Translating the Works of the Greeks

To go back to the development: in the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him), it was very simple. Later on, some of the Abbasid caliphs, al-Maʾmūn al-Rashīd^**, established a centre where they began to translate works from the Greeks, Hellenistic philosophy, the works of Aristotle and others, into Arabic. In fact, according to many research scholars today, much of the works of Aristotle and of some of the other famous Greek philosophers that are available today in English, and even in Greek, actually comes from the Arabic. Because the Greeks hid their works, the Muslims paid large sums of money to acquire these works and to translate them, and they preserved them. There was this group of Muslims who did that.

The harm that was created by this was that many Muslims of that time took these ideas on: this Hellenistic rationalism, Hellenistic logic, this way of thinking about the world. And, different from those Muslims who took on philosophy wholeheartedly, these people said that they were going to amalgamate: they would combine the beneficial points of Hellenistic philosophy and of Islam, and put them together, because they thought Islam needed that infusion. That is where many problems were created.

There were many other deviant groups and sectarians, people who had all these various different ideologies. The Muʿtazilah, who were the rationalists as such, were the strongest, and they did the most damage at the time, because they managed to get the leaders to adopt their way. Al-Maʾmūn al-Rashīd, Hārūn al-Rashīd's son, who was the khalīfah after his father as well, took this on wholeheartedly and began a campaign of persecution: of converting all of the ʿulamāʾ of Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jamāʿah, all of the ʿulamāʾ of Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jamāʿah, to this way of thinking.