Islam Creator of the Modern Age
1. Islam: Creator of the Modern Age
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Islamic revolution produced a favourable
atmosphere, it unleashed a mighty flood of
knowledge, which had been kept pent up for
thousands of years by the dam of superstition.
LEARNING AND ISLAM
Ptolemy II, who became the ruler of Egypt after
Alexander the Great in the third century B.C., was a
great patron of learning, and founded a library in
Alexandria, which contained about 500,000 books
on different subjects. It is this collection, which is
known in history as the great library of Alexandria.
It has been alleged – wrongly, as it happens – that
this library was burned down at the behest of the
second caliph, ‘Umar Farooq. It had, in fact, been
destroyed much earlier, in the fourth century A.D.,
long before the advent of Islam. According to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
“The library survived the
disintegration of Alexander’s empire (1st century
B.C.) and continued to exist under Roman rule until
the third century A.D ..”
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The truth is that one half of this library was burnt
by Julius Caesar in 47 B.C. In the third century,
