General Supervisor

that Arabs before Islam were mere nomad Bedouins who only experienced
unstable and stressful desert life, remote from any form of civilisation and
devoid of any civilisational origins. The objective researcher can but deem
this claim as unjust and deviant from truth. In fact, there were dynamic
centres of internal and world trade transactions in the north and the south
of the Arab Peninsula, for instance, in Mecca, Medina, Taef, Maarab, Sana’a,
Najran, Sarwah, and Dhafar.”1
Nonetheless, there are still some orientalists who insist on claiming that
Arabs didn’t use to have any form of civilisation; end even what the Arab
Muslims celebrated as pre-Islamic literary heritage which reflected that
very civilisation was seen by those orientalists and their disciples from Arab
scholars as simply a fake product or a mere concoction. Such views are voiced
by the German orientalists Theodore Noldka (1836-1930) and Vilhalm Ahlord
(1838-1909), the English orientalist D. S. Merglith (1858-1940)—among
others2—and their disciple, Taha Hussein, in his two literary works published
in Egypt in 1926 (entitled About Pre-Islamic Poetry) and in 1927 (entitled On
Pre-Islamic Literature), which were received by a wave of massive rejection
and radical criticism by literary scholars of Arabic and in Islamic circles.3
In fact, tackling all such thorny issues about Islam seems to be beyond the
1. Kamel Shahada, Translation and Our Legacy (pp. 231-241). In Proceedings of the 6th Annual
Conference on the History of Science in the Arab World (organised by the University of Halab
under the auspices of the Institute of Arab Scientific Heritage (Halab: The College, Halab University,
1984: 301-314).
2. For more details on Arabic poetry and the issue of forged imitation vs. authenticity, see Ancient
Arabic Poetry between Authenticity and Forgery (pp. 159-166). In Fouad Sezkeen, Lectures in the
History of Arab and Islamic sciences, Texts and Studies Series, vol. 1).
3. Abderrahman Badawi, Orientalist Studies on the Authenticity of Pre-Islamic poetry (Beirut: Dar
El-Ilm Lil-Malayeen, 1986: 5-14).
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scope of this paper. It would also be difficult for the researcher to identify
them in a variety of branches of knowledge (scientific or artistic) where
Muslims have taken the initiative and excelled in creativity or where they
refined their predecessors’ existing contributions in science and arts. The
aforementioned controversies are so ramified that they required collective
research efforts in order to determine their origins and loci and investigate
them so as to assess their veracity or falsehood. This would guarantee the
objectivity required by scientific scrutiny based on solid evidence and
capable of proving truth via using a clear methodology, without hostility
motivated by personal reasons. Such a scientific project would equally
include highlighting the status of Muslims in the civilisational map—as it
were—and the extent of their contribution to transferring civilisation down
from historically preceding as well as contemporary nations after verifying
its authenticity within the framework of Islamic culture.1
Orientalists often seek and find support for their claims in the huge amount
of disparate data published in the books of Arab and Islamic history, certain
books reporting the prophet’s tradition, some exegetical accounts—all of
them teeming with undocumented data, including what is known in the
science of exegesis as “Israelite data” used by certain exegetes without
any annotation or comment about their veracity,2 especially those data
openly contradicting the Holy Book and the Prophet’s Tradition and whose
1. For more data on the status of Muslims in the history of sciences, reference is made to those
contributions which focused on the history of Arab literature and heritage, written by orientalists,
Arabs, and Muslims. See, for instance, Fouad Sezkeen, Lectures in the History of Arab and Islamic
sciences, Texts and Studies Series, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: The Institute of Arab and Islamic science
History, 1984: 183).
2. Mostapah Hussein, Israelite Narratives in the Islamic Heritage (pp. 75-137). In Conference on the
Prophet’s Tradition (Tripoli, Libya: International Association of Islamic Daawa/ Propaganda, 1986).
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