Ideas
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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-Isma‘il 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 Qur’an; oaths taken on it are valid in Muslim countries, and it has exerted a profound influence on Islamic thought.
Study of the Qur’an dominated instruction in the schools of the early Islamic world. The core curriculum, as we would say today, consisted of memorising the Qur’an 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, Nizamal-Mulk.66 The Arab term for seminary was madrasa and here too the Qur’an 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 Qur’an 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 Mu‘tazilis (‘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 Qur’an. For example, if God is One, He has no human attributes and the Qur’an 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 Mu‘tazilite 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-Ma‘mun, who promoted the Mu‘tazilite view to a state religion, asserting a new dogma, ‘the creation [khalq] of the Qur’an’, directly opposed to the traditional view, that the Qur’an was ‘the uncreated word of God’. As may be imagined, this reversal of beliefs caused great consternation, the more so as al-Ma‘mun 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-Ma‘mun’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 Qur’an 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 ‘Ali al-Ash‘ari of Baghdad (active in the first half of the tenth century). Al-Ash‘ari 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-Ash‘ari’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-Ash‘ari 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, ma‘rifah, and intellectual knowledge, ilm.72
Many Muslims now revere al-Ghazali as second only to the Prophet in importance. His main book, Ihya‘ulum 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, ma‘rifah. 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 Qur’an 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, astrol
ogers 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 Qur’an 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 Qur’an. The curriculum included the ‘religious sciences’, the ‘Qur’anic 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 Mu‘awiyah, 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 Leó n, 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-Ahwa’ 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 middleage, 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 Qur’an. Second, he tried to reconc
ile 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 Qur’an 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 (‘amm), 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