الحمد لله نحمده ونستعينة ونستغفره، ونعوذ بالله من شرور أنفسنا، ومن سيئات أعمالنا ، وأشهد أن لا إله إلا الله وحده لا شريك له ، وأشهد أن سيدنا محمداً عبده ورسوله ، اللهم صلِّ وسلم وبارك على سيدنا محمد وعلى آله وأصحابه  ومن تبعه إلى يوم الدين

The title of this talk may appear to be strange because it implies that the main reason for the decline of Muslims is related to the main reason for the rise of the Jews.  To avoid any confusion regarding what I mean, I am going to start by giving the two main conclusions of my talk, and these are:

1. The decline of Muslims started when they became illiterate regarding the Quran and the rise of the Jews started when they became literate regarding the Torah.
2. The illiteracy of the Muslims regarding the Quran was promoted by the Muslim Scholars and the literacy of the Jews regarding the Torah was promoted by the Jewish scholars.

I am going to stop for a minute to let you absorb these two conclusions and asses whether they have merit before I start rationalizing them.  I also invite anyone who can propose another theory to prepare a talk and present it us.

There are several options for starting this discussion to justify these conclusions but let me divide the talk in three sections:

1. The relevance of Bani Israel to Muslims
2. The importance of literacy of the Quran to Muslims
3. The impact of the literacy of the Torah on Bani Israel

The relevance on Bani Israel to Muslims

Immediately after Allah introduced in the Quran the account of man’s creation, He revealed to us historical accounts of different nations who received revelations and Allah started with the Children of Israel (Bani Israel).  The name Israel is composed of two Hebrew words (Isr) which mean slave and “ael” which Allah. So, Israel means the slave of Allah, in Arabic Abdullah, which was the tile that Allah bestowed upon Prophet Jacob (Yaqoob) whose father was Prophet Isaac (Ishaq) and whose grandfather was Prophet Ibrahim (Ibrahime), (peace be upon them all).  So, the children of Israel are the descendants of Prophet Jacob (Yaqoob) and they also known as the Jews (Al-Yahood).  In general, the term Jews (Yahood) is used to refer to Bani Israel who followed Prophet Musa (M0ses) and thus follow the Torah.  So, the two titles Bani Israel and the Jews, can be used loosely as synonymous.

Allah may have selected to start with the story of the Children of Israel (Bani Israel) and emphasized it in many places in the Quran because of the great similarity between their role and the role of Muslims and between the nature of the revelations to Prophet Moses (PBUH) and Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). To the children of Israel, Allah revealed to them a book (The Torah) as He said:

وَإِذْ آتَيْنَا مُوسَى الْكِتَابَ وَالْفُرْقَانَ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَهْتَدُونَ

“And remember We gave Moses the book and the criterion, so that you might be guided aright.” (Al-Baqara 2:53) 

To Muslims, Allah also revealed a book (The Quran):

وَاذْكُرُوا نِعْمَةَ اللَّهِ عَلَيْكُمْ وَمَا أَنْزَلَ عَلَيْكُمْ مِنَ الْكِتَابِ وَالْحِكْمَةِ يَعِظُكُمْ بِهِ

“Remember Allah’s blessings on you and the fact that He sent down to you the Book and the Wisdom for your instruction. “ (Al-Baqara 2:231)’ 

There is also a great similarity in the preference and blessings that Allah granted to the Children of Israel and to the Muslims.  To the Children of Israel, Allah says:

يَا بَنِي إِسْرَائِيلَ اذْكُرُوا نِعْمَتِيَ الَّتِي أَنْعَمْتُ عَلَيْكُمْ وَأَنِّي فَضَّلْتُكُمْ عَلَى الْعَالَمِينَ

“O Children of Israel, remember My blessings that I granted you and how I favored you above all other people. (2:47) 

To the Muslims, Allah says:

كُنْتُمْ خَيْرَ أُمَّةٍ أُخْرِجَتْ لِلنَّاسِ تَأْمُرُونَ بِالْمَعْرُوفِ وَتَنْهَوْنَ عَنِ الْمُنْكَرِ وَتُؤْمِنُونَ بِاللَّهِ

“You are the best nation that has been raised up for mankind. You enjoin what is right, forbid what is evil and believe in Allah.” (3:110) 

Therefore, as we read the revealed warnings and the condemnations of the children of Israel, we should always keep in mind that while the arrow of condemnation is pointing to them its tail is pointing to us.   If we don’t heed the warnings and learn from their pitfalls, the head of the arrow of condemnation will surely start pointing to us.  To measure our position regarding Allah’s condemnation, you may want to just replace the name “Children of Israel” with the name” Muslims” and assess whether Muslims are following the same deviated path that brought condemnation to the children of Israel or following the straight path of Islam as Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) showed it to us.

Understanding the history of Bani Israel is so important because it is entwined to ours.  The importance of the history of Bani Israel is demonstrated by the frequency it is mentioned in the Quran.  For example, you will note that the name of Prophet Musa is mentioned in the Quran 136 times while Prophet Mohammad name is only mentioned 4 times.  

The importance of literacy of the Quran to Muslims

The importance of literacy of Quran for Muslims is clearly illustrated by the first word and the first command in the revelation which is “Read”.  In addition, the Quran has a chapter whose title is “the pen” and the pen is the tool by which knowledge is transmitted from one generation to another.  Therefore, the Muslim nation is known as the nation of reading.  This implies that anyone who does not read is not part of this nation.  Reading is a key aspect of any intellectual society, and this is expected to be a key attribute of the Muslims. The first few verses that were revealed spells out what a Muslim must be literate in:   

ٱقۡرَأۡ بِٱسۡمِ رَبِّكَ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ (١) خَلَقَ ٱلۡإِنسَـٰنَ مِنۡ عَلَقٍ (٢) ٱقۡرَأۡ وَرَبُّكَ ٱلۡأَكۡرَمُ (٣) ٱلَّذِى عَلَّمَ بِٱلۡقَلَمِ (٤) عَلَّمَ ٱلۡإِنسَـٰنَ مَا لَمۡ يَعۡلَمۡ (٥)

Read! In the Name of your Lord, Who has created (all that exists), (1) He has created man from a clinging clot (2) Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous, (3) Who taught by the pen. (4) He taught man what he did not know. (Al-Alaq 96:1-5)

These first few verses mention reading the revelation and all knowledge that are included in the revelations. The response of Muslims to this command of reading was amazing.  One command, one word from Allah and major transformation occurred.  Muslims became one of the most educated people in history with mass education spreading in the Muslim nation as unlike any other nation.  Also, Muslims were the first to build public libraries and universities.   

Why the Quran is the most critical book for Muslims to study starting from young age because it exposes the student to many subjects that promote the curiosity of the student to study many natural and social sciences and these topics were considered as part of his religious education.   As identified by Imam Abu Hamed Al-Ghazali (ابو حامد محمد الغزالي‎) and Imam Abu Bakr al-Arabi (ابو بكر العربى), the Quran includes over 77,000 forms of knowledge.   Therefore, you will find that Muslims whom we brag about regarding their contribution to Islamic civilization as well as western civilizations have written in many broad scientific subjects including what we call now religious subjects.  Let us look at three examples:

Ibn Rush (Averroes) work was motivated by the belief that all natural phenomena occur following laws that Allah established. In order to predict what will happen and take advantage of the system that Allah established; one must discover the divine laws in the universe.  This inspired him to study and write on mathematics, medicine, astronomy, physics, planetary mechanics, logic, geography, philosophy, psychology, and even classical music theory while he was also studying and writing on theology, Sharia, and Islamic jurisprudence.   Ibn Rushd wrote at least 80 original works in these diverse areas.  Ibn Rush (Averroes), this great scientist wrote a highly regarded book on Islamic Jurisprudent and perhaps the best-known work in this field of comparative Fiqh, the book is “Distinguished Jurist’s Primer” ( بداية المجتهد و نهاية المقتصد).

Another example of a Muslim who excelled in both natural and religious sciences is Ja’far as-Sadiq who was great chemist and his student Jābir ibn Hayyān who is known as the father of chemistry said: “my master Ja’far as-Sadiq taught me about evaporation, distillation and crystallization and everything I learned in alchemy was from him.”  While Ja’far as-Sadiq wrote books in the subjects of chemistry, mathematics, philosophy, astronomy and anatomy, he also developed the Ja’fari school of Fiqh and he is considered the sixth Shia Imam. 

Ibn Sina (ابن سینا‎), known in the West as Avicenna, studied and memorized the entire Quran by the age of 10.  Of the 450 works that is believed that he has written, around 240 have survived and they are in the areas of philosophy, medicine, astronomy, alchemy, geography and geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics and works of poetry.  His most famous work is the Book of Healing, a philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and the Canon of Medicine, a medical encyclopedia which became a standard medical text at many western universities. 

The Question is what has gone wrong with Muslims? The thesis I am forwarding here is that suddenly studying the Quran became restricted to certain elites who established themselves as the only people who can understand and interpret the Quran.  Those elites adopted this concept from the Christian scholars who wanted to keep the people in check by prohibiting them from reading the bible and limiting the reading and interpreting the bible to the clergy.   Disconnecting people from religious texts resulted in no one being able to question the religious authorities in their control of the masses. 

Unfortunately, when this dangerous policy was adopted by Muslims, the Quran lost its secret of developing the cognitive capacity of the Muslim youth to excel in all subjects.  To ensure that only few elites have access to the divine Quran, they started developing subjects that takes anyone over 20 years to study to be allowed to interpret the Quran.  None of these subjects was known by early Muslims who represented the best generation.  In addition, these subjects were divorced from natural and social sciences and thus add no value of the progress of the society.  The same group who imposes this severe restriction on learning the Quran keeps propagating the idea that there is no clergy in Islam.  But they formed a clergy system by de facto rule. 

As a result of this manipulation of the religion, the interaction of Muslims with the Quran became limited to learning how to read the Quran without understanding or just memorizing it to read for blessings.  Unfortunately, this is what we see even today.  The Quran is not a normal book, just reading it for blessing is a very small part of its contribution to the established of the golden era for Muslims.

The sad part is that even the so-called educated Muslims of today have fell in this trap and they lost the courage to even try to understand the Quran on their own, and worst they will discourage anyone who will try.  

So, the proposal in this thesis is that the fall of the Muslims civilization was done by the Muslim scholars who restricted the literacy of the Quran to very few who have very narrow scope in their studies as means for control and wealth generation. At the same time, they promoted the illiteracy among Muslims regarding the Quran but making its study so complicated and time consuming of studying many irrelevant subjects.

I’ll end this section of discussion by a quote that I modified slightly and see if you agree: “Quran is the source of our determination, the driver of our love of education, the instruction manual for life that leads us to have the morals and ethics we have. If you don’t teach from the instruction manual, and only teach from example, the sources of the lessons will become lost, and the teachings will become diluted, and this was the reason we eventually lost access to the advantages we had”.

The impact of the literacy of the Torah on Bani Israel

To understand the reason for the success of the Jews, I relied on a book entitled: “The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History,” written by Zvi Eckstein and Maristella Botticini. This book is published by the Princeton University Press and won the National Jewish Book Award for scholarship.

Zvi Eckstein is the Mario Henrique Simonson Chair in Labor Economics at Tel Aviv University and professor and dean of the School of Economics at IDC Herzliya in Herzliya, Israel.

Maristella Botticini is professor of economics, as well as director and fellow of the Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research (IGIER), at Bocconi University in Milan.

As I quote key parts of this book, I want you to reflect on the relevance of what I discussed regarding Muslims.  

From the time of the Babylonian exile, in the sixth century B.C.E. until the destruction of the Second Temple, Judaism rested on two main pillars: the rituals carried out at the Temple and the reading of the written Torah. A small elite of priests headed the Temple, and Torah study was also the province of a very few.  But after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E., the survival of the Jewish religion demanded that every Jew learn to read and write and acquire knowledge-acquisition skills; whoever was unable to do so − became assimilated.

In the absence of an actual tangible center of ritual, Judaism’s survival became contingent upon its ability to create an alternative that could adapt to the tough new conditions. The reading and studying of the Torah by every Jewish man − this constituted the foundation of the Jewish people’s existence from that point on. To ensure continuity, every man was tasked with the duty of imbuing his sons from a young age with the ability to read and write. That was indeed a revolutionary development in a world in which the majority were illiterate.  Thus, out of necessity, the Jews found themselves possessed with skills that proved critical for their economic development.

But instilling literacy and teaching Torah entailed high expenditure because most Jews were engaged in farming, and thus lived in poverty and hardship. How could a simple Jewish farmer in some Galilee village in 200 C.E. bear the cost of educating his sons? And what did he get out of it?  This was a central existential dilemma that burdened Jews in that period: to bear the financial burden of education and thereby cling to Judaism, or to benefit from saving of such expenditures, and thereby forgo Judaism. Obviously, Jews whose affinity for their religion was weak to begin with, would be tempted to choose less difficult alternatives.

Therefore, part of the Jewish people was assimilated, and two distinct patterns emerged: On the one hand, heightened literacy among the Jewish community, whose economy was largely agriculturally based. And, on the other hand, a slow but evident process of religious conversion ‏(primarily to Christianity‏), and in its wake a dramatic shrinking of the Jewish population.

In the mid-seventh century, there was a historic encounter between the Jews and then-ascending Islam. That encounter was destined to strengthen the literacy revolution that had taken root centuries earlier among the Jews, and to channel it in unexpected directions. The immense Muslim empire that arose after the prophet Mohammed’s death stretched from the Iberian Peninsula all the way to India and China. Within it was inculcated not only the religion of Islam but also a dominant language, Arabic, new institutions, and laws. The empire’s growth led to the development of many new industries, commerce expanded, and new cities were erected.

This tremendous wave of globalization and urbanization sparked increased demand for educated professionals with intellectual skills. The effect these changes had on the Jews was dramatic: Between 750 and 900, nearly all the Jews in Mesopotamia and Persia − some 75 percent of world Jewry at the time − left farming, moved to the big cities of the Abbasid Caliphate, and began to specialize in an array of literacy- and education-based professions, which were much more lucrative than farming.

The Jews became a people of merchants, tradesmen, grocers, bankers, scholars and doctors because of a clear advantage that they developed by the effort to ensure literacy among every Jew. That process prepared the Jews to take on key roles within the economy of the Muslim empire, since their skills were well suited to the needs of a growing urban and global world.

The Jews went out to locales where their skills made them highly sought-after, such as Yemen, Syria, Egypt and the Maghreb, and later on to Western Europe. Belonging to a collective with a strong identity enabled them to maintain inter-regional ties regardless of where they resided, and also to enforce contractual agreements from afar − something that was very helpful in commerce.  This can explain the success of the Jews in professions related to the credit and financial markets. In the 12th-13th centuries, moneylending was a typical Jewish occupation in England, France and Germany, and also their main profession in Spain, Portugal, Italy and other Western European lands.

Contradicting the prevailing view that the Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages specialized in moneylending because Muslims and Christians were forbidden to lend money with interest, the authors of the book “The Chosen Few” argue that the Jews in Western Europe willingly specialized in that profession and in banking because they had the right skills and conditions: the ability to read and write, mathematical skill and institutional means to enforce contracts; capital that was initially amassed from their work as merchants and craftsmen; and unprecedented networks that enabled them to communicate with each other throughout the Diaspora.

The rabbis and scholars who transformed Judaism into a religion of literacy during the first centuries of the first millennium, could not have foreseen the profound impact of their decision to make every Jewish man capable of reading and studying the Torah and other religious texts.  When people attribute the achievement of Jews to their determination, to how they value education, they are missing the true reason for their success which is the Torah.

The authors write: Torah is the source of our determination, the driver of our love of education, the instruction manual for life that leads us to have the morals and ethics we have. If you don’t teach from the instruction manual, and only teach from example, the sources of the lessons will become lost, and the teachings will become diluted, and we will eventually lose access to the advantages we have.

If the Torah did this to the Jews, Muslims have no chance of success until they go back to the Quran and become literate in it.  The Prophet (PBUH) said regarding the Quran that unfortunately, most Muslims don’t understand:

وَهُوَ الفَصْلُ لَيْسَ بِالْهَزْلِ مَنْ تَرَكَهُ مِنْ جَبّارٍ قَصَمَهُ الله، وَمَنْ ابَتَغَى الهُدَى فِي غَيْرِهِ أَضَلّهُ الله، 

It is the serious judgment and not the lighthearted amusement. Any tyrant who discards it, Allah will destroy him and whoever seeks guidance from other than it, Allah will misguide him.

وَهُوَ حَبْلُ الله المَتِينُ، وَهُوَ الذّكْرُ الْحَكِيمُ، وَهُوَ الصّرَاطُ المُسْتَقِيمُ، هُوَ الّذِي لاَ تَزِيعُ بِهِ الأَهْوَاءُ، وَلاَ يَشْبَعُ مِنْهُ الْعُلَمَاءُ، وَلاَ يَخْلُقُ عَلى كَثْرَةِ الرّدّ، وَلاَ تَنْقَضَي عَجَائِبُهُ،

It is the mighty rope of Allah. It is the noteworthy wise remembrance.  It is the straight path.   It is the one that will not make the whims deviates, and scholars will always be hungry to study it. Its responses do not need replenishment. Its wonders will never cease.

It was the broad literacy of the Quran that brought the golden age of Muslims, and it is the illiteracy of the Quran that caused the decline of the Muslims.   This Quran that we are illiterate of it includes over 77,000 forms of knowledge and we have deprived ourselves from these knowledge forms. 

DUA

Appendix 1.  Curriculum for Islamic Education