The all-round development of various branches of knowledge...

The all-round development of various branches of knowledge pertaining to physical and social phenomena, as well as the process of logical argumentation for justification of Islamic doctrine and deduction of Islamic laws ( ahkam ) with reference to Qur’anic injunctions and the Prophetic tradition, is indebted to Islam’s notion of ‘ilm .

Scientific knowledge, comprising natural and physical sciences, was sought and developed by Muslim scientists and mathematicians vigorously from the beginning of the last decades of the first century of Hijrah. The scientific endeavours found its flowering period with the establishment of the Bayt al-Hikmah in the reign of al-Ma’mun.

Undoubtedly the major contributions in philosophy and sciences were made by Iranians, but the myth created by the orientalists that the fundamental sources of Islam, viz. The claim that the Qur’an and Sunnah do not contain scientific and philosophical ideas is totally false.

As earlier stated, not only the Qur’an and hadith encouraged Muslims or rather made it obligatory for them to pursue truth freely from all possible sources, but also contained certain guiding principles that could provide a secure foundation for the development of religious and secular sciences. Some Prophetic traditions even give priority to learning over performing supererogatory rites of worship.

There are several traditions that indicate that a scholar’s sleep is more valuable than an ignorant believer’s journey for pilgrimage ( hajj ) and participation in holy war, and that the drops of a scholar’s ink are more sacred than the blood of a martyr. Amir al-Mu’minin, ‘Ali ibn Abi-Talib (PBUH) said that the reward for piety in the other world would be bestowed upon a believer in proportion to the degree of his intellectual development and his knowledge.

Islam never maintained that only theology was useful and the empirical sciences useless or harmful. This thought was made common by semi-literate clerics or by the time servers among them who wanted to keep common Muslims in the darkness of ignorance and blind faith so that they would not be able to oppose unjust rulers and resist clerics attached to the courts of tyrants.

This attitude resulted in the condemnation of not only empirical science but also ‘ilm al-kalam and metaphysics, which resulted in the decline of Muslims in politics and economy. Even today, large segments of Muslim society, both the common man and many clerics suffer from this malady.