The Transfer of Information

The Transfer of Information

Published: 2002

As Islam grew, Muslims adopted existing knowledge and built on it to fulfill their faith’s teachings. Muslims soon shared this wealth of knowledge with people in both conquered and non-conquered lands. Sharing this goodness with others also fulfills the Muslim faith. The Holy Qur’an teaches:

And never would God make your faith of no effect, for God is to all people Most surely full of Kindness, Most Merciful Qur’an, 2:143

The Prophet also said that God said:

I created people to benefit from Me, not so that I benefit from them.

Other Prophetic Traditions say:

A true believer loves for his fellow believer that which he loves for himself.

He who does not thank people does not thank God.

The best among you are the best in character.

Dr. A.Hakim Murad, a British authority on the history of the Middle Ages, claims that:

The transfer of knowledge and information from the Muslim Empire during the Middle Ages is the most important cultural transmission episode in its intellectual history.

He continued to say:

The first and most effective vehicle of such osmosis was, in fact, trade. Muslims found trade easy because it was rooted in their community.

Furthermore, the Holy Qur’an praises actions of revival and development. The Prophet himself was an honest trader, and Mecca was, in effect, a commercial center for the Arabian Peninsula, which sent caravans and traders across the desert north to Syria and south to Yemen.

The Muslims, inspired by the Qur’an to uplift their economy and standard of living, created a unified state, which extended from Southern France in the West all the way to Southern China in the East, thus removing the “old iron curtain” that had separated the Mediterranean culture in the West from the Indian and Persian cultures in the East.”

The removal of this divider and the Middle East’s geographic centrality was the basis for this great mercantile civilization. The domination of the world of the economy in the culture of Islam continued well into the 17th century,” Dr. A. Hakim Murad added.