I was unable to devote myself to the learning of this algebra and the continued concentration upon it, because of obstacles in the vagaries of time which hindered me; for we have been deprived of all the people of knowledge save for a group, small in number, with many troubles, whose concern in life is to snatch the opportunity, when time is asleep, to devote themselves meanwhile to the investigation and perfection of a science; for the majority of people who imitate philosophers confuse the true with the false, and they do nothing but deceive and pretend knowledge, and they do not use what they know of the sciences except for base and material purposes; and if they see a certain person seeking for the right and preferring the truth, doing his best to refute the false and untrue and leaving aside hypocrisy and deceit, they make a fool of him and mock him.8
9
The Philosopher
We ought not to be embarrassed about appreciating the truth and obtaining it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. Nothing should be dearer to the seeker of truth than the truth itself, and there is no deterioration of the truth, nor belittling either of one who speaks it or conveys it.
Ya’qūb ibn Ishāq al-Kindi
One of several recurring phrases I have been using in this book has been the ‘spirit of rational enquiry’, describing the feeling that pervaded the intellectual atmosphere in al-Ma’mūn’s Baghdad. I have also suggested that this spirit was to a large extent due to the widespread theological beliefs and doctrines of the Mu’tazili, or Mu’tazilites, who had originated in Basra some years before the arrival of the Abbāsids, but towards whom a number of the caliphs of Baghdad were sympathetic, including al-Ma’mūn. In this chapter I shall expand a little on their ideology and how it grew from earlier Christian scholars’ interpretation of Greek philosophy, particularly the work of Aristotle. I find that many writers gloss over this issue without really explaining what the Mu’tazilites stood for beyond a cursory nod towards their rational, non-literalist interpretation of Islamic theology, and so give the impression that those opposed to them were somehow anti-scientific or irrational. This is rather simplistic and has contributed to the notion that the decline of the golden age coincided with a backlash from conservative Islam against Mu’tazilism. While this hostile response certainly took place, it had little to do with waning of the bright light of scientific progress in the Islamic world centuries later.
Conversely, many Muslims around the world have viewed Mu’tazilism and, by extension, the rationalist scientific world-view with a degree of hostility. This has been either due to their fundamentalist, or literalist, interpretation of the Qur’an, making them view all secular philosophy with suspicion, or because they have associated the theological views of the Mu’tazilites with al-Ma’mūn’s unpopular inquisition (mihna) in which he tried to enforce his doctrinal beliefs on the general populace.
It is important to understand that the traditionalists who were opposed to the Mu’tazilite rationalists were by no means themselves irrational in their theological arguments. All theological schools of thought at the time operated on the basis of some form of synthesis between philosophy and theology – between reason and revelation. However, the Mu’tazilites were not just another sect among many, but rather the followers of a religious ideology that was seen as being aligned with the official doctrinal view of the caliphate. So it was politically sensible for those scholars who sought the patronage of the caliphate to align themselves with this movement.
The Mu’tazilites’ primary ethos was to celebrate the power of reason and the human intellect. For them, it is this intellect that guides mankind towards a true knowledge of God, His attributes, and hence the basics of morality. In that sense, they were part of the wider new Islamic theological movement that arose from the early kalām debaters and their methods of argument. They were, of course, as has been true of most of the theological movements that have arisen within Islam since then, primarily driven by their desire to interpret the words of the Qur’an. Where they differed from the more conservative element was in their belief that such understanding could be achieved only through the seeking out of knowledge, a worthy ideology that has resonated with every scientist around the world ever since. This is the ‘spirit of rational enquiry’ I refer to.
More specifically, the Mu’tazilites resorted to metaphorical interpretations of those Qur’anic verses with anthropomorphic content, for they did not believe in an anthropomorphic God in any form. This allowed them, for instance, to reject certain literal interpretations of passages in the Qur’an that are described as the ‘words of God’. God does not ‘speak’ in the way man does, they argued. Rather, His speech is something He brings into being and so, by extension, is the text of the Qur’an itself. This belief that the Qur’an was created by God rather than eternal is the best-known point of contention between the Mu’tazilites and the literalists. And while the theological debate surrounding the issue was extremely important to many scholars at the time, it is understandably somewhat academic as far as the everyday practice of Islam today is concerned.
A more serious difference between the Mu’tazilites and the literalists therefore – one that had a more direct and practical bearing on the nature of scientific progress – was the literalists’ view that the text of the Qur’an and Hadīth (the recorded conversations of the Prophet) gave Muslims everything they would ever need to know about their faith, and so the sort of philosophical debate and reasoning as practised by the Mu’tazilites and the scholars of kalām was not only unnecessary, but un-Islamic. This view has since broadened in some quarters to the erroneous belief that all knowledge is contained in the Qur’an; that anything God felt it was worth mankind knowing, including the laws of nature and our place in the universe, can be found written in the Qur’an, so there is no point in scientific enquiry. Such a dangerous attitude is still held by some Muslims in the world today and is one reason for certain anti-scientific attitudes that have held back technological, economic and social progress in many Muslim countries.
Another early problem that confronted Islamic theology was the issue of free will. Since God is omnipotent, people have argued, everything must be pre-ordained and directed by God, and humans can logically therefore have no free will. However, the Mu’tazilites believed that the Qur’anic commands and prohibitions are in fact worded in such a way as to imply that we do have a choice over our actions, and so, since God is just, He will only punish those who were free to choose, but who made the wrong choices.
Facing the problem of the existence of evil in the world, the Mu’tazilites used their arguments concerning free will to define evil as something that stems from the errors in human acts. God does no evil, and does not demand of any human to do evil. For if man’s evil acts had come from the will of God, punishment would have been meaningless. Mu’tazilites did not deny the existence of suffering that goes beyond human abuse and misuse of their free will granted to them by God. In order to explain this type of ‘apparent’ evil, they relied on the Islamic doctrine of taklīf – that life is a test for beings possessing free will, and hence the capacity for choice. None of these debates were new of course, as Christian and Jewish theologians had been discussing issues such as free will and the nature of good and evil long before Islam.
Al-Ma’mūn grew up in this atmosphere and many of his tutors were prominent Mu’tazilites. In 827 he made clear his Mu’tazilite sympathies by declaring as official the doctrine that the Qur’an was created rather than eternal. This in itself was not a controversial view and was quite widespread among theologians at the time; it would be wrong to think that it was confined solely to the Mu’tazilites.1 However, just four months before his death in 833, al-Ma’mūn asserted his supreme authority in all religious matters by issuing his mihna, decreeing that all Muslims should accept the doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’an. He regarded himself as not only the supreme political ruler of a vast Islamic Empire, but as the guardian of Islam itself,
entrusted by God with ultimate truth. He believed it was his duty not only to protect the state politically from external forces, but to ensure its religious well-being. It was therefore necessary to educate his people and correct them on all theological matters.
It is unclear from the letters in which he set out his mihna what lengths he went to in order to ensure it was carried out. This dramatic event was seen by later historians as having tainted the whole Mu’tazilite movement. However, it was much more to do with al-Ma’mūn’s attempts to enforce his personal theological views, which were in any case not at odds with most theologians’ thinking at the time, than with his championing of an unpopular creed, let alone speaking for Mu’tazilism in general. The mihna would continue during the reign of the following two caliphs, his young brother al-Mu’tasim and his nephew al-Wāthiq, and was only abolished in 849 by the next caliph, al-Mutawakkil.
It was by no means just theologians who were debating such matters. The most important thinker of all during this time was a philosopher – the very first of Islam – and, as such, differing in a fundamental way from the Mu’tazilite kalām theologians. His name was Ya’qūb ibn Ishāq al-Kindi (c. 800–c. 873) – Alkindus to the West – and he was the first of the great Abbāsid polymaths as well as the last of al-Ma’mūn’s great ‘Hall of Fame’ scholars that I want to introduce you to. Al-Kindi was an Arab from the powerful Kinda tribe, originally from Yemen but hugely influential in Arabia before and after the birth of Islam. He was born in Basra but probably spent some part of his childhood in Kūfa, where his father was governor. He is thought to have moved to Baghdad early in life and received his education there.2 Having shown great early promise as a scholar of Greek philosophy he was recruited by al-Ma’mūn.
By this time the translation movement was at its height, amid what has been described as a fully fledged scramble for any Greek scientific or philosophical text that the scholars of Baghdad and their wealthy patrons could lay their hands on. At the centre of all this was al-Kindi, a man who would question everything around him, and who applied his impeccable logic to issues surrounding God and creation. As a devout Muslim, he showed sympathies towards the views of the Mu’tazilites, a stance that would certainly have helped him initially to gain favour in the caliph’s court. But al-Kindi was no lackey, and he honed his views on purely logical, even mathematical, reasoning. This was a stance that would make him a number of enemies later in life and even bring him into direct conflict with rivals within the House of Wisdom itself.
During his early years, al-Kindi gathered around him a circle of scholars and translators, for he was not himself a translator and did not even read Greek. His strength was in assimilating, understanding and commenting on the translated work of the Greek philosophers that was presented to him. Eventually, the more prolific Hunayn ibn Ishāq would arrive in Baghdad and build up his own circle of translators. But what al-Kindi’s circle lacked in sheer volume of translations, they made up for with the quality and choice of the Greek texts they picked to study, driven always by al-Kindi’s own philosophical concerns and interests. His philosophy was a synthesis of ideas that were quite sophisticated for the time, based on the interpretation of revelation through reasoned argument, together with a rationalist, Aristotelian, view of the world around him, which fed directly back into his religious beliefs. He is thus rightly credited with being the scholar most responsible for bringing Greek philosophy into the Islamic world.
In order to understand this new synthesis of philosophy and Islamic theology, we need first to know a little about Aristotle himself and the philosophy on which al-Kindi based his ideas.
It is impossible to overestimate the impact that Aristotle (384–322 BCE) has had on mankind throughout history and across civilizations – and it is not surprising that he was the man that al-Ma’mūn met in his dream. In philosophy, he is peerless. Not only was he the greatest philosopher who ever lived, his ideas, through the work of al-Kindi, were to become the foundation on which early Islamic philosophy was built, even though many of the Aristotelian ideas would later be modified, extended and even rejected.
In many ways Aristotle represents the pinnacle of Greek knowledge and has been regarded by many as the greatest intellect of all time for his huge influence on so many thinkers over the next two thousand years. When one thinks of the greatest of the Greek philosophers, two other names also come to mind, however. Socrates3 (470–399 BCE) was, in a way, almost anti-scientific in his views. For example, he disapproved of geometry as a discipline for its own sake and felt that it should only be taught as a practical tool in architecture, agriculture and where useful in mathematical calculations involving financial transactions. His was thus a positivist, pragmatist attitude towards knowledge. Plato (428–348 BCE), who bridged the fifth century of Socrates and the fourth century of Aristotle as a student of one and the teacher of the other, was more akin to what we would regard as a modern theoretical physicist than his mentor, Socrates. He believed that the universe was describable mathematically and that it was thus comprehensible. It was therefore the job of philosophy to make sense of the mysteries of the universe, such as the apparently irregular motion of stars and planets, in terms of regular mathematical laws. But Plato did very little in terms of contributing to knowledge beyond the abstract and metaphysical and is not regarded as being as great a scientist as Aristotle – or, for that matter, someone like Archimedes.
Aristotle became a student of Plato in Athens at the age of 18 and was later to take on the role of tutor to Alexander the Great. He founded his famous school in Athens, the Lyceum, in 335 BCE. As well as being a great philosopher, Aristotle made many advances in mathematics, physics and cosmology, and was even one of the first historians of science. But his greatest contribution was in the life sciences. He can rightly claim to be the ‘father of biology’, in the same way that Pythagoras was the ‘father of mathematics’ and Hippocrates the ‘father of medicine’. Unlike Plato, who is known to have advised Greek astronomers to replace ‘observation’ with ‘speculation’, Aristotle based his approach on observation of the world around him and the gathering of data in order to build up empirical knowledge about nature – which is the way much of science is carried out today. Luckily, many of the greatest Greek ‘experimental’ scientists, such as Archimedes, Hipparchus and Galen, did not follow Plato’s advice.
In physics, Aristotle was to put forward the idea that all motion is the realization of a body’s potentiality to move. More generally, he argued that everything is subject to change. His term kinēsis refers to all kinds of change: alteration of the substance of an object, alteration of its size or shape, alteration of its quality and alteration of its position (motion). Thus the four types of kinēsis are represented by changes in quiddity, quantity, quality and position. An object falls because it ‘naturally’ wants to rejoin the earth from which it sprang, and fire rises so as to rejoin the sphere of fire above. Similarly, water and air find their natural levels. All other motion is not natural and requires the action of a force (which sounds remarkably like Newton’s first law of motion: a body remains at rest or in constant motion unless acted upon by an external force). Of all the Greeks, Aristotle’s work and teaching would have the greatest influence on Arabic scientists a thousand years later, and indeed on many later European thinkers.
Of interest here is Aristotle’s cosmology. For him, the universe is finite in extent, but has existed for ever. He claimed that the stars in the heavens are made up of an indestructible substance called the aether and are eternal and unchanging. His cosmology thus described the first ‘steady state’ universe, an idea resurrected by the British scientist Fred Hoyle in the mid-twentieth century, but that has since fallen out of favour with the overwhelming evidence in support of the Big Bang theory.
The celestial bodies, including the sun, moon, planets and stars, were considered by Aristotle to be attached to rigid, crystalline spheres that revolve in perfect circles around the earth, which sits at the very
centre of the universe. The other four fundamental elements – earth, water, air and fire – are subcelestial elements. He argued for a ‘Prime Mover’, a deity that is responsible for making the outermost sphere rotate at constant angular velocity, and imparting this motion from sphere to sphere, thus causing all the celestial spheres to rotate around the earth. This Prime Mover of Aristotle’s universe became the God of Christian, Jewish and eventually Muslim theologians who studied his work, the outermost sphere of the Prime Mover became identified with Heaven, and the position of the earth at the centre of it all was understood in terms of the concern that God had for the affairs of mankind and their unique place in his creation.
Pathfinders Page 17
