The second reason is that Islam is today practised by more than a billion people across the world. The subject of this book does not extend to include the scientific heritage of those Muslim countries such as Pakistan or Malaysia, which would have also been influenced by Indian and Chinese science. I am defining my subject matter more narrowly.
Of course we cannot hope to understand the context of Arabic science if we do not explore the extent to which the religion of Islam influenced scientific and philosophical thinking. Arabic science throughout its golden age was inextricably linked to religion; indeed it was driven by the need of the early scholars to interpret the Qur’an. Furthermore, politics in Baghdad during the early Abbāsid rule was dominated by a movement of Islamic rationalists, known as the Mu’tazilites, who sought to combine faith and reason. This led to a spirit of tolerance in which scientific enquiry was encouraged.
Many have argued that the scientific creativity of the Islamic world was short-lived because it came into conflict with religious teaching within Islamic society, culminating in the work of the Muslim theologian al-Ghazāli (the equivalent in terms of importance in Islamic teaching as Thomas Aquinas was to Christianity). However, many of the sciences, such as mathematics, medicine and astronomy, continued to flourish long after al-Ghazāli.
The third reason why I resist the temptation to refer to my subject matter as Islamic science is because of an unfortunate anti-scientific attitude among some Muslims today (although this is of course not restricted to Muslims). It is sad to think that a minority of contemporary Islamic scholars do not seem to be endowed with the enquiring minds of their forefathers. For the early scholars of Baghdad, there would have been no conflict between religion and science. The early thinkers were quite clear about their mission: the Qur’an required them to study alsamawāt wal‘arth (the skies and the earth) to find proof of their faith. The Prophet himself had besought his disciples to seek knowledge ‘from the cradle to the grave’, no matter how far that search took them, for ‘he who travels in search of knowledge, travels along Allah’s path to paradise’. Of course, this knowledge (’ilm) referred primarily to theology, but in its early years Islam never made a clear-cut distinction between religious and non-religious scholarly pursuits.
The seemingly comfortable compatibility between science and religion during the Abbāsid Empire contrasts starkly with the tensions between rational science and many different faiths around the world today. None of our modern-day angst existed in early Baghdad. One can of course argue that the science of the time was itself not so far removed from superstition – a mix of metaphysics and folklore. So it could be more easily absorbed into theological ideas. But what we shall also see is that, in contrast to many of the Greek philosophers’ abstract notions, the Arabic scientists were grounded in something very close to the modern scientific method in their reliance on hard empirical evidence, experimentation and testability of their theories. Many of them, for instance, dismissed astrology and alchemy as not being part of real science and being quite distinct from astronomy and chemistry.
It is clear that there is a broad continuum of attitudes held by today’s Muslim population towards science; all are no doubt sincerely held. Those who see the importance of science and who are able to disentangle it from religion would claim that ‘the Qur’an tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go’. Many devout Muslim scientists feel it is their religious duty to try to understand the universe from an empirical, rationalist scientific standpoint. Then, armed with this new-found knowledge, they can return to the words of the Qur’an in the hope of gaining a deeper and more profound understanding than they had before their scientific enlightenment. I have no problem here since their faith does not influence how they conduct their science. Only when the process is reversed do alarm bells start to ring: when one hears the argument that it is not necessary to try to understand the world around us from a scientific perspective since all we ever need to know is already written in the Qur’an anyway.
Ultimately, there can be no such thing as Islamic science or Muslim science. Science cannot be characterized by the religion of those who engage in it, as the Nazis in 1930s Germany attempted to do when disparaging Albert Einstein’s great achievements as ‘Jewish science’. The term ‘Islamic science’ may likewise be used by those with similar racist notions who wish to downplay its importance. Just as there is no ‘Jewish science’, or ‘Christian science’, there cannot be ‘Islamic science’. There is just science.
The one misgiving I have about my chosen term of ‘Arabic science’ (aside from its likely unpopularity among the population of today’s Iran, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, all proud homes of great scholars of the golden age) is that even choosing to name a scientific age by the language of its communication is problematic. After all, we do not refer to the scientific achievements of the European Renaissance as those of ‘Latin science’. Even stranger would be to refer to modern-day science as ‘English science’. But I nevertheless feel that ‘Arabic’ rather than ‘Islamic’ science is somehow more honest and less problematic. And I really do need to call it something to distinguish it from Greek or Indian or European Renaissance science, the meaning of all of which is quite clear; and to keep referring to it as ‘the science practised by the scholars of the golden age of Islam’ is, I am sure you agree, a bit of a mouthful.
MAP 1: THE ABBASID CALIPHATE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NINTH CENTURY
MAP 2: THE MIDDLE EAST AND MAGHRIB, TOWARDS THE END OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
1
A Dream of Aristotle
One night the Caliph Harūn al-Rashīd summoned his vizier Ja’far and said to him, ‘I wish to go into the city to find out what is happening and to question the people about the conduct of my administrators, so that I may dismiss those of whom they complain and promote those they praise.’
From ‘The Tale of the Three Apples’,
The Thousand and One Nights
The Bab al-Sharji district in the centre of Baghdad derives its name, which means East Gate, from the medieval fortifications of the city. It was part of the walls probably built around the first half of the tenth century. During the brief British stay at the end of the First World War, its gatehouse was used as a garrison church (and in fact referred to by the British as the South Gate, since the only other surviving gate, called Bab al-Mu’atham, was to its north). Nothing of those medieval walls, or the East Gate, remains today; I remember Bab al-Sharji as a hot, smelly, noisy, bustling and congested square, with its food stalls and second-hand record shops scattered around the busy bus depot and taxi ranks, but its name is a reminder of the expansion and transformation of this proud city over the years since its foundation in 762 CE as the new seat of power of the mighty Abbāsid Empire. For Baghdad has grown and shrunk and grown again, with the centre of government shifting over the centuries from one side of the Tigris river to the other as successive rulers chose the most suitable spot to build their elaborate palaces. If we probe into the history of the city we see that whatever suffering its present-day inhabitants have had to endure, they are in very good company. For no other city on earth has had to put up with the levels of death and destruction that Baghdad has endured over the centuries. And yet, as the capital of one of the world’s great empires, this had been the richest, biggest, proudest, most supercilious city on the planet for half a millennium.
Exactly twelve hundred years after its foundation, I was born in a Baghdad hospital in Karradat Mariam, a Shi’a district with a large Christian community, just a stone’s throw away from today’s Green Zone on the opposite bank of the river. That hospital is a few miles south of the spot where one of Baghdad’s most famous rulers was born in 786 CE. His name was Abū Ja’far Abdullah al-Ma’mūn. Half Arab, half Persian, this enigmatic and fascinating caliph is central to my story, for he was destined to become the greatest patron of science in the cavalcade of Islamic rulers, and the person responsible for initiating the world’s most impressive peri
od of scholarship and learning since ancient Greece.
In order to understand how and why this golden age took place, we shall need to dig deeper into the motives and psyche of early Muslim society and its rulers and carefully examine those factors (both internal and external) that helped shape and influence the period. But before we begin our journey in earnest, allow me to introduce you to this remarkable ruler.
Al-Ma’mūn was not the only caliph to support scholarship and science, but he was certainly the most cultured, passionate and enthusiastic. He created an environment that encouraged original thinking and free debate like no other Islamic ruler before or since. He was in fact the son of an even more famous caliph – in the West at any rate – called Harūn al-Rashīd (763–809), which translates as ‘Aaron the Righteous’, who pops up frequently as a character in the tales of The Thousand and One Nights (see Plate 2). Al-Rashīd oversaw the Abbāsid Empire’s expansion as far north as Constantinople and maintained diplomatic ties with China and the European Emperor Charlemagne, with whom he frequently exchanged delegations. They recognized each other as the most powerful men of their respective cultures, and diplomatic ties between the two rulers helped encourage strong trade relations. Charlemagne sent ‘Frisian’ cloths to Baghdad to correct a ‘balance-of-payments’ problem caused by Western tastes for Abbāsid silks, rock crystal and other luxury objects. In return, al-Rashīd sent many gifts to Charlemagne, including an elephant and an elaborate brass water clock, both of which must have amazed the European emperor. There are many stories of al-Rashīd’s wealth, and his collection of gems was particularly legendary.1 He is said to have bought a famous pearl called al-Yatima (‘The Orphan Pearl’) for 70,000 gold dinars. Charlemagne is also believed to have given him what is thought to have been the world’s largest emerald.
Al-Rashīd took a personal interest in many campaigns against the neighbouring Byzantine Empire, leading military expeditions against them throughout his reign. In 797 the defeated Empress Irene agreed to pay a large sum of money to al-Rashīd as the terms of her surrender. When her successor, Emperor Nicephorus I, withheld the payment, al-Rashīd declared war again, and Arab forces defeated the Byzantine emperor in a battle in Phrygia in Asia Minor (Turkey) in 805. The following year, he invaded Asia Minor again, this time with more than 135,000 men. Nicephorus was humiliated into agreeing to pay a yearly tribute of 30,000 nomismata (Byzantine gold coins).2
There is a further account of a sum of 50,000 dirhams3 sent by Nicephorus as a ransom to al-Rashīd for a female slave captured during the incursion of 806. It seems that the woman was betrothed to Nicephorus’ son and that the emperor’s offering to Baghdad was part of a larger exchange that involved brocade garments, falcons, hunting dogs and horses.
Back in Baghdad, however, al-Rashīd was a poor administrator, who owed his success to the running of the affairs of state by a powerful Persian family known as the Barmakis (referred to in the West as the Barmakids). The Islamic Empire was at its most powerful under al-Rashīd’s reign and many historians and poets have, over the centuries, referred to this period as the pinnacle of Baghdad’s golden age. However, this view was to a large extent based on nostalgia towards a bygone era before the cracks in the empire began to appear, which they soon did. It is remarkable that for a city which would remain as the most important in the world for five hundred years, the decline in its glory would begin, as we shall soon see, just fifty years after its foundation. Certainly al-Rashīd has been the beneficiary of almost universal sentimental glorification ever since.
Al-Ma’mūn (786–833) was born the same year that his father became caliph. His mother was a Persian slave concubine named Marajil who had arrived in Baghdad originally as a prisoner of war. She was the daughter of Ustath Sis, a Persian rebel leader defeated by the Abbāsids in Khurasan in what is today western Iran. Marajil worked in the kitchens of al-Rashīd’s palace. Historians have unkindly recorded that, as a forfeit for beating him in a game of chess, al-Rashīd’s Arab wife Zubayda insisted that he sleep with the ugliest and dirtiest slave in the kitchen. After much pleading he agreed and had sexual intercourse with Marajil, and she bore him his first son, Abdullah, to whom he gave the title al-Ma’mūn (‘The Trustworthy’). Marajil died soon after childbirth and al-Ma’mūn was placed in the care of the Barmaki family.
On assuming the caliphate, Harūn al-Rashīd had moved across the river from his father’s palace on the east side to the magnificent Qasr al-Khuld (‘Palace of Eternity’) that had been built by his grandfather and founder of Baghdad, the Caliph al-Mansūr. Within six months of the birth of al-Ma’mūn, Zubayda herself bore the caliph a second son, al-Amīn (787–813). The two boys were destined to grow up in very different worlds. Like al-Rashīd, Zubayda was of pure and noble Arab blood – she was a granddaughter of al-Mansūr and thus al-Rashīd’s cousin – and their son, al-Amīn, was the natural successor to the caliphate over his older half-brother, the son of a Persian slave girl. Unsurprisingly, al-Ma’mūn was never close to his stepmother but was certainly loved by his father, for there are many accounts of him as a young boy playing with the caliph in the beautiful gardens of the palace and on the banks of the Tigris.
As a young man, al-Ma’mūn memorized the Qur’an, studied the history of early Islam, recited poetry and mastered the newly maturing discipline of Arabic grammar. He also studied arithmetic and its applications in the calculation of taxes and inheritance. Most importantly, he was a brilliant student of philosophy and theology, or more specifically what is referred to in Arabic as kalām, which is a form of dialectic debate and argument. The early Muslim theologians found that the techniques of kalām enabled them to hold their own in theological arguments with the Christian and Jewish scholars who lived alongside them, and who had had a head start of several centuries to hone their debating skills by studying the writings of philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – historical figures from ancient Greece whose names would certainly have been known to the young Ma’mūn. It is even quite likely that some of their work had already been translated into Arabic. Al-Ma’mūn’s interest in kalām was to later play a big part in his lifelong obsession with science.
By the beginning of the ninth century, the teenage prince would have known a Baghdad at the very height of its glory: a vast and beautiful city characterized by the domes and archways of its famously intricate Abbāsid architecture. Although just four decades old, Baghdad was already the largest city in the world, with some estimates putting its population at more than a million.4 Certainly far larger in area than Rome, Athens or Alexandria had been at their grandest, Baghdad boasted dozens of sumptuous palaces, occupied by the members of the caliph’s family, his generals and viziers.
Given its turbulent history, almost nothing survives of early Abbāsid Baghdad today. It is worth remembering that, unlike for other, far older, cities such as Rome and Athens, there are no stone quarries in Iraq (although significant limestone and marble deposits could once be found in the north and the west of the country). All the buildings in Baghdad, including the palaces, were constructed mainly from sun-dried mud bricks, making them susceptible to the regular destruction of invading armies, fires and floods. But we can get a sense of the scale of these palaces from one of the very few surviving Abbāsid buildings of that early period.5 Known as the Palace of Ukhaidhir, its ruins stand about 120 miles south of Baghdad (see Plate 11). I vividly remember school trips there, during which my friends and I would race each other, completely unsupervised, around its precarious 65-foot high perimeter walls. It had originally been built as a private retreat by a wealthy member of the caliph’s family in the second half of the eighth century.
Most of Baghdad’s palaces could be found along either bank of the Tigris, and not all were for residential purposes. The grand vizier (derived from the Arabic word wazīr, meaning ‘minister’), Ja’far al-Barmaki, another familiar character in One Thousand and One Nights, built a pleasure palace known as al-Ja’fariyya (‘the Palace of Ja’far
’) in an undeveloped, secluded part of east Baghdad. It would later become the residence of al-Ma’mūn himself and the centre of a district containing a whole complex of palaces and luxury homes known as Dar al-Khilāfa (‘Home of the Monarchy’). Ja’far had been appointed as the young al-Ma’mūn’s personal tutor and he is credited with instilling in the future caliph a love for learning and scholarship.
The palaces, along with many of the important administrative buildings, were tall, multi-storey structures. Many were crowned with elaborate weathervanes depicting warriors on horseback, symbolizing the caliphs’ might. One account, for instance, tells how members of a captured rebel group attempting to escape from the caliph’s throne room – having realized that they would not be able to defeat his bodyguards – jumped from a window and fell nine floors to their death in the courtyard below.
Within the houses of the wealthy, marble was widely used for pillars, tiled floors and the flights of steps leading down to courtyards or the riverbanks. The plastered walls of the houses would have been draped with ornate tapestries, their floors paved with ceramic or marble tiles, with beautiful rugs that would be spread out during the winter months, then taken up during the heat of the summer. Families would have sat on embroidered cushions laid out on the floor. The rooms on the ground floor would often have had one side open onto a central courtyard, sometimes containing a small fountain. The kitchen would often have been below ground level but ventilated in its ceiling through a metal grid in the floor of the courtyard. In order to beat the summer heat, families would have slept up on the flat roof at night and in the cool basement (sirdab) for their afternoon siestas.
Pathfinders Page 3
