Michael Hamilton Morgan's The Lost History of Muslim Personalities: Mecca and the Arabian Peninsula between the years 570-732 A.D. Translation, Review and Commentary

كتابُ مايكل هاملتون مورغان "التاريخُ الضائعُ لأعلامِ المسلمينَ": مكةُ المكرَّمةُ وشبهُ الجزيرةِ العربيَّة بينَ الأعوامِ 570-732م دراسةٌ وترجمةٌ وتعليقٌ

Abstract

Michael Hamilton Morgan's English book "A Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scholar, Thinkers, and Artists" was published in 2008 in Washington by the well-known National Geographic Society. And it was published in translation into some foreign languages, including Arabic, under the title “The Lost History of Muslim Scholars” in Amman by Ministry of Culture in 2016. This book monitors the importance of scientific centres, Arab and Islamic personalities and works that contributed to the global civilization achievement. Here, the description of the Muslim civilizational achievement comes as "lost" - not in the narrative sense - but in the sense that few people, especially in the West, know very little about this subject, or even they know that many aspects of Western society go back to their origins, to Islamic sources. What increases the seriousness and importance of the topic is the presence of researchers who ignore this achievement, exclude it, or refrain from engaging in it for several different reasons, to the point of making the Islamic civilization widely absent and turning it into a mere fringe in the relevant books, especially the Western school and university curricula. This book presents an attempt to rediscover and celebrate Islamic civilization by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, especially in the West. We deal everyday with computers, track spaceflight, and communicate with the physical sciences, mathematics, medicine, engineering, music, literature, arts, architecture and spirituality, but many, including contemporary Muslims, are unaware that these fields of knowledge have been based for more than a thousand years on the achievements of Muslim scholars, thinkers and artists. This article includes a comprehensive review of this book with a general evaluation overview, referring to the Arabic edition of the book, as well as a translation of the sections written about Mecca and the Arabian Peninsula between the years 570-732 AD. This is followed in the end with references to the most important works that have been used or referred to in this article.