Faith and Reason in Islam, Islamic Ideology, NewAgeISlam.com

Islamic Ideology

Faith and Reason in Islam

By Asma Afsaruddin

In al-Mas‘udi's day, the great translation movement which had started in Baghdad in the ninth century was bearing rich fruit, making Greek philosophical texts accessible to Arabic-speaking Muslims and effecting a genuine intellectual revolution in the Islamic world. In this period, Muslims displayed a remarkable receptivity towards knowledge and learning, regardless of its source. Persian works of literature and philosophy and Indian treatises on mathematics were also translated and studied alongside Greek works. Some of the best-known philosophers of the medieval period – Avicenna, Averroes, al-Farabi – were Muslims, and their thought was influential in medieval Europe as well. Without this intellectual and cultural legacy that was transmitted to Europe from the Islamic world, there may well have been no European Renaissance!

Pope Benedict's statements, therefore, unfortunately point to a basic lack of knowledge about this organic continuity between the learning of the pre-modern Islamic world and that of the post-Renaissance West. He is not alone in this. Many otherwise highly-educated Westerners (and Muslims as well) are often quite ignorant of these historical connections. There are rejectionist Muslims today who would deny that Islamic thought and learning has in any way been influenced by non-Islamic sources. They too need to acquire a more accurate knowledge of the historical inter-connectedness between the West and the Muslim world. This is why so many find the "clash of civilisations" thesis credible today.

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