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There aren’t many public libraries
in Dubai. Well, there are some, run by the Dubai government, but
they aren’t most popular with the residents. You don’t see a
fraction of the crowd that you come across in the emirate’s fabled
malls. In our part of the world, you find more people obsessing
about latest models of mobile phones, laptops, cameras, cars or
that new tower of apartments coming up in the neighborhood, rather
than about books and authors.
On trips to Europe, one is endlessly
amazed by this spectacle of people--young and old--immersed in
their paperbacks or in those ubiquitous tabloids. Wherever you go
you find people reading. Always. Even cabbies are lost in their
copy of Sun or the Daily Mail as they wait for customers. This is
a far cry from life in much of Muslim world today where the
culture of reading is fast dying.
Our lack of interest in reading is
symptomatic of the larger malaise that afflicts us as a
people--our apathy to learning and a culture of knowledge and
scientific inquiry. Our hunger of learning and zeal to explore new
ideas and new frontiers of knowledge that once drove our ancestors
has given way to a crass, disturbing intellectual listlessness.
Is it any wonder then we are so way
behind the rest of the world? Not a single university from the
Muslim world - home to 1.6 billion people, a quarter of the
world’s total population - figures in the top 500 centres of
learning. Even as the world progresses and conquers new frontiers
of knowledge and ideas by the hour, the Muslims are yet to stir
out of their slumber of centuries. This would have been
understandable when most of the Muslim world had been under
colonial occupation.
There was a real crunch of resources
too. Today, however, it’s a vastly different world. Most Muslim
countries are doing well economically thanks to their rich natural
and financial resources. If petrodollars have transformed the once
desolate landscape of the Middle East into the world’s most
happening region, things haven’t been too bad for other Muslim
countries like Turkey, Malaysia and even Pakistan. However,
growing economic prosperity and development seem to have done
little to whet the Muslim world’s appetite for knowledge and
learning.
The Muslim world either pushes
itself on this path to deal with the challenges ahead or commits a
collective hara-kiri. After all, it was the Arabs and Muslims who
had pioneered the knowledge revolution that changed the world. No
history of Western progress will be complete without crediting the
critical role Arab scientists and philosophers played in it. As
William Dalrymple says: “So much that we today value
-universities, paper, the book, printing — were transmitted from
East to West via the Islamic world, in most cases entering western
Europe in the Middle Ages via Islamic Spain. And where was the
first law code drawn up? In Athens or London? Actually, no — it
was the invention of Hammurabi, in ancient Iraq."
There was a time when a burning
hunger for knowledge and new ideas consumed the Muslim lands.
Governments actively encouraged and supported the quest of
knowledge and spirit of scientific inquiry. Muslim lands were home
to scores of great universities and centres of learning long
before Oxford and Cambridge came into being.
The Arabs made great strides in
sciences like medicine, physics, chemistry, geography, astronomy
and navigation which the Europeans later used to chart their own
progress. The Arab contribution played a crucial role in Europe’s
Industrial Revolution and the phenomenal progress the West has
made since. Terms like alchemy, algebra, cipher and countless
others derived from Arabic are a tribute to the imprint Muslims
left on the world.
The House of Wisdom, or Dar al
Hikmah, founded in Baghdad in AD 762 was at the heart of this
great intellectual movement that transformed the Middle East and
the world. It was home to a great library and was the first of its
kind centre that promoted scientific research, dialogue and
published books. Thousands of books were translated from Greek,
Latin, Sanskrit and other languages. The House of Wisdom heralded
the golden era of Islam with Muslim scientists making great
breakthroughs in all areas. When the Mongol armies ran over the
Middle East and destroyed the House of Wisdom at Baghdad in 1258,
rivers ran black for weeks. This was the ink of all those books
and manuscripts dumped in the rivers in their thousands by the
invaders. Whatever happened to our love for the written word?
Aijaz Zaka Syed is a widely published writer and columnist.
Write
him at aijaz.syed@hotmail.com
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