Pathfinders

by Jim Al-Khalili

  The Andalusian city of al-Zahrā would have seemed dazzling and opulent to visitors from the Christian North, who were regularly welcomed there by the caliph. And just like the palace city of Sāmarra a century earlier, al-Zahrā was more than the caliph’s summer retreat away from his capital, Córdoba. It became the new centre of government when Abd al-Rahmān relocated his administration there just ten years after he had begun building it. It is sad to think that this glorious city would be utterly destroyed a little over sixty years later, as we shall see, during a bloody civil war that would bring to an end the Umayyad caliphate, if not Muslim rule, in Andalusia.

  When al-Hakam died in 976 he was succeeded by his 10-year-old son Hisham, but power was quickly seized by his vizier, Abū Āmir al-Mansūr (c. 938–1002), who became the de facto ruler. Better known in the West as Almanzor, his reign marked the peak of Muslim power in Spain. He had arrived in Córdoba to study law and literature but was ruthlessly ambitious and had engineered his way into being appointed manager of the estates of young Prince Hisham. Within a few years he had eliminated his political rivals and, when al-Hakam died, was in a strong position to serve his own interests by securing the succession of the young Hisham to the throne ahead of his brother. Over the following three years he consolidated his power by taking advantage of the youth and inexperience of Hisham to gain absolute control. The young caliph was effectively imprisoned in Medinat al-Zahrā’, which al-Mansūr had closed to all outsiders, completely isolating him. Al-Mansūr then built a new palace on the other side of Córdoba to which he moved all administrative affairs. The Umayyad caliphate was thereby reduced to little more than a ceremonial role, mirroring what was happening to the Abbāsid caliphate in Baghdad.

  Al-Mansūr disapproved of science; so much so that many books that had been preserved and collected at great expense by al-Hakam were publicly burned; only those on medicine and mathematics were spared. With his death in 1002, interest in subjects such as philosophy was revived, but this optimism was short-lived. Al-Mansūr’s son Sanjūl (Sanchuelo) had tried to claim the title of caliph for himself from the weak and ineffective Hisham. This led to an angry and violent uprising among the population of Córdoba still loyal to the Umayyad family. Meanwhile, North African Berbers, whom al-Mansūr had unwisely and increasingly relied upon, were gathering strength. In 1009 they chose to back a descendant of Abd al-Rahmān III as a rival caliph and, after a brief power struggle, matters came to a head when Berber forces laid siege to Córdoba between 1010 and 1013, destroying Medinat al-Zahrā’ in the process. Many of the books from al-Hakam’s wonderful library that had not been destroyed by al-Mansūr were now either auctioned off to raise funds for the beleaguered city or plundered by the Berber troops. Medinat al-Zahrā’ would be quickly forgotten and remained buried for nine hundred years until its ruins were uncovered in 1911.

  With Córdoba’s demise, the caliphate was finally abolished in 1031 and Andalusia disintegrated into a number of city-states whose rulers were known as mulūk al-tawā’if (‘the kings of the regions’). In the West, they are commonly referred to as the Taifa kings. These kingdoms were constantly at war with each other, competing for land and resources, but all were militarily weak. When Muslims first arrived in Spain in 711, they had been a powerful fighting force, but over the years had gradually grown soft. By the tenth century, the geographer Ibn Hawqal had noted that Andalusians no longer had an appetite for warfare.5 Instead, their armies were made up of European slaves and North African Berbers.

  With the increasingly successful raids and conquests from the Christian north and west (Portugal), the Taifa kings eventually asked for the help of the Islamic Berber rulers of the Maghreb. When Toledo was captured in 1085 by Alfonso VI of Castile, the Berbers moved in to secure what remained of Islamic lands. The Almoravids (al-Murābitūn – meaning ‘Those Ready for Battle’) ruled from 1085 to 1145, and they were followed by another dynasty, the Almohads (al-Muwahhidūn – ‘The Unitarians’), who ruled until 1238. Both were powerful dynasties that at their height ruled over much of north-west Africa, and both were intolerant in their treatment and persecution of the large Jewish communities within the cities, creating a widespread anti-intellectual atmosphere. Meanwhile the Christian Reconquista continued unabated, squeezing the land under Muslim rule ever tighter. By the mid-thirteenth century, only the Kingdom of Granada remained under Berber control. The final defeat came at the hands of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, when the Alhambra fortress palace fell in 1492, signalling the end of Islamic rule in Spain and nearly eight hundred years of Arab culture, the traces of which can still be seen throughout the southern half of the country today.

  Before the arrival of Islam, Christian Spain had had very little by way of a scientific tradition. So the Arabs who arrived there in the early eighth century were greeted with a situation very different from that of the early Abbāsids of Baghdad, who were able to draw upon the rich culture of the Persians and, to a lesser extent, the Greek philosophy and medical knowledge available to the Nestorian Christians, who had previously been under Byzantine rule. The early Muslims in Spain were frontiersmen in a province a long way from home, and a long way from the centre of the action. As such, they lagged far behind the Abbāsids, and when scholarship and cultural activity did finally get going it tended to be very derivative, copying what was going on in Baghdad. Added to this was the fact that there was no stimulus to scholarship brought about by a translation movement such as took place in Baghdad, and so we find that original science grew slowly in Andalusia.

  But grow and blossom it eventually did. At its peak, Andalusian science was dominated by medicine and philosophy rather than the exact sciences of mathematics and astronomy. As in the East, the early physicians in Muslim Spain were mostly Christians. But now, rather than studying the texts of Galen, they had access to the best that the Islamic East could offer, such as the translations of Hunayn ibn Ishāq. A merchant from the city of Jaen to the east of Córdoba, who had travelled to Baghdad, was one of the early facilitators of this trade. While in Baghdad, he met with the great al-Rāzi around the year 920 and brought back to Spain copies of some of his books.

  The very first of the great Andalusian scientists is also probably the best known. In fact, he was the only medieval scientist I had heard of, as a boy growing up in Iraq. His name was Abbās ibn Firnās (810–87), the legendary inventor and the Leonardo da Vinci of Islamic Spain. He is also regarded as the world’s first aviator. He is honoured on Arabic postage stamps and has airports named after him, as well as a crater on the moon (see Plate 15). But I always associate him with the excitement of my summer holidays. For his statue, with his famous flying contraption, stands majestically in the central reservation of the Baghdad International Airport road. I always knew we had arrived at the airport for another exciting trip to England, when we passed Ibn Firnās. A most colourful character, and a remarkable polymath and inventor, he lived during the reign of Abd al-Rahmān II. He had come to Córdoba to teach mathematics and music, after travelling to study in Baghdad.

  Ibn Firnās had an insatiable curiosity and foolhardy courage. He made his famous attempt at controlled flight when, at the age of 65, he built a rudimentary hang-glider and launched himself from the steep side of a mountain in Rusafa (known in Spanish as Arruzafa), a few miles north-west of Córdoba. Some accounts claim he remained airborne for several minutes before landing badly, hurting his back. Although he was able to alter his altitude and direction in order to reach his target landing spot, he had not taken into account the importance of birds’ tails in flight and later said that the landing could have been improved by providing a tail apparatus. Much of this story comes from unconfirmed reports and it is unclear whether he had the original idea watching another stuntman by the name of Armen Firman or whether this was just the Latinized name of Ibn Firnās himself.

  It was in medicine that Andalusia was to display an early bloom. Many of its scholars travelled to Baghdad during the mid-tenth
century to learn from top physicians like al-Rāzi and to study the Arabic translations of the texts of Galen. Among these physicians was the most famous surgeon of the medieval world, Abū al-Qāsim al-Zahrāwi (c. 936–c. 1013) (Abulcasis), who practised in al-Zahrā’, whence his name is derived, as court physician to the Caliph al-Hakam. His list of contributions to medicine is truly remarkable: he invented more than a hundred new surgical instruments, many of which are still in use today (such as the forceps used in childbirth), and he was the first to use catgut for internal stitching, the surgical hook, spoon, rod, speculum and bone-saw, the surgical needle, the syringe and the lithotomy scalpel. He pioneered the use of inhalant anaesthesia with sponges soaked in a concoction of narcotics including cannabis and opium. He also made advances in dentistry and perfected the performance of tracheotomies.

  Al-Zahrāwi’s work was to have a huge impact on Europe and the teaching of medicine during the Renaissance. Indeed, his legacy in the field can be compared with that of al-Rāzi and Ibn Sīna. His most famous text was a huge encyclopedia on medicine and surgery known as Kitab al-Tasrīf (The Method of Medicine). Its glorious full title translates as The Arrangement of Medical Knowledge for One Who is Not Able to Compile a Book for Himself. Written around the year 1000 CE, this thirty-volume work includes anatomical descriptions and classifications of diseases as well as sections on orthopaedics, ophthalmology, pharmacology, nutrition and, most importantly, surgery. For perhaps five centuries during the European Middle Ages, the Tasrīf was one of the primary sources for European medical knowledge, along with al-Rāzi’s al-Hāwi and Ibn Sīna’s Canon, and served as a reference for all doctors and surgeons. Some of the treatises that make up the Tasrīf were quickly translated into Latin and eventually printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.6

  The volumes on surgery are divided into three sections: on cauterization, on operations and on the treatment of fractures and dislocations. Throughout his work we find many illustrations of surgical instruments originally drawn by al-Zahrāwi himself (see Plate 19). Here, for instance, is his description of the syringe, regarded as being the very earliest accurate account of the instrument in the history of medicine:

  When there occurs an ulcer in the bladder, or there is a clot of blood or a deposit of pus in it, and you wish to instil into it lotions and medicaments, this is done with the help of an instrument called a syringe. It is made of silver or ivory, hollow, with a long fine tube, fine as a probe … The hollow part containing the plunger is exactly of a size to be closed by it, so that any liquid is drawn up with it when you pull it up; and when you press it down it is driven in a jet.7

  The other famous Andalusian physician was Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar), who was born in Seville around 1091 and became another of Islam’s great medical clinicians, second only to al-Rāzi in the whole of Islam. His writing, like that of al-Zahrāwi, was to have a big influence on medical practice in Christian Europe.

  In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, astronomers in Andalusia took up the challenge earlier posed by Ibn al-Haytham, namely to question Ptolemy’s methods and to correct his errors. An anonymous eleventh-century astronomer is known to have written a book called Recapitulation Regarding Ptolemy (al-Istidrāk ala Batlamyūs) that has yet to be recovered. It was said to include a list of objections to Ptolemy’s astronomy, and the work is famous because it led to a movement known as the ‘Andalusian Revolt’ that included not just astronomers but the very best of the Andalusian philosophers, such as Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd.

  In the late eleventh century, al-Zarqāli (Arzachel) built the first universal astrolabe that, unlike its predecessors, which had been designed to work at a particular latitude, could be used anywhere in the world. The device became known in Europe as a saphaea (from the Arabic safīha). Al-Zarqāli made a number of important measurements and even deduced that the orbit of Mercury is not circular but oval-shaped. Some writers have naively and wrongly claimed that he was somehow pre-empting Kepler’s elliptical orbits with this discovery. However, he still had Mercury orbiting the earth. Nevertheless, al-Zarqāli was one of just two Islamic astronomers to be mentioned in Copernicus’ De revolutionibus (along with al-Battāni).

  Another Andalusian scholar, Ibn Bājja (Avempace) (d. 1139), whom we met earlier as the man who attacked Ibn al-Haytham’s criticism of Ptolemy, famously proposed that the Milky Way was made up of very many individual stars and only appears to have a continuous misty glow from the effect of refraction in the earth’s atmosphere (although it has been claimed that al-Bīrūni knew this more than a century earlier).

  There also seems to have been a group of Arab and Jewish astronomers who carried out observations in Toledo around 1060. This group produced a zīj based on those of al-Khwārizmi and the Syrian astronomer al-Battāni. It would seem that these ‘Toledan Tables’ were far from the best or most accurate examples of Islamic astronomical measurements, but they had the advantage of being produced in Toledo, the single most important city for the transmission of Arabic science to the West. As such, the Toledan Tables were quoted by many later influential European astronomers, including Copernicus. They even make it into Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, proving that which parts of Arabic science are best known today is often down to serendipity rather than quality.

  Many of the Andalusian philosophers were inspired by the works of al-Kindi, al-Farābi and al-Rāzi, which had reached Spain early on. Among them are several men who deserve more than a cursory mention. The first of these is Ibn Hazm (994–1064), a contemporary of the three great scholars of the East that we encountered in the last two chapters: Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sīna and al-Bīrūni. Inevitably, he has to some extent been overshadowed by them and has therefore probably not received the recognition he deserves, but many historians regard him as being just as great a thinker, if not a scientist as such, as they were.8 He was a philosopher, theologian and historian and one of the most original thinkers in Muslim Spain. Probably best known for his work in jurisprudence and theology, he became a controversial writer and political activist for his continued support of the collapsing Umayyad dynasty in the first decades of the eleventh century.

  Without doubt, the most famous of the Andalusian philosophers was Abū al-Walīd Muhammad ibn Ahmed ibn Rushd (Averroës) (1126–98), who is considered by many to be the father of secular thought in Europe and one of the most important philosophers of all time. He is famous for extending the work of the previous Islamic philosophers (the ’ulamā’) such as al-Kindi, al-Rāzi, al-Farābi and Ibn Sīna in integrating Aristotle’s philosophy with Islamic theology. Being the last in this line of Islamic thinkers and the one on Europe’s ‘doorstep’, his work was to become well known across the continent. Show the average educated European the long list of medieval Islamic philosophers and the only two names they are likely to have even heard of will be Avicenna and Averroës. Indeed, if you look carefully at Raphael’s wonderful painting in the Vatican The School of Athens (1510), depicting the world’s greatest philosophers, the only Muslim you will find is Ibn Rushd. Of course, for Raphael – as indeed for any European – the two central characters in the painting are, unsurprisingly, Plato and Aristotle. But no other Muslim philosopher makes it, not because they are not worthy enough but because Raphael would not have known of them. Thomas Aquinas believed Ibn Rushd to be so important that he referred to him as ‘the Commentator’ to contrast with the other great master, Aristotle, who was known simply as ‘the Philosopher’.

  Ibn Rushd trained as a judge (qāthī) and worked first in Seville, which was the capital of Andalusia at that time, and then in Córdoba. Biographical reports from the period refer to him as a jurist rather than a philosopher, but it was his philosophical ideas that would so hugely influence European scholars. His interpretation of Aristotelian philosophy, known as Averroism, developed into a school of thought that had a lasting effect on Christian theologians keen to explore whether Aristotle’s philosophy could be merged or reconciled with Christianity in the same way it had wit
h Islam.

  During the golden age of Andalusia, there were large and prosperous Jewish communities that for the most part coexisted peacefully alongside Muslims and flourished in the major cities. But with the slow decline of the golden age came a worsening of relations between the two communities that led to several pogroms in the eleventh century and horrific massacres of the Jews, particularly at the hands of the Berber dynasties. Many Jews fled from their homes in Córdoba, Toledo and Granada for more tolerant parts of the Islamic and Christian worlds. Among them was the famous Jewish scholar Mūsa ibn Maymūn, better known today as Moses Maimonides, who excelled as a great philosopher and physician.

  Born in Córdoba in 1135, Maimonides had to flee with his family in 1148 when the city was captured by the Almohads and, after many years on the move, they finally settled in Egypt. His most famous philosophical work was The Guide for the Perplexed, which laid the foundations for much of subsequent Jewish philosophical thought. He was a big admirer of Andalusian Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Bājja and Ibn Rushd, but was also well versed in earlier philosophers from the East such as al-Farābi and Ibn Sīna.9 While the three monotheistic religions differ on a wide range of issues, they all tackle the same big questions, such as the meaning of good and evil, the existence of free will and the nature of the afterlife. And all medieval philosophers wrestled with the conflicting notions of revelation and reason. In this sense, what Maimonides took from the Islamic philosophers and applied to Jewish theology was no different from what Thomas Aquinas did for Christian theology.