The centrality of the Qurʾān as the prototype of the written word in Islam bears significantly on the role of books within its intellectual tradition and educational system. An early impulse in Islam was to manage reports of events, key figures and their sayings and actions. Thus, "the onus of being the last 'People of the Book' engendered an ethos of " early on and the establishment of important book repositories throughout the Muslim world has occurred ever since.
Upon the spread of Islam, libraries in newly Islamic lands knew a brief period of expansion in the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily and Spain. Like the Christian libraries, they mostly contained books which were made of paper, and took a codex or modern form instead of scrolls; they could be found in mosques, private homes, and universities, from Timbuktu to Afghanistan and modern day Pakistan. In Aleppo, for example, the largest and probably the oldest mosque library, the Sufiya, located at the city's Grand Umayyad Mosque, contained a large book collection of which 10,000 volumes were reportedly bequeathed by the city's most famous ruler, Prince Sayf al-Dawla. Ibn al-Nadim's bibliography Fihrist demonstrates the devotion of medieval Muslim scholars to books and reliable sources; it contains a description of thousands of books circulating in the Islamic world circa 1000, including an entire section for books about the doctrines of other religions. Modern Islamic libraries for the most part do not hold these antique books; many were lost, destroyed by Mongols, or removed to European libraries and museums during the colonial period.
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Other articles related to "islam":
... The conversion of the first ruler of Melaka, Parameswara, to Islam was unclear so far with no evidence as to whether he had actually converted ... and that only the latter converted to Islam at the age 72 ... Muhammad Shah, that the ruling class and the subjects began accepting Islam ...
... One attempt at a religion that emerged out of Shi'ite Islam in the 19th century was Baha'ism, which preaches a complete doctrine of perennial truth ... religions carry the same truth, ranging from Hinduism and Zoroastrianism to Islam and the Baha'i faith itself ... that Judaism and Christianity were early forms of one religion, Islam ...
... the government had appointed Muzharul Islam as the center's architect, but Islam deferred, instead recommending Alvar Aalto or Le Corbusier ... When those architects were unavailable, Islam enlisted his former teacher Louis Kahn as the architect ... Throughout the project's design and construction, Islam assisted Kahn ...
... Main article Criticism of Islam Criticism of Islam has existed since Islam's formative stages ... Early written criticism came from Christians, prior to the ninth century, many of whom viewed Islam as a radical Christian heresy ... of the life of Muhammad, the last prophet of Islam, both in his public and personal life ...
... The autobiography Ghazali wrote towards the end of his life, The Deliverance From Error (Al-munqidh min al-ḍalāl several English translations) is considered a work of major importance ... In it, Ghazali recounts how, once a crisis of epistemological skepticism was resolved by "a light which God Most High cast into my breast...the key to most knowledge," he studied and mastered the arguments of Kalam, Islamic philosophy and Ismailism ...
Famous quotes containing the word islam:
“Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.”
—Basil Bunting (19001985)
“During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.”
—Bernard Lewis, U.S. Middle Eastern specialist. Islam and the West, ch. 8, Oxford University Press (1993)
“The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)