed and
burnt. Eight hundred thousand persons are said to have been killed. The
Khalif Mustasim was sewn up in a sack and trampled to death under the feet
of Mongol horses.
“For five hundred years, Baghdad had been a city
of palaces, mosques, libraries and colleges. Its universities and hospitals
were the most up-to-date in the world. Nothing now remained but heaps of
rubble and a stench of decaying human flesh.”
|
|