Based on the book by Ali Mahmood titled “Muslims” – Purchase using this link – https://www.kjreports.com/product/muslims/
When the Prophet Muhammad left Mecca for Medina, he had less than a hundred followers. Within a century after he passed away, the Muslims had conquered all the territory from the Atlantic Ocean to China, and the empire of Islam led the world in science, education, medicine, culture, commerce. This empire dominated the world for a thousand years. The two empires that followed after the seventeenth century were, in comparison, short-lived—the British Empire lasted for two hundred years and its successor, the American Empire is in decline after only sixty years.
Between the seventh and the seventeenth centuries, Muslim power shifted from the Arabs to the Persians, the Turks and the Moguls. The capital of the Islamic empire moved from the sands of Mecca and Medina to Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba and Istanbul, as new dynasties replaced the old—the Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Fatimid—followed by Tamerlane, the world conqueror, and the three gunpowder empires—the Ottoman, the Safavid and the Mogul.
The golden centuries of the world of Islam flourished while the Dark Ages of Europe kept life, brutish and short. The great libraries of the caliphs in Cordoba and Baghdad ran to half a million books while the great European collections did not even reach a thousand volumes. The Canons of Avicenna (Ibn Sina) dominated medicine in Europe for five hundred years and Ibn Firnas demonstrated flight at the age of 76, a hundred years before Da Vinci drew his sketches, but never risked an actual attempt to fly. The thousand years of the Islamic Empire were a time of great achievement, great institutions, great cities and most of all great men.
When Saladin conquered Jerusalem and Balian, the Christian general reminded him of the cruelty and barbarism of the earlier Christian conquest. Saladin gently but firmly replied, ‘I am not of those men. I am Saladin’. He gave away all that came to him as ruler and died penniless without even the money for a decent burial. Suleiman the Magnificent before whom the world trembled, was the pre-eminent sovereign in both Asia and Europe.
This remarkable era is the legacy of The Prophet, and of those he inspired to pursue education, justice and merit. It was these values and attitudes that took the Muslims up; and it was the loss of these values and attitudes that, in the seventeenth century, brought the Muslims crashing down.
After one thousand years at the top, the Muslims spent two hundred years at the bottom; the former masters of the universe were deprived and humiliated by their new lords from the West. They became a people without hope.
