"It was under their successors at Oxford School (that is, successors to
the Muslims of Spain) that Roger Bacon learned Arabic and Arabic Sciences.
Neither Roger Bacon nor later his namesake (Francis Bacon) has any title to be
credited with having introduced the experimental method. Roger Bacon was no
more than one of the apostles of Muslim Science and Method to Christian Europe,
and he never wearied of declaring that knowledge of Arabic and Arabic Sciences
was for his contemporaries the only way to true knowledge. Discussion as to who
was the originator of the experimental method.... is part of the colossal
misinterpretation of the origins of European civilization. The experimental
method of Arabs was by Bacon’s time widespread and eagerly cultivated
throughout Europe.
Robert Stephen Briffault (1874 – 1948), British surgeon and social
anthropologist, author of “Making Humanity” (1919)
MAKING OUR WAY IN THE MIDDLE EAST
It is perhaps difficult, given the Islam terrorism of al Qaeda, ISIS, and the
Taliban that emanates out of this Middle Eastern culture today to read this
quote from Making Humanity written nearly 100 years ago and to still trust its
validity, but it is nonetheless true. The West owes a huge debt to the
pioneering wisdom of Arabic culture.
My first acquaintance with this culture was in reading a book in the fourth
grade at St. Patrick’s parochial school of the Moors coming up out of North
Africa and invigorating the culture of Spain. That experience occurred in 1942,
or three-quarters of a century ago. It seeded my interest in culture and its
influence on human behavior. My many books about culture owe something to this
impetus.
My approach to culture is from the perspective of an industrial psychologist,
not as a historian or philosopher, but also from reading scholars from the East
and West who have devoted their lives to such pursuits. I do not tarry from
seeing the significance of their findings, or hesitate in sharing them with
you.
The West over the last few centuries has had its innings, and some would say
they are the best in man’s history with space exploration, placing a man on the
moon, developing the personal computer, the Internet, 24/7 information spanning
the globe in an instant. Even so, long before the West lifted itself out of the
“Dark Ages,” the Arab World had experienced its Golden Age between 750 and 1258
C.E.
British science writer Philip Ball
(born 1962) wrote in The London Sunday
Times:
"Last November [2008], scientists using the Hubble space telescope
reported the first sighting with visible light of a planet circling a star
other than our own sun. It orbits 25 light-years away around one of the
brightest stars in the sky, called Fomalhaut. Isn't that a curious name for a
star? Not obviously mythological, it sounds as if it derives from some
forgotten French astronomer. Not so; it is, in fact, from the Arabic fum u'l
haut, meaning 'mouth of the fish'. And Fomalhaut is not alone in having an
Arabic derivation - there are well over 100 others, including Betelgeuse,
Aldebaran, and Deneb. How did the Arabs get to name stars?"
The answer is that Arabs once led the world in astronomy. Muslim scientists
were mapping the heavens when Europeans were lost in the aftermath of The Fall of Rome in 476 C.E.
Popular culture may prefer to believe that the baton of science and knowledge
of astronomy passed directly from the Greek
Ptolemy in the 2nd century to Copernicus (1473 – 1543) in the 16th century of the Renaissance, but that is simply not so.
What Copernicus and the West know about astronomy in the 16th century had come
to Europe via Arabic learning, including Ptolemy’s works, which were first
translated and refined between the 9th and 13th centuries by scholars of Islam.
These scholars didn’t just read Ptolemy, they challenged his data gathered from
an observatory established in Baghdad in 820 C.E. when Europe was first
starting to come out of the “Dark Ages” in the reign of Emperor Charlemagne of
the Holy Roman Empire, who had been coroneted in 800 C.E.
These achievements were occurring in Islamic science during the period of the
“Dark Ages” (476 – 1100 C.E.), at the end of which Europe didn’t turn to
science but the Crusades (1095 – 1296), invading the Middle East.
It is no accident that the Golden Age of
Arab Science (750 – 1258) first fragmented and then collapsed from this
European assault on Islam culture and lands, followed by European strategic
intervention and colonization of this Middle Eastern culture.
While Europe struggled (at least until the 12th century) with the rudiments of
mathematics and natural philosophy, the Abbasid caliphs of the 8th to 13th
centuries were promoting a rationalistic vision of Islam in the workings of the
world. These works were founded on the remnants of Roman and Hellenistic
culture, which Muslims had direct access to in such centers as Alexandria in
Egypt. Here Islam scholars prepared their Arabic versions of the works of
Aristotle and Euclid, Ptolemy, and Archimedes setting up schools and libraries
such as the “House of Wisdom” in Baghdad.
Aside from astronomy, Muslim thinkers were actively innovating in optics,
cartography, and medicine. The camera obscura, a kind of pinhole camera in
which an outside scene is projected onto a wall in a darkened room as light
enters through a small hole, was first studied experimentally by Iraqi
physicists and mathematicians in Egypt in the 11th century. English Franciscan
friar and philosopher Roger Bacon (1214 – 1292) used the device to study solar
eclipses (see The First Scientist by
Brian Clegg, 2003). Old masters such as Dutch painters Jan Van Eyck (1390 –
1441) and Johan Vermeer (1632 – 1675) may have employed this projection method
to achieve their micro-realist detail.
Aristotle teaching astronomy to Arabs.
The Arab scientific tradition was greatly influenced by the work of classical Greek scholars (© Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul). Incidentally, it was maps developed by Islamic cartographers that guided Portuguese nobleman and explorer Vasco de Gama (1460 – 1524) around the Cape of Good Hope in his initial voyage to India (1497 – 1499). In chemistry, early Islamic chemists gave us such words as alkali, alcohol, alembic, elixir, and alchemy. The standard theory of the alchemical transmutation of metals was laid out in the writings of Jabir ibn-Hayyan (721 – 815), also known as Geber, the “Father of Arab Chemistry.” He was a prominent polymath: a chemist and alchemist, astronomer and astrologer, engineer, geographer, philosopher, physicist, and pharmacist, and physician. The great physicist Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) was fascinated all his life with alchemy. Geber wrote about the practical use of nitric, hydrochloric, and sulfuric acid, which made their debut with him.
As India, China, Japan, and Russia have benefitted culturally from each other in the past two centuries, the Muslim world has profited from what it has learned from other cultures. For example, it learned how to make paper and bind books from the Chinese in the 10th century. Subsequently, Muslim merchants introduced it to India in the 13th century.
The Hindu-Arabic numeral system, that is, a set of 10 symbols—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0—that represent numbers in the decimal number system, originated in India in the 6th or 7th century and were introduced to Europe through Arab mathematicians around the 12th century. It was one of the ancillary benefits of the Crusades.
THE WEST COMES BACK – ROLE OF
ADELARD OF BATH
Adelard of Bath (1080 - 1152) was a
12th century English natural philosopher. He is known both for his original
works and for translating many important Greek and Arabic scientific works of
astrology, astronomy, philosophy, and mathematics into Latin from the Arabic
versions, which were then introduced to Western Europe. He is known as one of
the first to introduce the Hindu-Arabic numeral system to Europe. He stands at
the convergence of three intellectual schools: the traditional learning of
French schools, the Greek culture of Southern Italy, and the Arabic science of the East.
His significance is paramount because he was an open-minded European who felt
there was much to learn from what Crusaders called Eastern “infidels.” Europe
was still shrouded in the “Dark Ages,”
and it would be wrong to dismiss him simply as a “translator.”
Adelard traveled extensively through the "lands of the Crusades":
Greece, West Asia, Sicily, Spain, Tarsus, Antioch, and
Jerusalem. The time spent in these areas explains his fascination with
mathematics and his access to Arabic scholars. By 1126, he returned to the West
intending to spread the knowledge he had gained about Arab astronomy and
geometry to the Latin world.
One aspect of particular interest concerning this period, and Adelard’s
adventures, is its proximity to the Crusades (1095 – 1296). This was a time of
remarkable transition and he was witness to this evolution of human history.
While the Crusades offered little in the way of a “victory for the West,”
Adelard’s nondiscriminatory scholarly work inspired him to bring back to
England many ancient texts and new questions that would later give rise to an
English Renaissance.
Given the 11th and 12th centuries in which Adelard was alive, it was
understandably difficult for him to achieve his educational pursuits when there
was such a bias against Muslims in general and the Arabic culture specifically.
Alas, what could sophisticated Europeans learn from such heathens!
In the absence of a printing press and given the weak public literacy rate
(less than 1 percent of Europeans could read), books were rare items in
medieval Europe, and generally, only members of the royal courts and Catholic
monastic communities had such literate proficiencies. Fittingly, as it turns
out, Adelard studied with monks at the Benedictine Monastery at Bath's
Cathedral.
Adelard gave the West its first view of Euclid’s Elements (published c. 300
B.C.E.), a mathematical and geometric treatise consisting of 13 books that
Adelard secured from Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt. The thirteen books cover
Euclidean geometry and the ancient Greek version of elementary number theory.
The books also consist of definitions, postulates (axioms), propositions
(theorems and constructions), and mathematical proofs of the propositions. He
also acquired the astronomy and algebra of the Baghdad Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi (480 – 850) whose name
is preserved today with the word algorithm.
In contrast to the intellectual fervor that would flourish in Europe from the
17th century on, the period up to that point since the Fall of Rome was gaining
momentum by knocking on the door of the learned and sophisticated Islamic
world. While European monasteries were modest libraries copying hundreds of
books, Arabic libraries had thousands. When a Muslim ruler decided to donate
books to a new school, he sent 80,000 in his collection (see The House of
Wisdom by Jonathan Lyons, 2009).
Adelard, born in 1080 in England’s West Country, had no interest in the
Crusades or the hysteria that was being generated for them when he was a young
man. Instead, he displayed an interest in learning Arabic and Arabic culture
and was in Antioch in 1114 when he was thirty-four years old. It is known he
was there at the time because he survived the earthquake. He learned by doing,
washing cadavers, and studying their neural systems and structures.
After this experience, he returned to England a changed man determined to share
his knowledge of the East with his peers. He immediately encounters resistance
but overcomes this by sharing practical wisdom, such as a book of alchemy that
teaches how to tan leather, color glass, and dye cloth. He also brings back the
astrolabe, an instrument Muslims used to make astronomical measurements,
typically of the altitudes of celestial bodies, and in navigation for
calculating latitude, which was before the development of the sextant. In its
basic form, it consisted of a disk with the edge marked in degrees and a pivoted
pointer. This was the most powerful computer of its day, capable of telling
time, defining true north, and measuring the height of buildings based on the
latitude settings.
To give you a sense of the West in the 11th century, or Adelard’s time, it was simply
a mess. Daily life staggered under the burden of gratuitous violence and social
instability. Bands of mercenaries prowled the countryside to rape, plunder and
murder at will as there was no law and order. Primitive farm methods could no
longer keep pace with the soaring population so hunger and starvation were
routine. Violence was the currency of the day as the moral authority of the
Catholic Church was virtually nonexistent. The Church was holding on to its
tenuous authority by projecting its miseries on the “infidels” of the East,
gaining a reprieve by masterminding European unity through the Crusades.
It was in this climate that Pope Urban II (1095) at Clermont called for “the
First Crusade.” He claimed to be answering a desperate appeal of the Eastern
Emperor Alexius Comnenus (1081 – 1118) to save the Byzantine Eastern Catholic
Church. The pope gave a stirring sermon:
“A horrible tale has gone forth,” he
said. “An accursed race utterly alienated from God … has invaded the lands of
the Christians and depopulated them by the sword, plundering, and fire.” Toward
the end, he made this appeal: “Tear that land from the wicked race and subject
it to yourselves.”
This is worth noting as not only the powerful – in this case Pope Urban II and
Emperor Comnenus – wished to escape the problems at home, but individuals in a
collective psychosis desired such escape as well. The burden of sanity was too
much. This found Europeans welcoming the license to enact forbidden impulses of
hatred and violence. At a fever’s pitch, Europeans could be heard to shout,
“Deus vult! Deus vult!” (“God wills it!”)
Feckless religious leaders across the European continent were given a reprieve
with this call to arms to fight against the Turks, an unknown entity other than
“the enemy of the Church and God.”
WHY CRUSADERS JOINED THE FIGHT
It must have been something like the tens of thousands of Americans who
volunteered for military service after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor (December 7,
1941), as the list of the First Crusade’s leaders read like a medieval “Who’s
Who,” including the fabled Godfrey of
Bouillon (1060 – 1100).
Soon waves of people—probably over one hundred thousand, including about ten
thousand knights were headed for the Holy Land. Thus began over three hundred
years of similar expeditions and pilgrimages, which gradually became known as
Crusades, because the Red Cross is worn on the tunic of the Crusaders.
Why did so many respond? A spirit of adventure, for one thing. Pilgrimages to
the Holy Land had become a feature of medieval piety, and now the pilgrimage
was coupled with the prospect of fighting to recapture the Christian pilgrimage
sites and to avenge the dishonor their Lord Jesus had suffered.
The crusaders endured an arduous journey in dismal conditions for spiritual
reward. This was a holy undertaking with participants receiving plenary
indulgence and full remission of all their sins allowing them to enter Heaven
without passing through Purgatory. Finally, peasants could do something that
was nearly as spiritually noble as entering the monastery. Moreover, the
crusaders enjoyed a kind of happiness that as individuals they were incapable
of achieving otherwise, overthrowing their angst by focusing on the blind
target of Eastern infidels whom they hated and despised yet knew nothing about.
To put this in perspective, the huge numbers of commoners and nobility who went
on the Crusades, especially the First Crusade, is a testament to just how
different the medieval world was from our world today.
While some no doubt had worldly motivation like the prospects of owning land
upon their return, the motivation of the mass majority of the Crusaders was
that of believers. They honestly believed in Heaven, and that their
participation in the Crusade would absolve them of all sin.
For all but the wealthiest of noblemen, committing to the Crusades meant the
virtual liquidation of all their physical assets in Europe and becoming
homeless wanderers until they reached the Holy Land.
Let us remember that the “Holy Land” was at best an abstract concept to these
people. Almost none of them, not even the leaders of the Crusades, had ever
been to the “Holy Land,” or had any acquaintance with people of the Islam
faith; nor did they have any idea of just how far away it was.
Europeans of the early medieval period lived in a very small world. Most people
would live and die without ever having traveled farther than a day's walk from
their village. So for these people to take to traveling the tens of thousands
of miles of poor dirt roads to reach the Holy Land would be like a modern
person venturing to Mars.
It was the climate of a new age as only two decades earlier William the Norman
successfully conquered England (1066). The Crusades were a way to deal with
social and political ills that plagued the land without dealing with them at
all.
Adelard had found sanctuary in an elite cathedral school that still existed as
chaos and disorder swept in with the barbarian invasions of the Western Roman
Empire. This began in the 5th century C.E. and had destroyed formal education
and the perpetuation of classical knowledge except for Schools in the Church.
The Muslim conquest in East 300 years later (750 C.E.) sealed the West’s
isolation by choking off easy access to the Byzantine Christians in far-off
Constantinople, where some traces of the Greek intellectual tradition could
still be found, and yet another reason for the Crusades.
The wonders of classical learning were all but forgotten or pushed to the
extreme margins of European consciousness. Invaluable texts were lost through
inattention, destroyed by the illiterate hordes that ransacked libraries, or
simply rendered unintelligible by the general ignorance of would-be-scholars or
ignored not being able to read Greek. The irony is that the Roman aristocracy
of the Roman Empire could read the Greek masters in the original Hellenistic
language and so there had been no concerted effort to translate the philosophy
of Plato and Aristotle, the engineering wonders of Archimedes, or the geometry
of Euclid into Latin. The disappearance of Greek as the language of learning
meant that centuries of knowledge virtually vanished from the collective minds
of Latin-speaking Europeans. This was not the case in the Islamic world.
Were it not for the scattered monasteries in Ireland, northern England,
Catalonia, and southern Italy, where monks labored to keep the classical
traditional alive, nothing would have been saved. Compared to what these monks
were able to save, however, proved meager in comparison to the heights once
scaled by the Greeks, or the new and exciting work being carried out in the
Arab world.
As a data point, the best minds of Adelard’s day had no grasp of the use of
zero. Masters at the Cathedral of Laon, where he attended, taught the latest techniques
employed by King Henry I (1133 – 1189), who ruled both England and Normandy in
the early 12th century, to manage his treasury. What were these techniques?
These included the use of a special tablecloth, marked out in rows and columns
like a chessboard, and based on the principles of the abacus which had reached
France from Arab Spain some years before. The cloth was known as “the
sacrarium” (Latin for “chessboard”), and is the original English term for the
treasury, “the Exchequer.” Despite the importance of this royal mission of
managing the treasury, the standard of learning at the Laon Institute remained
very low, one contemporary textbook revealed consistent errors in basic
calculations.
Time was as vexing a problem as the sloppy management of royal accounts. As
shown earlier, time was crucial to the Benedictine monks, who developed a crude
timing mechanism. Even by the sleepy standards of medieval Christendom, time
was a serious business linked to work and the pursuit of heavenly salvation with
stipulated times for both. The Rule of St. Benedict, which governed tens of
thousands of monasteries in the 6th century, required eight sets of prayers at
specific times every 24-hours. The changing position of the sun was a rough
guide of the hour, but at night the monks of the Latin West were left literally
in the darkness of their ignorance.
NOTHING IS PERMANENT, NOT EVEN
GOLDEN AGES
“Pax Romana,” or the “Golden Age of Rome” lasted from 509 B.C.E., when the
Roman Republic was founded, and the government was run by elected Senators, who
were chosen from the upper class, called “Patricians,” with the lower class
called “Plebeians,” who were farmers, artisans, soldiers, and merchants, to 476
C.E., when Rome was sacked and devastated by barbarians from the North.
NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND - FIFTEEN
By 270 B.C.E., Rome controlled all of Italy and soon would conquer Carthage,
Macedonia, Greece, and parts of Asia Minor. This expansion led to civil war and
the end of the Republic when Julius Caesar came to power in 48 B.C.E. After his
murder on March 15, 44 B.C.E. (called, “The Ides of March!”), Caesar’s Grandnephew, Augustus, became Emperor. This
began a peaceful interlude for 200 years called “Pax Romana,” which became a time of cultural and intellectual
achievements for Rome. As shown in Fourteen
- Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land.
"PAX ROMONA" ROMAN EMPIRE, 44 BC
GOLDEN AGE OF ISLAM
The Islamic Golden Age refers to the period in the History of Islam, traditionally
dated from the 8th century (750) to the 13th century (1258), when much of the
historically Islam world was ruled by various caliphates, experiencing
a scientific, economic,
and cultural flourishing period as we have attempted to show. This period is
traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph
Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration in Baghdad of the “House of
Wisdom,” (see Jonathan Lyons 2009 book of this title where he shows how the
Arabs transformed Western Civilization). After soaring to cultural and
intellectual heights never known before, the Golden Age is said to have ended
with the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate with the Mongol invasions and the
“Sack of Baghdad” in 1258, ending the Islamic Golden Age.
Several factors led to the “Golden Age.” Muslims following the Prophet Mohammed
studied and searched for knowledge. The Quran was clear: “The scholar’s ink is
more sacred than the blood of martyrs.” Another factor was that communications
became easier because the Muslim Empire united extensive geographic areas.
Translations by Muslim scholars from Greek, Latin, and Chinese into Arabic were
ongoing. This removed language barriers for scholars into the depths of all
available learning in the human community. Libraries were established in Cairo,
Aleppo, and Baghdad, as well as urban centers in Iran, Central Asia, and Spain.
Books could be made and bound because of learning how to make paper from the
Chinese. Bookshops opened in several cities with thousands of titles. And finally,
the “House of Wisdom,” essentially an academic institution as a university was
established in Baghdad in 1004 C.E.
ISLAMIC MEDICINE
Islamic medicine and science reflected the light of the Hellenic sun,
illuminating the darkest night of the European Middle Ages. It was the dawn of
a new day and the European Renaissance was centuries in the future. Muslim men
of science as part of the family of man were preserving what had been thought
to have been lost forever with the collapse of Rome in 476. On the contrary,
during this Golden Age, biomedical science of the Arabic-Islam world underwent
remarkable development between the 8th and 13th centuries. This flowering of
knowledge and intellect would later spread to Europe and influence both medical
practice and education.
The scientific achievement of the Arabic nation originated on the Arabian
Peninsula in the 7th century C.E., where the preaching of the prophet Mohammed
united the Arab tribes and inaugurated the Muslim religion. The Islamic State
was formed in 622 C.E. when the Prophet moved from Mecca to Medina. Within a
century after his death (632 C.E.) a large part of the planet, from southern
Europe throughout North Africa to Central Asia and on to India was controlled
by and/or influenced by the new Arabic-Muslim Empire. In 711 C.E., Arab Muslims
invaded southern Spain and a center of flourishing civilization (al-Andalus)
was created. Another center emerged in Baghdad from the Abbasids, who ruled
part of the Islamic world during the historic period characterized as the
“Golden Age” (750 to 1258 C.E.).
Many of the achievements of the Islamic-Arabic Golden Age, as previously
mentioned, were based on previous initiatives taken by the ancient Egyptians,
Hebrews, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. Hence, translators were invited to
Baghdad, where scientists and researchers studied the past and created the
future. The result of their work represented impressive progress in all sectors
of science. The rulers of Islamic Spain, in an attempt to surpass Baghdad, recruited
scholars who made contributions of paramount importance to science, medicine,
technology, philosophy, and art.
Medical science developed impressively with intense efforts directed at the
translation and analysis of the works of Hippocrates, Rufus of Ephesus, and
Galen. Arab scholars synthesized and elaborated on the knowledge they had
gathered from ancient manuscripts, adding their own experience. Numerous Arab
pioneers are mentioned in medical history. Among the most famous are: Yuhanna
ibn Massuwayh who performed dissections and described allergy; Abu Bakr
Muhammad ibn Zakariyya ar-Razi (Rhazes) who differentiated smallpox from
measles, and described the laryngeal branch of the recurrent nerve. He also
introduced mercurial ointments and hot moist compresses in surgery and even
investigated psychosomatic reactions. He is the author of Al-Hawi, a medical
encyclopedia of 30 volumes; Az-Zahrawi (Abulcasis), known as the father of
surgery, performed tracheotomy and lithotomy introduced the use of cotton and
catgut and described extra-uterine pregnancy, cancer of the breast, and the
sex-linked inheritance of hemophilia. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) differentiated
meningitis from other neurologic diseases, described anthrax and tuberculosis
and introduced urethral drug instillation stressed the importance of hygiene,
and dietetics, and the holistic approach to the patient. His work al-Qanun fil
Tibb (The Canon of Medicine) represented the authority in medicine for 500
years; Ibn-Zuhr (Avenzoar) described pericarditis, mediastinitis, and paralysis
of the pharynx, and pointed out the importance of drugs for body and soul; and
Ibn-Nafis studied and described pulmonary circulation.
Progress was common during this “Golden Age” in all medical fields, including
anatomy, surgery, anesthesiology, cardiology, ophthalmology, orthopedics,
bacteriology, urology, obstetrics, neurology, psychiatry (including
psychotherapy), hygiene, dietetics, and dentistry. These pioneers would benefit the giants of
Western medicine would emerge centuries in the future.
Unfortunately, the decline is a historical phenomenon observed in all times and
cultures and the Arabic-Islamic world was no exception. From the 9th century
C.E., several provinces had already started to fall away from Abbasid control
and in the next four centuries, the political power of the Empire was dispersed
among newly independent states.
Around the 12th century C.E., the Abbasid Empire became weak with clashes
between Shiite and Sunni factions in Islam, marking the beginning of the end.
The split lies in the schism that occurred when the Islamic prophet Muhammad
died in the year 632, leading to a dispute over succession to Muhammad as a
caliph of the Islamic community spread across various parts of the world, which
led to the Battle of Siffin in 657. Even during the Arab-Islam Golden Age, this
continued to fester. Then there were the Turks who played a major role. Turkish
soldiers, who first reinforced the Empire after 861 C.E., now undermined the
central authority. While the Abbasid Caliphate was disintegrating, in 1057 C.E.
the Seljuk Caliphate was beginning. By then the Empire had lost unity and power
due to mounting religious differences between the Shiites and Sunnis with
charges of heresy, corruption, and assassinations. Along with the internal
pressures, the European Crusades (1097 – 1291) further weakened the Muslim
Empire. Finally, in 1236, Cordoba fell to Spanish Christians, and in 1258,
Baghdad fell to the Mongolians. The Golden Age of Islam at an end.
THE INEVITABLE RISE & FALL OF
CULTURES
East
and West have differed but also share a common history as positive encounters
through the centuries have served to advance collective knowledge. Each has had
high points in the history of human civilization taking advantage when
conditions were ripe to borrow and build upon the achievements of earlier
“Golden Ages” such as that of Greece and Rome.
Advances in human history are cumulative and the fruits of the achievements of
mankind are one continuous human story. Rather than multiple civilizations,
there are geo-cultural domains that together, over time, comprise human
civilization. By our conditioning, especially when we are going through
traumatic change, political rhetoric conceives and promulgates victors and
victims, but as Nayef R. F. Al-Rodham points out in “The Role of the Arab-Islamic
World in the Rise of the West” (2012), human civilization has had many authors,
but that aside, it resembles the flow of multiple rivers into a common ocean
that contributes to its character, depth, and resilience.
Just as the West is essentially governed by the Judeo-Christian code of that
dominant religion, Islam’s belief system, cultural norms, intellectual codes,
moral principles and political regulations are governed in Islam by the Quran
and the Hadith represents practical dimensions of the Quran’s religious
instruction.
The debt owed Muslim scholars is real and evident in the work of European
scholars whether it is acknowledged or not. For example, there is a remarkable
similarity between the work of Al-Ghazali (1058 – 1111) and that of Descartes
(1596 – 1650) in the argument against the infallibility of sense perception.
There are also similarities between Al-Ghazali’s theory of causation and that
of David Hume (1711 – 1776).
The work of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225
– 1274) resembles that of Islam polymath leader Ibn Rusid (1126 – 1198). Aquinas may have come in contact with Rusid’s
work at the University of Naples, which, incidentally, was founded by Frederick
II of Sicily (1272 – 1337), who was a great admirer of Arabic philosophy. The mathematical works of Ibn Al-Haytham (965 – 1040) influenced the
work of Friar Roger Bacon, Descartes,
Kepler, and Christiaan Huygens.
Da Vinci, John Locke, Voltaire, Descartes, Kant, and Rousseau are known to have been influenced by Ibn Tufayl’s (1105 – 1185) book Hayy Ibn Yazan, which tells the story of a child who grew up on a desert island and through the application of reason became enlightened.
Even so, the pervasive utopianism of the West that chooses to think everything
begins and ends with it, along with its religious animosity towards belief
systems other than Christian-Judaic appears to promote the idea of the
superiority of the Eurocentric West to the inferiority of the Muslim world.
Yet, Europe’s failure to acknowledge its cultural and intellectual debt to the
Islamic world not only perpetuates the myth of Europe as the birthplace of
modernity, but it also continues to fuel hostility between the East and the
West to this day, terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the
Taliban exploit.
As an independent contributor to its success, the Eurocentric West is
problematic and part of the utopian mindset. It has personified Western history
with Nowhere Man surely to find himself at some point as a resident in Nowhere
Land. In “The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece” (2015), Josiah Ober shows how the civilizations
of the East and West have been an important source for each other, and how
science, politics, the arts, and philosophy have spiraled out of recognition of
each other. This is the land of Plato and Aristotle, Homer and Thucydides,
Herodotus and Archimedes as well as the aforementioned Islam scholars. Greece gained independence from the Ottoman
Empire (1821 – 1832), but living standards never rose to the level of Ancient
Greece. In the run-up to the Second World War, Greece became the poorest nation
in Europe. What went wrong?
Unemployment became a defining feature, the lack of jobs and the initiative to
create jobs was another factor. The population exploded after the war, and
wealth went to the elite while over the next 70 years (or since WWII) the
working middle class continued to shrink. Greece forgot who and what it was.
The third-century Greek poet Theocritus asserted that Greece was a pastoral or
farm society when it was a collection of energetic city-states with diverse
manufacturing. America’s Thomas Jefferson believed in a pastoral nation, which
proved a faulty philosophy as well.
Modern Greece instead of promoting an energetic entrepreneur
industrial-technical society has produced a heavily dependent class-conscious
bureaucratic state where the government is the chief employer. The incentive to
do real work is not there. Now the government is bankrupt, and workers’ jobs
and pensions are in limbo. Since the government produces nothing, Greek society
finds itself in serious economic straits.
We have had the Golden Age of Greece,
Rome, Islam, The Roman Catholic Church, Great Britain, and the United States. The
threat was always there that this eminence could disappear. So what invariably
happens? Those in positions of power stayed the same, missed the changes, fail to
face them, and unwittingly sponsored internecine conflicts and divisive
polarities that ultimately become the order of the day as we see in our own time
and our civilization.
In the last hundred years, we have seen the United States rise to the the equivalent of an empire, an empire that it did not seek and an empire it has
had difficulty handling as its values and beliefs are in collision with the
requirements of empire.
This reflects collective ignorance of who and what we are and how we came to be
what we are. Greece rose and fell, Rome rose and fell; Islam rose and fell,
Great Britain rose and fell, and now the American Empire is in these troubled
waters. The struggle is a matter of history, learning from that history,
appreciating that possible demise or collective salvation occurs from within.
For the Italian thinker Curzio Malaparte
(1998 – 1957), the great Western sin is “progress.” The western culture he sees
in the moral drama of a single plot of sin and redemption.
Ancient societies had no such plot. Not having the Christian story of redemption,
they were not seduced by the myth of progress. Indeed, pagans of antiquity did
not see themselves corrupted by civilization. They knew that when civilization
breaks down barbarism emerges and vanquishes everything they hold dear. Brutality is the disease of civilization.
There are two kinds of human beings, Malaparte advises, savages and the
refined, but only one kind of man, a being forever at war with himself. And
therefore, the disease within the individual is the same in collective man as in
a nation, as one is contiguous with the other. That is the story of humanity.
NEXT: NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND –
PART SIXTEEN – THE RISE OF THE CLERICAL SKEPTICS
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