Page 324 - Quranic Wisdom - New.indd

Positive Aspect of Negative Event

Positive Aspect of Negative Event

hen Arabs came to India, it was apparently an invasion.
WHowever, there was a positive side to this negative event.
The Arabs introduced a new culture into India, for example
they brought equality. Former Prime Minister of India Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru has endorsed this fact in his book The
Discovery of India, where he writes of the Arabs coming to India
with their ‘brilliant culture’ (p. 227).
The Arabs also became an instrument of introducing Indian
knowledge to the rest of the world. For example, the Indian
numeral system came to be known to the Arab mathematician
Al-Kindi. He discovered a tract on this subject in Sanskrit and
translated it into Arabic. He then wrote his Arabic book in four
volumes, “On the Use of the Indian Numerals” (Kitab fi Isti‘mal
al-’Adad al-Hindi) about 830 AD. The original Sanskrit text
is now lost. The only source of knowing this chapter of Indian
history is through the Arabic translation. Al-Kindi’s work was
principally responsible for the diffusion of the Indian system of
numeration in the Middle East and the West. The Arabs learned
the numeral system from India and called it Indian numerals. As
it was from the Arabs that the Europeans learned this system, the
Europeans called them Arabic numerals.

It is nature that creates such historical turbulence
for the benefit of mankind.

The British entered India in the eighteenth century. This was
again akin to an invasion by a foreign power. But this invasion

323