Abstract
This chapter tracks historical developments from civilization’s birth in Mesopotamia to the great Persian, Islamic, and Ottoman empires to the splitting up of the Middle East into many separate and independent countries during the early twentieth century. The rise of Islam within the context of world history is a fascinating story, as are the connections between Islam and the emergence of modern medicine. Despite staunch opposition from enemies in Mecca, Islam would spread from a tiny community in Medina on the Arabic peninsula to rule nearly one-quarter of the known world in less than 100 years. The history of Islam is intimately connected to the rise of science and medicine in the Middle East. This was a time when Muslim caliphs worked closely with Christian physicians to establish hospitals and care for the sick. After centuries of folk Arabic Medicine and Prophetic Medicine, a science-based Islamic Medicine with Greek roots emerged. Grounded on observation and experimentation, Islamic physicians made many key contributions in medicine, surgery, and pharmacy during Islam’s Golden Age. These discoveries would later serve as the basis for modern medicine in Europe and the rest of the Western world. The Golden Age ended with the invasion from the north by Mongols, who destroyed the libraries and many institutions of higher learning.
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Notes
- 1.
Citations to Sahih Bukhari (the most respected of all Sunni Hadiths) is based on a 2009 translation by M. Muhain Khan (2009). We list the reference by volume, book, and number (vol/book/no). See http://d1.islamhouse.com/data/en/ih_books/single/en_Sahih_Al-Bukhari.pdf (last accessed October 3, 2013).
- 2.
In this chapter we frequently cite the work of Fazlur Rahman (1919–1988), who has been described as “the most learned of the major Muslim thinkers in the second-half of the twentieth century, in terms of both classical Islam and Western philosophical and theological discourse” (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/531762/posts). In addition to being a highly reputable and exact Islamic scholar, he studied the original sources and translated into English many texts that are now available only in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or Urdu. Considered a Sunni scholar and philosopher, he was raised in Pakistan and obtained a Ph.D. in Islamic philosophy from Oxford University. He is known widely as a prominent moderate reformer, and served for many years as the leader of the Islamic Research Institute in Pakistan. After leaving that position, he taught at the University of California at Los Angeles and later became the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and the first Muslim member of the Divinity School faculty at the University of Chicago. He grew up in a Sunni family of the Hanafi school (representing reason). His famous textbook Islam (1979, University of Chicago Press) is used as an undergraduate text in many Western universities.
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Koenig, H.G., Shohaib, S.A. (2014). Historical Background. In: Health and Well-Being in Islamic Societies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05873-3_1
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