From East to West

Dedicating oneself to the discovery of the mysteries of nature was a daunting task that entailed intense motivation and a strong incentive.

Beginning in 610 AD, Islam expanded rapidly because of favourable circumstances. A great empire came into being in just a period of fifty years. God gave them political dominance to carry out the necessary task of conquering and subduing nature and bringing about the social revolution required for the fulfilment of God’s plan. God has stated in the Quran that if Muslims would fail to fulfil God’s plan, He will raise another nation for its fulfilment (47:38). This objective of replacement was achieved through Crusades.

During the rule of Caliph Umar, Muslims conquered Palestine which was under Christian rule. Palestine, being their holy land, Christians could never come to terms with this occupation by the Muslims. The European Christian rulers could not tolerate this occupation. This dispute persisted. Finally, the Christian rulers planned to recapture Syria and Palestine through military intervention.

The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims, started primarily to secure control of holy sites. In all, eight major Crusade expeditions occurred between 1096 and 1291 AD. During these two hundred years, about nine bloody battles took place between the two groups, but they failed miserably to recapture the holy land despite the Christian Empire’s united efforts. This defeat brought them the realisation that it was not possible to defeat the Muslims through military warfare. Therefore, the Christian nations re-planned their strategy. They called it ‘spiritual crusade’ which actually meant ‘intellectual crusade’.

Now the Christian nations turned their attention to the development of science. The writings of Greek and Muslim philosophers were widely translated into Latin. Educational and scientific activities continued on a large scale in Europe. To this spiritual crusade, Oxford University was established in the United Kingdom in 1096 as followed by another institution of excellence, the Cambridge University in 1209 and so on.

This spiritual crusade ushered in a great, far-reaching revolution in Europe, known as the Renaissance, between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. This spiritual crusade was succeeded by a ‘natural crusade’ that took the form of the discovery of nature. Both spiritual crusades as well as the natural crusade, began with a negative mindset. Initially, the Western nations made a desperate attempt to defeat Muslims in the field of knowledge because they realised that they could not defeat them on the battlefield. God used their negative psyche as an incentive. God used the western people to discover the secrets hidden in nature to create a world that would prove to be a source of support for the Islamic mission. This event of support by the west was foretold in a verse of the Quran, “We shall show them Our signs in the universe and within themselves, until it becomes clear to them that this is the truth.” (41:53)

This role of the western nations has also been predicted in a tradition as follows, “God will support this religion even by a fajir” (Sahih Bukhari, Hadith No. 3062). The word ‘fajir’ here means a secular person. The incidents tell us that the secular support refers to the people of the western world whose efforts have led to the emergence of modern civilisation and the discovery of the signs hidden in the universe, the physical world as well as within human beings. The psyche of vengeance that arose in the people of the west was very intense in the wake of the Crusades, and God diverted this intensity towards the discovery of the secrets hidden in nature.

Dedicating oneself to the discovery of the mysteries of nature was a daunting task that entailed intense motivation and a strong incentive. The humiliating defeat of the Western nations in the Crusades produced this desired impetus in them. We find one such example in the early twentieth century when a British scientific team planned a dangerous expedition, to explore Antarctica. The head of the team published an advertisement in the London Times in 1914 in these words: “Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant dangers, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”

This advertisement in the Times received so many applications that a process of selection had to be adopted to select the best candidates. It was this spirit of madness which made it possible for the west to bring the modern age into existence.