‘No Golden Age during early era’
the collective mind of muslims has been preoccupied for years with the saying that muslims were “not only the best nation but also the most advanced in the world because their ancestors lived in an era when science spread to the world and others and europe in particular benefited from the early muslims.”
this preoccupation with the golden age includes a strange paradox that contributed to the continued backwardness of the arabs and the civilization of muslims, backwardness that they have been floundering for hundreds of years and have been unable to get out of it no matter how much they tried.
the first irony is that the so-called golden age, as the moroccan thinker ahmad asad says, during which science flourished and the movement of translating the books from greek was active and a wonderful era, but it did not rise to the level of human civilization, despite all that is achieved. the criterion for the prosperity of the state was in terms of its expansion and the subjection of many provinces to it.
this era witnessed bloody events, invasions and wars, and not even the great caliphs and leaders were safe from being flanked by its fire, whoever was killed by the sword and tortured and who was burned to death often at the hands of other muslims, all because of the struggle for power and wealth and enslaving women.
the first era of islam did not witness any urbanization or prosperous science, and universities or scientific institutes were not known in the following periods, and the dominant feature of life during the first period was oralism – oralism is the education of deaf students through oral language by using lip reading, speech, and mimicking the mouth shapes and breathing patterns of speech. oralism came into popular use in the united states around the late 1860s – so there was no codification, and therefore we at that stage did not benefit from any civilization effect mentioned, so where is the golden side of it?
as for research progress and codification, it took place at a later stage and they relied on translation, and the majority of scholars of that period were non-arabs and non-muslims, in the well-known sense, this led to the second paradox, which is the insistence of islamic parties or groups to atone for these scholars, despite the greatness of their accomplishments. they even refused to give their names to any public buildings or scientific institutes.
if we are proud of them, then we are proud of scholars who lived and died as infidels, heretics, and deniers of knowledge of religion, and if they deny their affiliation with us, then we tear apart what we call the ‘golden age’.
