The struggle over whether the Koran was uncreated and existed from eternity or whether it was created at a particular time by God and hence not eternal was no arcane quibble. This explosive question would not be left to theologians. It became a crisis in Islam. Men suffered torture and death for asserting that the Koran was or was not created.
It was during the brilliant and turbulent reign (724–743) of Caliph Hisham of Damascus, the tenth of the great Umayyad caliphs in the East, that the dangerous notion of the created Koran was first seriously proposed. In some ways Hisham himself was experimental. As he pushed his conquest out from Syria, defeating the Khazars and conquering Georgia, he tried to make his Arab troops part of the local communities. Pointing his ambitions eastward, he presided over the first Arabic translations of Iranian literature, and welcomed the foreign motifs from Persian architecture and decoration. He recruited talent wherever he could find it, even enlisting the Christian theologian John of Damascus as his financial officer.
Hisham braved strange and powerful enemies across the Middle East, ingeniously enlisting them in his empire of the faithful. But he was a scrupulous guardian of the faith. In the cosmopolitan atmosphere of his reign we begin to hear suggestions that the Koran was created. John of Damascus reported that this novel idea was considered “a contemptible abomination.” Caliph Hisham had Ja’d b. Dirham, the rebellious teacher of the suspect doctrine, put to death. After the fall of the Umayyad dynasty, the very name of Umayyad became anathema. The Umayyad tombs were violated. The corpse of Caliph Hisham himself was exhumed and publicly scourged.
With the rise of the Abbasid dynasty, the Muslim community was split. The authority of the new caliphate, never recognized in Spain nor in Morocco, reached westward only as far as Algiers. The traditional popular view of the uncreated Koran continued to be officially protected. When the famous Harun al-Rashid (786–809), fifth Abbasid caliph, heard one of the learned men of his realm (Bishr al-Marisi) say that the Koran was created, he threatened to “kill him in such a way as he had never yet killed anyone.” The unfortunate rebel went into hiding for twenty years, until Harun al-Rashid had died.
It was in the Golden Age of the caliphate, in the reign of Al-Mamun (813–833), Mamun the Great, that the House of Islam became newly receptive to the creative novelties of the outside world of unbelievers. Then, too, the dogma of the created Koran was newly tolerated. For a few years it actually became the official doctrine.
Under Mamun the Great, culture flourished as never before in the closed community of Islam. He opened windows to the world, especially to the West. In his new capital of Baghdad, Mamun set up his House of Wisdom, or more precisely a House of Knowledge. There he collected scholars, seeking out from remote capitals like Constantinople great works of the “foreign” sciences, and he brought translators to put works from Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Sanskrit into Arabic. Now Believers could read works of Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Euclid in their own language. Mamun had an observatory built by the great astronomer-astrologer Al-Farghani, who wrote treatises on Ptolemaic astronomy, on the mathematical theory of the astrolabe, and made a new estimate of the circumference of the earth. The great Al-Khwarizmi wrote a treatise on algebra, introduced Hindu numerals (later misnamed “Arabic”), and surveyed Greek and Hindu science. Never before and probably never since, was the community of Islam so receptive to creativity and novelty wherever found.
It is not surprising, then, that Mamun the Great welcomed the suggestion that the Koran itself offered another proof of the creativity of Allah. In 827 he publicly adopted and proclaimed the doctrine of the Mu’tazilites that the Koran was created.
Mamun the Great attached such importance to this dogma that he instructed his governors to query judges and scholars and enforce belief in the dogma of the created Koran. This became his test of orthodoxy. With threats of torture he made some Muslim martyrs among those who refused. The most famous of these, Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (780–855), had been a scholar from his boyhood in Baghdad. He traveled about the holy cities, studied with famous Muslim scholars in Mecca, Medina, Syria, Mesopotamia, Kufa, and Basra, and returned to settle in Baghdad, where he became the very model of everyday orthodoxy. He offered many more than the required number of prayers daily, and recited the whole Koran once every seven days. People called his life a continuous fast. He refused to budge from his traditional faith that the Koran was Allah’s uncreated word. When chains and prison would not persuade him, in 834 Mamun’s successor Caliph Mutasim had him scourged in the palace. As the angry crowd outside were about to attack the palace the caliph stopped the punishment. Soon thereafter Ibn Hanbal was freed.
Popular feeling for the tradition of the uncreated Koran was so strong that no later caliph dared insist on the contrary dogma. In 848 Caliph Al-Mutawakkil proclaimed that no one should be required to subscribe to the doctrine of the created Koran. The name of Hanbal became sacred and thousands attended his funeral. His compilation of forty thousand traditions related to the sunnah (the words and deeds) of the Prophet survived as an authority for Muslim law and sciences. His disciples, the Hanbalites, became one of the main schools of Muslim law. The caliphs had learned that the believing masses would not give up their faith in the uncreatedness of the Koran, which remained orthodox Muslim dogma.
Over the centuries again and again this position has been officially fortified. Mullahs gave this mysterious dignity of uncreatedness even to the everyday utterance of the words of the Koran by the faithful. “Agreement has established,” orthodox mullahs affirmed, “that what is between the two covers is the word of God, and what we read and write is the very speech of God. Therefore the words and letters are themselves the speech of God. Since the speech of god is uncreate, the words must be eternal uncreate.” So Islam rests firmly on Inlibration.
The more we read of the Koran and the Muslim God, the more natural it seems that Islam exempted their Holy Script from the world of creation. For the Muslim God, though a kind of Creator, had a character quite different from the God of the Hebrews and the Christians. As we have seen, Muslims allowed that the Bible was originally a sacred scripture. In several places, the Koran, too, mentions the six days of Creation. But in the Koran the role of the Creator is transformed. The familiar words of Genesis record that God spent six days on the Creation. “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made” (Genesis 2:2 and 3).
In the Koran God never rests, for he can never be tired.
We created the heavens
And the earth and all
Between them in Six Days
Nor did any sense
Of weariness touch Us.
(Surah L, 38)
It is no wonder that the Koranic God was not wearied. For He created not by making but by ordering, not by work but by command. The creation of anything occurs when He decrees it into being.
To Him is due
The primal origin
Of the heavens and the earth:
When He decreeth a matter,
He saith to it: “Be,”
And it is.
(Surah II, 117)
Again and again the Koran describes God’s fiat.
There are some similar expressions in Genesis of God creating by fiat. “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). But there is a vast difference in emphasis between the acts of Creation in the Bible and in the Koran. And between the character of the Hebrew-Christian God the Maker, and the Muslim God of Fiat. In the Bible, the Creation in the first chapter of Genesis is a historic event, prologue to all the rest of history chronicled in the Book. In the Koran the six “days” of Creation are not the beginning of a story but “signs” of God’s omnipotence and his claim on our obedience. Everything about us today, how man is benefited by animals, how the sun
and moon and stars shine, how the winds blow and change, how the rain falls to nourish the crops, how ships move, and how mountains remain in place—all these command our obedience and our awe of God.
The Muslim Creator-God is notable not only, nor even mainly, for His work in the Beginning, but as an orderer, a commander, of life and death in our present. The Judeo-Christian God is awesome for the uniqueness of His work in the Beginning. Then He may intervene by divine providence. But the Muslim God awes us by the continuity, the omnipresence, the immediacy, the inscrutable arbitrariness of his decrees.
It is He Who gives Life
And Death; and when He
Decides upon an affair,
He says to it, “Be,”
And it is.
(Surah XL, 68)
After the six days of God’s ukases, the six days of fiat, the God of the Koran, having no reason to rest, simply mounted the Throne of authority. From there he continued to rule by decree over life and death and every earthly act.
The relation of the Muslim God to his creature man, then, is quite unbiblical. The uniqueness of the biblical Creator-God was in his powers of making; the uniqueness of man and woman too would be in their power to imitate their God and after their fashion to exercise the power of creation. After God created the species in the Beginning, he blessed them to be fruitful and multiply; He made them so that each procreated after its kind (Genesis 1:22). This spectacle of Creation shaped and limited Western man’s thinking.
In the Koran, God’s fiat recurs in the conception and gestation of every human being, in every repetitive phenomenon of nature. Again and again God gives his order, “Be,” and it is, for each stage in man’s growth. Every such decree of re-creation provides an additional “sign” of God’s power and authority.
Why did God create man? The God of the Bible would judge man by his fulfillment of his godlike image. Not so in Islam.
“I have only created
Jinns and men, that
They may serve Me.
I created the Jinn and humankind only that they might worship Me.”
(Surah LI, 56)
Since Allah would judge men only by their attitude toward Him, Muslims do not like to be called Mohammedans. This is a kind of sacrilege, implying that any man, even the Prophet himself, could claim the submission due to God alone. The People of the Koran prefer to call themselves Muslims, from “Islam,” the Arabic word for submission or obedience. The Koran repeatedly reminds us that Allah’s creatures are also his “servants” or “slaves.” What clearer warning against reaching for the new? For a believing Muslim, to create is a rash and dangerous act.
BOOK ONE
CREATOR
MAN
The artist’s whole business is to make something out of nothing.
—PAUL VALÉRY (c.1930)
Mystified by the power to create, it is no wonder that man should imagine the artist to be godlike. In the West, belief in a Creator-God was a way of confessing that the power to make the new was beyond human explanation. By deifying the Creator, the West somehow encouraged and endorsed the new. Of course man’s power to create did not depend on a theory, and the human need to create has transcended the powers of explanation. Peoples of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome who did not know a Creator-God, who made something from nothing, still created works unexcelled of their kind. And peoples of the East who saw a cosmos of cycles created works of rare beauty in all the arts. Across the world, the urge to create needed no express reason and conquered all obstacles.
Still the West, whose unusual hospitality to the new was rooted in many causes and many mysteries, found added incentive in the vision of a Creator-God and a creator man. Creators in the West found their own ways to make a legacy, our heritage of the arts. In this book I describe the who, when, where, and what. But the why has never ceased to be a mystery.
Man’s power to make the new was the power to outlive himself in his creations. He found the materials of immortality in the stone around him or the artificial stone that he could make. He flexed his muscles of creativity in structures whose purpose would remain a mystery, and in temples of community. He dared to make images of himself and of the life around him. He made his words into worlds, to relive his past and reshape his future.
PART THREE
THE POWER
OF
STONE
Lend me the stone strength of the past
and I will lend you
The wings of the future, for I have them.
—ROBINSON JEFFERS (1924)
9
The Mystery of Megaliths
FROM the valleys of the Indus and the Nile to the Orkney Isles, the coasts of Brittany and the jungles of Yucatán, time offers its own verdict on man’s creations. Everywhere men have protested and resisted. Upended fifty-ton stones, alone or in rows or in circles, bear witness to man’s effort to outlive his life and make something that would endure forever. These first grand megalith creations long outlasted their creators. But with their message comes the mystery of their creation, reminding us that men never know the powers of what they have created.
Of the many puzzling megaliths, the enormous works of primeval architecture scattered around northwestern Europe, the most impressive and the most famous is Stonehenge. On an undulating plain near the cathedral city of Salisbury in southern England are the remains of two concentric circles of large stones, enclosing rows of smaller stones. In the early Middle Ages this pile was christened “Stonehenge” from the Old English for “hanging stones.”
Stonehenge “stands as lonely in history,” said Henry James, “as it does on the great plain.” When archaeologists found similar remains elsewhere around the Atlantic fringe of Europe, they tried to give Stonehenge its proper place in history. Most other megaliths were single stones or groups of stones called menhirs (from Breton or Welsh “long stone”) set upright. But Stonehenge was a large open-air structure of stones symmetrically arranged. Some had been shaped to lie on the uprights. The tops of some showed a projecting piece, a tenon, to fit into the mortise hole of the stone that rested on it.
The individual menhirs were single feats of primitive engineering. Stonehenge was something more—a work of primeval architecture. Archaeologists who made timetables from remains in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean, dated Stonehenge near the dawn of European history. They would not believe that Stonehenge could be the work of “barbarians” who had neither metal nor writing. Stonehenge, they said, must have been a distant offshoot from the centers of Western civilization in the Mediterranean. “Megalithic missionaries,” they said, must have brought the advanced Mediterranean technology across Europe. These migrants supposedly were not “fresh contingents of Neolithic farmers” but “a spiritual aristocracy.” The peculiarities of their sepulchral architecture suggested at least three groups of such missionaries in Great Britain. This appealing vision confirmed the fertility of the revered sources of Western culture in the eastern Mediterranean and at the same time affirmed the incompetence of mere “barbarians.” Without the inspired know-how of Egypt and Mycenae behind them, who could have created such grand structures in those remote centuries?
But this self-serving vision proved an illusion, a parable of the dangers of seeming too wise about man’s powers of creation. An unpredicted new twentieth-century technique for dating man’s past creations dissolved the tempting vision of prehistoric missionaries crossing Europe to instruct Neolithic barbarians in the architecture of megaliths. It was a surprising by-product of World War II research for the atomic bomb. In 1945 an ingenious atomic physicist, Willard Frank Libby (b. 1908), and his students at the University of Chicago suggested that measuring the presence of a rare isotope of carbon (carbon-14) might help date archaeological remains. This form of carbon is always found in the atmosphere in microscopic quantities and it disintegrates at a fixed rate. When organic objects cease to grow, they cannot assimilate carbon. Thus, by comparing the amount of carbon-14 in the object wi
th that in the atmosphere today, it might be possible to fix the approximate date when a fossilized organism died or when a tree was cut. This provided a better method than any before for dating objects up to fifty thousand years in age. When checked by another technique, “dendrochronology” (the use of very old trees to measure antiquity), it appeared that Libby’s assumptions about the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere in the distant past were not quite correct. Tests on the rings of trees several thousand years old revealed that the radiocarbon level before 1000 B.C. had deviated from the present level and was higher than now. This changed the yardstick for measuring antiquity and meant that specimens were even older than suggested by Libby’s examples based on constant carbon-14 production in the atmosphere.
When applied to Stonehenge and the associated organic remains, these new techniques carried a startling message. They pushed the date for the construction of Stonehenge back to about 2000 B.C., long before the Cyclopean stone walls of Mycenae. Stonehenge, one of the most impressive, now became one of the earliest works of European architecture, the work of “mere barbarians,” people who had neither metal nor writing. It meant that other megalithic monuments could have dated from that early age. The enduring monuments of primeval architecture, then, were no longer witnesses to the outreaching power of Mycenae. Instead they revealed man’s irrepressible creative powers everywhere and democratized the history of man the creator. For now it appeared that the great prehistoric works were not dispersed from a single source. From this too we learn not to underestimate man’s powers to create. If we see the what we must not always expect to know the why or the how. Archaeologists did not see how these prehistoric Britons could have moved fifty-ton megaliths. Still Stonehenge must have been the precocious work of remote antiquity.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 10