FULL TEXT HERE
Marxist historian of religion, Paul Siegel, notes how the insurgent power of early Islam was able to topple decaying elites in Persia, Syria and Egypt:
Beyond these countries Islam expanded like a compressed force that had been released. Within a century of Muhammad’s death (AD 632) it conquered the vast expanse between the Himalayas and the Pyrenees, an empire larger than the Roman Empire at its height. The great cities of Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo, and Antioch were taken. Alexandria, the foremost commercial city in all the world, fell after a siege lasting over a year. The border of China was reached; North Africa was added to the Islamic empire; Spain was acquired; Europe itself seemed threatened, as it was for centuries. Nothing had ever been seen like this amazing series of victories.
There were the Medieval Muslim thinkers who have provided the intellectual foundations for the rise of the West.
Lebanese Marxist historian, Hussain Muruwwah in his 1979 study of the golden age of Islam, Materialist Trends in Arabo-Islamic Philosophy, hailed Ibn Sina as an antecedent of the modern left who ‘combined metaphysics with political engagement and was persecuted for it … certainly a living embodiment of a sublime progressive idea called the unity of life.’
To read more about intellectual heroes such as Al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd who have received the recognition in the non-Islamic world and even hold much esteem among their co-religionists today, READ the full text as archived HERE.
Otherwise, related readings pertinent to the rise of political islam in Malaysia can be sourced from:
The radicalisation of Islam in Malaysia
The rise of Political Islam in Malaysia
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