According to legend, when the caliph Umar conquered Alexandria in the seventh century, he had the famous and vast library destroyed, saying that if the writings contained within were in agreement with the Koran, then they were redundant and therefore useless; if they disagree with the holy book of the Muslims, then they are blasphemous and must be burned. It turns out that this apocryphal story was not invented by critics of Islam but rather was created by Muslims of the twelfth century to justify the burning of other heretical texts.

The centuries provide many such examples of Islam's deliberate turning-away from knowledge and human rights, a very common phenomenon in other world religions. The Koran, for example, accepts slavery as an institution, even more so than the Bible. It should be noted that the Muslims are bidden to be kind to their slaves, and to free a slave is considered a great act of kindness. However, under Islam, slaves are merely property and have no legal rights whatsoever. Black slaves especially were treated with total contempt and disdain by ancient Muslims. In fact, black slaves existed in the Muslim world into the twentieth century - some sources report that thousands of blacks are kidnapped from Africa each year and reduced to slavery in Middle Eastern Muslim households.

The study of "foreign" sciences - that is, subjects like mathematics, philosophy, natural history, medicine, and astronomy - was looked upon with great suspicion and occasionally open hostility, especially during the Middle Ages. These foreign sciences were allegedly a threat to Islam, as they came largely from non-Muslim sources. Ibn Warraq quotes one non-Muslim scholar as suggesting that science and philosophy flourished on Muslim soil during the first half of the middles ages; but it was not by reason of Islam, it was in spite of Islam. Not a Muslim philosopher or scholar escaped persecution. To give Islam the credit for [Ahmad ibn Rushd] and so many other illustrious thinkers, who passed half their life in prison, in forced hiding, in disgrace, whose books were burned and whose writings almost suppressed by theological authority, is as if one were to ascribe to the Inquisition the discoveries of Galileo, and a whole scientific development which it was not able to prevent.

The twelfth-century Arabian scientist Ibn al-Haitham asserted that the earth was spherical, not flat. His work was castigated as heretical and his books were burned. Carl Sagan updates this Muslim aversion to a spherical Earth in his 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World:

In 1993, the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, issued an edict, or fatwa, declaring that the world is flat. Anyone of the round persuasion does not believe in God and should be punished. Among many ironies, the lucid evidence that the Earth is a sphere, accumulated by the second-century Graeco-Roman astronomer Claudies Ptolemaeus, was transmitted to the West by astronomers who were Muslim and Arab.

In Islam, any study that is not essential to the furtherance of the cause is deemed unnecessary and therefore forbidden. Biology and paleontology, for example, is largely ignored by believers since discoveries in those areas would hinder Islam rather than promote it, e.g. the development of heretical evolutionary theory.

Copy And Pasted from Islamanics!

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