Intellectual Islamic History

We hear the term Ahl Sunnah wal Jama'ah often. What does it exactly mean? How did it evolve historically? Why is it so important? What factions were formed among the sahaba and their followers? Why Kufa and Basrah became the centers of conflict? A refreshing discussion by the great Allama Syed Sulaiman Nadwi.

Urdu translation of the Arabic book, ma za khasar al-alam bi inhitat al-Muslimeen. This book has sold hundreds of thousands copies in various translations.

What was Imam Abu Hanifah's view on dealing with the government and the rulers? What was his own practice? What were his relations with the Omayyad and Abbasid rulers? Why some of his students joined the government and others shunned it? The historic insights in this lively book will help guide the Muslims today also to answer these questions for themselves in their interactions with the Muslim rulers.

The Kitab at-Tabaqat al-Kabir by Abu 'Abdullah Muhammad ibn Sa'd is one of the most important and earliest surviving collections of biographical details of the early Muslims, spanning just over the first two centuries of Islam. It is a rich storehouse of information compiled from all the sources available to Ibn Sa'd, as a result of which, the reader is given a vivid insight into the lives of the early Muslims and how extraordinary they were.

"14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun founded a special science to deal with the problem of history and culture based on the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle and their Muslim followers. This work examines the philosophic foundation and principles of Ibn Khaldun's new science of culture, to show that an adequate understanding of his contribution to the study of the various aspects of human society requires an understanding of his all-comprehensive approach to sociology."

A detailed exposition of the Khawarij: their history from the time of their founders to the end of the Umayyad dynasty, their beliefs, peculiar traits, and the various sects that represented their beliefs. Also discusses the links between them and Abdullah ibn Saba.

This is an edited and updated version of author's Phd thesis which earned him a doctorate from the University of Karachi. The author teaches at the Darul Uloom Karachi. A very comprehensive treatment of the subject of Waqf in Islamic Jurisprudence.

What do coffee beans, torpedoes, surgical scalpels, arches, and observatories all have in common? Were Leonardo Da Vinci’s flight ideas original? Who devised the casing for pill capsules and where did Fibonacci learn to flex his mathematical fingers?

All these answers can be found here in ‘1001 Inventions: Muslim Heritage in Our World,’ written in an accessible style for those with limited knowledge of either Islam or history. A golden age of civilization, from 600 to 1600 CE, will unfold, because medieval Muslims were trailblazers in fields as diverse as medicine and mechanics, cartography and chemistry, education and engineering, architecture and astronomy. No area was too obscure to miss the scrutiny of enquiry backed up by rigid scientific experimentation.

So get comfortable with this guidebook and prepare to begin on a voyage of discovery through a thousand years of science and technology into the lives of medieval pioneers whose ingenious inventions have helped create our world today.

This is a unique book. You may be aware of a few of the contributions of Islamic Civilization to the history of humanity and the world we live in today. For example, many people know about the Islamic origins of Algebra and Arabic Numbers. However, much of this history remains obscured, and hidden from view. This book places many aspects of the profound impact of Islamic Civilization into plain view and shows how it has been suppressed and distorted. Western historians, in general, have removed the Islamic source with regard to every single change that affected science and civilization at the origin of Western civilization, and modern civilization, and then, each and everyone has substituted a number of explanations for such changes within their field of study. This systematic suppression of the Islamic source of modern science and civilization has been, however, noted by individual historians who have re-considered the history of their subject. Thus, in his `History of Dams,’ Norman Smith, began his chapter devoted to Islamic dams, by noting how historians of civil engineering have ignored the Muslim period, and have claimed that nothing was done by the Muslims, even worse, they have blamed the Muslims for the decline of irrigation and other engineering activities, and their eventual extinction, which is `both unjust and untrue.’ (from the Introduction) The book's more than 500 pages are packed full with thousands of referenced facts and includes a substantial select bibliography. It is set to become the standard reference work for the subject and the starting point for anyone wanting to explore the field further.