Scholars agree that modern industrial progress owes its existence to Arab-Muslim influences. A. Humboldt writes: “It is the Arabs who should be regarded as the real founders of physics.”

Philip Hitti writes in his book, History of the Arabs (1970): “No people in the Middle Ages contributed to human progress so much as did the Arabians and the Arabic speaking peoples.”Historians generally accept that it was the science which reached Europe through the Arabs (who were of course Muslims) which finally brought about the renaissance (or the first awakening, to be more precise). Original works in Arabic written after the establishment of Bait al Hikmah in Baghdad in 832 CE, were translated into Latin. “This stream was diverted into Europe by the Arabs in Spain and Sicily which helped create the European Renaissance,” writes Professor Hitti.

What brought about this thinking in the Arabs in the first place, considering that they had been submerged in the same backwardness as the rest of the world of that time? There can be only one answer: the creed of monotheism. The Arabs, after the advent of Islam, were imbued with the spirit of monotheism, while others practiced polytheism. This difference caused the divergence in their histories, one shaped by the course of events, the other shaping history itself.

Henri Pirenne acknowledged this as a historical fact: “Islam changed the face of the globe. The traditional order of history was overthrown.”