by Tahir Shah
Having jetted in for the Kumbh Mela from the community’s Temple of Consciousness Ashram, just south of Denver, most of them were American, with other followers hailing from Germany, France and Spain. Unified by their enthusiasm for neatly packaged mysticism, and by their blinding smiles, the devotees of Sai Maa stuck out a mile, as did the fraternity’s organization.
Awash with press packs, plush white vehicles, and printed schedules, with merchandising, photo ops and presence on social media sites, the godwoman’s set-up had to be appreciated for its slickness.
Having whispered that I was a journalist, I was instantly ushered past an office packed with computers and technicians, and welcomed into a pristine audience room decorated with bunches of plastic flowers. It was explained that Sai Maa took a vow of silence for four hours in the middle of each day, but that she was willing to break her vow and speak just to me.
Grunting thanks for the honour, I waited.
From time to time a blue-eyed devotee would shuffle in and out, blinding me with a smile. After I’d waited a little more, there was suddenly a sense of heightened anticipation, as though a VIP – or rather a god – was about to arrive.
A small door opened and the lady in the red turban wafted through.
I have met plenty of self-appointed godmen and godwomen in India before, but Sai Maa was different from all the rest. There was a sense that, despite the abundant trappings of the guru business, she was merely putting on a show. And the show was perfectly configured to be lapped up by the legions of Occidental devotees who were craving a figure such as herself.
All Sai Maa was doing was filling a niche.
Though struggling to speak at first, Her Holiness quickly found her voice. It was soft and mellifluous, gliding out through lips anointed in fuchsia-coloured gloss. During my audience, I learned that Sai Maa had moved from Mauritius to France at twenty-one, that she had sat on the City Council of Bordeaux, and that she still owned a château there. I learned, too, that she had two grown-up children. She had been quite late in becoming a self-styled god.
It became clear that there were big plans afoot in the Maa’s Temple of Consciousness movement. Construction was at that very moment taking place downriver on the banks of the Ganges at Varanasi, to build an ashram in the shape of two intersecting hearts. Dedicated to Global Enlightenment, Sai Maa’s work was already reaching a worldwide following through cyberspace.
In the middle of my audience, a stream of American devotees filed in. With shaved heads bowed low, they prostrated themselves before their deity. Having kissed her feet, some of them snapped pictures with their phones. Almost as soon as they had come, the disciples were ushered out by an officious blue-eyed henchman from LA. I felt like congratulating him because he had understood the crux of the guru business – the art of limiting access.
Once the white-clad devotees were gone, Sai Maa babbled away in florid sound bites for a long while. I wondered how to break free and claw my way back to the glorious human stew of the Kumbh Mela a stone’s throw away outside. My break came when the godwoman’s BlackBerry began to buzz. Squinting at the display, Sai Maa took the call, chattering away in French.
Fifty yards from where the godwoman was sitting with scrubbed-clean devotees waiting at the door, a wizened old woman from Bihar was lying on the ground. She was weeping hysterically, her ragged clothing all covered in mud.
‘I lost my son in the crowd,’ she sobs, ‘and I don’t know how I will ever find him again.’
As I watched, a stall-keeper selling fried orange jalebis strode up and helped her from the ground. He pointed up to a loudspeaker that was blaring a distraught appeal.
‘You’re not the only one lost,’ he said tenderly. ‘I’ll take you to the place where you can speak on this thing, and it will find you your son.’ He handed her a bowl of hot jalebis and together they set off towards the setting sun.
The next morning I was taken to the scene of a fire. Faulty wiring had short-circuited, setting a Jeep alight, the petrol tank of which had exploded. Miraculously, only two people had been killed. The smouldering remains of dozens of tents and charred belongings had been heaped up in a great pile. Helped by his sons, a slightly built man was picking through it all, his expression forlorn.
‘We came all the way from Tamil Nadu,’ he said, ‘and we have lost everything we brought with us.’
I asked the man about his life. Like most of the people at the Kumbh Mela, he was from India’s rock-solid underbelly.
‘We are farmers,’ he said, ‘and we have a little land outside Chennai. We grow rice and have some buffalo as well. We have come here as an act of devotion, a devotion to the river. Of course we hope to be blessed in return, but the reason we are here is to give ourselves to the river.’
All of a sudden the sky darkened as though the end of the world had come. A sense of panic prevailed. Time was running out – before the deluge struck.
A young holy man wrapped in a saffron robe saw me standing in the makeshift street wondering what to do. Tugging at my wrist, he led me fast through the maze of uniform tents, as the wind whipped up once again. It was late morning but the sky was as dark as midnight. As the first raindrops gushed down, the young sadhu thrust me into his tent. His name was Hardwar, and his expression was so composed that I couldn’t take my eyes off his face.
We sat in silence listening to the rain. Behind him was a cluster of sadhus drawing quietly at their pipes. And, beside him, was a boy of fourteen with almond eyes and an orange turban wrapped tight around his head. Recently ordained into the order of the Juna Akhara, he was lying on his stomach playing a video game on his phone.
‘We will be leaving soon,’ said Hardwar, straining to make himself heard against the thunderous roar of rain, ‘down to Varanasi, where we will camp at the crematorium ghat. Our prayers here are almost done.’
I asked what the Kumbh Mela meant to him. Hardwar’s lips were touched with the faintest tinge of a smile. ‘It’s a mirror,’ he said, ‘in which is reflected the heavens, the universe and the world.’
As the rain flooded down outside, turning the dust into ankle-deep mud, I told Hardwar about Sai Maa and her jet-set devotees. He thought for a moment, then tapped me on the knee.
‘God descends to Earth and is always present at the Kumbh,’ he said softly, ‘but to find him you must search for the most unlikely person. In him or her is God.’
The downpour ended and I went back outside to wade through ankle-deep mud. As I struggled through it, I couldn’t help thinking of the farmer from Tamil Nadu, who had been a random victim of the fire. And my thoughts turned to the millions of farmers, like him, who rely on the Ganges for their lives.
I have heard it said that almost half a billion Indians depend on the waters of Mother Ganga for drinking water and for irrigating their crops. The Subcontinent may be urbanizing quickly, but millions spend their lives toiling away on the patchwork of tiny ancestral farms which lie in the Ganges’ path.
As a sacred waterway that is herself a goddess, Indians believe the Ganges cannot ever be defiled by the misdeeds of Man. She’s above pollution. It’s for this reason of course that people are quite happy to gulp down cups of her holy water, even though it’s dark grey with silt and grime. Indeed, having bathed at the Sangam, a great many pilgrims filled little containers with the Ganges’ hallowed water, to take home to family members and friends who were unable to make the journey to the Kumbh.
With such a colossal tide of humanity clustered on the same stretch of riverbank, local authorities have been increasingly worried about the environmental impact of the fifty-five-day event. Despite a mass of sandbags at the waterline, soil erosion has been considerable. But the real damage to India’s goddess-river has been in the pollution. Plastic bags may have been outlawed at the Kumbh Mela for the first time, but severe ecological damage was done if only by the mind-numbing amounts of raw sewage flowing into the sacred confluence.
After almost a week at the festival, I
headed from my luxurious vantage point down to it one last time.
More people were arriving every moment.
Although I myself was exhausted from the crowds, the noise, the godmen and the wild hullabaloo, there was a sense of rebirth, as though the Kumbh Mela was reinventing itself for the newcomers.
I watched as an extended family stumbled down to the waterline, clutching a hotchpotch of belongings. So as not to be separated amid the hordes, they had tied a dark blue cord around them all.
Reaching the Sangam in time for dawn, the legions of ordinary souls were stripping off their garments and wading into the water. Almond-eyed Assamese were bathing there along with thickset Punjabis from the north, and with swarthy Tamils from the Bay of Bengal. There were Hindus from the Himalayas and from Calcutta, from the Great Thar Desert and from the vast Indian diaspora that spans the world.
With the pink blush of first light touching the rippling surface, I pondered how little it all could have changed in centuries. And that’s what made the Kumbh Mela so special to me – the sense that it was a circle of humanity linking us to our ancestors, to nature, and to our fellow men.
That night I took a taxi to the Allahabad railway station to take my train. The route was flooded and tens of thousands of pilgrims were wading through the overflowing sewers and conduits. With the traffic gridlocked for miles ahead, I abandoned the cab and joined everyone else on foot, my suitcase on my head.
Inside the station there were people everywhere. A great many were sprawled out on the platforms. Some were lying on carpets they had brought from home, others sharing their food with strangers, or in prayer. The atmosphere was convivial, a far cry from how it had been a few days before when a footbridge had collapsed. In the resulting stampede thirty-six pilgrims had been trampled to death.
The dark blue sleeper train to Delhi rolled in, iron wheels grinding against the tracks. All of a sudden there was a frenzy of commotion as the pilgrims threw themselves at the train.
As I wondered how I would ever get aboard, I saw out of the corner of my eye a familiar face. This time it was smiling – it was the face of the wizened old woman from Bihar, her son’s hand clasped tightly in her own.
The End
THE LEGACY OF ARAB SCIENCE
An Essay
TAHIR SHAH
SECRETUM MUNDI PUBLISHING
MMXIII
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Legacy of Arab Science
TAHIR SHAH
Secretum Mundi Publishing
3rd Floor, 36 Langham Street, London W1W 7AP, United Kingdom
http://www.secretum-mundi.com/
[email protected]
Cover design by www.designbliss.nl
First published
Secretum Mundi edition, 2013
978-1-78301-134-6
© TAHIR SHAH
Tahir Shah asserts the right to be identified as the Author of the Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalog record for this title is available from the British Library.
Visit the author’s website at: http://www.tahirshah.com/
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The Legacy of Arab Science
Occidental society tends to believe that the scientific and cultural bedrock upon which it sits was a product of the Classical world, most notably that of the Romans and the Greeks. At our schools, teachers hold forth explaining Latin etymology, talking about the contributions of Euclid, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle. They remind us of the breakthroughs of these scholars, and highlight how the knowledge amassed by Classical cultures has shaped our own world of learning.
But, in our obsession with the Romans and the Greeks, we blinker ourselves to the full picture. We forget how exactly the knowledge in our libraries, in our universities, and in our heads, arrived there. And, we forget how the breakthroughs of Classical culture were moulded to form the basis of modern Occidental civilization.
As usual with the transmission of knowledge, things weren’t nearly as simple as we trick ourselves into believing. In reality, the knowledge of the Classical scholars passed through a matrix, a distinct system that honed it and gave it shape, rather like a sword-smith giving edge to a blade. As so often happens in human history, the lines of transmission are not straight, but zigzag.
Now, for the first time, historians are re-evaluating the way scientific thought developed, focussing on how one breakthrough fuelled another in both East and West. And, for the first time, the Occident is coming to terms with the extraordinary and pivotal contribution of Arab science – a contribution that allowed the world we recognize to be conjured into existence.
Without it, quite simply, most of the technology we know and take for granted wouldn’t exist. The cell phone in my pocket wouldn’t be able to communicate, and the laptop at which I’m typing wouldn’t work. The hospital that kept me alive in the first week of life wouldn’t have existed either. Nor would the technology that allowed me to hold this printed page. There wouldn’t be panes of glass in the windows and, perhaps most of all, the technology that runs our computers and so shapes our lives today, simply wouldn’t be there.
As someone who has one foot in the East and the other in the West, I find it extraordinary to remember the roll call of breakthroughs that can be attributed to Oriental society. More precisely, breakthroughs that came about between the ninth and thirteenth centuries CE, regarded as the golden age of Arab learning.
During this time, a wildfire of learning swept through the land, a realm that was fast expanding as the boundaries of the Islamic faith were pushed out in all directions. It was an era in which the first hospitals and lending libraries were constructed, and the first academic degrees presented. Mental patients were treated with music for the first time – more than a millennium before our idea of music therapy. And, an endless catalogue of inventions was spawned from the learning centres which, in time, became the blueprint for our own Occidental universities.
The Arabs invented chemical apparatus, hydraulics systems and pharmaceuticals, astronomical tools, and even household soap. They wrote about the concepts of evolution, environmentalism, and pollution, outlined scientific method for the first time, as well as the idea of peer review. They shaped the building blocks of our own scientific culture, and reworked all sorts of other things that are so critical to our world. It was through them that we received paper, the ‘Indian’ numbers, and the massive mathematical breakthrough of Zero.
Arab contributions from the golden age span almost all the sciences. They can be found in mathematics and botany, in chemistry, psychology and philosophy, and in engineering, physics, agriculture and astronomy, in metallurgy, medicine and zoology.
The nucleus of almost all the technologies which govern our lives passed through Arab cultures – from the gears in our cars, to the watches on our wrists, to the satellites which bring us TV, and the know-how that makes the Internet possible.
This lecture will give a snapshot of the role of Arab science, and consider the knock-on effect it had, allowing the Renaissance to take place, in turn enabling our world to be conjured.
The rise of Arab science really begins with the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE. At the rather traditional prep school I attended in England, they used to teach that centuries of darkness followed in the wake of the Roman collapse. Then, as though a lightning
bolt from the heavens struck, came the European Renaissance. In between – so they taught me at any rate – there wasn’t anything important to speak of – just a black hole of culture, a time that schoolboys learn (or used to learn) that was called the ‘Dark Ages’. No scholarship, no learning, no breakthroughs, just a desert of utter cultural and intellectual darkness.
Picture it: Almost a thousand years when nothing really happened at all. And, then, the Renaissance – the rebirth of learning – constructed solely on the bedrock of glorious Classical culture.
It sounds wonderfully romantic, but nothing could be father from the truth…
To understand the present, we need to look carefully at how the Classics reached us. Because, like so often happens in human history, the lines of transmission aren’t straight.
Please rest assure though – not for a minute am I going to pretend that the Arabs came up with everything from scratch. Far from it. And this is the key point: in the sciences, the Arabs took Classical work and refined it. They corrected the mathematics because they could, using the immensely powerful Indian numbers. It must have been like harnessing the power of a mainframe computer. But these numbers were just one arrow in their armoury of equipment. As we shall see, the Abbasids developed paper, and writing equipment, and they had a common language that was a lingua franca – all the way from Timbuktu in the west to Samarkand and beyond in the east.
Yet, given what we know, it seems remarkable to me that the Arab contribution – which was so profound – is often sidelined or completely forgotten altogether. And, very often, it was centuries ahead of its time.
All the while, the early Arab scholars committed their ideas to paper, allowing them to be circulated in the farthest reaches of the fledgling Islamic world. They wrote about the concepts of evolution and discussed what we would know as environmentalism, and classification (what we know as mineral, animal and vegetable), as well as coming up with clear scientific method.
