by Will Durant
Is clothed in grace with a measuring rod, as tailors a garment fit.
O cypress tree, with silver limbs, this color and scent of thine
Have shamed the scent of the myrtle plant and the bloom of the eglantine.
Judge with thine eyes, and set thy foot in the fair and free,
And tread the jasmine under thy foot, and the flowers of the Judas tree….
O wonder not if in time of spring thou dost rouse such jealousy
That the cloud doth weep while the flowrets smile, and all on account of thee!
If o’er the dead thy feet should tread, those feet so fair and fleet,
No wonder it were if thou shouldst hear a voice from his winding sheet.
Distraction is banned from this our land in the time of our lord the King,
Save that I am distracted with love of thee, and men with the songs I sing.71
VI. MOSLEM SCIENCE: 1057–1258
Moslem scholars divided the medieval peoples into two classes—those that cultivated science, and those that did not. In the first class they named the Hindus, Persians, Babylonians, Jews, Greeks, Egyptians, and Arabs. These, in their view, were the elite of the world; the others, of whom the Chinese and the Turks were the best, resembled animals rather than men.72 The judgment sinned chiefly against the Chinese.
The Moslems continued, in this period, their unchallenged ascendancy in science. In mathematics the most signal advances were made in Morocco and Azerbaijan; we see here again the range of Islamic civilization. In 1229 Hasan al-Marraqushi (i.e., of Marraqesh) published tables of sines for each degree, and tables of versed sines, arc sines, and arc cotangents. A generation later Nasir ud-Din al-Tusi (i.e., of Tus) issued the first treatise in which trigonometry was considered as an independent science rather than an appendage to astronomy; this Kitab shakl al-qatta remained without a rival in its field until the De Triangulis of Regiomontanus two centuries later. Perhaps Chinese trigonometry, which appears in the second half of the thirteenth century, was of Arabic origin.73
The outstanding work of physical science in this age was the Kitab mizan al-hikmah, or Book of the Balance of Wisdom, written about 1122 by a Greek slave from Asia Minor, Abu’l Fath al-Khuzini. It gave a history of physics, formulated the laws of the lever, compiled tables of specific gravity for many liquids and solids, and proposed a theory of gravitation as a universal force drawing all things towards the center of the earth.74 Water wheels, known to the Greeks and Romans, were improved by the Moslems; the Crusaders saw such wheels raising water from the Orontes, and introduced them into Germany.75 Alchemists flourished; they knew, said al-Latif, “300 ways of making dupes.”76 One alchemist drew from Nur-ud-din a substantial loan for alchemical research, and disappeared; a wit, apparently unreproved, published a list of fools in which Nurud-din’s name led all the rest; and offered, if the alchemist would return, to substitute his name for that of the Sultan.77
In 1081 Ibrahim al-Sahdi of Valencia constructed the oldest known celestial globe, a brass sphere 209 millimeters (81.5 inches) in diameter; upon its surface, in forty-seven constellations, were engraved 1015 stars in their respective magnitudes.78 The Giralda of Seville (1190) was an observatory as well as a minaret; there Jabir ibn Aflah made the observations for his Islah al-majisti, or Correction of the Almagest (1240). The same reaction against Ptolemaic astronomy marked the works of Abu Ishaq al-Bitruji (Alpetragius) of Cordova, who paved the way for Copernicus by destructively criticizing the theory of epicycles and eccentrics through which Ptolemy had sought to explain the paths and motions of the stars.
The age produced two geographers of universal medieval renown. Abu Abdallah Muhammad al-Idrisi was born at Ceuta (1100), studied at Cordova, and wrote in Palermo, at the behest of King Roger II of Sicily, his Kitab al-Rujari (Roger’s Book). It divided the earth into seven climatic zones, and each zone into ten parts; each of the seventy parts was illustrated by a detailed map; these maps were the crowning achievement of medieval cartography, unprecedented in fullness, accuracy, and scope. Al-Idrisi, like most Moslem scientists, took for granted the sphericity of the earth. Rivaling him for the honor of being the greatest medieval geographer was Abu Abdallah Yaqut (1179–1229). Born a Greek in Asia Minor, he was captured in war and enslaved; but the Baghdad merchant who bought him gave him a good education, and then freed him. He traveled much, first as a merchant, then as a geographer fascinated by places and their diverse populations, dress, and ways. He rejoiced to find ten libraries at Merv, one containing 12,000 volumes; the discriminating curators allowed him to take as many as 200 volumes at a time to his room; those who have loved books as the lifeblood of great men will sense the dusty joy he felt in these treasuries of the mind. He moved on to Khiva and Balkh; there the Mongols almost caught him in their murderous advance; he fled, naked but clutching his manuscripts, across Persia to Mosul. While buttering the bread of poverty as a copyist, he completed his Mu’jam al-Buldan (1228)—a vast geographical encyclopedia which summed up nearly all medieval knowledge of the globe. Yaqut included almost everything—astronomy, physics, archaeology, ethnography, history, giving the co-ordinates of the cities and the lives and works of their famous men. Seldom has any man so loved the earth.
Botany, almost forgotten since Theophrastus, revived with the Moslems of this age. Al-Idrisi wrote a herbal, but stressed the botanical rather than merely the medicinal interest of 360 plants. Abu’l Abbas of Seville (1216) earned the surname of al-Nabati, the Botanist, by his studies of plant life from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Abu Muhammad ibn Baitar of Malaga (1190–1248) gathered all Islamic botany into a vast work of extraordinary erudition, which remained the standard botanical authority till the sixteenth century, and marked him as the greatest botanist and pharmacist of the Middle Ages.79 Ibn al-Awan of Seville (1190) won a like pre-eminence in agronomy; his Kitab al-Falaha (Book of the Peasant) analyzed soils and manures, described the cultivation of 585 plants and fifty fruit trees, explained methods of grafting, and discussed the symptoms and cures of plant diseases. This was the most complete treatment of agricultural science in the whole medieval period.80
In this as in the preceding age the Moslems produced the leading physicians of Asia, Africa, and Europe. They excelled especially in ophthalmology, perhaps because eye diseases were so prevalent in the Near East; there, as elsewhere, medicine was paid most to cure, least to prevent. Operations for cataract were numerous. Khalifah ibn-abi’l-Mahasin of Aleppo (1256) was so confident of his skill that he operated for cataract on a one-eyed man.81 Ibn Baitar’s Kitab al-Jami made medicinal-botanical history; it listed 1400 plants, foods, and drugs, 300 of them new; analyzed their chemical constitution and healing power; and added acute observations on their use in therapy. But the greatest name in this acme of Moslem medicine is Abu Marwan ibn Zuhr (1091–1162) of Seville, known to the European medical world as Avenzoar. He was the third in six generations of famous physicians, all of one family line, and each at the top of his profession. His Kitab al-Tasir, or Book of Simplification on Therapeutics and Diet, was written at the request of his friend Averroës, who (himself the greatest philosopher of the age) considered him the greatest physician since Galen. Ibn Zuhr’s forte was clinical description; he left classical analyses of mediastinal tumors, pericarditis, intestinal tuberculosis, and pharyngeal paralysis.82 Translations of the Tasir into Hebrew and Latin deeply influenced European medicine.
Islam led the world also in the equipment and competence of its hospitals. One founded by Nur-ud-din at Damascus in 1160 gave free treatment and drugs during three centuries; for 267 years, we are told, its fires were never extinguished.83 Ibn Jubayr, coming to Baghdad in 1184, marveled at the great Bimaristan Adadi, a hospital rising like some royal palace along the banks of the Tigris; here food and drugs were given to the patients without charge.84 In Cairo, in 1285, Sultan Qalaun began the Maristan al-Mansur, the greatest hospital of the Middle Ages. Within a spacious quadrangular enclosure four buildings rose around a courtyard adorned
with arcades and cooled with fountains and brooks. There were separate wards for diverse diseases and for convalescents; laboratories, a dispensary, out-patient clinics, diet kitchens, baths, a library, a chapel, a lecture hall, and particularly pleasant accommodations for the insane. Treatment was given gratis to men and women, rich and poor, slave and free; and a sum of money was disbursed to each convalescent on his departure, so that he need not at once return to work. The sleepless were provided with soft music, professional storytellers, and perhaps books of history.85 Asylums for the care of the insane existed in all the major cities of Islam.
VII. AL-GHAZALI AND THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL
Amid these advances of science the old orthodoxy fought to keep the loyalty of the educated classes. The conflict between religion and science led many to skepticism, some to open atheism. Al-Ghazali divided Moslem thinkers into three groups—theists, deists or naturalists, and materialists—and denounced all three groups alike as infidels. The theists accepted God and immortality, but denied creation and the resurrection of the body, and called heaven and hell spiritual conditions only; the deists acknowledged a deity but rejected immortality, and viewed the world as a self-operating machine; the materialists completely rejected the idea of God. A semi-organized movement, the Dahriyya, professed a frank agnosticism; several of these doubting Thomases lost their heads to the executioner. “You torment yourself for nothing,” said Isbahan ibn Qara to a pious faster during Ramadan; “man is like a seed of grain that sprouts and grows up and is then mowed down to perish forever…. Eat and drink!”86
It was in reaction against such skepticism that Mohammedanism produced its greatest theologian, the Augustine and the Kant of Islam. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was born at Tus in 1058, lost his father early, and was reared by a Sufi friend. He studied law, theology, and philosophy; at thirty-three he was appointed to the chair of law at the Nizamiya College in Baghdad; soon all Islam acclaimed his eloquence, erudition, and dialectical skill. After four years of this glory he was laid low by a mysterious disease. Appetite and digestion failed, paralysis of the tongue occasionally distorted his speech, and his mind began to break down. A wise physician diagnosed his case as mental in origin. In truth, as al-Ghazali later confessed in his remarkable autobiography, he had lost belief in the capacity of reason to sanction the Mohammedan faith; and the hypocrisy of his orthodox teaching had become unbearable. In 1094 he left Baghdad, ostensibly on a pilgrimage to Mecca; actually he went into seclusion, seeking silence, contemplation, and peace. Unable to find in science the support he sought for his crumbling faith, he turned from the outer to the internal world; there, he thought, he found a direct and immaterial reality, which offered a firm basis for belief in a spiritual universe. He subjected sensation—on which materialism seemed to rest—to critical scrutiny; accused the senses of making the stars appear small when, to be so visible from afar, they must be vastly larger than the earth; and concluded from a hundred such examples that sensation by itself could be no certain test of truth. Reason was higher, and corrected one sense with another; but in the end it too rested on sensation. Perhaps there was in man a form of knowledge, a guide to truth, surer than reason? Al-Ghazali felt that he had found this in the introspective meditation of the mystic: the Sufi came closer than the philosopher to the hidden core of reality; the highest knowledge lay in gazing upon the miracle of mind until God appeared within the self, and the self itself disappeared in the vision of an all-absorbing One.87
In this mood al-Ghazali wrote his most influential book—Tahafut al-Filasifa (The Destruction of Philosophy). All the arts of reason were turned against reason. By a “transcendental dialectic” as subtle as Kant’s, the Moslem mystic argued that reason leads to universal doubt, intellectual bankruptcy, moral deterioration, and social collapse. Seven centuries before Hume, al-Ghazali reduced reason to the principle of causality, and causality to mere sequence: all that we perceive is that B regularly follows A, not that A causes B. Philosophy, logic, science, cannot prove the existence of God or the immortality of the soul; only direct intuition can assure us of these beliefs, without which no moral order, and therefore no civilization, can survive.88
In the end al-Ghazali returned through mysticism to all orthodox views. The old fears and hopes of his youth flowed back upon him, and he professed to feel the eyes and threats of a stern deity close over his head. He proclaimed anew the horrors of the Mohammedan hell, and urged their preaching as necessary to popular morality.89 He accepted again the Koran and the Hadith. In his Ihya Ulum al-Din (Revival of the Science of Religion) he expounded and defended his renovated orthodoxy with all the eloquence and fervor of his prime; never in Islam had the skeptics and the philosophers encountered so vigorous a foe. When he died (1111), the tide of unbelief had been effectually turned. All orthodoxy took comfort from him; even Christian theologians were glad to find, in his translated works, such a defense of religion, and such an exposition of piety, as no one had written since Augustine. After him, and despite Averroës, philosophy hid itself in the remote corners of the Moslem world; the pursuit of science waned; and the mind of Islam more and more buried itself in the Hadith and the Koran.
The conversion of al-Ghazali to mysticism was a great victory for Sufism. Orthodoxy now accepted Sufism, which for a time engulfed theology. The mullahs—learned exponents of Moslem doctrine and law—still dominated the official religious and legal world; but the field of religious thought was yielded to Sufi monks and saints. Strangely contemporary with the rise of the Franciscans in Christendom, a new monasticism took form in twelfth-century Islam. Sufi devotees now abandoned family life, lived in religious fraternities under a sheik or master, and called themselves dervish or faqir—a Persian and an Arabic word for poor man or mendicant. Some by prayer and meditation, some by ascetic self-denial, others in the exhaustion that followed wild dancing, sought to transcend the self and rise to a wonder-working unity with God.
Their doctrine received formulation in the 150 books of Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240)—a Spanish Moslem domiciled in Damascus. The world was never created, said al-Arabi, for it is the external aspect of that which in inward view is God. History is the development of God to self-consciousness, which He achieves at last in man. Hell is temporary; in the end all will be saved. Love is mistaken when it loves a physical and transitory form; it is God Who appears in the beloved, and the true lover will find and love the author of all beauty in any beautiful form. Perhaps recalling some Christians of Jerome’s time, al-Arabi taught that “he who loves and remains chaste unto death dies a martyr,” and achieves the highest reach of devotion. Many married dervishes professed to live in such chastity with their wives.90
Through the gifts of the people some Moslem religious orders became wealthy, and consented to enjoy life. “Formerly,” complained a Syrian sheik about 1250, “the Sufis were a fraternity dispersed in the flesh but united in the spirit; now they are a body well clothed carnally, and ragged in divine mystery.”91 The populace smiled tolerantly at these sacred worldlings, but lavished worship upon sincere devotees, ascribed to them miraculous deeds and powers, honored them as saints, celebrated their birthdays, prayed for their intercession with Allah, and made pilgrimages to their tombs. Mohammedanism, like Christianity, was a developing and adjustable religion, which would have startled a reborn Mohammed or Christ.
As orthodoxy triumphed, toleration waned. From Harun al-Rashid on, the so-called “Ordinance of Omar,” formerly ignored, was increasingly observed. Theoretically, though not always in practice, non-Moslems were now required to wear distinguishing yellow stripes on their clothing; they were forbidden to ride on horseback, but might use an ass or a mule; they were not to build new churches or synagogues, but might repair old ones; no cross was to be displayed outside a church, no church bell should ring; non-Moslem children were not to be admitted to Moslem schools, but could have schools of their own: this is still the letter of the law—not always enforced—in Islam.92 Nevertheless there were 45
,000 Christians in tenth-century Baghdad;93 Christian funeral processions passed unharmed through the streets;94 and Moslem protests continued against the employment of Christians and Jews in high office. Even in the heat and challenge of the Crusades Saladin could be generous to the Christians in his realm.
VIII. AVERROËS
For a time philosophy survived in Moslem Spain by judiciously sprinkling professions of orthodoxy among the timid tentatives of critique; and thought found a precarious freedom in the courts of rulers who enjoyed in private the speculations that they accounted harmful to the populace. So the Almoravid governor of Saragossa chose as his minister and friend Abu Bekr ibn Bajja, who had been born there about 1106. Avempace, as Europe would call him, had reached even in youth an extraordinary proficiency in science, medicine, philosophy, music, and poetry. Ibn Khaldun tells how the governor so admired some verses of the young scholar that he vowed the poet should always walk on gold when entering his presence; whereupon ibn Bajja, lest this vow should abate his welcome, put a gold coin in each of his shoes. When Saragossa fell to the Christians the poet-scientist-minister fled to Fez, where he found himself destitute among Moslems who accused him of atheism. He died at the age of thirty, allegedly by poison. His lost treatise on music was accounted the masterpiece on that subtle subject in the literature of Western Islam. His most famous work, A Guide to the Solitary, renewed a basic theme of Arabic philosophy. The human intellect, said Ibn Bajja, is composed of two parts: the “material intellect,” which is bound up with the body and dies with it; and the “Active Intellect,” or impersonal cosmic mind, which enters into all men, and is alone immortal. Thought is man’s highest function; by thought, rather than by mystic ecstasy, man can attain to knowledge of, and union with, the Active Intellect, or God. But thinking is a perilous enterprise, except in silence. The wise man will live in quiet seclusion, shunning doctors, lawyers, and the people; or perhaps a few philosophers will form a community where they may pursue knowledge in tolerant companionship, far from the maddened crowd.95