with all due respect: why do you give merits to religion, since it was the culture that favored this renewal?
It's like I said that Humanism and Renaissance were due to the Catholicism (totally the opposite, indeed)
I'm asking questions as to the influences. These factors are often complex and multifaceted. I agree that Catholicism didn't play a major role in the renaissance. To the contrary it often supressed it. The churches resistance to Galileo is a well known example. The period of upheavel in Europe as Christianity underwent a schism was a bloody and brutal time. It was also characterised by intellectual developments that could no longer be restrained.
The developmental and flowering of intellectual and cultural pursuits in Islam soon after the establishment of the Abbasids is a different story. One of several key ingredients that stimulated intellectual developments was the Quran itself.
The acquisition of knowledge, the independant investigation of reality, humility, the capacity to consider what we learn or discover judiciously and wisely are not just intellectual attributes but spiritual ones to.
Lets consiser this in more depth:
One of the purposes of our being created is that we may discern and know God:
“And Allâh has brought you out from the wombs of your mothers while you know nothing. And He gave you hearing, sight, and intellects that you might give thanks"
Surah 16:78
Reading and recitation are as keys to knowledge:
“Read! In the Name of your Lord Who has created all that exists.
He has created man from a clinging substance.
Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous.
Who has taught by the pen.
He has taught man that which he knew not”
Surah 96:1-5
Muhammad teaches that first we should have knowledge and warns against acting without knowledge:
“And follow not that of which you have no knowledge. Verily, the hearing, and the sight, and the heart of each of those ones will be questioned”
Surah17:36
Muhammad asks we have knowledge and fear of God
“It is only those who have knowledge among His slaves that fear Allâh”
Surah 35:28
Muhammad says being both learned and believer occupies a noble status:
“Allâh will exalt in degree those of you who believe, and those who have been granted knowledge”
Surah 58:11
Because of the importance of knowledge, Muhammad has asked we seek more of it:
“and say: ‘My Lord! Increase me in knowledge’”
Surah 20:114
The learned are exalted:
“Say: ‘Are those who know equal to those who know not?’ It is only men of understanding who will remember ”
Surah 39:9
Those who have knowledge may be the amongst those who readily understand the truth from God and believe in it:
“And that those who have been given knowledge may know that it is the truth from your Lord, so that they may believe therein, and their hearts may submit to it with humility”
Surah 22:54
Through God's Teachings our hearts can become purified and we can attain to wisdom,
Certainly did Allah confer [great] favor upon the believers when He sent among them a Messenger from themselves, reciting to them His verses and purifying them and teaching them the Book and wisdom, although they had been before in manifest error.
Surah 3:164
There is no goodness in knowledge which is not confirmed by action, or words which are not adorned by deeds:
“O you who believe! Why do you say that which you do not do?
Most hateful it is with Allâh that you say that which you do not do”
Surah 61:2-3
In regards knowledge, we are asked to consider even the celestial realm as this too is God's Creation:
Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of the night and the day are signs for those of understanding.
Who remember Allah while standing or sitting or [lying] on their sides and give thought to the creation of the heavens and the earth, [saying], "Our Lord, You did not create this aimlessly; exalted are You [above such a thing]; then protect us from the punishment of the Fire.
Surah 3:190-191
My hope in posting these verses is to provide a sense of the importance Muhammad placed on knowledge and learning, but also the attitudes towards its acquisition and practice.