Ideas
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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-Ma‘mun, who was sympathetic to a semi-secret sect, the Mu‘tazilites, who were rationalists obsessed with reconciling the text of the Qur’an and the criteria of human reason. Al-Ma‘mun, 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-Ma‘mun’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 Qur’an 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 Qur’an, 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-Jami‘ 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 on page 272, 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 wa‘l 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, aliksir, 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 Imru’-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-Mal‘mun’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 Sin
a, 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.