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Obeying the Qur'an's injunctions, Muslims studied both the Book of Divine Revelation (the Qur'an) and the Book of Creation (the universe), and founded a magnificent civilization. Scholars from all over Europe and elsewhere benefited from the great Muslim centers of higher learning at Damascus, Bukhara, Baghdad, Cairo, Fez, Qairawan, Zaytuna, Cordoba, Sicily, Isfahan, and Delhi. Historians liken this Muslim golden age, in full flower when Europe was enduring its dark Middle Ages, to a beehive. Roads were full of students, scientists, and scholars travelling from one center of learning to another. Such "Renaissance" men and women as Jabir Ibn Hayyan, Ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, Muhammad Ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Abu al-Hasan al-Mas'udi, Ibn al-Haytham, al-Biruni, al-Ghazzali, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and Abu Bakr al-Razi were shining like stars in the high sky of science.
In his monumental Introduction to the History of Science, George Sarton divided time into chronological chapters and named each chapter after that period's most eminent scientist. From the mid-eighth century to the mid-eleventh century, each of the seven 50-year period carries the name of a Muslim scientist: "The Time of al-Khwarizmi," "The Time of al-Biruni," and so on. Within these chapters we have the names of about 100 important Islamic scientists and their main works. John Davenport, a leading scientist observed: It must be owned that all the knowledge whether of Physics, Astronomy, Philosophy or Mathematics, which flourished in Europe from the 10th century was originally derived from the Arabian schools, and the Spanish Saracen may be looked upon as the father of European philosophy.4
Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher writes: The supremacy of the East was not only military. Science, philosophy, poetry, and the arts, all flourished in the Muhammadan world at a time when Europe was sunk in barbarism. Europeans, with unpardonable insularity, call this period 'The Dark Ages': but it was only in Europe that it was dark—indeed only in Christian Europe, for Spain, which was Mohammedan, had a brilliant culture."5
Robert Briffault, the renowned historian, acknowledges in his The Making of Humanity: It is highly probable that but for the Arabs, modern European civilization would have never assumed that character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution. For although there is not a single aspect of human growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the paramount distinctive force of the modern world and the supreme course of its victory—natural sciences and the scientific spirit... What we call science arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of inquiry; of new methods of investigation, of the method of experiment, observation, measurement, of the development of Mathematics in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs. For the first 500 years of its existence, the realm of Islam was the most civilized and progressive portion of the world. Studded with splendid cities, gracious mosques and quiet universities, the Muslim East offered a striking contrast to the Christian West, which was sunk in the night of the Dark Ages. It retained its vigor and remained ahead of Christian Europe until the terrible disasters of the thirteenth century.6
During the tenth-century, Muslim Cordoba was Europe's most civilized city, the wonder and admiration of the time. Travelers from the north heard with something like fear of the city that contained 900 public baths and 70 libraries with hundreds of thousands of volumes. Yet whenever the rulers of Leon, Navarre, or Barcelona needed surgeons, architects, dressmakers, or musicians, they applied to Cordoba.61 The Muslims' literary influence was so vast that, for example, the Bible and liturgy had to be translated into Arabic for the Christian community's use. The account given by Alvaro, a Christian zealot and writer, shows vividly how even non-Muslim Spaniards were attracted to Muslim literature: My fellow Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs. They study the works of Muhammadan theologians and philosophers, not in order to refute them, but to acquire a correct and elegant Arabic style. Where today can a layman be found who reads the Latin commentaries on Holy Scriptures? Who is there that studies the Gospels, the Prophets, the Apostles? Alas, the young Christians who are most conspicuous for their talents have no knowledge of any literature or language save the Arabic; they read and study with avidity Arabian books; they amass whole libraries of them at a vast cost, and they everywhere sing the praises of the Arabian world..."7
3. Black Hole: An area of space–time with a gravitational field so intense that its escape velocity is equal to or exceeds the speed of light, a great void, an abyss. White Hole: A hypothetical hole in outer space from which energy, stars, and other celestial matter emerge or explode.
3. Quoted by A. Karim in Islamic Contribution to Science and Civilization.
4. Pakistan Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 3.
5. Lothrop Stoddard, The New World of Islam (London: Chapman and Hall, 1922). The various disasters are the Mongol destruction of vast swaths of Muslim Central Asia, which culminated in their destruction of Baghdad, at that time the Islamic world's capital, and its environs (1258) and the Crusades (eleventh century to the present day). When General Allenby arrived in Jerusalem in 1917, he announced that the Crusades had been completed. When the French arrived in Damascus, their commander cried out beside Saladin's tomb: "Nous revenons [we return], Saladin!" K. Armstrong, Muhammad, A Biography of the Prophet, 40. American president George W. Bush announced the beginning of a new crusade after the event of September 11, 2001. During the thirteenth century, the Crusaders conquered Palestine, Syria, and Cyprus and established a state in Jerusalem.
6. Thomas Arnold, The Legacy of Islam (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931).
7. Dozy, Reinhart P. (tr.), Indiculus Luminosus.
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Islam & Humanity 
