Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

12

Falsafah

and

al-Jabr

in Baghdad and Toledo

‘Wisdom’, according to an ancient Egyptian proverb, ‘has alighted on three things: the brain of the Franks, the hands of the Chinese, and the tongue of the Arabs.’ Together with archery and horsemanship, eloquence completed the three basic attributes of ‘the perfect man’ in the Arabia of the Bedouins.¹

These Bedouins, the indigenous people of the Arabian peninsula, were hardly civilised. The word Arab, or Ereb in the Old Testament, means nomad, a way of life which, as we have seen, prevents the collection of many belongings and obviates the need for any kind of public architecture where art can flourish. It was the camel which made the deserts habitable but this animal wasn’t domesticated until around 1100 BC, so the Bedouins are unlikely to be much older. Being permanently on the move limits the size of tribes, to about six hundred maximum, and in the peninsula ghazw, or razzia in English, a variety of brigandage ‘was virtually a national institution’.² In the words of one poet, ‘Our business is to make raids on the enemy, on our neighbour and on our own brother, in case we find none to raid but a brother.’³

This did not make for a settled civilisation but, as that remark implies, the one cultural area where the early Arabs distinguished themselves was in poetry. Even today the rhythm and rhyme – the very music – of words produces in Arabs what they call ‘lawful magic’ (sihr halal). ‘The beauty of a man’, says another proverb, ‘lies in the eloquence of his tongue.’⁴ The oldest written poetry dates from the sixth century in the form of the qasidah, or ode. But by then it must already have existed as an oral tradition for many generations because there was in place a set of fixed conventions. In form the ode could be up to a hundred lines long and might have a single rhyme threading through the entire work. There was a stereotyped beginning, in which the poet would invariably give an evocative description of an exotic destination he had visited. There was a small number of favourite themes, including a long camel journey, an equally narrow mix of metaphors, allusions and sayings, and the poet would conclude by reflecting ‘on the limits of humanity in the face of an all-powerful world’. The odes were essentially narrative works rather than dramas or essays and what counted, for Arabs, was their delivery – it has even been argued that the steady rhythms of the qasidah are intended to echo the swaying of the camel as it moves across the desert. True or not, taken together these poems comprised the diwan of the Arabs, the ‘register’ of their collective experience.⁵ Poets and poetry had high prestige in the ancient Arab world.

The most famous ancient odes were the so-called ‘Seven Muʾallaqat’, or ‘suspended’ poems. These poems are still revered throughout the Arab world because, according to legend, they were awarded the annual prize at the poetry competition at the brilliant fair of Ukaz. This was a market town, near Mecca, which held an annual fair during the season when razzia was forbidden. Part of the fair included a literary congress where poets from all over the Arab world gathered to deliver their verses in a public contest. Following their victory at Ukaz, the Seven Muʾal-laqat were written down in golden letters on linen sheets, and then suspended from the walls of the Kaʾbah, the sacred stone at Mecca. They have been translated into English as The Seven Golden Odes.⁶

In keeping with their nomadic lifestyle, the Bedouins were not notably religious. Their early deities consisted of springs (oases) and rocks. There was a red stone deity in Ghaiman, a white stone at al-Abalat, a black stone at Najran and, the most famous, a cube-shaped meteorite at Mecca. This was the Kaʾbah.⁷ Since they were a pastoral people, the Bedouin also worshipped several lunar deities but there was, in addition, Hubal, a rare idol in human form, which some people think was imported from Babylon. However, the main god at Mecca was al-ilah, allah, the god. This name at least, written as hlh, was very old, going back to the fifth century BC, and appears to have originated in Syria. The name Mecca comes from Makuraba, meaning sanctuary, and implies that it was a religious centre from the earliest times. Certainly, Ptolemy assumed as much when he mentioned it in his Geography, written around AD 150–160.

Muslims now refer to this period, the era before Islam, as the Jahiliyya, ‘the time of ignorance’, when there was no attempt to bring together all the disparate myths and legends scattered across Arabia. And it was, perhaps, this very unco-ordinated nature of their early beliefs that helped give Islam, when it did appear, such an immediate appeal. According to tradition, Muhammad was born around AD 570, in Mecca, into a family who were part of the tribe of Quraysh. Mecca was itself in the middle of change at the time. In theory it formed a link in the trade routes between Rome and the East (the great caravan routes ended at the port of Yemen). But in practice, for the Romans ‘Province Arabia’ was the land of the Nabateans, who lived further north, with their capital at Petra (now in Jordan). So, like Syria, Arabia was a border province with an uncertain status. Traders were as likely to travel east via the Silk Route through central Asia, meaning prosperity in the peninsula was far from assured. On top of this there was repeated catastrophe when, three times between 450 and 570, the great dam at Maʾrib burst, destroying vast tracts of fertile land. Arab legends tell of serious economic decline in the sixth century.⁸

One other factor is important in understanding the emergence of Islam: there was by then a ring of monotheism encircling Arabia. In addition to developments in the north, there had long been a community of Jews in the Yemen, and Abyssinia had by now been converted to Christianity. The Red Sea was narrow and much-crossed and early, pre-Islamic pottery shows many Christian influences. Mecca itself was at a crossroads, where the north–south route to the Yemeni ports crossed the east–west route from the Red Sea to Iraq. Two huge caravans, one in summer, one in winter, set out from Mecca each year. This is another way by which ideas would have travelled.

Very little is known about Muhammad, despite the fact that writing, biography and scholarship were all well developed by the sixth and seventh centuries. The first biography we know about was written in 767, well after the prophet’s death, and even that is known only through a later edition, compiled in 833. As for non-Arab sources, the first mention of Muhammad by a Byzantine historian comes in the ninth century only, when he is referred to by Theophanes. We do have a physical description. He was neither tall nor short, and he was not fat. He had long, curly, black hair and a fair skin, dark black eyes with long lashes, broad shoulders, with strong arms and legs. He had a large mouth and beautiful teeth but he was not in any other way physically remarkable. What we also know is that, according to tradition, Muhammad’s father died when he was six, after which he was brought up by his grandfather, then by his uncle. A number of traditions have it that Muhammad’s relatives were the custodians of certain relics attached in some way to the Kaʾbah, so the family may have had a particular pre-Islamic religious prestige. At twelve, he was taken by his uncle to Syria where he met a Christian monk, named Bahira according to the legend. At twenty-five, Muhammad married his employer, Khadijah, ‘a wealthy and high-minded widow, fifteen years his senior’.⁹ He helped run her business in the caravan trade for a time but it was the leisure afforded by his marriage that allowed Muhammad to spend time in a small cave just outside Mecca, called Hira.

He was in this cave one day in 610 when, suddenly, he heard a voice which ordered him to ‘Recite!’ At first he was unsure what to do and the voice repeated itself twice before he plucked up courage and replied ‘What shall I recite?’ At this the voice answered: ‘Recite in the name of the Lord who created all things, who created man from clots of blood. Recite, for thy Lord is the most generous, who taught by the pen, who taught man what he did not know.’ The night of that day later came to be known as ‘The Night of Power’. There were later episodes, both in the cave and at home in Mecca, when Muhammad was so disturbed that he asked his wife to cover him with blankets. To begin with there were several voices but later there was only one, that of the archangel Jibril or Gabriel. Muhammad recorded all the instructions he received – some were written on palm leaves, some on stones, some he just memorised. Later, as we shall see, they were collected into a book, the Qurʾan.¹⁰

In some ways, the message Muhammad received was not new. It overlapped with Zoroastrian, Hebrew and Christian ideas. God is one and there is no other. There is a Judgement Day with eternal paradise for those who faithfully follow His instructions and worship Him, and there is everlasting punishment in hell for those who go against His will.

Even as a boy, Muhammad had been known in his family and among his friends as ‘al-Amin’, the faithful, and so he may always have commanded a certain amount of religious respect. His first converts were his family and friends and then, as with Christianity, among slaves and the poorer classes. This brought him his first opposition, from the wealthier families, and he was forced to seek refuge on the other side of the Red Sea, in Ethiopia. There his visions continued, the most famous being the so-called isra, the nocturnal journey in which Muhammad was transported first to Jerusalem, and then to heaven, where he saw the face of God. This tradition is the basis for Jerusalem being the third holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Madina.

The second crucial stage in Muhammad’s career, after the voices in the cave, began in 621. In that year, while he was still in exile across the Red Sea, he was approached by some emissaries from a small town about 200 miles north of Mecca, called Yathrib. He had met some of these emissaries at the annual fair in Ukaz, they had been impressed by him, and now asked him if he would arbitrate in the town’s disputes. In return, they said, they would offer protection for him and his followers. Muhammad agreed but he didn’t hurry matters. About sixty families were sent on ahead, to test the waters, and he himself followed the next year. This migration, the Hijra in Arabic, is regarded by the faithful as the decisive moment in Islam and later, when the Muslim calendar was established, it started from the year in which the Hijra took place. The centre of the new religion was now transferred to Yathrib, referred to by the faithful as al-Madina: the City.¹¹

In Madina the picture we have of Muhammad is mixed. On the one hand he became both a religious and a political and military leader. On the other, he was an ordinary citizen, who mended his own clothes and lived in an unpretentious clay house, surrounded (eventually) by twelve wives and lots of children, many of whom died. He continued to develop his ideas, gradually diverging from Judaism and Christianity. In Madina he substituted Friday for the Sabbath, instituted the adhan, the call to prayer from the minaret, fixed Ramadan as a month of fasting, and changed the qiblah, the direction to be faced when praying, from Jerusalem to Mecca. He also authorised the holy pilgrimage to al-Kaʾbah in order to kiss the black stone. This was provocative because at that time al-Madina and Mecca were rival towns and in fact the third stage of Islam arose when, after a war of eight years, Muhammad’s 300 troops secured victory over an army more than three times the size and captured the city. In the process, 360 idols were allegedly destroyed and Islam substituted. The area around the Kaʾbah was declared sacred. Originally only polytheists (i.e., pagans) were forbidden from approaching the Kaʾbah but gradually it was applied to all non-Muslims. According to Philip Hitti, in his History of the Arabs, first published in 1937, ‘no more than fifteen Christian-born Europeans have thus far succeeded in seeing the two Holy Cities and escaping with their lives’.¹² This injunction of a sacred area around the Kaʾbah is of course strongly reminiscent of that which applied to non-Jews approaching the inner sanctum of the Temple in Jerusalem (see here).

The fact that Muhammad was a political leader as well as a religious figure was very important for Islam. He made laws, dispensed justice, imposed taxes, waged war and formed alliances. His aim in all this was the restoration of true monotheism which he felt had been corrupted or distorted elsewhere. ‘He was God’s final revelation and at his death (according to tradition on 8 June 632) the revelation of God’s purpose for humankind had been completed: after Muhammad there would be no more prophets and no further revelations.’¹³

As a set of ideas, Islam is closer to Judaism than to Christianity. In the Middle Ages, however, it was so similar to both monotheisms that, to begin with, many Christians thought it was merely a heretical Christian sect rather than a completely new faith.¹⁴ Dante, in The Divine Comedy, places Muhammad in one of the lower levels of hell, together with the ‘sowers of scandals and schism’.¹⁵ As with Judaism, in Islam God’s unity is the supreme reality. He has ninety-nine ‘excellent names’, which is why the full Muslim rosary has ninety-nine beads. Islam is also closer to Judaism than Christianity in that its God is more a god of might and majesty than a god of love. This fits with Islam’s concept of religion as a ‘submission’, or a ‘surrender’ to the will of God. What appears to have particularly impressed Muhammad is Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son in the supreme test set by Yahweh. Abraham’s submission, or aslama in Arabic, provided the word for the new religion.

After the idea of God as a unity, and submission, the next-most important idea in Islam is that Muhammad was the true messenger of God ‘whose only miracle was the Qurʾan’.¹⁶ This solitary miracle reflects the essentially simple nature of the new faith – it had no theological complexities, like the Resurrection, the Trinity or Transubstantiation. There were no sacraments and there was no priestly hierarchy, at least not to begin with. The solitary miracle implied that the Qurʾan was the word of God and therefore ‘uncreated’. By far the worst sin, and in fact the only unpardonable one, was shirk, identifying other gods with Allah.

Islam also identifies five ‘pillars’, by which the faith is pursued. The first pillar is profession of the faith, the second is prayer. The devout Muslim must pray five times a day and turn towards Mecca.¹⁷ However, the Friday noon prayer is the only public observance in Islam and is obligatory for all males.¹⁸ The third pillar is zakah, a tithe to help the poor and to provide funds to build mosques. According to Pliny, pre-Islamic Arabs had to pay a tax to their gods before they were allowed to sell spices at market, so it may be that Muhammad adopted this ancient idea. The fourth pillar is fasting from dawn till sunset during the month of Ramadan. Fasting was well known among Jews and Christians but there is no evidence of its use in pre-Islamic Arabia. The final pillar is the pilgrimage (haj or hazz) – once in a lifetime the faithful, of both sexes and if they can afford it, must visit Mecca at a holy time of the year. This idea may also have originated with ancient solar cults, which would congregate at the Kaʾbah after annual fairs.

From the outside, then, there is a sizeable overlap between Islam and Judaism and Christianity, not to mention ancient pagan practices. One idea that differs from these other faiths is jihad, the holy war, espoused by certain small sects as the controversial sixth pillar. The Qurʾan does specify that one of the duties of Islam is to keep pushing back the geographical boundaries that separate the dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, from the dar al-harb, ‘the war territory’, but the extent to which this is to be achieved by war, and how ‘war’ is to be understood, is far from clear.

In 633, the year after Muhammad died, Abu Bakr, the first caliph, observed that the Qurʾanic memorisers, the huffaz, were dying out. Fearing what this might mean, he began to collect the palm leaves, stones, bones and parchment on which (according to tradition) the scattered verses of the ‘book’ were written. This took some time and it was left to his successor, Umar, together with Zayd ibn-Thabit, who had been secretary to the Prophet, actually to put the verses together, though it was yet another man, the third caliph, Uthman (644–656), who organised their final form. This edition, known as the Uthmani, existed in three copies, at Damascus, al-Basrah and al-Kufah, and became the authorised version, in use to the present day. That is the traditional view. Modern scholars suspect, however, that there was no involvement of Abu Bakr. Instead, they think Uthman found various copies all over the Arab world, with divergent readings. He canonised the Medina version and ordered all others destroyed. On this view, the text of the Qurʾan was finalised by two viziers only in 933. More than three hundred years therefore elapsed before the authorised version of the Qurʾan was settled, much longer than for the Christian Bible after the Crucifixion.

Despite this, the faithful Muslim believes that every letter of the Qurʾan was dictated to Muhammad by Jibril, and is therefore the inspired word of God. It contains one hundred and fourteen surahs, or chapters, divided into ninety Meccan and twenty-four Madinese. The Meccan chapters, the early ones, are in general short, fiery, impassioned and prophetic. The main themes are the ethical duties of man and the coming retribution for the unfaithful. (Islam in fact has two judgements: one at death, the other at resurrection.¹⁹) In contrast, the Madinese chapters, ‘sent down’ after the initial struggle was over, are much more verbose, and mainly concerned with legal matters. Details about religious ceremonies are sketched in, about what is and is not sacred, and laws are set out regarding theft, murder, retaliation, usury, marriage, divorce, and so on. There are also many references to both the Old and New Testaments. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Jonah – all figure alongside the Fall, the Flood and Sodom. Scholars have noted that the forms of many Old Testament names in the Qurʾan show that they are derived from Greek or Syriac sources, rather than Hebrew, and that certain miracles attributed to Jesus, such as speaking in the cradle, are found only in the Apocrypha. This throws a glimmer of light on the books available to Muhammad in the seventh century.²⁰

The fact that the Qurʾan is written in Arabic is all-important for pious Muslims, who believe that Arabic is the language of God and is the tongue spoken in Paradise. They believe that Adam originally spoke Arabic but forgot it and was punished by being made to learn other – inferior – languages. In fact, Arabic is a fairly modern form of the Semitic languages, which include Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian), Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic (the language of Jesus), Syriac and Ethiopic. Chronologically, this group is divided into three. The languages of Mesopotamia date back to the third millennium BC, those from Syria-Palestine to the second millennium BC, whereas the languages of Arabia and Ethiopia date from only the eighth century BC.²¹ That is the modern scholarly view, but early Muslim authorities had little idea of where their language came from. One idea was that it was produced by imitating the sounds of nature, another that it was the product of a convention among early peoples, who decided it was the best language. In fact, Arabic as we understand it is derived from Aramaic, via the cursive script of the Nabateans who, as we have seen, had their capital at Petra, in what is now Jordan. Even in early Islamic times, the language was still being formed. There was, for example, no system for writing vowels and the diacritical marks that now help distinguish similar letters (a from ā) hadn’t been invented. As an aid to reading, it became the practice to insert dots where vowels should go in red ink, with the rest of the script in black.²²

So, far from being the first language, spoken by Adam, Arabic began as a relatively late dialect in the north-western region of the Arabian peninsula, where it happened to be spoken by the Quraysh aristocracy, into which Muhammad was born. Its status as the language of the Qurʾan has led to anomalies. Muslims, even modern grammarians, philologists and literary critics, often insist that Arabic is superior to other tongues, and that the Arabic of the Qurʾan is of surpassing beauty that cannot be improved. This is why Muslims the world over must read the Qurʾan in the original Arabic and why only one translation (into Turkish) has ever been authorised. This has remained the view of modern Islamic scholars, even after the origins of the language were unearthed beginning in the eighteenth century, and the presence of foreign loan words was detected.²³

At Muhammad’s death, Islam was confined to the Arabian peninsula. But, as the Prophet insisted, his conception of the new faith was intended to go beyond that. ‘Islam was not a religion of the blood, but of the faith.’ This was a new idea for Arabs but it was enormously successful. Within barely a hundred years, Islam had grown to the point where its borders touched India in the east, the Atlantic ocean in the west, the heart of Africa in the south, and Byzantium in the north. Its attraction lay partly in the certainties it offered, in the fact that, in its early years, it was a tolerant religion, certainly so far as earlier forms of revelation were concerned (Judaism and Christianity), and partly for entirely practical reasons – for example, it taxed people less than the Byzantine empire.

But there was another reason: the caliphate. At the Prophet’s death, a new leader was needed. His close circle of followers chose Abu Bakr, who had been one of his earliest converts. When he was asked how he was to be addressed, he said he would take the title Khalifa, which in Arabic means both a successor and a deputy. This allowed for some ambiguity – did it mean that Abu Bakr was the deputy/successor of Muhammad or of God? Nevertheless, the institution of the caliphate was installed. It would have profound effects.²⁴

To begin with, the institution was not hereditary (strangely, the Qurʾan gave no guidance on the succession). The first four caliphs, not related, are labelled by modern Muslims as the Rashidun, ‘the rightly guided ones’, and, despite the fact that all but the first were assassinated, their period in office is usually regarded as a golden age. However, the fourth caliph, Ali, was Muhammad’s son-in-law and cousin and, in offering himself for election as caliph, he was reverting to a pre-Islamic tradition. Given the history of assassinations, many of the faithful believed that a relative of the Prophet might offer leadership closer to the original. Ali’s followers became a party known as Ali, shiʾatu, Ali, which in time was collapsed into Shiʾa.²⁵ Later, the Shiʾa would become extremely influential – but not just yet, for Ali too was assassinated. In the Islamic civil war that ensued, the victor was Muʾawiya, the governor of a province in Syria and a member of the Meccan clan of Umayya. This brought about the next phase in Islamic development, because for nearly a century the succession of the caliphate was in the hands of the Umayyad dynasty. In subsequent orthodox history this period is relegated in importance. Before the Umayyads came the ‘rightly guided ones’ and after them, as we shall see, Islamic leadership was in the hands of the ‘divinely approved’ caliphs.²⁶ This reflects a major division that had opened up in Islam. The Shiʾa took the view that the caliphate belonged by divine right to the blood descendants of the Prophet and in 680 this led to revolt when Husayn, the son of Ali and grandson of the Prophet, faced the Umayyads in battle. Husayn’s forces were completely routed and according to tradition there was only one survivor. From here on there emerged two significant differences between Shiʾa and so-called Sunni Muslims: the former believed (a) that the caliphate should consist of the blood descendants of Muhammad; and (b) that the Qurʾan was literally true.

The Umayyad victory over Husayn was no surprise. They were extremely astute political leaders (extending their empire in India, Africa and the Iberian peninsula). They also developed a wonderful architecture and promoted learning. This was the work mainly of Abd al-Malik (685–705) and his successor, Hisham (724–743), under whose rule Arabic replaced Greek and Persian as the official language of administration, Roman and Byzantine coins were replaced by Arabic ones, and the Dome of the Rock and its adjoining Aqsa mosque, ‘the first great religious building complex in the history of Islam’, were erected in Jerusalem.²⁷ This marked Islam’s emergence as a major civilisation in its own right.

It was also under the Umayyads that the first Arabic centres of learning were created. These were at al-Basrah and al-Kufah. It was here that the first grammars and dictionaries were compiled, as the Arabic language came under systematic study. It was here too that the tradition of hadith grew up. Hadith means ‘tradition’, but it also has a more specific meaning. It was an act or saying attributed either to Muhammad himself or to one of his immediate circle. Regarded as second in importance only to the Qurʾan, hadith provided the basis for much Islamic theology and fiqh, non-canon law.²⁸ In the Qurʾan Allah speaks, in the hadith Muhammad speaks. In hadith only the meaning is inspired; in the Qurʾan both meaning and the word are inspired.²⁹

As mentioned above, it was also under the Umayyads that the earliest examples of Islamic architecture were created – the Dome of the Rock, in Jerusalem (691) and the Great Mosque of Damascus (706), where the Umayyads had their court. Many people think that the Dome of the Rock is still the most beautiful Islamic building ever conceived, and many Muslims think it demonstrates the superiority of Islam. This is true despite the fact that Islam never spawned any grand ideas of aesthetic theory – buildings were judged by their function as much as, if not more than, their appearance. This is not so surprising given that the Bedouin, as nomads, lived in tents and had no real need of architecture. The first mosque (from masjid, a place to prostrate oneself) at al-Madina, was a simple open courtyard that in time was covered over with palm leaves supported by palm trunks. A cut-down trunk served as the minbar, or pulpit, on which Muhammad would address the faithful. All early sources agree that the Prophet’s own mosque, and those built by his companions, were very humble. Moreover, Muhammad is reported to have been hostile to the decoration of mosques and said that ‘the most unprofitable thing that eats up the wealth of a believer is building’.³⁰

If there were no formal aesthetics in Islam, however, there were some general ideas that became established as tradition. One was the idea of ornament, or embellishment. Islam concedes that God created the world and ornamented it and gave man the ability to produce ‘devices of embellishment’. The Arabic word zayyana means both to embellish and to produce a beautiful thing, ‘as God embellished the heavens with stars’, though another word, malih, derives from the root m-l-h, which also forms the word milh, meaning salt. Thus in Arabic beauty implies ‘delectation’ rather than the Platonic idea of moral good.³¹ A beautiful woman in Arabic poetry is inevitably adorned with jewellery and perfume. There is more to this idea of ornament than the word means in the West, however. Islam understands that God created the world and that it is perfect. There is, as a result, little scope for man to truly create – all he can do is adorn what God has produced. It follows that adornment, embellishment, ornament are to be understood not as truly creative activities, or improvements on what God has given us, but as ways of venerating and glorifying God. Linked to this is the fact that pre-modern Muslims had no religious emblem to compare with the Christian cross (the crescent is a modern innovation). Only the word of God is sacred, all other forms and patterns are neutral and interchangeable.³² The whole idea of mosque architecture and decoration therefore was to emphasise humility and the interiority of faith. The main decorative device was the arch but the central aspect of the mosque was the mihrab, the prayer niche, which faced Mecca. The area around the niche was usually the most heavily decorated, the two main forms of which were the arabesque and calligraphy.

The arabesque is not rooted necessarily in any prohibition on the representation of the human figure. The Qurʾan does not prohibit such representation and paintings and sculptures in early Islamic societies were by no means unknown, even portraiture, even portraits of Umayyad caliphs. Figural depictions, in fact, did not begin to disappear until the fourteenth century. Rather, the idea underlying arabesques arose from geometry. The Arabs took from the Greeks the idea that proportion was the basis of beauty, and they also considered it was the basis of all science, since it encouraged man to think in abstract terms, ‘an activity that led to purity’.³³ There is no Arabic word for arabesque and, again, there is no elaborate theory about its use. When all is said and done, line plays the main part in the effect. It is humble, egalitarian (no one design is more important than another), the visual equivalent of the word-plays so treasured in Islamic poetry. Its aim is to dazzle the beholder, leaving his or her mind clear for contemplation of God. No less important, these clean, coherent shapes cannot err.³⁴

Calligraphy draws its force from the central fact that the Qurʾan represents ‘direct, divine speech’, that Mohammad thought that handwriting ‘was one of the keys of man’s daily bread’, and therefore it becomes something akin to the icon in Christian art. The Qurʾan is to Muslims what Jesus (and not the Bible) is to Christians: it is the way God manifests himself to believers. Just as numerology has always been popular among mystics, some Sufis (see below) regarded the Arabic alphabet as occult. But a better and more typical way of looking at calligraphy is as a ‘rhetoric of the pen’, adornment of the word produced in ways that reflect a geometrical harmony.³⁵

This approach to ornamentation brings us back to the Dome of the Rock. The building of the Dome was not simply the creation of a religious site. At another level it was a complex political act. Jerusalem was in fact not Jerusalem at that time. It is never mentioned directly in the Qurʾan and where it is, in early Muslim writings, it is referred to as Aelia, the name chosen by the Romans, which was intended to de-sanctify the city and remove any Jewish or Christian associations. The Dome of the Rock was specifically built to outshine both the church of the Holy Sepulchre and the most sacred spot in Judaism, the place where, according to rabbinic tradition, Abraham had been willing to sacrifice his son, and where the Ark of the Temple had rested. As the historian Bernard Lewis has put it: ‘This, ʿAbd al-Malik seemed to be saying, was the shrine of the final dispensation – the new temple, dedicated to the religion of Abraham, replacing the Temple of Solomon, continuing the revelations vouchsafed to the Jews and Christians and correcting the errors into which they had fallen.’ For example, the Qurʾanic inscription on the shrine explicitly denies Christian ideas about the Trinity: ‘God is one, without partner, without companion.’ Elsewhere: ‘Praise be to God, who begets no son . . .’ As the Dome of the Rock shows, Islam was more than a successor faith to Judaism and Christianity: it superseded them.³⁶

Despite these political, military and cultural successes, there was an inherent instability in early Islam. In its ideals it was a far simpler faith than, say, Christianity. It was egalitarian and there was in theory no clergy, no Church, no rank in which some were more privileged, or closer to God, than others. But this did not sit well with the very existence of a dynasty, who exercised worldly as well as spiritual power. When the opponents of such a regime were also descendants of the Prophet himself, that instability was multiplied. This forms the background for the uprisings against the Umayyads, first in 747, then two years later, in favour of the Abbasids, descendants of the Prophet’s uncle, al-‘Abbas.³⁷ After the second uprising, Abuʾl-ʿAbbas, the leader of the Shiʾa sect, was voted caliph by his troops and a new dynasty came into force. The Abbasid caliphate was to endure for half a millennium, and Abuʾl-ʿAbbas’ successor, al-Mansur, marked this sea-change by moving the capital, replacing Damascus with a brand-new city situated on the west bank of the Tigris river in what is now Iraq, near the site of the old Persian capital of Ctesiphon. The official name that al-Mansur gave to his new city was Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace. But that never caught on and it was always known by the small city that had been there for generations – Baghdad.³⁸

The name Baghdad means ‘Given by God’ but the city was also known as the ‘Round City’ because of its circular form. The new metropolis was built in four years, al-Mansur employing, allegedly, a hundred thousand labourers, craftsmen and architects. He chose the site partly because it was easy to defend, and partly because the Tigris gave access as far afield as China and, going upriver, Armenia. The ruins of the city of Ctesiphon served as the main source of stone.

The great Baghdad caliphs were al-Mansur himself, who was the second Abbasid, al-Mahdi, the third, and Harun al-Rashid, (786–809), and his son al-Maʿmun. ‘Though less than half a century old, Baghdad had by that time grown from nothingness to a world centre of prodigious wealth and international significance, standing alone as a rival to Byzantium.’³⁹ The royal palace occupied a third of the round city and the luxury contained within it was legendary. The caliph’s cousin-wife ‘would tolerate at her table no vessels not made of gold and silver’, and once, when welcoming foreign dignitaries, the procession is said to have boasted one hundred lions. In the Hall of the Tree the silver birds were built so as to ‘chirp automatically’.⁴⁰ The harbours of the city were occupied by ships from China, Africa and the Indies.

From all over the known world, people flocked to Baghdad.⁴¹ The city’s position meant that it was within easy reach of India, Syria and, most important of all, Greece, and the Hellenistic world. In particular, it was close to an impressive centre of learning that already existed not far away at Gondeshapur in south-west Persia. Here there flourished a large community of Nestorians, a heretical Christian sect which, as we saw in the previous chapter, had been forced to flee from territory further west in the fifth century. (Nestorians believed that Jesus was both divine and human.) Alongside them, other political and religious refugees arrived in Gondeshapur, including some who had been expelled from the pagan Academy in Athens (the one founded by Plato) when that institution was closed down by Christians in 529. For many years, therefore, Gondeshapur had been home to scholars of every belief and none and, in particular, to physicians. They, above all others, had a vested interest in learning about medicinal herbs, surgical methods and other treatments from across the known world. And so for them the translation of foreign texts became a common procedure. Many of the Nestorian families in Gondeshapur developed into medical dynasties, passing down the (translated) medical manuscripts from father to son. Gondeshapur also had the first hospital, the Bismaristan. Inside the city there was a great variety of languages spoken: Greek, Syriac, Aramaic, Sanskrit, reflecting many traditions, and texts were chiefly translated out of Greek and Sanskrit into Syriac and Aramaic. After Gondeshapur was conquered by the Arabs in AD 638, these scholars quickly learned the tongue of their conquerors and an intensive programme of translation into Arabic from Greek and Indian medical, geometrical and other scientific manuscripts was begun.⁴²

This was the model that was transferred to Baghdad and Damascus. Thus the very idea of translating valuable foreign manuscripts was itself originally a Christian/Jewish/pagan practice. There was no such tradition or precedent in the Arab world and, as Gondeshapur was ecumenical and international, with as many Jews and pagans as Christians leading the way, that is how the translations were organised in Baghdad. As the City of Peace grew in size and importance, many descendants and successors of the Nestorian medical dynasties physically transferred from there. Then, at the beginning of the ninth century, the Islamic world was fortunate in having an open-minded caliph, al-Maʿmun, who was sympathetic to a semi-secret sect, the Muʿtazilites, who were rationalists obsessed with reconciling the text of the Qurʾan and the criteria of human reason. Al-Maʿmun, it is said, had a dream – possibly the most important and fortunate dream in history – in which Aristotle appeared. It is as a result of this dream that the caliph decided to send envoys as far afield as Constantinople in search of as many Greek manuscripts as they could find, and to establish in Baghdad a centre devoted to translation.

Some time around 771 an Indian traveller in Baghdad brought with him a treatise on astronomy, a Siddhanta, which al-Mansur insisted be translated. This became known in the city as the Sindhind. The same traveller also brought with him a treatise on mathematics, which introduced a new set of numerals, 1, 2, 3, 4 etc., which we still use to this day (before that numbers had been written out as words, or used letters of the alphabet). These later became known as Arabic numerals though nowadays we credit them (at least mathematicians do) with being Hindu numerals. The same work also introduced the 0, which may have originally come from China. The Arabic word for 0, zephirum, is the basis of both our words ‘cipher’ and ‘zero’. These texts were translated into Arabic by Muhammad ibn-Ibrahim al-Fazari, on whose work the famous Muslim astronomer, al-Khwarizmi (c. 850) based much of his thinking.⁴³

The Arabs did not interest themselves overmuch in Greek literature – poetry, drama, history. Their own literary tradition, they felt, was more than enough. But medicine, as represented by Galen, the mathematics of Euclid and Ptolemy, and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle were a different matter. The earliest Muslim thinker to have conceived an overall picture of the sciences was al-Farabi (d. 950), whose catalogue Ihsa al-ulum, known in Latin as De Scientiis, organised the different activities as: linguistic sciences; logic; mathematics, including music, astronomy and optics; physics; metaphysics; politics; jurisprudence; theology. Ibn Sina, later, divided the rational sciences into the speculative (seeking after truth) and the practical (aimed at well-being).⁴⁴ The speculative sciences included physiognomy, the interpretation of dreams, and of charms. The practical sciences included morality and prophetology.

A number of libraries and centres of learning had been established in the great Islamic cities, based largely on Greek models discovered during the Arab conquests of Alexandria and Antioch. But by far the most famous was al-Maʿmun’s House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), founded in 833. Many translations were carried out in the House, as well as astronomical observations, chemical experiments, and teaching (though Hugh Kennedy casts doubt on this, claiming that the House was only a library). Even here, however, the ‘sheikh of translators’, as he was called, was yet another Nestorian Christian from al-Hirah, Hunayn ibn-Ishaq (809–873), who spoke four languages and was appointed superintendent of the House of Wisdom and given control of all scientific translation. He was, says Hugh Kennedy, a protégé of the Banu Musa family, who were the chief patrons of study of the exact sciences in Baghdad’s golden age. Hunayn taught his son, Ishaq, and his nephew, Hubaysh, to follow him and between them they translated Aristotle’s Physics, Plato’s Republic, seven books of anatomy by Galen (now lost in Greek), and works by Hippocrates and Dioscorides. Hunayn also translated the Old Testament from the Greek Septuagint, but this too has been lost.⁴⁵ No less distinguished than Ibn Ishaq was Thabit ibn Qurra, founder of a second school of translators, who transcribed into Arabic the works of Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy (including the Almagest) and Apollonius. Had it not been for Ibn Qurra, the number of Greek works in existence today would have been smaller. Ibn Qurra wasn’t a Muslim either – he was a member of a pagan sect, the Sabians, who, fortunately, were mentioned in the Qurʾan and therefore had protected status. Ibn Qurra and Ibn Ishaq collaborated on a project to measure the circumference of the earth. They repeated their effort more than once, to confirm the result, an early demonstration of the experimental approach. They took it for granted that the earth was round.

It was no different in philosophy or literature, where the success of Christians and pagans underlined the openness of Baghdad. Abu Bishr Matta bin Yunus, a close colleague of the famous al-Farabi, who tried to reconcile Aristotle and the Qurʾan, was a Christian and studied in Baghdad. One of the most important poets of the seventh and early eighth centuries was a Christian, Ghiyath ibn-al-Salt, from near to Hirah, on the Euphrates, who was even taken to Mecca by his caliph. Though appointed court poet, he refused to convert, or to give up his ‘addiction’ to wine, or to stop wearing his cross. He divorced his wife, married a divorcée, was often seen with prostitutes and drank ‘to saturation’, claiming that was the only way he got ideas for his poetry. He died in his bed.⁴⁶ It is no secret that the most famous of all so-called Arabic literary works, Alf Laylah we-Laylah (A Thousand Nights and One Night), was in fact an old Persian work, Hazar Afsana (A Thousand Tales), containing several stories, many of Indian origin. As time went by additions were made, not just from Arabic sources but Greek, Hebrew, Turkish and Egyptian.⁴⁷

Besides academic institutes such as the House of Wisdom, hospitals as we understand them today were developed under Islam.⁴⁸ The first, and most elaborate, was built in the eighth century under Caliph al-Rashid (the caliph of the Thousand Nights and One Night), but the idea spread very rapidly. The medieval Muslim hospital, as it existed in Baghdad, Cairo or Damascus, was very sophisticated for the time, much more so than the Bismaristan in Gondeshapur. For example, there were separate wards for men and women, special wards were devoted to internal diseases, ophthalmic disorders, orthopaedic ailments, the mentally ill, and there were isolation wards for contagious cases. There were travelling clinics and dispensaries and armies were equipped with military hospitals. Mosques were attached to the bigger hospitals, with madrasas – colleges – where aspiring doctors from all over the world came to be trained. It was also in the eighth century, in the Arab lands, that the idea of the pharmacy, or apothecary, was born. In Baghdad at least, pharmacists had to pass an exam before they were allowed to produce and prescribe drugs. The exam covered the correct composition of drugs, the proper dosage, and the therapeutic effects. The Muslim contribution, on top of the ancient remedies, included camphor, myrrh, sulphur and mercury, plus the mixing of syrups and juleps.⁴⁹ One text in particular, Ibn al-Baytar’s thirteenth-century Al-Jamiʿ fi al-Tibb (Collection of Simple Diets and Drugs) consisted of more than a thousand entries based on plants the author had himself collected along the Mediterranean coast. The notion of public health also began with the Arabs – among other things, doctors would visit prisons, to see whether there were any contagious diseases among the convicts that might spread.

Two Islamic doctors from this time must rank among the greatest physicians in all history. Al-Razi, known in the West by his Latin name, Rhazes, was born in 865 in the Persian town of Rayy and was an alchemist in his youth but also a polymath. He wrote nearly two hundred books, on such diverse subjects as theology, mathematics and astronomy, though nearly half of what he produced was medical. He clearly had a sense of humour – two of his titles were On the Fact That Even Skilful Physicians Cannot Heal All Diseases and Why People Prefer Quacks and Charlatans to Skilful Physicians. He was the first chief physician of the great hospital at Baghdad and, in choosing the site, is said to have hung up shreds of meat in different places, selecting the spot where putrefaction was least.⁵⁰ (If true, this comes close to being the first example of an experiment.) But al-Razi is best known for making the first description of smallpox and measles.⁵¹ His other great book was Al-Hawi (The Comprehensive Book), a twenty-three-volume encyclopaedia of Greek, pre-Islamic Arab, Indian and even Chinese medical knowledge. It covered diseases of the skin and joints, and explored the effects of diet and the concept of hygiene (not so straightforward before the germ theory of disease).

The other great Muslim physician was Ibn Sina, again known in the West by a Latinised name, Avicenna.⁵² Like al-Razi he wrote some two hundred books, on a diverse range of subjects, but his most famous work was Al-Qanun (The Canon), a majestic synthesis of Greek and Arabic medical thought. The range of diseases and disorders considered is vast, from anatomy to purges, tumours to fractures, the spreading of disease by water and by soil, and the book codifies some 760 drugs. The Qanun also pioneered the study of psychology, in that Ibn Sina observed a close association between emotional and physical states, the beneficial role of music, the role of the environment in medicine (i.e., rudimentary epidemiology), and in so far as he viewed medicine as ‘the art of removing impediments to the normal functioning of nature’, he may be said to have given the discipline its philosophical grounding. In the twelfth century the Qanun was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona (see below, this chapter) and, together with al-Razi’s Al-Hawi, displaced Galen and served as the basic textbooks in European medical schools until at least the seventeenth century, well over half a millennium.⁵³

In 641 Alexandria had fallen to the Muslims. For many years, as we have seen, that city had been the mathematical, medical and philosophical centre of the world, and the Muslims came across countless books and manuscripts on these subjects in Greek. Later, among the faculty members of the House of Wisdom, there was an astronomer and mathematician, Muhammad ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi, whose name – like Euclid – was to become a household word throughout the educated world. His fame rested on two books, one of which was far more original than the other. The less original book was probably based on the Sindhind, which was the Arabic word for the Brahmasphuta Siddhanta, the treatise by Brahmagupta which had been brought to the court of al-Mansur and in which various arithmetical problems were described, as well as Hindu numerals. Al-Khwarizmi’s work is known now only in a unique copy, a Latin translation, the original Arabic version having been lost.⁵⁴ The Latin title of this work is De numero indorum (Concerning the Hindu Art of Reckoning). Al-Khwarizmi gave such a complete account of the Hindu system that, as Carl Boyer points out, ‘he is probably responsible for the widespread but false impression that our system of numeration is Arabic in origin’.⁵⁵ Al-Khwarizmi made no claim to originality on this score but the new notation became known as that of al-Khwarizmi or, carelessly, algorismi, ultimately corrupted to our word algorithm, now used for any peculiar rule of procedure. The actual descent of our numerals is shown in Figure 10, which doesn’t show how slowly these transformations took place. Even in the eleventh century, Arab scholars were still writing numbers out in full, in words.

But al-Khwarizmi is also known as the ‘father of algebra’ and, certainly, his Hisab al-Jabr waʿl muqabalah contains over eight hundred examples. Translated into Latin in the twelfth century, by Gerard of Cremona, the Algebra was in use until the sixteenth century as the principal mathematical textbook in European universities. From the introduction in the Arabic version (missing in the Latin copy) it seems possible that algebra originated in the complex Islamic laws governing inheritance. These often involved complicated calculations to determine which son inherited what and how debts were to be settled. The word al-jabr apparently meant something like ‘restoration’ or ‘completion’, and refers explicitly to the subtracted terms transferred to the other side of the equation, while muqabalah meant ‘reduction’ or ‘balance’ or something very like it. In Don Quixote, the word algebrista is used to mean a bone-setter – i.e., a restorer. In quadratic equations, elements are reduced either side of the equation, to restore balance.⁵⁶ In the al-Jabr, al-Khwarizmi introduces the idea of representing an unknown quantity by a symbol, such as x, and he provides six chapters, solving six types of equations composed of the three quantities: roots, squares and numbers. Although al-Khwarizmi’s al-Jabr has traditionally been seen as the first work of algebra, a manuscript was found in Turkey in the late twentieth century which throws doubt on this. Entitled Logical Necessities in Mixed Equations, its subject matter was much the same, and some of the equations solved were exactly the same. It thus seems that one manuscript was derived from the other, though no one knows which came first.⁵⁸

Figure 10: Genealogy of our numerals⁵⁷

[Source: Carl Boyer, A History of Mathematics, New York: Wiley, 1991, page 237. This material is used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.]

In the chemical sciences, the leading Arab figure was Jabir ibn-Hayyan, known in the West as Geber, who lived in al-Kufah in the last half of the eighth century. Like most chemists of the time, he was also obsessed by alchemy, in particular with turning base metal into gold (which Jabir believed was accomplished by means of a mysterious substance, al-iksir, or elixir, yet to be discovered). Alchemists also believed that their subject was the ‘science of the balance’, that precious metals could be produced by observing and then improving on the methods of nature.⁵⁹ But chemistry offered the chance of systematic experimentation and Jabir is certainly one of those who can be regarded as the founder of the experimental method. He was the first to describe systematically the principal operations in chemistry – calcination, reduction, evaporation, sublimation, melting and crystallisation. In parallel with this, al-Razi gave a systematic classification of the products of nature. Mineral substances, he said, were divided into spirits (mercury, sal ammoniac), substances (gold, copper, iron), stones (haematite, iron oxide, glass, malachite), vitriols (alums), boraxes and salts. To these ‘natural’ substances, he added ‘artificial’ ones – verdigris, cinnabar, caustic soda, alloys. Al-Razi also believed in what we would call research in the laboratory and he had a lot to do with the separation of chemistry proper from alchemy.⁶⁰

Just as the world was made perfect by God, so that ‘art’ could only ever be ‘ornamentation’, adoring God’s original creation, so philosophy, falsafah, was knowledge of the way things are, but only in so far as man was capable of working things out for himself. In other words, falsafah was inevitably and by definition limited: revelation was, and would always remain, superior to reason. As with the sciences, Arab philosophy was essentially Greek, modified by Indian and other Eastern ideas, and expressed in Arabic, always with the proviso that reason was limited. Hukama, the sages, who practised falsafah, were contrasted with mutakallim, theologians, who practised kalam, theology.

The three greatest Arab philosophers were al-Kindi, al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. Al-Kindi, born in al-Kufah around 801, amalgamated the views of Plato and Aristotle, but he also awarded a high place to Pythagoras, whose mathematics, he thought, were the basis of all science. He was well-born, numbering among his ancestors Imruʾ-al-Qays (d. c. 545), one of the authors of the ‘suspended odes’. Among his own people he was known as Faylasuf al-Arab and he is often referred to as the first Arab philosopher. In fact, al-Kindi was more a transmitter of philosophy – an advocate of the Greek way of thought – rather than an original thinker. He insisted on the difference between philosophy and theology and in doing so risked the ire of orthodox Muslims, because he thought theology should be made subject to the rules of philosophy, such as logic. He also argued that philosophy was open to all, unlike theology, where there was a hierarchy of access to the truth. He wrote a lot on the soul, which he regarded as a spiritual entity, created by God. But his main contribution may be summed up by the story told about him, where he entered al-Malʿmun’s salon and sat above a theologian. When challenged, he replied that he deserved his higher seat because ‘I know what you know and you don’t know what I know.’⁶¹

Al-Farabi also attempted a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle, but it was Ibn Sina, whom we have already encountered in the section on medicine, who made the most of Greek thought in his adaptation of Plato.⁶² His philosophy was speculative: he was drawn to Aristotle’s metaphysics and Plato’s theory of ideas. His idea of God was closer to Aristotle’s unmoved mover (though Ibn Sina’s was a creator god), with all other things being of a dual nature – body and soul. Man’s soul was part of a universal soul emanating from God, the second of three emanations, the first being intellect, and the third matter. For Ibn Sina the soul continued at death but did not occupy other bodies. He thought that the highest state that humans could achieve was prophethood, the genuine prophet receiving his knowledge directly from God, without intermediary but via divine light. He felt that man had free will, though God had control of the major forces. This brought Ibn Sina into conflict with orthodoxy, which maintained that God had an eternal decree over what happened. It is difficult at this distance to appreciate how radical Ibn Sina was in his advocacy of philosophy as separate from theology. But Roger Bacon (d. 1294), the English philosopher, thought he was the greatest authority on philosophy after Aristotle.⁶³

Islamic science and philosophy was often the work of Syrians, Persians and Jews. In contrast, Islamic theology – including canon law – was mainly the work of Arabs. The idea of hadith has already been introduced but in the eighth century this tradition went through several twists. The most notable stemmed from the famous edict of Muhammad, ‘Seek ye learning though it be in China.’ This encouraged many Muslim scholars to travel, to the extent that many such arduous journeys were seen as acts of piety, and men who lost their lives in the course of their travels were seen as martyrs, equivalent to those killed in holy war.⁶⁴ Travel gave a pious man authority – for who could contradict what he had seen and learned? As a result, in the eighth and ninth centuries in particular the number of hadith increased vastly. And here, we should not forget that even the pious were not above a little private enterprise. According to Philip Hitti, one teacher in al-Kufah, just before his execution in 772, admitted to having invented more than four thousand traditions. Because of this, it was later laid down that a ‘perfect’ hadith had to have two elements – a chain of authority, and an original text. On this basis, hadith became divided into genuine, fair or weak.

In the ninth century (the third Muslim century) the hadiths became canonised into six books. The most authoritative is generally regarded as that of Muhammad ibn-Ismaʿil al-Bukhari (810–870). Over sixteen years, so it is said, he visited one thousand sheikhs and, out of 600,000 traditions that he collected, he chose 7,397 which he accepted as sacred. These are divided into three categories: prayer, pilgrimage and holy war. This book is now regarded as second only in authority to the Qurʾan; oaths taken on it are valid in Muslim countries, and it has exerted a profound influence on Islamic thought.

Study of the Qurʾan dominated instruction in the schools of the early Islamic world. The core curriculum, as we would say today, consisted of memorising the Qurʾan and hadith, together with writing and mathematics. The pupils practised their writing on secular poems, lest a mistake be made with sacred texts. ‘Deserving pupils in the elementary schools (kuttab) of Baghdad were rewarded by being paraded through the streets while almonds were thrown at them.’⁶⁵

The Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, was the most pre-eminent educational institution in Baghdad, but the first academy to resemble a college, which was residential and concentrated on teaching rather than research (as we would say), was the Nizamiyah, the theological seminary founded in Baghdad in 1065–1067 by the Persian vizir, Nizam-al-Mulk.⁶⁶ The Arab term for seminary was madrasa and here too the Qurʾan and ancient poetry formed the basis of a curriculum that extended to the humanities, much as the Greek and Roman classics formed the basis of European education in later centuries. The Nizamiyah was merged with another madrasa, al-Mustansiriyah, which was equipped with a hospital, baths and a kitchen and had a clock tower at its main gate. Ibn Battuta, the great Arab traveller, visited Baghdad in 1327 and found that the merged institution had four juridical schools.⁶⁷ Eventually there were about thirty of these madrasas in Baghdad and almost as many in Damascus. Until the introduction of paper, the chief method of recording what was learned was the memory and stories of astounding feats of memory were a common form of entertainment. Some scholars, it was said, could memorise 300,000 traditions. Mosques also had libraries and offered lectures on hadith. This was something that all travellers could rely on. Books were common by now in the Islamic world. According to one author, in the late ninth century, there were more than a hundred book dealers in Baghdad, all congregated in one street. The booksellers were often calligraphers as well, who would copy books for a fee, and often used their shops like cafés in later times, as meeting places for authors.⁶⁸

Not everyone agreed that the Qurʾan was solely the work of God. In the middle of the second Islamic century (the eighth century AD) there emerged a school of thinkers that called almost all aspects of traditional Islam into question. They were known as the Muʿtazilis (‘those who keep themselves apart’), and they believed that truth could be reached only by bringing reason to bear on what is revealed in the Qurʾan. For example, if God is One, He has no human attributes and the Qurʾan could not therefore have been spoken by Him – it must have been created in some other way. At the same time, since God is just, bound by the principle of justice, man must have free will – otherwise, to judge men for acts they are not free to undertake would be unjust.⁶⁹ The most daring of the Muʿtazilite thinkers was al-Mazzam (active in the first half of the ninth century AD) who proclaimed that doubt ‘was the first requirement of knowledge’.⁷⁰

This form of thinking appealed in particular to al-Maʿmun, who promoted the Muʿtazilite view to a state religion, asserting a new dogma, ‘the creation [khalq] of the Qurʾan’, directly opposed to the traditional view, that the Qurʾan was ‘the uncreated word of God’. As may be imagined, this reversal of beliefs caused great consternation, the more so as al-Maʿmun set up the mihnah, a tribunal similar to the Inquisition which tried those who denied the new dogma. This new dispensation, and the persecution of the orthodox views, was continued after al-Maʿmun’s death by his two successors, but then the situation was reversed. The man usually given credit for starting the return to orthodoxy is Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855), who argued that since God is all powerful, his justice is not like human justice, and that if the Qurʾan is one with him, this is not to say that he has human attributes – his attributes are divine and must be accepted as such, not on an analogy with human attributes. Ibn Hanbal was followed by Abu-al-Hasan ʿAli al-Ashʿari of Baghdad (active in the first half of the tenth century). Al-Ashʿari argued that God’s hearing, sight and speech were not the same as those human attributes. Man must accept them, ‘without asking how’. The Nizamiyah seminary in Baghdad was set up to propagate al-Ashʿari’s ideas.⁷¹

After him, much Islamic thought, like much Christian thought, became obsessed with reconciling Greek ideas with the sacred text. And here, al-Ashʿari was followed by the man who is universally regarded as the greatest Islamic theologian, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali. Born in 1058 in Tus, Khurasan, Persia, he was in some respects the St Augustine of Islam. He roamed the world, acquiring wisdom, in the tradition inspired by the Prophet, and he flirted, intellectually, with both scepticism and Sufism. Sufism was and is the main form of Islamic mysticism, an ascetic movement, with elements of Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Christianity and Buddhism. Wool (suf) was adopted as a form of dress in imitation of Christian monks, as was celibacy. Sufis were faintly apocalyptic, with their belief in an ‘anti-Christ’ and they were characterised by the achievement of ecstasy as a way to purify the soul. They introduced the rosary, probably taken over from the Hindus (and passed to Christians during the Crusades), and they distinguished, as did the Gnostics, between knowledge of God, maʿrifah, and intellectual knowledge, ilm.⁷²

Many Muslims now revere al-Ghazali as second only to the Prophet in importance. His main book, Ihya ʿulum al-din (The Revivification of the Sciences of Religion), is a blend of dialectic, mysticism and pragmatism. It had an enormous effect on individuals as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Blaise Pascal and it has very largely shaped the Islam that is practised today. The book is divided into four parts. The first examines the pillars of Islam, the second goes beyond ritual to consider various everyday aspects of life, such as marriage, listening to music, the acquisition of worldly goods, while the third part looks at the passions and the desires. The last part is the most original and deals with the path to God. Throughout the early parts al-Ghazali reminds his readers continually to be aware of the soul at all times, that it is just that sort of self-awareness that makes someone bring something extra to all their activities, making them more worthwhile.⁷³ In this section, al-Ghazali argues that the path to God is marked by a series of stages. The first is repentance, then patience, fear, hope and renunciation of all those things that may not be sinful in themselves but are hindrances to reliance on God. At each stage, says al-Ghazali, there are revelations which comfort the individual on his journey. These, however, are given by the grace of God and are temporary. Yet, as the soul moves upward, its own efforts count for less and more is led from God. The main problem is getting stuck at any one stage and going no further. One must renounce all illusions and open oneself to God. The highest point is reached when man loses all awareness of himself, when God reveals himself through love, and man becomes aware of a new kind of knowledge, maʿrifah. Man may have a vision of God from a distance at this point, and be allowed a glimpse of the paradise to come. Ever since al-Ghazali, Sunni Islam (the belief that the Qurʾan and the habitual behaviour of the Prophet is sufficient guide) has been the dominant form.

Openness and toleration thus ran right through Baghdad’s golden age, when so much groundwork was being done in medicine, mathematics, philosophy, geography and other branches of science. The culmination came at the turn of the eleventh century. It was then that Ibn al-Nadim published his al-Fihrist, a compendium of books then available in the round city. This, as was mentioned earlier, showed an exotic array of activities that interested the Arabs of the time, but it is clear from this that people – merchants, theatre types, writers, scientists, astrologers and alchemists – were flocking to Baghdad, rather as people flocked to Berlin, Paris or New York in later ages, because it was so open, a kaleidoscope of humanity. The Arabs’ own taste for travel was stimulated in the early eleventh century when the magnetic compass arrived from China, enabling ships’ captains to dispense with coastal sailing.

But the great openness didn’t last. The areas of study derived from Greek and Indian origin became known in some quarters as the ‘foreign sciences’, and were treated with suspicion by the pious. In 1065, or 1067, as we have seen, the Nizamiyah was founded in Baghdad. This was a theological seminary, where the Qurʾan and the study of old poetry – rather than Greek science – became the backbone of study. Later merged with a younger outfit, the al-Mustansiriyah, this joint institution became the prototype of the madrasas, the theological colleges, often linked to mosques, which spread all over the Islamic world, teaching primarily moral and ethical matters, based on the Qurʾan. The curriculum included the ‘religious sciences’, the ‘Qurʾanic sciences’, and above all ilm al-kalam, which means both theology and ‘defensive apologia’, the reassertion of the faith against the inroads of science and philosophy. Thus a great turning inward came about. In some ways the Arab world has never recovered.

Although it was more than 2,000 miles away to the west, Spain (or most of it) had been Muslim since the early eighth century. Before the Muslim conquest there, Spain had been one of the most recently Christianised European countries and therefore Arab civilisation was able to take firm hold. It was held for more than two hundred years – from 756 to 961 – by the Umayyad dynasty. After they had been deposed in Damascus by the Abbasids, one of their number, Abd-al-Rahman ibn Muʿawiyah, grandson of Hisham, had escaped and, with loyal Syrian troops, traversed north Africa arriving, finally, at the straits of Gibraltar. Despite opposition from the local Arabs already living there, who formed an alliance with Charlemagne, Abd-al-Rahman beat them back, to establish another Umayyad dynasty.

Arab civilisation achieved a glory in Spain to rival that in Iraq, with the high point coming in the last half of the tenth century. By that point, Cordova, the capital, was on a par with Baghdad and Constantinople as one of the three great cultural centres of the ‘known world’. It had paved streets, where each house undertook to mount a light outside at night. There was a regular postal service, coins in gold and silver, gardens galore, a whole street of bookshops, and seventy libraries. ‘Whenever the rulers of León, Navarre or Barcelona needed a surgeon, an architect, a master singer or a dressmaker, it was to Cordova that they applied.’⁷⁴

Abd-al-Rahman III was the most impressive ruler of all. He founded the university of Cordova. This, located in the main mosque, preceded al-Azhar in Cairo and even the Nizamiyah in Baghdad. It was decorated with mosaics brought in from Constantinople and water was fed to it in lead pipes. There was a library of some 400,000 books. One visitor from the north remarked in his memoirs that ‘nearly everyone could read and write’.⁷⁵ Among the ideas born in Cordova was comparative religion, in the work of Ali ibn-Hazm (994–1064). His al-Fasl fi al-Milal w-al-Ahwaʾ w-al-Nihal (The Decisive Word on Sects, Heterodoxies and Denominations) broke new ground, not only in its examination of the different Muslim groups, but also in the way Ibn Hazm drew attention to various inconsistencies in the biblical narratives. It would be five hundred years before Christian thinkers thought such matters important. Similarly, Ibn Khaldun (born in Tunis in 1332) made an equivalent breakthrough as the inventor of sociology. In his al-Muqaddimah he conceived a theory of historical development, taking account of geography, climate, and psychological factors, in an effort to discover rational patterns in human progress. This no doubt had a great deal to do with the fact that, in Egypt, where he finally settled in middle age, and was given a teaching position at al-Azhar, the oldest and most distinguished university in the area, he had the opportunity to meet scholars from Turkestan, India, east Asia and deepest Africa. His approach is clearly set out in the beginning of the Muqaddimah: ‘On the surface, history is no more than information about political events, dynasties and occurrences of the remote past, elegantly presented and spiced with proverbs. It serves to entertain large, crowded gatherings and brings us to an understanding of human affairs . . . The inner meaning of history, on the other hand, involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanations of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of events. History, therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy. It deserves to be accounted a branch of philosophy.’⁷⁶ Ibn Khaldun called this science of society, which he claimed to have discovered, ilm al-umran, the science of civilisation. At the core of any civilisation, he said, lies social cohesion and this is the most important phenomenon to understand.⁷⁷

Many of the ideas conceived by the Arabs in and around Baghdad actually filtered through to Europe via Spain, including ideas the Muslims had garnered from elsewhere. Hindu numerals are a case in point (see next Chapter for a fuller discussion). It was in Spain in the second half of the ninth century that Hindu numerals were modified into the form known as huruf al-ghubar (‘letters of dust’). These ghubar numerals appear to have been introduced for use with a sand abacus, and they are closer in form to the ones we use today. The other way the Hindu-Arabic numerals were introduced to Europe was via the work of Leonardo Fibonacci, of Pisa (c. 1180–1250). Fibonacci’s father was a merchant who did a lot of business in north Africa. As a result, his son travelled in Egypt, Syria and Greece and studied under a Muslim. He became steeped in Arabic algebra and, in doing so, learned about Hindu numerals.⁷⁸ In 1202 he wrote an invaluable book, albeit one with a misleading title. Liber abbaco (‘Book of the abacus’) is not at all about the abacus but is a good treatise on algebra, in which Hindu numerals are thoroughly introduced. It starts by describing ‘the nine Indian numerals’, together with the sign 0, ‘which is called zephirum in Arabic’.⁷⁹ Fibonacci also used the horizontal bar in fractions, as had been used for some time in Arabia, but it didn’t come into popular usage elsewhere until the sixteenth century.

It was the Arabs in Spain who made great advances in botany. They improved our understanding of germination (which plants grow from cuttings, which from seeds), the properties of soil and, in particular, of manure. In medicine they introduced the idea of cauterisation of wounds, and discovered the ‘itch mite’. It was Arabs who conceived the idea of sharab, or syrup, originally a mix of sugar and water designed to conceal the taste of unpleasant medication. They also invented ‘soda’. In medieval Latin sodanum was a remedy for a headache, based on the Arabic suda, meaning migraine. Alcohol, alembic and alkali are all Arabic chemical terms, as azimuth (al-sumut) and nadir (nazir) are astronomical usages.⁸⁰

So far as influence on Western thinking is concerned, the greatest achievement of Muslim Spain was in the falsafah of Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn-Ahmad ibn-Rushd, otherwise known as Averroës. As Sir Philip Hitti has pointed out, thought in Spain was quite adventurous. Ibn Najjah hinted at the possibility of atheism, and Ibn Tufayl showed some awareness of evolution. But, probably, they were too far ahead of their time. Averroës was much more the man of the moment. Born in Cordova in 1126, into a family of judges, he was educated at Cordova’s mosque-based university, specialised in law and medicine and became both a doctor and a philosopher. He was the first person to notice that no one is ever afflicted with smallpox twice, the beginnings of the idea of inoculation, and he conceived the function of the retina, a crucial breakthrough.⁸¹ But it is as a philosopher that Averroës had most influence, more so in Christendom than in the Muslim world. He was commissioned by the sultan in Morocco to prepare a clear text on philosophy. Together with this went an honorarium, a robe of honour and an appointment as chief justice, first in Seville, then in Cordova, where he followed Ibn Tufayl.⁸²

Averroës’ writings did three things. First, like so many before him, he tried to reconcile the thought of the Greeks, especially Aristotle and Plato, with the Qurʾan. Second, he tried to reconcile the role of reason and revelation. Third, he tried to show how various segments of the populace, according to their intellect and education, could relate to these ideas. In the manner of the times, his main work was a commentary on Aristotle, but it was a paraphrase as much as a commentary, in which he attempted to set out Aristotle’s, and Plato’s, original thought, dismissing later accretions and forgeries, and giving his own gloss. In his devotion to reason, his most important argument was that not all the words of the Qurʾan should be taken literally. When the literal meaning of the text appears to contradict the rational truths of philosophers, he said, those verses are to be understood metaphorically. In particular, he argued that he could not accept the theological notion of predestination or corporeal resurrection. For him it was the soul, not the body, which was immortal and this changed the nature of paradise, which could not be sensual. He accepted, with Plato, that benign rulers can bring their people to God. And he advocated that there are three levels of humanity. Philosophy was for the elite (khass); for the generality (ʿamm), the literal meaning was sufficient; dialectical reasoning (kalam) was for minds in an intermediate position. Averroës’ method was as important as his arguments. He introduced a measure of doubt, which was never very popular in Islam but proved fruitful in Christianity. And his idea of several levels of understanding was especially appealing in a religion with a favoured insider class, the clergy. In Venice, in the 1470s alone, more than fifty editions of Averroës’ works were published and Averroism became established in the curricula of all the major European universities.⁸³

Just as Baghdad and its House of Wisdom had been a major translation centre in the ninth century, so Toledo occupied a similar position after the Christian conquest of the city in 1085. Chronologically speaking, the first person to produce Latin translations of Arabic works was probably Constantine the African (d. 1087), a Tunisian Muslim who converted to Christianity, and who worked in Salerno, southern Italy. He produced fairly poor translations (‘barbarous’ according to one scholar) of works by Hippocrates and Galen, sometimes passing them off as his own. There were also a number of translators in Sicily, who worked on the Arab falaysufs, but the harvest in Toledo was incomparably greater.⁸⁴

Translations from Arabic were made in Catalonia from the tenth century on, and Barcelona was the home of the first Spanish translator we have a name for – Plato of Tivoli. Between 1116 and 1138, with the help of an Andalusian Jew, Savasorda, he translated Jewish and Arab works on astrology and astronomy, but shortly afterwards the centre of these activities shifted to Toledo, which had become a jewel of Graeco-Judaic-Arab culture. Scholars flocked to Toledo to consult the primarily Arabic treasures that had been gathered in Spain during the years of Islamic dominance. The name of the archbishop of Toledo, Raymund (1125–1152), has become associated with this venture, and the term ‘Toledo school’ has been applied to this otherwise disparate collection of individuals. What seems to have happened is that, to begin with, very few of the Western scholars who arrived in Toledo understood any Arabic, and they therefore made use of Jewish and Mozarabic scholars already living there (Mozarabs were Christians allowed to practise their faith under strictly controlled circumstances). These individuals turned the Arabic texts into Spanish, and the immigrant scholars then turned the Spanish into Latin. Gradually, however, this situation evolved, as the immigrant scholars themselves learned Arabic. Even so, the spirit of co-operation continued. Just as Plato of Tivoli had co-operated with Savasorda, so two of the most distinguished translators of the Toledo school had their collaborators. Dominicus Gundisalvi, archdeacon of Segovia, worked with the converted Jew Avendeath (Ibn Dawud), better known as Johannes Hispanus, and Gerard of Cremona, probably the best-remembered translator of all, worked with the Mozarab Galippus (Ghalib).⁸⁵

Gundisalvi was the principal translator of the Arabic philosophers – al-Farabi, al-Kindi, al-Ghazali and Ibn Sina included. The preeminence of Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187) is testified by the fact that, after his death, his colleagues and pupils in Toledo compiled a biographical and bibliographical note which was inserted into the manuscripts of his many translations. ‘From this note we learn that Gerard, scorning the worldly riches which he possessed, led an austere life entirely devoted to science, for love of which he learned Arabic and translated from that language more than seventy works, a list of these being given in the note.’⁸⁶ Prominent among these was the Almagest (which is how Ptolemy became known in the West), Ibn Sina’s Canon, and works of Euclid, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, al-Razi, al-Khwarizmi (‘the beginning of European algebra’) and al-Kindi. In effect, the whole range of Hellenistic-Arabic science, which had inspired the Abbasid culture of the ninth and tenth centuries, was preserved and transmitted by Gerard, who, after spending a considerable number of years in Toledo, returned home to Lombardy to die. To these names, we should add those of two Englishmen, Adelard of Bath, who translated Euclid and al-Khwarizmi, and Robert of Chester, notable for producing the first Latin version of the Qurʾan and the first translation of al-Khwarizmi’s algebra.⁸⁷

By the close of the thirteenth century, the bulk of Arabic (and therefore Greek) science and philosophy had been transmitted to Europe. Since the land route from the north to the Iberian peninsula lay through Provence and the Pyrenees, the southern French towns – Toulouse, Montpellier, Marseilles, Narbonne – benefited. Translations were carried out at all these locations, with Montpellier becoming the chief centre of medical and astronomical studies in France. At the famous abbey of Cluny, north of Lyons, a number of Spanish monks helped make the abbey a focus for the diffusion of Arab learning. The abbot, Peter the Venerable (1141–1143), sponsored a new Latin translation of the Qurʾan. Arab and Greek science passed north from there to Liège, among other places, and then on to Germany and England.

The overall shape of the Arab empire, encircling the east–west Mediterranean (like the Romans before), and extending as far as India, thus had an important role in the development of Europe. Greek learning was preserved, and added to, and by a roundabout route – across north Africa and up through Spain, rather than directly through Byzantium and the Balkans – reached western Europe. The long-term effects of that transmission will emerge over the remaining chapters of this book, but two points are worth making here. The first is that Europe’s initial encounter with the Greeks, Aristotle in particular, but Plato and other authors also, was via Arab ‘re-elaborations’ rather than through direct transmission. For example, the logic, physics and metaphysics of Aristotle were studied either in translations from Arabic translations of the Greek originals, or in the works of Ibn Sina. This meant that, for a time at least, Greek philosophy was overlaid with the Islamic concern of trying to reconcile the Qurʾan with rationalism, in particular Ibn Sina’s view that passages which did not agree with reason were to be understood allegorically. This had a profound influence on people like Thomas Aquinas and on interpretations of the Bible.

In the second place it meant that Europe for a time accepted the close link established in Islamic thought between philosophy and medicine. This link (evidenced by the fact that the Arabic word hakim can mean either physician or philosopher) is seen especially in the works of al-Razi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. The obvious importance of Arab medicine, recognised in the West, added to the importance of philosophy, so closely associated with it.

Arab knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, medicine and philosophy were of crucial importance in the early days of science in the West. The roundabout route from Baghdad to Toledo kept alive the basic ideas by which we still live today.