Cordova...

Cordova, Seville, Granada, and Toledo, to name only a few of the centers of Muslim Spain, opened their gates to the teeming alumni who were seeking admission to the universities (See Philip K. Hittis History of the Arabs PP. 557-605 for Muslim contribution in the cause of intellectual upsurge).

It is on this account that Stanley Lane Poole in his History of the Moors in Spain mourns the fall of the Muslim Empire of Spain in these words: The fall of Granada happened within forty years of the conquest of Constantinople; but the gain to Islam in the East made no amends for the loss to Europe in the West. The Turks were incapable of founding a second Cordova.

Dozi, by no means a friend of Islam, is nevertheless compelled to pay a glowing tribute to the administrative, cultural, and, in particular, intellectual caliber of the Muslims. Such was the influence exerted by these votaries of the Medinite School of learning that despite the secularization of the state by the rulers, their zeal was transmitted to the coming generations through the various centers that sprang up.

Even Christian monarchs solicited their cooperation in their day-to-day administration. Thus, the Sicilian King Rogers administrations, both civil and military, were mainly staffed by Muslim intellectuals, who gave the court an oriental complexion. Philip K. Hitti attributes the prosperity enjoyed by his realm to the intellectual caliber of the Muslim staff.

They not only administered his Kingdom efficiently but also manipulated his susceptibilities as to imbue him with a Muslim view of Christianity. The chief gem of his court was Al-Idrisi geographer and cartographer at Palermo. It will thus be obvious to even a superficial observer that the torch lit ablaze by Imam Ja'far as-Sadiq (a.s) at Medina was the powerful lighthouse that illuminated the intellectual firmament of not only his own age but also the ages that followed.

His own powers of observation are marvelous to the extreme as will be seen from a perusal of his works on the varied branches of learning, which, of course, always converge to the central theme of Tawheed.

To cite only a few instances of his intuitive grasp of the nature of things, we may observe his ultra-modern, scientific description of the development of the human embryo through its various stages till its flowering into maturity, with special emphasis at each descriptive pause to focus the mind on the specific merit of ingenuity evinced therein.