Bismillahi Ta’ala
Author: Umme Danyaal
Whenever we hear the word ‘explorer’, the switch in our mind automatically clicks to names such as Vasco Da Gama, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, and Ferdinand Magellan to name a few as ‘the great explorers of all time’, who navigated the earth, found new territory, civilized or cultured the natives and expanded on humanity. We have been taught bits and pieces of their lives that have been highlighted with the facts being blanketed and our minds holding them on a pedestal.
The sad truth is the reasons why Western explorers traversed the world are very different from that which we know, their object was to colonize, steal the riches possessed by the country, and turn the natives into slaves for very selfish reasons.
Let me tell you a secret
These explorers were only ‘successful’ because they were assisted by Muslim navigators who were masters of the sea or they used resources created by Muslims. The birth of Islam opened new prospects for the Arabs and the many different conquests during the early decades of Islam evoked their valiant spirits. The great voyages by Arab Mariners as early as the 1st year A.H who were fearless and roamed about the sea regardless of its depth, current, and weather conditions reached distant lands such as Ceylon, Zanzibar, Maldives, Malaya, Java, and Sumatra.
As we know for believers the center of the world has always been the house of Allah, the place every Muslim gravitates towards 5 times a day in prayer and also to perform either Hajj or Umrah. Hajj is a pillar of Islam that every believer desires to fulfill, this desire and thirst to go to the sacred lands as Islam spread across the seas paved the way for Muslims from around the world in commercial and geographical ventures and created a beautiful merging of Arabs with non-Arabs.
Muhammed Al Idrisi
Today with modern technology we can search and go through maps within seconds but this would not have been possible without Muhammed Al Idrisi the cartographer (map maker), born in Morocco he was a keen traveler from his teens and travelled to North Africa, Spain and Turkey.
He was hired by the King of Sicily as an adviser for 18 years where he was asked to compile a book that was the greatest medieval geographical book of all time in English the title translates to AN ENTERTAINMENT FOR HE WHO LONGS TO TRAVEL THE WORLD, his work was a combination of that which is found in the Qur’an and experience from travel. In the 12th century, his map was considered the most precise map ever made and was used for warfare by Sultans and kings, up to the 15th century his work was studied internationally by Geographers as he was one of the earliest geographers to explain the world was round, this was 500 years before the realization dawned on Galileo.
An amazing fact in his map is the South was at the top and the North was at the bottom which was later changed by Europeans. Al Idrisi in his work has hinted that Arabs knew the Americas. Modern research has proved that the Arabs discovered America at least 5 centuries before Columbus. The names of the islands in the Atlantic proved that they were inhabited by Arabs and their descendants.
Ibn Majid
Ibn Majid known as the “Lion of the Sea” for his extensive knowledge regarding the oceans, was known by everyone who traveled the Indian Ocean, he was known in the West as the navigator of Vasco Da Gama when he piloted his historic voyage to India which was a first by a European via the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean, he was also famous for inventing the needle compass known as the Mariners compass which became very popular amongst the Arab sailors and allowed them to take distant voyages into the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, they circled the African continent and also touched the shores of the new world.
Ibn Battuta
Abu Abdullah Muhammed known as Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan born Individual and the greatest Muslim traveler of all time who explored the world around the same time as Marco Polo but surpassed him by traveling 5 times as far as Polo did from Morocco to the Middle East going to Russia, India and South East Asia. He left home at the age of 20 and returned at the age of 51 completing 4 Hajj in this time as well as spent months at a learning, teaching, and trading. Coming from a background of people well versed in Islamic jurisprudence he too was a Qadhi and even spent time in Delhi serving as a judge. He travelled about 75000 miles which equaled approximately 3 times around the world.
The subject matter of early Muslim geographers in their compilations included simple geographical descriptions of the many different countries which also explained how the natives lived, the country’s physical features, and climate conditions. This golden period of Muslim geographers and their compilations of travel and explorations later paved the way for Christians of the West in their endeavors of exploration and discoveries.
Muslims may claim their right in the exploration of vast oceans and the discovery of lands far off, but the difficulty is that this era of human activity is not known as the largest collection of this literature was destroyed at the time when Baghdad fell. The invaluable manuscripts were turned to ashes by the Mongols and the Muslim civilization met a similar fate in Spain at the hands of the Christians.