The main source of teaching for Muslims is the Koran. It was written down over a long period of time by Prophet Mohammed, dictated to him by the Angel Gabriel. The word Koran means 'recitation'. It is made up of 114 chapters, laying down clearly rules on domestic and political, as well as spiritual matters. The style is both simple and yet poetic. It has, through the ages, served as an inspiration to Arabic literature.


Muslims of Arabia and the near East brought to Europe as well as Africa an immense amount of scholarship. Muslim society was unique in developing branches of learning, astronomy and medicine for example, distinct from religious thinking and magic.

Modern mathematical knowledge owes much to al Kwarizmi, whose book The Calculation of Integration and Equation dealt with equations, algebra and measurement. He and other Muslim scholars gave us:

- Numerals and counting in tens
- Use of the decimal point
- Algebra

Geography was another area where the Muslim world excelled. The most famous geographer, born in the 12th century, was al Idrisi, who visited Spain, North Africa and Anatolia. He drew up maps, which for their time, were extremely accurate. There are many other Muslim writers and travelers - Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, 9th century; Ibn Jubair, 12th century; and Ibn Battuta , in the 14th century.


The written word and the book are central to Muslim society. Shaykh Bay Al-Kunti's library in Timbuktu was a legal reference point for a large part of Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1930s. In the 9th century the library in Cordoba, in Islamic Spain, contained 500,000 volumes, while the largest Christian library in Europe, in St. Gallen, Switzerland, contained at that time just 36 volumes.


By the 19th century Muslim scholarship had fallen behind modern European scholarship. The Egyptian pan-Islamicist, al Afghani, believed that Islam had become weighed down by its past and wanted to revitalise it academically, without westernising it. He was hugely influential in West Africa and East Africa. The British at first were happy to let Koranic schools take the burden of education, but later helped build a small number of schools for Muslims, which had a non-religious component as well as religious strand to their syllabuses.

These include: the Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum (1902); the first school for Muslim girls in Kenya in 1938. In Nigeria, schools were built in Kano (1911), and Sokoto (1912), with a Teachers Training College built in Katsina, in 1923.