Aspects of Sami Frasheri’s contribute to Islamology

Abstract

Often, it is said and written that Sami Frashëri is one of the most well-known Albanian and international scholars and that he wrote many works, over 60, in many fields (linguistics, lexicography, history, culture, play, Islamology etc) and in various languages (Albanian, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Greek, French), but these assertions are not always communicated by authentic, systematic and specialized studies.
Attentive reading of voices on distinguished personalities and dwellings contained in Kamus’ul-a’lam professes our claim that Sami was an authentic islamolog, who can be compared to the most serious and famous thinkers among Albanians living in that time.
Sami does not agree with the European stands that culture and civilization have their beginning with Greeks. He asserts, “civilizations, appeared in the Earth since antiquity, have more or less written their histories”, and continues, “when we look at these histories, we understand that, since the emergence of the first civilization till to the extinction of the Greek’s civilization, it has been present one time at a given people and the other time in several ones, and in this way, there has not been even a single time that globe lacked it”.
Using the historical-comparative and analytical methods works out further his thesis to point out “… just like the Greek civilization is more perfect that the Egyptian one, the Phoenician one than that of the other Asiatic people, there is no doubt that the Islamic civilization is even more perfect than that of Greeks”.
He put the stress on the fact that European’s overlook of Muslim’s contribution should not be a product of “their fanaticism”, but of the lack of Muslims’ works spreading among European people, which resulted in unawareness of wide masses concerning the Muslim works.
We think that the main reason of ignoring Islam was the general platform of the Christian world towards the Muslim one, which does not recognize it as a heavenly religion from the start to nowadays.
It should be emphasized that beside the pronounced role of the Islamic culture and civilization in general, it is also worth pointing out the fact that it played an important role in the formation of scholastic philosophy and revival of Renaissance in Europe.
It can be concluded that the Islamic civilization and culture opened new paths yet unknown to the Europeans by that times, oriented the European viewpoints towards the cultures of little importance for them, and made Europeans love Islamic culture and civilization, which along with its own values, offered the Greek forgotten ones as well.
Islam explained the problems of the world, the right, social relations, role of God in the existence and that of man in society.
We hope that this brief view on some Islamologic viewpoints of Sami Frashëri, conveyed along with the meditations of competent authors and our reflections in the way we see it, become one of the fortunate initiatives for the study of this famous erudite and scholar’s live and work.