In the first passages ever revealed to the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم, Allah said, Read [O Prophet] in the name of your Lord who created.

[He] created humans from a clinging substance. Read, and your Lord is the Most Generous. Who taught by the pen.

[He] taught mankind what they knew not.251

What may be the most overlooked teaching of the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم, and yet one of the greatest debts owed to him, is the fact that he taught the world the importance of knowledge.

Liberating them from centuries of superstition, he taught his followers the necessity of investing their lives in pursuing education.

Historians recognize that it was on his cue that literacy rates soared past those of contemporaneous societies, even though in the Arabia of his birth, illiteracy was the norm. In a very short span of time, the major Muslim cities such as Mecca, Madinah, Baghdad, and Cordoba (Muslim Spain) became the hubs of knowledge and scholarship. It suffices to consider that the caliphal library in Medieval Cordoba, one of its seventy libraries then, reportedly had 400,000 books while the largest library in Christian Europe probably had 400 manuscripts.252

He صلى الله عليه وسلم validated his followers’ intellectual potential by saying, “You know better concerning your worldly affairs.”253 Through statements like these, the early Muslim understood that demonstrated expertise and empirical findings ought to be respected.

Stemming from that paradigm, Islam instituted the liability of physicians and set intellectual standards for centuries. This was no coincidence, but rather due to the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم saying, “He who practices medicine without being known for proficiency in medicine shall be liable.”254 Cautioned by that statement, tenth-century Baghdad (Iraq) instituted a medical licensing exam that all physicians had to take before practicing medicine.255

In addition to pioneering this accountability, Islam also provides by it a way to counteract the enormous amount of medical misinformation circulated on the internet by non-specialists today. Now that the phenomenon of democratizing knowledge has infected our world with the inability to distinguish between reliable facts and pseudo-scientific medical claims, the Prophet Muhammad’s صلى الله عليه وسلم teachings offer a safeguard against falling back into the dogmatic anti-intellectualism that characterized the world before mass literacy.

In another tradition, the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم said, “Allah has not sent down a disease except that He sent down for it a cure, regard-less of who may know it and who may be ignorant of it.”256 In other words, these cures are all discoverable, so let the research renaissance begin. Muslims became so advanced in medicine that William Osler, a founder of the Medical Library Association, said the Canon (Qanūn) of Avicenna (Ibn Sīna) had remained a medical bible in Europe for a longer period than any other work.257

It was also the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم who introduced the concept of medical quarantine. When ‘Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb , the Prophet’s second successor, reached a place called Sargh during his travels, he was informed that there was a plague in the lands of Shām where he was heading. ‘Abdul-Raḥmān ibn ‘Awf , another senior Companion of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم, told ‘Umar that the Messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم had said, “When you hear about its occurrence in a land, do not enter it. And when it happens in a land, do not flee it.”258

On the renaissance of knowledge sparked by the guidance of Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم, Yale University’s Franz Rosenthal says in Knowledge Triumphant, For ‘ilm (knowledge) is one of those concepts that have dominated Islam and given Muslim civilization its distinctive shape and complexion. In fact, there is no other concept that has been operative as a determinant of Muslim civilization in all its aspects to the same extent as ‘ilm… There is no branch of Muslim intellectual life, of Muslim religious and political life, and of the daily life of the average Muslim that remained untouched by the all-pervasive attitude toward knowledge as some-thing of supreme value for Muslim being. ‘Ilm is Islam, even if the theologians have been hesitant to accept the technical correctness of this equation. The very fact of their passionate discussion of the concept attests to its fundamental importance for Islam.259

In The Classical Heritage in Islam, Rosenthal adds, Neither practical utilitarianism, however, which made an acquaintance with medicine, alchemy and the exact sciences appear desirable to Muslims, nor theoretical utilitarianism, which prompted them to occupy themselves with philosophical-theological questions, might have sufficed to support an extensive activity of translation, had not Muhammad’s religion, from the very beginning, emphasized the role of knowledge (‘ilm) as the driving force in religion and, thereby, in all human life.260

Robert Briffault (d. 1948), a British surgeon and social anthropologist, writes, The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist of startling discoveries or revolutionary theories; science owes a great deal more to the Arabs; its own existence...261 Roger Bacon was no more than one of the apostles of Muslim science and method to Christian Europe; and he never wearied of declaring that knowledge of Arabic and Arabic science was for his contemporaries the only way to true knowledge... Science is the most momentous contribution of Arab civilization to the modern world...262

The Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم was therefore not just an orphan who adopted the world with his compassion, but an unlettered shepherd who provided an extraordinary prism that addresses every theological, ethical, or civilizational inquiry until the end of time. He propounded a message of profound substance, coupled with fine-tuned laws that remained flexible enough that the message would remain forever pertinent and never become outdated. He offered the world a definitive message, but one also versatile enough to accommodate the transformations in world dynamics that were unimaginable to the brightest minds 1,400 years ago. Such vitality reflects the impeccable equilibrium that was struck in his teachings, and somehow without any trial-and-error phase.

With that, we complete our tour of what could be described as the intellectual miracle of the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم, namely that his message was among the most compelling facets of his prophethood and the strongest indicators of its divine origins.

His teachings laid the foundation for a coherent and integrated system of theology, law, and ethics that addressed all the needs of the existential human condition: physical, mental, social, and spiritual. His system endures to this day and will persist for as long as God wills, bringing enlightenment, wisdom, and comfort to millions of believers throughout history and across a diverse range of social and cultural contexts.