Transcript for: Muslim Influence on Western Enlightenment
The Western world
is considered by many to be a melting pot of various
cultures, races, religions, and ethnic identities, but many here in the West still struggle to acknowledge
the positive influences of the Muslim world
on our civilization. The European Enlightenment was
an intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th centuries,
in which European politics, philosophy, science,
and communications were radically transformed. This period is often
called the Age of Reason and many of our Western
ideas on the way we understand the world today can be traced back
to the discoveries
of the Enlightenment. David Hume, Emmanuel Kant,
John Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire. These were all major
thinkers of the time. But what if I told you
that the Enlightenment might've looked
totally different if not for the
impact of Muslims. Let's take a moment to rehash a little bit of Muslim history. The Prophet Muhammad
brought Islam to Arabia in seventh century CE, and
for the next 500 years, Muslims led the world
in scientific innovation and the pursuit of knowledge. This is because at the same
time that Islam was on the rise in the East, in the
West, Europe was entering the Dark Ages. For many centuries, the Western world
had been the pinnacle of culture and knowledge, largely due to the success of
the Greek and Roman empires. But around the seventh
century, things in the West were beginning to decline. Much of the impressive
culture and technology of the Roman Empire was
being destroyed by invaders. The church began
suppressing Greek science and philosophy by closing
down museums and libraries, and persecuting scholars. It just so happens that while
the Greek and Roman world was on this decline, the
Islamic world was rising up. So luckily, Muslims
managed to keep alive and cultivate much of
the diminishing culture and scientific knowledge
that the West had worked so long to achieve. Not only did Muslims preserve
and translate many of the ancient texts that
inspired Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, but they also contributed
to the invention of the scientific method and
the modern university system, which led to the
Scientific Revolution. Famous Muslim scholars,
like Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna, and Ibn Rushd, also
known as Averroes, studied and admire the works
of ancient philosophers like Aristotle, but they
also questioned these works. They wanted to know why the
world worked the way it did. And so these scholars
observed the natural world, formed hypothesis, conducted experiments, and drew conclusions
from the results. This was essentially the birth
of the scientific method. Using this method, Muslim thinkers were able to
make rapid advancements in the fields of science,
math, and medicine. The mathematician Al-Khwarizmi is considered the
Father of Algebra. The word algebra actually comes from the Arabic word al-jabr. Muslims also invented
decimal fractions and gave us the Arabic numerals
we use today. These numerals allowed
Europeans to do simply equations far more quickly than they could with the Roman numerals
they were using before. The Muslim physician and
philosopher, Avicenna, who I mentioned earlier,
is one of the major names in the field of
medical innovation. He conducted the first
known clinical drug trials. His book, The Canon of
Medicine, written in 1025 CE, continued to be widely
used in Europe until the 16th century. And what I've mentioned doesn't
even come close to listing all of the major contributions
to Western culture that came out of the Muslim
world during the middle ages. The European enlightenment
was a foundational period of Western history, in
which so many aspects of our society were
radically improved. Because of the major scientific
and medical discoveries during this period, the West
became a much safer, cleaner, nicer place to live. It's exciting to learn that this period of Western
development owes a lot of its innovation to
Muslim discoveries. I'm Sophia Ally, for
Let the Quran Speak.