Professor Abdul Jabbar Shakir, a Pakistani scholar and researcher on Allama Iqbal, says optimistically that the 21st century will be the century of Islam. "It is my conviction that Islam will be the religion of humanity in the 21st century," he said in Jeddah during a visit to perform Haj.Shakir rejected the theory of clash of civilizations as a Western rhetoric and said that "civilizations never clash but they move parallel to each other." Shakir, who is the director of Baitul Hikmat in Lahore, claimed that his center has more than 50,000 books, 5,000 manuscripts, and 30,000 magazines. Of those, 3,500 books in 18 languages are on the life of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). According to him it is the biggest such collection in the world.
| That's what makes him such an expert on civilizations and able to forecast what the 21st century's going to be like. I wish I was able to see 14 centuries into the future like that. |