How the Quranic revelations shaped the modern world

Blinded by hate and spurred by ignorance, some Westerners take pride in desecrating the Quran, Islam’s holiest book and the fountainhead of faith for billions of practising Muslims worldwide.

Such vile acts – most of them reported from Sweden and Denmark – hurt Muslims deeply because the global Islamic community sees their actions as efforts to destroy part of human history influenced and shaped by the Quranic revelations.

Anti-Muslim radicals the world over cannot fathom the fact that the Quran, the guiding light of Islam, has been a crucial element in the rise of major empires like those of the Umayyads, Abbasids and Ottomans — global powers that influenced and dominated long periods of world history, especially between 7th-20th century.

Islam’s universal character also played a crucial role in the building of great centres of knowledge, bringing together scholars from diverse backgrounds in Muslim capital cities like Baghdad, Cairo and Istanbul.

During Islam’s Golden Age in the 8th century, Baghdad’s famous school, the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikmah), was the world’s top centre for scientific research, a fact which is lost to the Quran-burning fanatics.

Many modern scholars commend the House of Wisdom and other Muslim institutions that were instrumental in translating ancient philosophical texts from Greek and Latin into Arabic, preventing them from being lost with the passage of time and preserving crucial global heritage. In its heydays, Baghdad’s famous bookstores sold thousands of books a day.

“Without the advent of the Quran, there would have been no Islamic sciences as we know them, sciences that were brought later to the West and we therefore would not have words such as ‘algebra’, ‘algorithm’, and many other scientific terms of Arabic origin in English,” wrote Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a leading Islamic scholar on Quran, in The Study Quran.

Quran’s references to historical events as well as the mechanisms of the cosmos, inspired early Muslims to think deeply about human life, its meaning and context in the universe. This wisdom also led Muslims to dabble in social and experimental sciences, says Abdulaziz Hatip, professor of tafsir (Quranic commentary) at Marmara University.

As a result, a century after the Quranic revelation, not only religious thought but also scientific research gained ground, flourishing across the Islamic world, according to Hatip.

“The greatest contribution of the Quran to human thought is that it helps an individual discover his/her ability to understand the physical world, human anatomy, history and natural events as a critical observer,” Hatip tells TRT World.

The professor says that the path-breaking work of Muslim scientific institutions and scholars influenced Western civilisation over time and played a crucial role in shaping the modern world.

Thanks to the global influence of Islam, scientific and cultural centres were built across a vast region spanning all the way from Cordoba to Baghdad. As the capital of the Abbasid caliphate in the mid-9th century and with a population of one million, Baghdad emerged as “the world’s largest, most prosperous, and celebrated city” of that period.

With the expansion of Muslim states between the 7th and 9th centuries across large parts of the Middle East, Central Asia and what is now Spain, science, culture and the arts — as well as trade activities — were globalised, spreading to many parts of the known world.

The Muslim world’s material wealth and scientific supremacy were a big attraction for Europe’s medieval religious and political leaders, who launched a wave of attacks known as the Crusades (1095-1291) on the Islamic Middle East to ransack its riches.

Despite the violence and devastation of the Crusades, Islam under the Ottoman Empire continued to spread across a broad region from Anatolia (Asia Minor) to Eastern Europe between the 13th and 17th centuries. During the same period, the Islamic faith also made more progress across South Asia and the Far East.

The global Muslim population is nearly 2 billion present. According to several estimates, Muslims will constitute the largest population on the planet by 2075.

Birth and spread of Islam

Scholars and politicians are unlikely to have predicted the ongoing demographic expansion of Islam in the 7th century when Prophet Muhammad received the first Quranic revelations in Mecca, a city in today’s Saudi Arabia.

At that time, Mecca had a population of just 600, according to experts. And Muslims of Mecca, under the leadership of Prophet Muhammad, numbered around 200 prior to their forced migration to Medina.

But how did the faith observed by just 200 people change the world and spread across the globe so fast? And how has it influenced and advanced the progress of civilisations from the West to the East?

“The Quran is intimately connected to the Prophet Muhammad and his personality, place and location in history. The Prophet and the message of the Quran created a community with heroic character. They were people who could make self-sacrifice,” says Ebrahim Moosa, Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought & Muslim Societies at the University of Notre Dame.

“They favoured their fellows — especially the weak and needy — above themselves, and they favoured the liberating message of Islam over their own lives and souls. The Prophet and the Quran inspired them to water the tree of revelation in the world with their sacrifices,” Moosa tells TRT World.

“Therefore, that first community of Islam is revered and honoured over the generations. Such people can change history as the early Muslims did,” says the professor.

The “heroic character” of Islam’s first generation has its roots in a strong motivation to change world history — because the Quran assured them they would be “the best community ever raised up for mankind, enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong”, according to a verse in the Muslim holy book.

“Earnest men have taken this prophecy seriously — to the point of trying to mould the history of the whole world in accordance with it,” wrote Marshall G. S. Hodgson, one of the greatest Western scholars on Islamic history and understanding, in his masterpiece ‘The Venture of Islam’.

Other scholars have developed other theories to explain Islam’s rapid spread across continents following its birth in Mecca in 610 AD with the first revelation of Quranic verses.

These arguments range from the military and political prowess of the first Islamic rulers, who marched across large territories from the Arabian peninsula to current-day Iraq, Syria, North Africa and Central Asia, to the liberation of economic policies Muslim leaders enforced across their newly conquered lands.

Quran’s transformative message

Among other factors, the transformative power of the Quran, which pledged believers to receive both the ultimate truth of current life and winning happiness in the afterlife, has played a crucial role in the spread and prevalence of Islam across the world, according to Omer Turker, professor of Islamic philosophy at the Marmara University.

“The early Muslims believed that they had the knowledge of the truth through Prophet Muhammed and they could really practise this truth pursuing the true example of the Messenger of Allah. As a result, they also believed that they had to convey this truth and its true life form to all people around the world,” Turker tells TRT World.

“Islamic truth is expressed in its best manifestation through a pure form of monotheism (Tawhid). The first Muslims strongly believed that they had a sacred mission to make the divine word based on tawhid reach the whole of humanity,” says Turker.

Unlike the Bible, which contains scriptures that were written in three different languages – Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek – the Quran has remained intact in its original language, Arabic, for centuries.

This historical continuity deepens the connection Muslims have with their holy book and, as a result, acts like the burning of the Quran are particularly disturbing for them.

Like Turker, Moosa points out that the unique combination Islam proposes — a monotheistic message and a code of life through religious practices — is a fundamental factor in not just the rapid expansion of the religion during the first century of its existence but also in its global presence and growth since then.

Islam provides believers with “a unique rhythm and pattern to daily life punctuated with obligatory daily prayers and rituals,” as well as annual religious experiences like fasting and zakat, which means ‘purification’ in Arabic and refers to a financial donation Muslims make to the poor, according to Moosa.

Furthermore, a lifetime ritual like the hajj, a pilgrimage to the holy lands of Mecca and Medina, provides Muslims with a sense of being part of a global community, Moosa adds.

“The Quran is the constant companion of Muslims in the journey of life. Its verses are the first sounds recited into the ear of the newborn child. It is recited during the marriage ceremony, and its verses are usually the last words that a Muslim hears upon approaching death,” wrote Nasr in 2015.

All these rituals and practices give Islam “an extraordinary coherence and consistency that can easily be implemented almost anywhere in the world,” says Moosa.

“Despite changes in Islam's centre of gravity to Syria under the Umayyads, Iraq under the Abbasids, Istanbul under the Ottomans, and Egypt under the Mamluks, the rituals have remained in place and a global community becomes visible twice a year for more than 1,400 years,” says Moosa, referring to the culmination of hajj, when the global Muslim community celebrates Eid al Adha, and the observation of the Eid al Fitr at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

Thanks to these rituals, the Muslim community, separated by lands and seas, has been able to keep its common denominators intact for centuries.

A universal political project

Islam's universal appeal has allowed Muslims to create a global community (umma) and to survive for centuries, despite encountering many internal and external challenges, from sectarian tensions to the Crusades and Western colonisation of Islamic lands.

Similarly, Islam’s inclusive nature also enabled Muslims to create multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious states led by caliphs, who served as political and religious authorities in the global Muslim community.

“It (the Muslim community) came closer than any had ever come to uniting all mankind under its ideals,” observed Hodgson in The Venture of Islam.

In modern times, West-led globalism has prevailed with the support of international institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and NATO, which are further bolstered by the dominance of a dollar-based economic system.

But in the past, various Muslim political entities — from the Umayyads to the Fatimids and Ottomans — came very close to devising a type of international order like the current globalist system.

The first Islamic state — founded under the Rashidun Caliphate between 632 and 661 and led by the companions of Prophet Muhammad — ruled much of the Middle East, Iran and Central Asia.

After this period, two powerhouses — the Umayyads and Abbasids, the Arab dynasties at the time — came to power, controlling much of the known world between the 7th and 9th centuries, except for China and parts of India, Europe and current-day Russia.

Later, in the 16th century, at the zenith of its power, the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim-Turkic dynasty, went on to maintain a vast and enduring empire across Eurasia.

Future of Islam

Despite a glorious and progressive past, the Islamic world has, in the last four centuries, seen a visible decline, with many Muslim states currently facing serious economic problems and political instability.

The dynamics behind this political and economic decline continue to be the subject of a heated debate, with some blaming the destructive effects of Western colonialism and others pointing to the scientific downturn of Muslim societies.

But Hodgson believed that if Muslims are able to “frankly” face the realities — both the positive and negative aspects — of their Islamic heritage, they might be able to address this current crisis.

In doing so, the scholar maintained that Muslims might also be able to help modern societies “overcome the cultural dislocations” of modernity and “provide a basis for creativity in the midst of lettered mass culture”.

“More generally, it (Muslim morality) might show that Islam was able to fill the modern need for moral vision, for a creative illumination of the human conscience in a technicalist world,” he wrote.

Like Hodgson, Hatip believes that the future of Islam depends on the stance and attitude of Muslims. “The answer of the Quran on this matter is clear: Unless a society changes itself, Allah will not change the good or bad, positive or negative situation they are in,” the professor says.

“Liberation from the current disgraceful situation is possible by returning to the principles of the Quran, which is full of life, happiness, honour and dignity.”