A History of the Muslim World to 1405

by Vernon O Egger

  Holt, P.M. The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the eleventh century to 1517. London and New York: Longman, 1986.

  Maalouf, Amin. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, Jon Rothschild, tr. New York: Schocken Books, 1984.

  Powell, James M., ed. Muslims Under Latin Rule, 1100–1300. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990.

  The Loss of Andalus

  Abun-Nasr, Jamil M. A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period, 3d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

  Brett, Michael. Ibn Khaldun and the Medieval Maghrib. Aldershott, Hampshire/Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate/Variorum, 1999.

  Brett, Michael and Elizabeth Fentress. The Berbers. Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996.

  Burns, Robert J. Islam Under the Crusaders. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973.

  Cornell, Vincent J. Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1998.

  Fletcher, Richard. Moorish Spain. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992.

  MacKay, Angus. Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500. New York: St. Martin’s, 1977.

  Scales, Peter C. The Fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba: Berbers and Andalusis in Conflict. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994.

  Wasserstein, David. The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985.

  Realignment in the East

  Daftary, Farhad. The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma‘ilis. London: I. B. Tauris, 1994.

  Daftary, Farhad. The Ismailis: Their History and Doctrines. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

  Morgan, David. The Mongols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.

  Saunders, J.J. The History of the Mongol Conquests. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Consolidation of Traditions

  The turmoil of the period from 950 to 1260 inevitably had an impact on cultural life. The fracturing of political unity, the militarization of society, and the repeated invasions meant that it was unlikely that large-scale, state-sponsored intellectual projects such as al-Ma’mun’s Bayt al-Hikma would be funded again. Moreover, as a result of the conflicts, libraries were often burned and looted, patron-rulers were killed, and scholars themselves were sometimes kidnaped or killed. On the other hand, the very proliferation of small states meant that petty rulers wanted to enhance their status by patronizing the arts and sciences. It may be that more scholars and artists were funded under the political decentralization that characterized this period than would have been possible under centralization.

  Thus, despite the hardships of the era, the period from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries was an era of cultural efflorescence in the Muslim world. Scholars built on earlier developments in science and philosophy, theology, and Sufism, and achieved a level of sophistication that awed their contemporaries in other societies. New institutions were devised within the Dar al-Islam to conserve and perpetuate the knowledge and skills learned, and scholars and rulers of other states—most notably in western Europe—made great efforts to borrow from the achievements of the Muslims.

  Science and Philosophy

  The ninth century witnessed the monumental project of translating Greek and Syriac texts into Arabic. During the next several centuries, Muslim scholars worked out the scientific, philosophical, and religious implications of those texts. Many of the scholars became famous throughout the Dar al-Islam for their original work in science, mathematics, and philosophy, but gained an even wider fame in Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when their own work was translated into Latin. On the other hand, it became clear that elements of the philosophical legacy from Greece were incompatible with certain interpretations of Islamic doctrine. The Aristotelian tradition, in particular, posed problems for Muslim intellectuals just as it would in the thirteenth century for European Christian intellectuals.

  Mathematics and the Natural Sciences

  One of the great mathematicians and physicists of the period from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries was Ibn al-Haytham (known later to the Latins as Alhazen), who was born in the Iraqi city of Basra about 975. He was well educated in religious studies and obtained a position as an administrator. He became so disgusted, however, with the religious bickering of the period—this was the time when Iraqi Sunnis and Shi‘ites were particularly intolerant of each other—that he resigned from his position and devoted himself to science. Apparently a Shi‘ite himself, he won a reputation for his scientific achievements in Basra, and then went to Egypt during the reign of al-Hakim, the Fatimid caliph-Imam. Ibn al-Haytham is famous for advances he made in geometry, astronomy, the theory of light, and number theory, but he is best known for making the first significant contributions to optical theory since Ptolemy, whose work was done in the second century. He is the first to have used the camera obscura, and his name is best known in the context of “Alhazen’s problem,” which he stated as follows: “Given a light source and a spherical mirror, find the point on the mirror where the light will be reflected to the eye of an observer.” He contradicted Ptolemy’s and Euclid’s theory of vision that the eye sends out visual rays to the object of the vision; according to Ibn al-Haytham, the rays originate in the object of vision and not in the eye. He published theories on refraction, reflection, binocular vision, the rainbow, parabolic and spherical mirrors, spherical aberration, atmospheric refraction, and the apparent increase in the size of the moon and sun near Earth’s horizon. He died in 1039.

  A contemporary of Ibn al-Haytham was al-Biruni (973–1048), a native of Khwarazm. In an age of multitalented scholars, al-Biruni impressed everyone he met. Many consider him to have been the most erudite scholar of the period under review. He obtained positions in several Iranian courts, where he measured latitudes and longitudes between cities and measured solar meridian transits. In 1017, he was back home when Mahmud of Ghazna conquered Khwarazm. Al-Biruni was one of the many captives taken to Ghazna, and he remained a virtual prisoner of Mahmud for the rest of that ruler’s reign. He was forced to accompany Mahmud on several campaigns to India, but he made the most of the experiences and subsequently wrote a massive and perceptive description of Indian society and culture. He mastered Turkish, Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic, and he published numerous works in physics, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, history, and what we might call anthropology. He introduced techniques to measure the earth and distances on it using triangulation. He estimated the radius of the earth to be 3930 miles, a value not obtained in western Europe until the sixteenth century. His wide range of abilities is demonstrated in his having translated Euclid’s works into Sanskrit.

  ‘Umar Khayyam (ca. 1048–1122) was born in Nishapur. He is most famous in the English-speaking world for Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of the Rubaiyat, a collection of quatrains, only some of which can be attributed to him with certainty. He was an even greater mathematician and astronomer than he was a poet, however. Like al-Biruni, Khayyam complained of the difficulties that the constant wars caused for the scholarly life, and yet, like him, his accomplishments would have been notable even for a scholar in the most serene of circumstances. His first appointment was in Samarqand, but his achievements in music theory and algebra were already so great by the age of 25 that the young Saljuq sultan Malik-Shah invited him to help set up an observatory (without telescopes, which would be used for the first time in the seventeenth century) in Esfahan. For eighteen years he was the leader of a team of observers that developed important astronomical tables. He also began work on calendar reform and calculated the solar year to be 365.24219858156 days. (Today it is said to be 365.242190 days.) When Sanjar became the supreme sultan of the Great Saljuqs in 1118, Khayyam moved to his capital at Merv, which Sanjar was turning into a great center of Islamic learning. Among Khayyam’s achievements is a complete cl
assification of cubic equations with geometric solutions found by means of intersecting conic sections. He also realized that a cubic equation can have more than one solution.

  Philosophy

  The most influential of all the Muslim philosopher–scientists was Ibn Sina (980–1037), known later in Europe as Avicenna. He was born in Bukhara into an Isma‘ili family, although he does not appear to have been one himself. His father held a position in the Samanid regime, and Ibn Sina grew up having access to the royal library. He was a child prodigy, mastering Islamic law and then medicine, and he became a practicing physician at the age of sixteen. He then began a study of metaphysics, and he reports that he had to read al-Farabi’s work on Aristotle forty times before he understood it. His study of philosophy was interrupted by Mahmud of Ghazna’s defeat of the Samanids. He escaped the fate of al-Biruni (with whom he had exchanged much correspondence) and headed west rather than east in search of patrons to support his intellectual pursuits. He spent the rest of his life serving in the courts of provincial Shi‘ite rulers, first in Khorasan, then at the Buyid court in Rayy, and then successive posts in Qazvin, Hamadan, and finally in Esfahan. He served as court physician and twice was wazir, but the political intrigues endemic in the courtly life led to his being imprisoned at least once and his life endangered several times.

  Remarkably, this man of affairs was one of the most productive scholars in history, and left a permanent mark in both medicine and philosophy. The Book of Healing is a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopedia that treats logic, the natural sciences, the four disciplines that the Latins called the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music), and metaphysics. His Canon of Medicine is the most famous book in the history of medicine in both East and West. Although some scholars regard it as advancing very little beyond the medical compendium of al-Razi, its great accomplishments were its clarity, its comprehensiveness, and its classificatory system. As a result, it was used in the medical colleges of western Europe into the seventeenth century.

  As great as his influence was in medicine, Ibn Sina is also widely regarded as having been one of the world’s greatest philosophers. Basing his own work on that of al-Farabi, which had been the most sophisticated Neoplatonic work before the eleventh century, he took advantage of the fact that Greek thought had been a part of the Arabic tradition for two centuries. His writing is more confident and more original and, as a result, has been more influential. He infused the existing Neoplatonic system with more Aristotelian content, including a subtle discussion of the difference between necessary and possible being. He also tried to prove that it was possible, despite the Neoplatonic tradition, that a personal soul would survive death (rather than losing its identity in the One). Although he tried to reconcile Islamic doctrines and philosophy, the brilliant system that he created posed serious challenges to the revealed message of Islam, precisely because it was so persuasive to intellectuals.

  The defense of the traditional religious doctrines fell to al-Ghazali (1058–1111), whom Europeans would later call Algazel. Born in Tus, in Khorasan, he was educated in schools near the Caspian Sea and in the Nishapur area, and he moved to Baghdad about 1085. In 1091, Nizam al-Mulk appointed him to the new Nizamiya college there, where he became a popular lecturer in jurisprudence and theology. Although possessed of a keen philosophical mind, his theological commitments made him hostile to the legacies of Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism. He wrote a summary of the views of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina entitled Intentions of the Philosophers. Designed to help his students understand Neoplatonism so that they could begin to criticize its weaknesses, it was so lucid and objective that thirteenth-century Europeans concluded that the book reflected al-Ghazali’s own views, and they believed that he had worked in the same tradition as al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. The sequel to this book was a criticism of Neoplatonism entitled The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which was not translated into Latin, but was highly influential in the Islamic world. In it, al-Ghazali challenged the philosophers’ denial of the resurrection of the body, their postulate of the eternality of the world, and their notions of causality, which had diminished the concepts of God’s sovereignty and omnipotence and had rendered him subject to necessity.

  Al-Ghazali’s attack on philosophy triggered a response by Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known in Europe as Averroes. By the twelfth century, some of the greatest advances in philosophy in the world were taking place in Andalus. Ironically, this was the period of the Almoravids and Almohads, who have a reputation today for anti-intellectualism. Ibn Rushd was well versed in the work of the great Andalusi Neo-platonists Ibn Bajja (ca. 1095–1138), known in Europe as Avempace, and he was the student and protegee of Ibn Tufayl (ca. 1100–1185), known to the Latin world as Abubacer. Ibn Rushd came from a family of jurists, and he himself was trained in medicine, the religious sciences, and philosophy. He was a qadi as well as a physician in Cordoba and Seville under the Almohads. He then became court physician to the caliph in Marrakesh in 1182.

  The official religious ideology of the Almohad state made the Qur’an and Hadith the only sources of truth, a position which would seem to create a hostile environment for philosophy. The two caliphs whom Ibn Rushd knew, however—Abu Ya‘qub (r. 1163–1184) and his son Abu Yusuf (r. 1184–1199)—were genuinely interested in philosophical speculation. Except for one brief period after 1194, when Abu Yusuf was compelled by popular agitation to send Ibn Rushd back to Andalus and to burn his books publicly, the patronage and respect of the Almohad rulers saved Ibn Rushd from the anger of many of the more traditionally pious.

  A member of the ulama as well as a philosopher, Ibn Rushd was determined to construct a case for philosophy that would not violate the norms of true religion. Ibn Rushd’s philosophical role was to champion true Aristotelianism and to extricate it from Neoplatonism. His profound, yet lucid, commentaries on the texts of Aristotle earned him in Europe the nickname “The Commentator.” He swept away the concept of successive emanations from the One and argued for a restoration of the original Aristotelian concept of the First Cause or Unmoved Mover, by which it can be argued that a multiplicity of Intelligences can come directly from God, rather than in successive emanations. He upheld the Aristotelian concept of the eternity of the world, but pointed out that this does not mean that the world is eternal by itself, leaving room for a way to finesse the problem of creation. Ibn Rushd also argued for personal immortality, even though medieval Europeans misunderstood him on this point until the fourteenth century.

  In addition to numerous commentaries and original works, Ibn Rushd wrote the Incoherence of the Incoherence, a response to al-Ghazali’s attack on philosophy. Al-Ghazali had equated philosophy with the Neoplatonism of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, but Ibn Rushd was not interested in defending Neoplatonism. Rather, he wanted to demonstrate that the conclusions of philosophy, if well understood, were in harmony with revelation and were an infallible source of truth. If there are apparent conflicts between revelation and philosophy and a review of the philosophical reasoning reveals no mistakes in assumptions and logic, then the scriptures are obviously meant to be interpreted allegorically.

  Ibn Rushd said that there are three types of learners: those who can reason philosophically, those who are convinced by dialectical arguments (the theologians), and those who are convinced by preaching, inspiration, or coercion. The Qur’an was intended for all three, but the meaning of the Qur’an is not readily apparent to all persons. Those who are endowed with the ability of philosophical reasoning are under a divine obligation to pursue philosophy, and they are not obligated to change the demonstrable truths obtained by that means just because they contradict the opinions of theologians. Theologians rely upon dialectic and rhetoric and are in no position to argue with the superior conclusions of philosophy. Moreover, the theologians are wrong to make public the various interpretations of ambiguous verses, for it could confuse or raise doubts in the minds of the masses. Ibn Rushd thought that al-Ghazali, as a mere theologian
, was out of place to be scolding philosophers. His discipline lacked the rigorous methods and concepts that characterized philosophy, and he should have ensured that theology yields to philosophy, rather than the reverse.

  Ibn Rushd is often regarded as the last great philosopher in the Islamic world. Such a judgment has to be qualified. Brilliant Muslim minds would continue to work out highly sophisticated systems of thought for centuries to come, but after Ibn Rushd, such systems were developed only within a theological context and are best described as philosophical theology. Ibn Rushd’s defense of an open-ended quest for truth by rational means had little resonance in the Dar al-Islam. East of the Maghrib, al-Ghazali’s attack on philosophy had persuaded scholars that reason needed to be disciplined by the doctrines taught by the religious establishment rather than given free rein. In the Maghrib and in Andalus, domestic and foreign affairs combined in the early thirteenth century to bring a halt to the exuberant philosophical tradition that had taken root there in the twelfth century. The Maghrib continued to be a hostile environment for philosophy, and Andalus collapsed under the impact of the Reconquista, leaving only Granada. The ablest minds and the wealthiest patrons left the peninsula for permanent exile. After the early thirteenth century, the Muslims of the peninsula never again produced literature that interested Muslims outside that beleaguered community itself.

  The Sunni Resolution to the Tension between Reason and Revelation

  Although most Muslim intellectuals remained suspicious of metaphysics, philosophical modes of reasoning and arguing made a lasting impact on Sunni Islam. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the new Islamic theology, in the person of al-Ghazali, had gone head to head with philosophy’s most articulate exponent, Ibn Sina, and to most observers, the fight ended in a draw. Al-Ghazali’s arguments were often better than those of either Ibn Sina or the later Ibn Rushd, and many of his critics and supporters alike noted that he had attempted to demonstrate the inadequacy of philosophy on philosophical grounds. Moreover, he admitted that he found many of the methods and results of philosophers to be highly useful; he conceded that they had made valuable contributions in logic, mathematics, ethics, and politics. Ironically, although al-Ghazali attacked Neoplatonism, his own metaphysics were shaped by Neoplatonism. He did not deny emanationism, for example, and he assumed the existence of the Universal Intellect and the Universal Soul.