A retired Brigadier posted as a Pro-Vice Chancellor of a central university situated over 100-km east of Delhi sometimes back came out with a strange interpretation of history. If he is to be believed, the ‘decline’ of Muslims started between eighth and 11 centuries as the Ummah or community started committing ‘cultural and intellectual suicide’. He further added that the Muslims started abandoning reason when they were still the masters of Spain.
Yet he went on to take the names of several Muslim scholars and the contributions of the community which took place even after the 11th century C.E. Then he said that the development in the Muslim world continued till the 16th century.
He is not alone. Of late, there are several similar lectures based on factually incorrect and self-contradictory interpretation of history which are doing the rounds on YouTube. Such misinformation campaign should be stopped forthwith as it is wreaking havoc among the youths.
However, the Brigadier then cited the example of 1580 when, according to him, Muslims destroyed a telescope installed in an observatory after the plague spread in Turkey. He highlighted this example to buttress his argument that look how Muslims had abandoned reasoning, which ultimately led to their downfall.
Curiously, as he spoke, the audience – obviously academics and students of the university – clapped.
The fault is not just with the army officer, the self-appointed social media lecturers as well as their listeners. It is in the way we fathom and appreciate history. We largely base our understanding of history on the works of western historians, most of them have their own way of interpreting any development – even if they are not biased.
The problem lies not only in understanding history but also in appreciating the present, that is in the grasping of history in the making. The cruel irony is that many of our great professors and scholars of history are unable to develop their own understanding of the history-in-the-making, that is the developments which take place in their own lifetime and just around them. Their own power of comprehending anything gets blurred because of the media reportings, largely based on half-truths or slanted information. They quote western writers to understand even a small development, which takes place in their own vicinity.
The following few examples would help further understand the matter. In Israel there are about 10-12% Orthodox Jews who never read newspapers, listen to radio or watch TV. They only believe and follow what their Rabbis preach.
In the US, there are people who still believe that human being has not set foot on the moon.
In India, there are a set of people who strongly believe that cow-urine and cow-dung cakes have great medicinal values. That is why you can get them on order from amazon.com and are even available in the malls and stores not only in India but also in the US.
Should one then conclude that the Jews, the Christianised US and Hinduised India have abandoned reasoning and are anti-Science?
It has become a fashion of a sort to prove some points by citing selective instances from the books written by western writers to come to any fantastic conclusion. Herein lies the reason for the western domination on the planet. Their scholars managed to convince the world the way they like to be. The army Brigadier who holds the second most influential post in that university must understand that in 1683, that is 103 years after the smashing of telescope the same Turkish army was in the outskirts of Vienna in the heart of Europe. Between 1616 and 1645 the Turkish navy sank 450 naval vessels of European nations in the Mediterranean Sea.
That is the one reason why the European imperialist powers managed to conquer the North and South America, Central and South Africa, South-East Asia and South Asia much before the Muslim-dominated North Africa, where they actually came in the 19th century. The Turkish army did not fight with swords and spears all these years as the western scholars would like the world to believe.
That the Turks were also one of the great powers till early 20th century can be gauged by the fact that their army defeated the combined forces of Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada in Gallipoli in the early part of World War-I. The combined Allied army was led by none else but Admiral Winston Churchill, who became the PM of England by World War-II. The British suffered humiliating defeat notwithstanding the fact that they had the advantage of having lakhs of soldiers from the Empire, especially the Indian sub-continent. They finally succeeded in getting the Ottoman Empire dismembered by engineering a revolt among the Arabs of Hejaz.
To develop the understanding of history one must go through E H Carr’s What is History? It is a small book of less than 100 pages.
Many contemporary scholars, especially Muslims, have failed to appreciate the message in the decline and disintegration of the Soviet Union, another ‘Super Power’, just three decades back. It collapsed not because the people there abandoned reasoning, became illiterate and ignorant and had started neglecting Science. Everything was there but it could not hold on simply because the people there lost trust on the very system they created to run the country. Communism, once believed to be the panacea for all ills across the world, suddenly became irrelevant in the country where the first revolution took place.
Mughals lost power in India not because the Muslims started hating education and modern Science as the founder of a famous college over 100-km east of Delhi wanted the world to believe. The truth is that rulers like Tipu Sultan were much more far-sighted than many of their counterparts in Europe and even the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was a great patroniser of learning. He himself was the master in five languages.
The Mughal Empire started collapsing by the 18th century because of internal feud, disunity, betrayal, etc. and the whole ruling class became pleasure loving as they found no great challenge in India. They became soft and corrupt. An empire or even a civilization starts losing the race when it stops contributing some good and positive values and ideas to the people of the world at large. Unlike the general perception, when the French Revolution took place in 1789 there was very small percentage of educated people in France. At the time of Unification of Italy in mid-19th century, which led to the creation of this country, an overwhelming number of people thought that Italia (as they call it in Italy) is the name of the queen and not that of the newly created nation. But when the same European powers lost their empire in the second half of the 20th century, they were scientifically and educationally much advanced. Similarly, if the US goes the Soviet Union way in the future, one would not jump to the conclusion that it had abandoned science.
This obsession with Science education should be immediately stopped as in this post-modern world it is leading that very West to disaster.