Do not be surprised if I told you that our golden Islamic civilization rose with that thing... and the West snatched it from us with that thing.
Some may think that this is something like geographical discoveries or fierce wars under the name of “Islamic conquests” or “Crusades,” but if we go back to asking: How was each party able to carry out geographical discoveries and manufacture the latest advanced weapons, benefiting from the other party’s experiences? ?
I leave the answer to the interest of the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, in missions to other countries that were months away from them. The first mission was to Jerash in Yemen, where he - may God bless him and grant him peace - sent Urwa bin Masoud and Ghailan bin Salamah - may God be pleased with them - to learn tank making (a machine). A wooden fort with men in it, whose mission was to penetrate the forts. This mission returned successfully, as the first tank was made during the siege of the people of Taif in the year 8 AH.
This position shows us that missions, or what is currently known as (scholarships), are the basis of development for a primitive society such as the Islamic society, which began to advance and develop until it achieved fame that became famous as the (Islamic Golden Age), which benefited from the civilizations of the Greeks, Persians, Byzantines, and Indus. , China, and many others. The Arabs used to say: Seek knowledge, even if it is in China.
In contrast to this was the (European Dark Age), which was dominated by ignorance and the Church’s fight against science under the pretext of science being contrary to the Bible, and with the religious and intellectual revolution, the most important phenomenon of which was scientific missions, the Europeans emerged from the swamp of darkness into the sun of the Renaissance, where they benefited from the scientific heritage of Muslims and its famous position at the time. In Cordoba, “the capital of Andalusia,” the English orientalist Henry George Farmer says: An increasing number of scholars realized that the influence of Islamic civilization as a whole in Europe and the Middle Ages was enormous in fields such as: Islamic sciences, Islamic philosophy, theology, and Arabic literature. And aesthetics, this has been recognized by historians.
We should not forget that the two parties dealt with scholarships honestly in terms of honest scientific transmission and attribution to its sources, as well as the return of scholarship students to their countries immediately after completing their studies in order to strengthen their community that supported them with these scholarships.
During scholarship, we may find that the scholarship student imitates the residents of that country in their way of life and livelihood, but this should not reach the point of bragging about that country at the expense of your home country, for this is what some Muslim children today lost, and I wish they had taken a lesson from the Europeans’ dealings with our Islamic civilization, as the Church She complained about Christian youth being influenced by Muslims, called on them to be proud of their values, and sometimes sent threats to deprive them of the afterlife, as they claimed!
For our part, it is necessary to be proud of our values and religion wherever we go, so as not to appear devoid of a glorious past, and to be in a miserable present, but rather to draw inspiration from those who came before us in the fields of knowledge.
