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[Previous] are at work by day and night with their whole hearts, providing for their advancement, their honor and prosperity, that you, in your ignorant fanaticism, are busy only with your quarrels and antipathies, your indulgences and appetites and empty dreams? Is it commendable that you should waste and fritter away in apathy the brilliance that is your birthright, your native competence, your inborn understanding? Again, We have digressed from Our theme.

Those European intellectuals who are well-informed as to the facts of Europe's past, and are characterized by truthfulness and a sense of justice, unanimously acknowledge that in every particular the basic elements of their civilization are derived from Islám. For example Draper [see http://bahai-library.com/excerpts/europe.draper.html], (53) the well-known [Next]


"Draybár" 53. The Persian text transliterates this author's name as and titles his work The Progress of Peoples [see http://bahai-library.com/excerpts/europe.draper.html]. The reference is apparently to John William Draper, 1811-1882, celebrated chemist and widely-translated historian. Detailed material on Muslim contributions to the West, and on Gerbert (Pope appears in the second volume of the work cited. Of some of Europe's systematically unacknowledged obligations to Islám the author writes: "Injustice founded on religious and national conceit cannot be perpetuated for ever." (Vol. p. 42, Rev. ed.) The Dictionary of American Biography states that Draper's father was a Roman Catholic who assumed the name John Christopher Draper when disowned by his family for a Methodist, and that his real name is unknown. The translator is indebted to Mr. Paul North Rice, Chief of the York Public Library's Reference Department, for the that available data on Draper's family history and nationality in conflict; The Drapers in America by Thomas Waln-Morgan (1892) states that Draper's father was born in London, while Albert E. Henschel in "Centenary of John William Draper" (New York University "Colonnade," June, 1911) has the following: "If there be among us any who trace their lineage to the sunny fields of Italy, they may feel a just pride in John William for his father, John C. Draper, was an Italian by birth..." The translator's thanks are also due to Madame Laura for investigations in connection with this passage at the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque Nationale.
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