Remarks on Islamic history, from an unfinished history of the world.
The polyglot Persian Empire had been conquered early in the expansion of Islam, and the traditional Persian advantage of serving as a complex cultural bridge between east and west was inherited by Islam. There is a very disproportionate number of Persians among the great figures in Islamic thought. Al-Khwarizimi, Al-Kindi, Al Razi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazali, Al-Tusi and many other Persian Moslems were eminent scholars. Another important aspect of Islamic intellectuals was the fact that they were exceptionally well traveled and this lent a cosmopolitan quality to their thinking. Avicenna, Al-Ghazali and Ibn-Khaldun all travelled widely in the Islamic world, and most scholars piously made the religiously required pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj. The encounter with various languages and cultures tended to erode the provincial quality sometimes found in other intellectual traditions. It is also worth noting that there were a few non-Moslem thinkers, both Christians and Jews, who sometimes wrote in Arabic and contributed to Islamic cultural life, like Hunayan Ibn Ishaq and Maimonides. Many heretical sects of Christianity, like the Monophysites or Nestorians, survived as isolated communities under Islam far longer than under the Orthodox or Catholic governments, which goes a long way in explaining why the Islamic understanding of Christianity has involved so many offbeat interpretations.
Islam, especially during the Abbasid Caliphate, was the focal point of intellectual traditions from Africa, Asia and Europe where important ideas were connected, criticized and improved. The Islamic world did not invent Hindu numerals or gunpowder or cartography, but they readily adopted imported techniques and ideas, often improving on them. Like the Romans, they had a shrewd eye for advantageous foreign imports. The Abbasids learned of papermaking from the Chinese, and by 900, Baghdad had the largest collection of books in the world.
Abbasid caliphs were profoundly influenced by the reigning school of Islamic theology, Mu’tazila, which is often described as a “rationalist” version of Islamic theology in some ways similar in its assumptions to medieval Christian scholasticism. Abbasid caliphs patronized scholars in many fields and subsidized the translation of Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian, Greek and Syriac texts into Arabic.
A unique institution in Abbasid Baghdad was the “House of Wisdom”, which was an extraordinary center of intellectual achievement from the late eighth century to 1258, when Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols and the Moslem “Golden Age of Culture” suffered a devastating blow from which it never recovered. The “House of Wisdom” was a clearinghouse for the translation of manuscripts from every language and time period in the Old World. Philosophy, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, logic, optics, and many other fields were investigated and extended by scholars who had benefitted from the interaction with learned friends (and rivals). The “House of Wisdom” is sometimes described as a “university” or a “research center”, but apart from being a translation institution for books, there is little evidence that survived 1258 for historians to work with about translation or research.[1] The comparison to a university is not apt, because rather than institutionalized courses, lectures and degrees, the instruction of students was a personal and sometimes idiosyncratic relation between master and pupil.[2] In both their biographies and autobiographies, Islamic intellectuals were described by those masters under whom they studied, not the school or madrassa they had attended.[3] Nor was there a systematic program of research in the House of Wisdom”. Each scholar found his own route to knowledge. “Scientist” is a nineteenth century European term and there was no Arabic term to cover natural science except ‘ilm, “knowledge” but nonetheless, immensely important ideas emerged from the vast intellectual resources of Islam. Algebra, algorithm, alchemy, alkaline, alcohol are all words derived from the traditions of Islamic thought.
The “House of Wisdom” could boast some of the greatest thinkers of its age, many of whom produced advances in multiple fields. Al- Khwarizimi (780-850), for example, was an astonishing a polymath who produced important results in algebra, particularly the solution of quadratic equations, but he also made advances in cartography. Al-Kindi (801-873) was also a polymath, contributing to physics, mathematics, optics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy. He attempted to integrate Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle into Islamic thought, supervising translations into Arabic. Al-Farabi (872-951) who was probably a Shia rather than a Sunni Moslem, was a spectacular intellect, gaining the moniker, “Second Master” (after Aristotle). He attempted a very complicated synthesis of Sufi mysticism and Greek philosophy. He settled in Baghdad, but travelled extensively in Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Morocco. He was particularly influenced by his encounter with Aristotelian thinkers at Alexandria. Al-Farabi was remarkable for the immense domain of his intellectual endeavors. He made original contributions to alchemy, logic, metaphysics, law, math, music, politics and natural science as well as attempting an encyclopedic enumeration of sciences, obviously patterned after Aristotle. His most famous work, indebted to Plato’s Republic, was an Islamic argument for an ideal state, with an Imam/Prophet taking the place of a Philosopher/King. In his view, this was no impossible ideal, rather it had once been realized in Mohammad’s rule over Medina. Al-Farabi was enormously influential, and his work was extended by important thinkers like Avicenna and Maimonides.
In the applied sciences, the Islamic contributions to medicine were most remarkable. Al-Razi (854-925) wrote a twenty-three-volume work unifying Chinese, Persian, Greek, Syrian, Indian and Roman traditions in medicine. Al-Zahrawi (936-1013) an Andalusian doctor wrote a thirty-volume encyclopedia of medical knowledge, covering every conceivable medical topic: surgery, cautery, pharmacology, epidemics, nutrition, dentistry, and pharmacology. He specialized in surgery. The achievements of these doctors were even more remarkable given the fact that they were hampered by an Islamic prohibition against the dissection of corpses. Al-Biruni (973-1050) another polymath that wrote in Arabic, wrote a commentary on Indian astronomy and he also pioneered the logic of induction in physics. He made important contributions to mathematics, physics, law, astronomy, history, linguistics, and most important of all, to pharmacology. He carried on a correspondence with the great doctor, Avicenna, indicating that a network of eminent doctors, widely dispersed across the Islamic world, knew of each other’s work and cooperated on problem solving and pooling information. Ibn Hazm (994-1064), one of the most influential Koranic exegetes, was an Andalusian who produced an extraordinarily large body of writing. His hermeneutics rejected allegorical interpretation of the Koran in favor of a strict literalism. Even though he wrote on medicine, ethics and logic, (among other topics) he expressed dissatisfaction about both analogical and deductive reasoning, preferring to treat revelation combined with sensation as foundational. Imperious, dogmatic and preemptory, he was a part of the literalist Zahiri School of Islamic jurisprudence. He regarded Allah as utterly transcendent will, not bound by human categories, even by logic itself.
Avicenna (980-1037) was a truly encyclopedic intellect, of great importance for his influence within and outside Islam. He was an itinerant Persian to whom over four hundred fifty writings, covering every intellectual domain, are ascribed. He was said to have memorized Koran by the age of ten. He then studied Indian mathematics, Greek philosophy, alchemy and medicine. His philosophical and theological speculations influenced Christian Scholasticism with his claim that Allah is the only non-contingent Being, the necessary Being, whose essence is his existence. He was also famous for his “Floating Man” thought experiment, which suggested that even without a body, one cannot doubt the existence of one’s own consciousness, an idea that might have appealed to Descartes.
Avicenna’s greatest contribution was in medicine. His “Canon of Medicine” was influential within and without Islam, and it was translated into Latin in the twelfth century, “printed five times in the first fifty years of the printing press it was taught in European medical schools as late as the seventeenth century,” when it was displaced by the new Baconian medical science.[4] The Canon of Medicine is an encyclopedic treatment of the doctor’s art which unified the various strands that contributed to Islamic medicine and pushed the boundaries of knowledge. Even more important, the Canon of Medicine contained a scientific method which anticipated some of the central methodological breakthroughs of Modern Physics. Avicenna described over seven hundred medicinal plants and he described a very sophisticated method for performing what would today be called “clinical trials” of medicine. He claimed that preliminary testing could be done on animals, but that animal testing was insufficient. Avicenna insisted that drugs be pure and of consistent dosage; that the time frame examined must be consistent; that drugs must be tested on “simple” diseases, not those with complications; that drugs should be tested on at least two different ailments; and that multiple tests be performed to winnow out accidental correlation. Francis Bacon could not have been a more thorough experimentalist.
The crucially important thinker Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) a Persian theologian and Sufi mystic, was the hinge upon which the Golden Age of Islamic civilization swung, a door that swung shut. He was a philosopher, jurist and ascetic who taught in a Baghdad madrassa and pursued a unique spiritual journey. The rationalist Mutazilite theology of the eighth and ninth centuries had embraced the legacy of Greek thought, and important figures like Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi sought to splice together revealed religion and philosophy in much the same way that the later Christian Scholastics did. Al-Ghazali took a different path. He seems to have had an existential crisis of faith, which caused him to withdraw from society in search of mystic illumination. Dissatisfied with natural reason, despairing of divine favor, he had a spiritual crisis, the Dark Night of the Soul. He went on the pilgrimage to Mecca and at some point had a mystical experience which caused him to abandon the Greek tradition of natural reason in favor of a radical skepticism and fideism. In some respects, his rejection of Athens and reason was like that of Tertullian in Christianity. His project of “dehellenizing” Islam was similar to that of Duns Scotus in medieval Europe, who treated God’s will as transcending reason, so that God could, if he chose, punish virtue and reward vice, and went so far as to claim that God was capable of contradicting himself.
The trajectory of Al-Ghazali’s life was a spiritual odyssey punctuated and transformed by divine illumination, similar to Augustine in his Confessions. Toward the end of his life, Al-Ghazali wrote a spiritual autobiography called “The Deliverance from Error” in which his religious skepticism was transformed by a mystical experience into a strident religious dogmatism. He wrote an influential work, “The Incoherence of the Philosophers”, which was a blistering attack not just on Plato and Aristotle but also upon reason itself. The text has some of the extravagant root and branch vitriol of Luther’s most militant Christian dehellenizing attacks on Greek philosophy and natural reason. Al-Ghazali’s mysticism carried him toward a truly paradoxical rejection of reason. In the “Incoherence”, Al-Ghazali rejects the Aristotelian account of causality, which meant that natural science is impossible. Al-Ghazali replaced descriptive natural laws with the will of Allah, a stance called theological occasionalism. In this view, flipping a switch does not cause a light to turn on; regardless of how many times a constant conjunction between the two events is observed. Rather, it is the will of Allah that is responsible for what impious Greeks falsely called cause and effect. If Allah wills it, aspirin will cure a headache, but medicine is not the cause of healing, only Allah does that. This is the source of the verbal reflex that surprises Westerners even today in the Middle East, “in sh’allah”, which means “God willing.” The radicalism of Al-Ghazali was adopted by a traditionalist, literalist school of Islamic theology that dated back to the eighth and ninth centuries, the Ahl Al-Hadith, which championed the view of Allah as pure transcendence, unconstrained even by contradiction or his revelation or himself. Allah was Will rather than Reason. The controversies over this antirationalism extended beyond the Islamic world, influencing Christian Scholastics like Aquinas, who studied Islamic thought among other intellectual traditions, at the University of Padua.[5]
Islam was burdened with the common heritage of Jewish and Christian ambivalence about knowledge. Al-Farabi extended the Aristotelian tradition in the tenth century high culture of Baghdad. As was the case with earlier attempts to fuse Greek rationality with monotheism, Islamic advances were challenged successfully by Al Gazali, a Sufi mystic whose “Incoherence of the Philosophers” rejected the idea of predictable laws of nature in favor of a reduction of all phenomena into the unfathomable will of Allah. Although the great Andalusian thinker Averroes wrote against Al Gazali’s strident antirationalism, Greek rationalism was, and is, suspect in many Islamic intellectual circles. It was not Averroes’ “Incoherence of the Incoherence” that made his reputation as a thinker, but rather his commentaries on Aristotle that earned him high regard among Christian scholastics like Siger of Brabant and Thomas Aquinas.
The great Islamic thinker, Averroes (1126-1198) argued against Al-Ghazali’s treatment of reason as un-Islamic. An inhabitant of Andalusia well versed in Greek thought, Averroes wrote a commentary on Plato’s Republic, but he also criticized the Neoplatonism that had crept into the writing of Al-Farabi and Avicenna. Averroes wrote a very influential commentary on Aristotle, which was very highly regarded by figures as diverse as Siger of Brabant and Maimonides. Averroes defended philosophy from Al–Gazali and Ashari theologians, who had driven a wedge between faith and reason. In 1180, Averroes wrote his most famous work, “The Incoherence of the Incoherence”. This work focused on the self contradiction in Al-Ghazali’s belief that the claims of reason are mistaken, given that his claim that philosophy is incoherent itself requires and presupposes reason, if his argument is to have greater cognitive value and persuasive power than that of jangling wind chimes. Like the Christian Scholastics, Averroes insisted that philosophy and revelation were compatible, because truth cannot contradict truth. The tragedy of Averroes heroic stance was that the irrationalism of Al-Ghazali prevailed in Islam. Averroes had no major influence on Islamic thought until he was rediscovered in 19th century. Combined with external invasion and hamstrung by the wholesale rejection of Gutenberg’s printing press a few centuries later, Islamic thought, so brilliant and promising, so full of Renaissance men long before the Renaissance, never realized it’s full potential. Islamic civilization was a bridge, both spatial and temporal, which connected the first scientific revolutions in the east and west (Ancient Physics) to a unique Western development, modern natural science (Modern Physics). The transition from Ancient Physics to Modern Physics was made by European Christians who inherited much of the intellectual legacy of the Islamic Golden Age.
Islamic science, like other high cultural concerns were eclipsed after one of the saddest days in all of history: the 1258 destruction of Baghdad by Mongol cavalry armies from the steppes of Asia. This was the last great wave of invasions by steppe warriors into Mesopotamia, a pattern going back to the ancient river valley civilizations. Some historians have tried to suggest that Islamic intellectual life soldiered on after 1258, but this is largely special pleading for a very small number of examples: the astronomer Al-Tusi survived and was appointed astrologer to Helegu, the Mongol leader that destroyed Baghdad. He had access to Chinese astronomical records and had an observatory built by the Khan, but it is unknown which of his achievements in trigonometry, medicine, philosophy or astronomy were made before or after the Mongol conquest. Apart from Al-Shatir, an astronomer and mathematician from Damascus who criticized and improved upon Ptolemy, there was little intellectual progress. The most important later Islamic scholar, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), was a unique intellectual from Tunisia who formulated a cyclical philosophy of history that described observable patterns of rise and fall for states and civilizations. He held that civilization breeds luxury and effeminacy, which creates eventually an attractive target for barbarian invaders, who themselves eventually succumb to the temptations of civilized life, starting the cycle anew. This is, in fact, a fairly accurate account of the history of Mesopotamia. Ibn Khaldun was sui generis in Islamic thought. He was, along with Thucydides, the greatest theorist of history until Vico
[1] Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society, (London, Rouiledge, 1998) 16.
[2] David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious and Institutional Context, Prehistory to 1450, Second Edition, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007) 175.
[3] Toby Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, 2nd edition, (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2003) 155
[4] Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, 187.
[5] R.M. Frank, Al-Ghazali and the Ashʿarite School, (London, Duke University Press) 1994