The writer [Joseph Hell] goes on to show how the audience, which included learned men as well as students, were the judges of the teacher’s competence and how a man who did not know his subject or could not support his thesis with convincing arguments could not survive their criticism for an hour, but was at once discredited. These teachers of the Arab universities [Muslim universities with Arabic as the medium of instruction] were the foremost men of learning of their age; they were the teachers of modern Europe. [...] --- Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, Causes of Rise and Decline, 1927