Islam and Medicine

Excerpts from the acclaimed book "The Road to Mecca" by Leopold Weiss (Muhammad Asad), pp. 190-193.

"It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it.

"For, indeed, it was Islam that had carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God's creation and, thus, of His will. No demand had been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet's message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim (Ibn Majah)): and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. When they pondered the Prophet's saying, God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well (Al-Hakim), they realized that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute to a fulfillment of God's will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse [sic], We create every living thing out of water (Al-Qu'ran, 21:30) - and in their endeavor to penetrate to the meaning of these words, they began to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology...And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all the other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that Whoever treads a path in search of knowledge , God will make easy for him the path to paradise (Muslim); That the student of knowledge walks in the way of God (at-Tirmidhi); that the superiority of the learned over the mere pious is like the superiority of the full moon over the stars (Abu Dawud)"...

"Throughout the whole creative period of Muslim history - that is to say, during the first five centuries after the Prophet's time - science and learning had no greater champion than the lands in which Islam was supreme."

"Social life was similarly affected by the teachings of the Koran. At a time when in Christian Europe an epidemic was regarded as a scourge of God to which man had but to submit meekly at that time, and long before it, the Muslims followed the injunction of their prophet which directed them to combat epidemics by segregating the affected towns and areas. And at a time when even the kinds and nobles of Christendom regarded bathing as an almost indecent luxury; even in the poorest of Muslim houses had at least one bathroom, while elaborate public baths were common in every Muslim city (in the ninth century, for instance, Cordoba had three hundred of them): and all this in response to the Prophet's teaching that Cleanliness is part of faith (Muslim). A Muslim did not come into conflict with the claims of spiritual life if he took pleasure in the beautiful things of material life, for according to the Prophet, God loves to see the sign of His bounty on his servants (at-Tirmidhi)..."

"Little wonder, then, that as soon as it emerged beyond the confines of Arabia, Islam won new adherents by leaps and bounds. Born and nurtured in the world-contempt of Pauline and Augustianian Christianity, the populations of Syria and North Africa, and a little later Visigothic Spain, saw themselves suddenly confronted with a teaching which denied the dogma of Original Sin and stressed the inborn dignity of earthly life: and so they rallied in ever-increasing numbers to the new creed that gave them to understand that man was God's vicar on earth. This, and not a legendary 'conversion at the point of the sword', was the explanation of Islam's amazing triumph in the glorious morning of its history"

"It was not the Muslims that had made Islam great: it was Islam that had made the Muslims great."