The West on its part has been paying the debt it owes to the...

The West on its part has been paying the debt it owes to the Muslim East with compound interest. There is hardly a Muslim thinker in this century who has not owed a deep debt of gratitude to Western thinkers. In fact, Muslim scholars have drunk so deep at the fountainhead of Western learning that many of them have lost the taste for appreciating the learning of their own ancestors. Thus, Muslim scholarship has been inspired by the urge to acquire new knowledge advanced by the West.

With the desire to receive higher education and have research degrees in the fields of arts, sciences, and humanities, thousands of Muslim students go to the universities of Europe, America, and the Soviet Union. On their return, most of them engage themselves in communicating their knowledge to their pupils in the universities of their respective countries. There is a group of Muslim scholars who are trying to recapture their past heritage.

This is being done by the collection, preservation, and publication of the classics of their ancestors. Cairo is the centre of this activity. Dairat al-Maarif of Hyderabad Deccan also did excellent work in this field up to the partition of the sub-continent of India in 1366/1947 when the organization ceased to exist. Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey are also publishing translations of Arabic classics in their respective languages.

In this connection the services of Munshi Newal Kishore, a Hindu by profession and a Muslim in spirit, cannot be ignored. He published Urdu versions of hundreds of Muslim classics and, thus, rendered invaluable service to the Urdu language.

The same desire to recapture the past has found expression in the celebra­tion of Firdausi’s and ibn Sina’s millenaries and Nasir al-Din Tusi’s seventh centenary at Teheran in 1934, 1954, and 1955, respectively; the International Islamic Colloquium towards the end of 1957 at the University of the Panjab, Lahore, Pakistan; Masudi’s millenary in 1958 in the Aligarh Muslim University, India; al-Ghazali’s ninth centenary in March 1961 at Damascus.

There are ambitious programmes of development and reconstruction in countries like Pakistan, the United Arab Republic, Turkey, Iraq, and others. In the implementation of their programmes these countries are getting economic and technical aid from foreign powers and international agencies. Education is receiving special attention. New universities are being built in different Muslim lands.