The Impact of Islam

by Emmet Scott

  This latter question has occurred to very many writers over the past few years, including Bernard Lewis, whose 2001 book What Went Wrong? poses the question in its title. Lewis could offer no definite answer to the problem, nor have any other writers of a similar view.

  But even the suggestion that Islam at one time encouraged science and learning is problematic; and there is much evidence to suggest that the Arabian faith was never, even at the beginning, well-disposed to free thought and the acquisition of knowledge. Most people are aware of the accusation that the Muslim conquerors of Egypt did immense damage to that country’s ancient monuments, and a tradition exists that it was the Caliph Umar who ordered the destruction of the great library at Alexandria, shortly after the conquest of Egypt. And were not the numerous Roman cities of Anatolia, Syria and North Africa despoiled by the Arabs; do not their stark remains litter the landscape of these regions to this day? How are these things to be reconciled with the view that Islam was, at one time, tolerant, enlightened and relatively peace-loving? One answer is to suggest that the achievements proudly attributed to medieval Islam were largely illusory; the science of the Arabs, it can be argued, was not theirs at all, it belonged primarily to the peoples they had conquered, the Persians, Syrians, and Egyptians. The philosophers, geographers, mathematicians, and physicians of these peoples were permitted, for a short time, to continue their studies, before they were closed down under the weight of Arab theocracy. But even this solution is problematic: If the philosophers and scientists of Persia, Syria and Egypt were permitted for a brief period to continue their studies, how is it that some of them seem to have been still active three hundred years later, in the tenth century? And how is this initial Arab liberalism to be squared with the evidence of initial fanaticism, such as the destroyed Roman cities of Syria and North Africa?

  Finding an answer to these questions seems akin to squaring the proverbial circle. Is it possible to arrive at a solution?

  To begin with, there is no question that the early Islamic world was fabulously wealthy, prosperous, and advanced. It could scarcely have been otherwise, when it conquered and, within a very short time, controlled virtually all of the ancient centers of culture and population of the Near East. By circa 650 Islamic armies had subdued everything from Egypt and Libya in the west, to Persia and Afghanistan in the east. The wealth, and learning, of those regions, including the enormous population centers, with their libraries and universities, were all now at the disposal of Muslim rulers. As well as the actual plunder accrued in successful wars of conquest, the Arabs imposed heavy taxes upon the natives who refused to convert to Islam, whilst the treasures of ancient and venerable churches and temples were more often than not simply looted. This was usually disguised as an act of religious piety, since church treasures were frequently in the form of statues or gold-covered images – idols, which it was the sacred duty of Muslims to destroy. In Egypt, even the tombs of pharaohnic times were plundered.[12] In addition, new sources of gold and silver were discovered around this time. In Khorasan, to the east of Persia, and in Transoxiana beyond it, between Kashmir and the Aral Sea, “vast mines of silver” were discovered, whilst the Arab conquest of Nubia, to the south of Egypt, opened the gold mines of that region to their use.[13] And these new sources of wealth were of such richness that they could scarcely have done else than produce an epoch of prosperity.

  For a while, it seems that some Muslim rulers did patronize universities and other seats of learning. Scientific and philosophic treatises were indeed composed, and there is no doubt that Arab, or at least Arabic-speaking scholars were in possession of many classical Greek texts not generally available in Europe. These men, it is evident, made important contributions, in various areas of scientific and scholarly endeavor. In addition, the Arabs, or rather the Arab rulers of the Near East (for the great majority of the population remained non-Arab in language and non-Muslim in religion for several centuries after the conquest), learned the secrets of paper-making, the compass, and various other crucial technologies from the Chinese between the eighth and eleventh centuries, which technologies they utilized and eventually (inadvertently) spread to Europe: But what of the argument that Islam encouraged the arts and sciences? Here, the Islamophiles are on much shakier ground. The Arabs who emerged from Arabia with Caliph Umar were mostly illiterate nomads, whose knowledge of what we call science was non-existent. Like all barbarians, they would of course have been deeply impressed, to begin with at any rate, by the advanced and civilized cultures which they overran. Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia were ancient civilizations with unique attributes. Each had long-established universities, libraries and traditions of learning. When the Arabs conquered these regions there is evidence that they permitted these institutions, for a time at least, to continue their activities. Furthermore, these nations, and Persia in particular, were conduits through which flowed new ideas and techniques from the great civilizations of the Far East, from India and China. Much, indeed most, of the new technologies and methods that medieval Europeans learned from the Arabs, were not Arab or even Near Eastern at all, but Chinese and Indian. Europeans used the Arabic names for these things (such as “zero,” from the Arabic zirr), because it was from Arab sources that they learned them. But they were neither Arab nor Middle Eastern.

  Fig. 2. Astrolabe from Islamic Spain, eleventh century

  Such astrolabes, common in the Islamic world at this time, were exact copies of similar machines used in the Byzantine world during the sixth and early seventh centuries.

  This is in fact the case with the great majority of the “Arab” learning outlined by such enthusiasts as Briffault. The claim, for example, that the Arabs discovered the distillation of alcohol, which Briffault makes, is quite simply false. Alcohol had been distilled in Babylonia prior to the Arab conquest.[14] Under the Arabs, distillation techniques were improved; but they did not invent distillation. Again, the claim that the Persian Al-Khwarizmi invented algebra is untrue; and it is now widely admitted that the Greek mathematician Diophantes, building on the knowledge of the Babylonians, was the first to outline the principles (in his Arithmetica) of what we now call algebra.[15] Al-Khwarizmi did make a number of important innovations, such as the quadratic equation and the introduction of the decimal number system from India, but in many other respects his work was not as advanced as that of Diophantes. Furthermore, he clearly owed much to the fifth century Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata, whose 121-verse Aryabhatiya expostulated on astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, methods of determining the movements of the planets and descriptions of their movements, as well as methods of calculating the movements of the sun and moon and predicting their eclipses. And we note too that Aryabhata was manifestly the source of the astronomical ideas attributed to Al-Zarkyal and Al-Farani, which Briffault places such store in.

  There is another important consideration to remember: Whilst “Arab” scientists and philosophers of this time used Arab names and wrote in Arabic, the great majority of them were not Arabs or Muslims at all, but Christians and Jews who worked under Arab regimes. The Saracen armies which conquered the Near East in the seventh century imposed their faith and their language in the corridors of power; and the subdued peoples were forced to learn it. At no time, however, not even at the beginning, did genuine Arabs and Muslims show much interest in science and scholarship. Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. In fact, during the eighth and ninth centuries, “the whole corpus of Greek scientific and philosophical learning was translated into Arabic, mainly by Nestorian Christians.”[16] We know that “Schools, often headed by Christians, were … established in connection with mosques.”[17] The leading figure in the Baghdad school was the Christian Huneyn ibn Ishaq (809-873), who translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato an
d Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. Throughout the Muslim world it was Christians and Jews (especially the latter), who did almost all the scientific research and enquiry at this time. And there is much evidence to suggest that the efforts of these scholars were often viewed by their Muslim masters with the deepest suspicion. Certainly there was not the encouragement to learning, much less to new research, that is so frequently boasted.

  Even the limited number of “Arab” scholars who were not Jews and Christians were rarely Arabs. We are told that Al-Kindi was “one of the few pure Arabs to achieve intellectual distinction.”[18] More often than not they were actually Persians. This was the case, as we saw, with the mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, and also with the great philosopher Avicenna, among many others. The Persian origin of so much “Arab” learning reminds us again that a great deal of what has been attributed to the Arabs was in reality Persian, and that, prior to the Islamicization of Persia in the seventh century, the country had, under the Sassanids, been a cultural and intellectual crossroads, bringing together the latest mathematics from India, the latest technology from China, and the latest philosophy from Byzantium; and making important contributions to all of these herself. This leads to the suspicion that “Al-Khwarizmi” and “Avicenna” (Ibn-Sina), may have been scholars of the Sassanid period, whose works were translated into Arabic and their names “Arabized” during the Abbasid period – perhaps in the early eighth century.

  Rodney Stark explains how Islam does not have “a conception of God appropriate to underwrite the rise of science. … Allah is not presented as a lawful creator but is conceived of as an extremely active God who intrudes in the world as he deems it appropriate. This prompted the formation of a major theological bloc within Islam that condemns all efforts to formulate natural laws as blasphemy in that they deny Allah’s freedom to act.”[19]

  Allah’s freedom to act is seen all too clearly in the outlandish events of Muhammad’s life, where sacred moral laws are broken by the Prophet and his followers, only to be vindicated – afterward – by new “revelations” from Allah.

  Allah’s total freedom to act resulted in fatalism and the death of reason; a universe dominated by forces that are utterly incomprehensible. If my house is destroyed by lightning, it is the will of Allah; it has nothing to do with my failure to install a good lightning-rod. This was the very essence of what we now call “Medievalism.” Islamic cosmology was explained thus by Maimonides:

  Human intellect does not perceive any reason why a body should be in a certain place instead of being in another. In the same manner they say that reason admits the possibility that an existing being should be larger or smaller than it really is, or that it should be different in form and position from what it really is; e.g., a man might have the height of a mountain, might have several heads, and fly in the air; or an insect might be as small as an insect, or an insect as huge as an elephant.

  This method of admitting possibilities is applied to the whole Universe. Whenever they affirm that a thing belongs to this class of admitted possibilities, they say that it can have this form and that it is also possible that it be found differently, and that the one form is not more possible than the other; but they do not ask whether the reality confirms their assumption …

  [They say] fire causes heat, water causes cold, in accordance with a certain habit; but it is logically not impossible that a deviation from this habit should occur, namely, that fire should cause cold, move downward, and still be fire; that the water should cause heat, move upward, and still be water. On this foundation their whole [intellectual] fabric is constructed.[20]

  The rejection by Islam and the Islamic world of science and reason is illustrated by a number of significant events, such as the burning by Al Mansur (Caliph of Cordoba, late tenth/early eleventh century) with his own hand, of the “materialist and philosophical works of the library associated with Hakam II,”[21] as well as by the major and obvious facts, such as that by the thirteenth century Europe had overtaken the Islamic world in virtually every field of science and technology – though Islam had, just a few centuries earlier, inherited all the great centers of Greek and Babylonian learning, when Europe had to start from scratch. And if the learning of Islam during the tenth and eleventh centuries has been exaggerated, so has the ignorance of Europe in the same centuries. A commonly-held belief is that Europe of this period was devoid of towns and that building is stone was virtually unknown. We are presented with a picture of rustic hamlets and thatched hovels. Historians speak of a primitive barter economy, universal illiteracy, and all-pervading instability.

  It is of course true that during the tenth century the great majority of Europe's population lived in the countryside, and that life was, by modern standards, primitive. Yet high culture was not lacking, and revolutionary developments were transforming the environment. This was the century which saw the widespread adoption of the moldboard plow and the horse-collar, two innovations which permitted the utilization of the heavier soils of northern Europe and were symptomatic of an increasing population. During the same century building in stone, which had fallen into abeyance since the seventh century, was resumed on a large scale, as the still-standing magnificent Romanesque churches testify. Although domestic architecture is scarcer, we know from illustrations on tapestries and manuscripts that the princes and prelates of the time inhabited Roman-style palaces and villas, complete with tiled roofs and pillared porticoes. The Roman system of roads was maintained, as is proved by the frequent travels undertaken by rulers, merchants and churchmen.[22] Evidently too the taverns and hostelries of the Roman epoch were still in operation. And the arts and the sciences were not, contrary to popular opinion, moribund. Some of the artwork that survives from the period can stand comparison with the best achievements of Rome. Indeed, the British Isles experienced something of a golden age in this respect. The distinctive Hiberno-Saxon art of the ninth and tenth centuries has bequeathed to us with some of the finest and most technically advanced miniature art ever produced, both in metal and on parchment.

  A major part of Europe's revival during the tenth century was spearheaded by the monks of the Benedictine Order. The Benedictines may not have intended to make their communities into centers of learning, technology and economic progress; yet, as time went on, this is exactly what they became. Indeed, one can scarcely find a single endeavor in the advancement of civilization during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in which the monks did not play a central role. It is well-known, of course, that they preserved the literary inheritance of the ancient world (much more completely, in fact, than was previously realized), yet they did much more. According to one scholar, they gave “the whole of Europe … a network of model factories, centers for breeding livestock, centers of scholarship, spiritual fervor, the art of living … readiness for social action – in a word … advanced civilization that emerged from the chaotic waves of surrounding barbarity. Without any doubt, Saint Benedict was the Father of Europe. The Benedictines, his children, were the Fathers of European civilization.”[23]

  We could fill volumes enumerating the achievements of the Benedictines. That they single handedly preserved much of ancient literature is well-known. Not so widely known is the enormous quantity of that literature that they saved. We are accustomed to think that, following the collapse of the Western Empire, most of the literary heritage of Greece and Rome was lost in the west and was only recovered after contact with the Arabs in Spain and Italy during the eleventh century and after the fall of Constantinople during the fifteenth. Yet this notion is quite simply untrue. The great majority of the literature of Greece and Rome that has survived into modern times was preserved by the monks of the sixth and seventh centuries and was never in fact forgotten. Thus for example Alcuin, the polyglot th
eologian of Charlemagne’s court, mentioned that his library in York contained works by Aristotle, Cicero, Lucan, Pliny, Statius, Trogus Pompeius, and Virgil. In his correspondences he quotes still other classical authors, including Ovid, Horace, and Terence. Abbo of Fleury (latter tenth century), who served as abbot of the monastery of Fleury, demonstrates familiarity with Horace, Sallust, Terence, and Virgil. Desiderius, described as the greatest of the abbots of Monte Cassino after Benedict himself, and who became Pope Victor III in 1086, oversaw the transcription of Horace and Seneca, as well as Cicero’s De Natura Deorum and Ovid’s Fasti.[24] His friend Archbishop Alfano, who had also been a monk of Monte Cassino, possessed a deep knowledge of the ancient writers, frequently quoting from Apuleius, Aristotle, Cicero, Plato, Varro, and Virgil, and imitating Ovid and Horace in his verse.

  By the end of the tenth century we find that monasteries all over Europe were in possession of enormous libraries stacked with the works of the classical authors, and that knowledge of Greek and even Hebrew was widespread. This is important, because it illustrates the continuity between this period and the world of Late Antiquity, and calls into serious question the entire concept of the Dark Age. It shows too that Christian Europe did not need to depend upon other societies and cultures (such as the Islamic) to reacquaint it with letters. Thus we find for example that Gerbert of Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II, taught Aristotle and logic, and brought to his students an appreciation of Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, Persius, Terence, Statius, and Virgil. We hear of lectures delivered on the classical authors in places like Saint Alban’s and Paderborn. A school exercise composed by Saint Hildebert survives in which he had pieced together excerpts from Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Seneca, Terence, and others. It has been suggested that Hildebert knew Horace almost by heart.[25]