The Revival #23
Date:
Channel: Muhammad West
Series: Muhammad West - Ramadan 2024 - The Revival
File Size: 18.74MB
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AI Generated Summary ©
The decline in the Ottoman Empire, Middle East, and fall in the Muslim umroom were due to a lack of learning and discussion among the Muslim population, resulting in the drop in fall's movement. The fall also affected the way people were addressed, with some being disconnected from the religious text and others being rigid. The printing press was invented by the Catholic church, and its use in Europe is widely distributed and mass produced. The speakers emphasize the importance of bringing back the idea of Islam and reforming the way it is taught in the world, as well as educating people on their religion to uphold the values of the church. The sharia is important in bringing about reform and reading the Quran in a stormy period.AI Generated Transcript ©
Night number 23
and, one of the odd nights.
I know everybody looks a bit tired, but
may Allah
grant us the ability to make the most
of this evening. Ameen.
Yesterday, we introduced the gunpowder states, and we
said these are basically the last Muslim
empires or Muslim nations before
the advent that we have today where there
is no centralized power. And those those states
were the the Ottoman Empire,
the Safavid Empire of Iran, and the Mughal
Empire of India. We spoke about the Mughals
and, basically, the rise and fall of the
Mughals yesterday.
But in general, I wanna talk about the
overall decline
and how many you know, as we went
through the series,
people were we marveled at what we had
achieved as a ummah, how far we had
extended in in terms of learning and discovery,
yet we almost want to connect the dot.
How did we go from there to here?
What was the the reason
that we fell? And there are many, many
reasons that we can discuss, but perhaps
the intellectual decline can be traced to one
moment, one real event, and we'll talk about
this, inshallah, this evening. What is the cause
of the intellectual decline in the decline in
the Muslim ummah? So we spoke about the
Ottoman,
the Mongolian devastation. The Mongolians destroyed the capital,
Baghdad, which was the center of learning, the
most advanced,
center in the world. Within, also, Andalus, which
is also a center of our learning, disappeared,
wiped off the map because of the Reconquista.
And
the the lands that followed, the Ottoman lands,
the Mughal lands, these were not
centers of learning.
They almost began from scratch.
And the people themselves, the Ottomans, the Safavids,
the Mughals, are more military kind of people.
These were not
ulama in the sense both from a religious
perspective and from the dunya perspective. If you
look at the classical books of of Islam,
you would find many books being written by
the scholars of Sham and the scholars of
Baghdad, the scholars of of
of of Khorasan and Persia
or or Andalus. You would not find it
from the scholars of these areas.
And so we almost have a a a
a a a you know, starting from scratch
from these area, these regions. Also, these areas,
the ulama of those times,
you could find that the academic
discussion, the way in which we were debating,
exploring new ideas, this had disappeared. The door
of ijtihad was closed. The ulama became very
rigid.
They became
very dogmatic,
closed minded. They wouldn't discuss matters,
and knowledge was taken out of the hands
of the people and was centralized in the
ulama. Literacy itself amongst the late the common
folk. Remember we said Andalus?
Literacy was almost a 100% amongst the common
man. You would find in the Ottoman Empire,
the Mughal Empire,
literacy was just in single digits.
Very few people could read or write,
and so the culture of discussion and learning
had been lost. I mean, just think about
this. A 1000 years ago,
Ibn Sina, who writes his book Kitab U
Shifa, he reintroduces,
he reintroduces
Plato and Socrates. He reintroduces
this kind of rational thinking, which challenges Islamic
thought.
As a response, Imam Ghazali writes 2 volumes.
And then as a response to Imam Ghazali,
imam ibn al Ruzh in Spain writes a
number of volumes. This kind of
Iman Taymiyyah
he gives a fatwa which is grounded in
the hadith about talaq, and he gets arrested.
Yesterday, he wants to translate the Quran into
Persia, and he's almost killed. And so what's
going on? How is our academic thought and
our thinking going backwards? And so people were
disconnected from the religious text, and independent thinking
was closed. And this also then had a
knock on effect while the ulama closed
Islamic ulama, the religious fraternity, closed the doors
of independent thought within Islam. That's also extended
to the secular science, the worldly science. We
stopped discovering new things, curing diseases,
having new discoveries,
for many, many 100 of years. Coffee was
made haram. And we'll talk about one particular,
technology that was made haram that really knocked
us
far back. So we see the Muslims falling
behind technologically.
The ulama are also unable to resolve new
issues because they're not they're not willing to
think new. They are stuck and rigid in
their madhab system, and they reject any new
kind of ideas. Now
there's one thing that that that that caused
our fall. Many people are looking at the
history, what happened, what went wrong. We'll talk
about this one point. For that, we go
a little bit back.
751,
the year 751, this is, at the height
of the or the Umayyad dynasty,
a small battle between the Muslims and the
Chinese.
Small battle. Not many people. It wasn't a
huge,
war between, like, not in the hundreds of
thousands of of people. It was a kind
of small battle, but it changed the course
of history. It's called the battle of Talas,
the battle of Talas. And this was between
the Muslims and the Tang dynasty of China.
The Muslims and the Chinese had a had
a had a had a skirmish,
and this is deep inside Chinese territory, and
the Chinese lose. The Muslims have defeat them.
And when the Chinese retreated,
very strangely, there was a new type of
technology that was acquired by the Muslims. Within
this army, within the Chinese camp, there were
people who knew how to make paper.
Before that, the art of paper making was
unknown.
The Chinese invented paper, and through paper, paper
was a very secretive kind of technology. They
only used it to have, like,
religious texts or for the emperor. Everything else
was written on leaves or parchment or whatever
it was, and so paper was acquired. When
the Muslims captured these papermakers,
they took them to Baghdad,
and, the the technology was was was was
was learnt. This revolutionized the the Muslims understood
what this means. Now instead of us having
to write on leather or having to chisel
things in stone, we can now, you know,
mass produce
information.
This was, like, revolutionary.
And so the Muslims took papermaking from the
Chinese,
and they became the best papermakers in the
world. And as you are making more paper,
you are writing more books, you are spreading,
proliferating
knowledge across the ummah. And through that, we
had libraries and we had schools and we
had knowledge
generationally building on 1 generation, now has books,
builds them for the generation. And from there,
we had universities and all the great scientific,
discoveries, algebra, medicine,
astronomy, all of these wonderful things.
A wonderful fact that I always mention is
the 1st university in the world was established
by Alaihi Fatima Fihri, 859.
This is a 100 and well, 1,100
years before before,
Cambridge was basically established. Well, ladies went to
Cambridge. A 1000 years, a lady establishes university
in in Islam. A 1000 years later is
the first time ladies in Europe go to
university. So this is what's happening. But as
time goes on, we said that the the
papermaking then goes to Al Andalus.
They the first paper manufacturers are in Spain
under Muslim rule. And then as Andalus falls,
this technology goes into Europe.
Europe is now making paper as well, writing
books, but it's still much far behind compared
to the Muslims.
But it would be the Europeans who come
up with a new invention. They come up
with a printing press.
What is the printing press? Basically, if in
the past, if I had if I had
a
Quran and my brother wanted a Quran, we
had to write it out. You had to
hand write the Quran out. But,
Johannes Gutenberg understood that if I could have
some kind of template that presses the same
thing, I can copy
1,000 and 1,000 in the same book over
and over again. So now I can mass
produce books.
And so the printing press was invented by
the Europeans in 14/40,
and through this, they could mass produce books
and the,
and the technology now spread that everybody could
have access to reading material.
When this technology came to the Muslims,
the ulama, the Ottoman ulama
declared this thing haram,
that it is not allowed to have a
printing press.
And a fatwa was given that anybody that
uses this machine
is going to be executed.
Now
at the same time this fatwa is given,
Europe is going through a
a transformation because of this technology.
And I take a bit of a tangent.
We talk about the Protestant Reformation. We'll talk
about this for a minute. There is a
a a priest called Martin Luther, not the,
I had a dream, Martin Luther King. He's
named after this,
priest, Martin Luther.
So what is this all about? The Catholic
church,
obviously, at that time, was the most powerful
institution in Europe. They were the biggest land
owners of Europe. The kings of Europe were
subject to them, and part of their decree,
their doctrine was no person could read the
Bible except the church.
No one was allowed to have a Bible.
In fact, the Bible was not even in
the spoken language of French or English. It
was in Latin, which the people couldn't speak.
And because the church made it so that
we are a clergy, you can't get to
God. You need to go through us to
get to God. And so this man, Martin
Luther, was a priest. He started off as
a lawyer. He had a a life,
a life threatening experience and then he said,
I'm gonna become a priest. And as he
goes into the the priesthood, he sees a
lot of things within the church that he's
not okay with. One of the things is
called an indulgence. An indulgence is basically that
you come to the MJC. They say, MJC,
I'm gonna give you a donation. Masha'Allah, how
much you're gonna give? A R1,000,000? Fantastic. You
give us a R1,000,000 donation. We're gonna write
a certificate out for you. This tells you
you have a get out of jahannam free
card. We give you permission to get out
of jahannam. This is called the indulgence. The
Catholic church was issuing this thing,
and he thought to himself, how is this
possible?
How could the church
offer
indulgences
to save people from hell? What authority do
we have? And as he dug deeper into
the the workings of the church, he found
so much of what was being taught by
the people was not aligned to the Bible.
Now because the people didn't have access to
the Bible, they weren't allowed to read it,
it was really the church that were, you
know, taking, you know, taking control of of
of
of of the society. They were basically misleading
society. So he writes a thesis
around all these problematic things within the church.
Now these were not new ideas.
This kind of thought was not new, but
now he's got the printing press. So, well,
there were priests before that raised this concern,
and they wrote to the church, and he
just got buried, he now took this, and
he mass produced it on the printing press.
And,
also, the fact that we could now translate
the Bible in the spoken language of the
people, he was from Germany, and they could
mass produce the Bible,
people had access for the first time what
was a very secretive thing with the church,
and this led to a whole reformation. Now
interesting, if you look at his reforms, remember
we spoke about Ibn Taymiyyah
trying to go back to,
reforming or reviving Islam. Look at what he's
saying. He's saying that we must go back
to the original scripture of the Bible. We
should cut out interpretations which don't align with
the Bible. We should,
every person has
He's basically
looking at what is happening in the Muslim
lands, and that is why the first
Muslim the first Quran that's translated into German,
the person who writes the forward is this
Martin Luther.
Martin Luther
is inspired
by what he's seeing with the Muslim that
with Islam. We don't have a clergy. We
don't have a pope. Everybody has access to
the Quran. Everybody can read the Quran. Everybody
can interpret the Quran within certain
framework,
and this is what he says. What? We
should have the same thing within Christianity. And
so he leads a reformation, and this reformation
turns Europe upside down. Many of the the
the the the European,
monarchs are in favor of this because now
the church doesn't have a monopoly on land.
The monarchs cannot take repossess a lot of
the land from the church because you don't
have a link between God. Each and every
one of us can do our own thing.
And so with the reformation,
the church's power gets diminished,
books becomes widespread,
scholars are able to interpret themselves, and because
of this, we have
a a a spread of learning and intellectual,
you know, intellectual explosion within Europe. The same
time, the Ottoman Khalifa has declared it haram
for for us to print books. And so
now we see the imbalance beginning.
Now as time goes on,
when the Muslims were kicked out of Spain,
many of the Spanish
had a printing press. They had this technology.
When they came to the Ottomans, they said,
you know, what this we've got this amazing
technology. And the Khalifa then decreed that Muslims
are not allowed to use the printing press.
The Jews are allowed to use it and
the Christians. So what you have now is
you have a very highly educated literate Jewish
population,
Christian population with an illiterate Muslim population. Also,
one of the reasons why the ulama this
was because of the ulama. Right? The Khalifa
would not have this decision if it wasn't
the ulama telling him, if you do this,
we're going to jahannam. Why did they say
this? Because they also did not want to
diminish their power and authority.
And their fear was, look what's happening in
Europe. Because of this, all these modern ideas
are being floated around. The church is collapsing.
If we allow the people here to have
books and read it themselves,
tomorrow, you know, it's going to be crazy.
So we shouldn't have this. How long does
it take before the Ummah decides, you know,
this this can't continue? Let's see.
So the printing press is developed in 14/40.
300 years later, still no printing press. Eventually,
Hungarian,
diplomat who embraces Islam, he has to write
a book to the Khalifa and says, Sheikh,
there is no we are falling so far
behind the Europeans now. You have to allow
this to come about. We have to allow
that we can develop books so that our
people can read and we can educate our
people.
Eventually, the Khalifa says, okay. Fine. But you
can't print anything in Arabic. No Arabic books.
No Islamic books. Only a set limited amount
of books you can print, which we will
give you. So this continues for another 100
years. Very limited amount of printing in the
Ottoman Empire. Nowhere else printing press in the
Muslim world. Eventually, in the 1800,
a printing press arrives in Cairo.
Who brings it? Napoleon. Remember I said Napoleon
invaded Egypt? When he invaded Egypt, he brought
with him an Arabic printing press. Why? Because
he understood propaganda. I need to communicate with
the people here. I need to tell them
that I am the new in fact, many
people thought it was actually Muslim because he
was saying I'm here to save your religion.
I'm trying to uphold, and he he wrote
about how much he admires Islam and. How
does he communicate with him? Through pamphlets. He
brought a printing press with him. And so
when he left, he thought, I'm not gonna
bring this whole thing back, this machine back
to France. I'm just gonna leave it here.
And that was the printing press, the first
one that we had. The places like Hawaii
and Tahiti had printing presses before Cairo, Baghdad,
Constantinople,
Istanbul.
And so by this time, the gap, 400
years, where the Europeans are learning, developing, developing,
more millions and millions of books are being
pushed out. We are still writing books by
hand. We are so far behind the Europeans,
and this is where that gulf now you
understand the big gap between us and them.
And so the most educated and so the
Muslim ummah is miles behind the Christian world
or the Europeans. And within the Muslim lands,
And the only people who are actually learning
are those who leave the Muslim lands, And
the only people who are actually learning are
those who leave the Muslim lands. They go
to European the European cities. There, they learn
and read. When they come back and they
see Islam and the the practicing Muslims are
so far behind, the idea comes that the
problem is Islam. Islam is the cause of
stagnation.
Islam is the cause of being backwards, that
it is the Sharia that must be gotten
away. It's not the ulama. The blame is
now put on Islam, and, therefore, you're going
to find a wave of
modernizing.
Now you'd find the term reformation.
Now I I remember the series. The series
is called a revival. Islam, we don't do
a reform.
There's nothing in Islam that needs to be
changed or reformed or developed. Islam is perfect.
If anything is going wrong, we need to
revive something which was lost, and that's what
Islam needs to go through, a a revival,
not a reformation. Christianity had to reform itself,
had to fix everything that was broken. For
us, we need to bring back all the
ideas, all the concepts, all the discoveries we
had, and this series has shown We had
ruled the world and led the world. We
had no conflict between the sciences of the
duniya and the learning of the sharia. In
fact, one complimented the other. We lost the
plot somewhere. Us, not the Sharia. And so
we'll talk insha'Allah. With that, the, basically, the
gunpowder states, the Muslim,
falls way behind and the colonial period begins.
Our lands become invaded and Islam gets pushed
further to the back. How did we keep
our Islam alive in this very dark period?
We'll talk about
that tomorrow.
Last last question,
we asked
was the first in the to translate the
Quran into which language? To into Persian. Right?
The first Persian,
translation.
Sister Amina Kasim?
Sister Amina.
Shamir.
And then today's question,
in in which battle took place 751 between
the Muslims and the Tang dynasty? This battle
caused us to discover paper.
The name inshallah is is is there.
20 past in inshallah.
20 past in inshallah.