by Ehsan Masood
Distorted imaginations
There are two main ways in which the Dark Ages myth has distorted the truth about the Islamic contribution to knowledge, culture and, in particular, science.
The first is the idea that the scholars of Islam acted as little more than custodians to the great classical works of scholarship, and added little of substance to the progress of human knowledge. Just how wrong that view could be will become clear later on. But it has led to much of the attention around the scholarship of the Islamic middle ages being focused on the ‘Translation Project’, the extraordinary movement to translate many of the great works of ancient Greece into Arabic, during Islam’s so-called Golden Age under the Abbasid caliphs in the 9th century. This was indeed a phenomenal achievement, and it did ensure that the best of classical learning was not lost. But it seems likely that it is just one part of the sustained Arabic scholarship that began before the Golden Age of the Abbasids and endured for many centuries after, spreading well beyond Abbasid Baghdad, into Cairo and Cordoba, Persia and Uzbekistan.
There is what some scholars call a ‘classical narrative’ about Islamic science that has been put forward by orientalists in the past. This tells us that Muslim intellectual life shone for a few centuries under the Abbasids and their immediate successors. The Abbasids, led by the Caliph al-Mamun, were on the side of a progressive, rationalist approach to Islam, which enabled Muslims to take on board Greek learning in translation. But the growing influence of a conservative tendency which gave more weight to literalism in revelation and less to human logic gradually stifled scholarship. The turning point was a famous polemic against intellectuals in the 12th century by the theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali called The Incoherence of the Philosophers. When Baghdad and many other Islamic cities were destroyed by the horrific Mongol raids in the following century, Islam turned inwards and intellectual life declined – at just the time when the Europeans were able to go forward with the essentially Greek body of knowledge passed on by the Arabic scholars of the Golden Age.
The problems with this classical narrative are gradually being exposed, however. The philosophical standoff between the so-called rationalists and literalists was far more nuanced than it suggests, and the idea that Islamic science came to an end after al-Ghazali, or even the Mongol raids, is now known to be wrong. Some of the greatest minds of the Islamic era, such as al-Jazari, ibn al-Nafis and the astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, carried on the tradition well beyond the first stirrings of the European Renaissance.
An Islam of the West
The second distortion created by the Dark Ages myth is the notion that there was little or no positive contact between the West and Islam, and little real exchange of ideas, except for the eventual passing on of classical texts prior to the Renaissance.
There is no doubt that the history of the Crusades and the barriers of misunderstanding between the West and Islamic countries today help to reinforce the impression that beneficial contact between Islam and the West was minimal. It is highly likely, too, that many scholars in the Renaissance later played down or even disguised their connection to the Middle East for both political and religious reasons. The notion of the Dark Ages has reinforced the impression of separation. How could there be any contact between Islamic civilisations and a Europe lost in barbarian darkness?
Much new scholarship and archaeological research, however, is challenging this assumption. It now seems likely that there was considerable contact between Islam and the West even as early as the 7th century. In some ways, it is a mistake to talk about the Islamic ‘world’ and the Western ‘world’, as people often do; what is more accurate is to say that they are simply different parts of the same world.
The Arabs of Europe
For a start, Arabic-speaking merchants seem to have been trading throughout Western Europe at this time, providing wealthy people with luxuries such as sugar, carpets and silks. Gold dinar coins inscribed in Arabic have been found across Europe dating from the 8th to the 10th centuries. One of the most remarkable finds in England is a gold coin from the time of the Mercian King Offa, of Offa’s Dyke fame, around 773–96 CE. This coin, now in the British Museum in London, is like the dinars minted for the first Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur in Baghdad in 773–4, with one exception – in the middle of the Arabic words stating that ‘there is no God but Allah alone’, there is inscribed in Latin capitals the name OFFA REX. A few scholars believe strongly that this could be evidence that Offa had converted to Islam. Equally likely, however, is that Offa had the coins copied – Arabic inscription and all – for the purpose of buying goods from the merchants of the Islamic world. An early example, if you will, of the idea of a trans-national single currency.
Across the English Channel at around the same time, the Frankish king Charlemagne was minting silver ‘denarius’ coins, also clearly modelled on Arabic dinars. He too was very much in the market for oriental luxuries. Indeed, Charlemagne was at this time exchanging gifts and letters with Baghdad’s Harun al-Rashid, the caliph made famous in The Thousand and One Arabian Nights tales. In 801 CE, he sent Charlemagne an elephant called Abul Abbas, which is believed to have caused a sensation in the streets of Aix-la-Chapelle. The caliph also sent the king a carved ivory horn, a tray, a gold pitcher, a chess set, a tent, brass candlesticks and a water clock that astonished everyone who saw it and heard it striking the hour!
In addition, research from scholars such as Nabil Matar of the University of London shows that there was extensive and continuous contact between Islam and Christian Europe throughout the early and late middle ages in a host of different ways. Besides the merchants and entertainers who plied their trade across Europe, there was exchange of ideas and goods at every level in the places where the worlds of Islam and Europe became one – in Spain, in Sicily and in southern France – not to mention via Byzantium.
Some of the ways in which Islamic science and technology fed into Europe will be explored later in this book. At the same time, there are strong parallels between many things Islamic and those long regarded as part of the Western way of life. How they came to be will also be explored in these pages.
A shared Europe
It is already well known that coffee came from the East. According to one theory it was discovered after goat-herds in Yemen, or perhaps Ethiopia (depending on which version of the story you read), noticed how frisky their charges became after eating certain berries. You might even know that the sugar that sweetens coffee originated here too. Indeed, there are many more everyday pleasures that are to be found in early Islam, but whose history is not so well known.
Take gardens as a place of relaxation rather than just a place for growing vegetables or herbs, for instance. They came to us from Persia. ‘Early Muslims everywhere made earthly gardens that gave glimpses of the heavenly garden to come’, says the historian A.M. Watson in his book Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World. ‘Long indeed would be the list of early Islamic cities that could boast huge expanses of gardens.’ Islamic-era Toledo boasted Europe’s first large botanical gardens in the 11th century. Many of the traditional flowers that grace the English garden also existed in the Islamic world – tulips, carnations, irises, and of course that quintessentially English flower, the rose. So too did many garden features, such as fountains and pergolas, conservatories and bandstands, not to mention mazes and sunshades.
Move indoors and you might walk across the carpet for a gentle game of chess. Both of these were also in use in the early Islamic world. Islamic carpets were imported as essential luxuries for centuries, long before the 18th-century Industrial Revolution meant that they could be made more cheaply in Europe. Chess, developed and played in India, came to Europe around the 9th century via Persia and Arabic-speaking Spain, and via the Viking trade routes from central Asia. The word ‘checkmate’ is similar to the Persian shahmat, meaning ‘the king is defeated’. After your game, you might drink an aperitif from a glass – distillation and drinking-glasses are both inn
ovations developed in Islam.
Even many deeper aspects of Western faith and culture are shared by those of the ancient Islamic world. The arches of some cathedrals, those pinnacles of Christian architecture, are shared by many mosques. And stained-glass windows were also used in Islamic times, as was the music notation: ‘do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do’. Many of our basic institutions, too, can also be found in the world of medieval Islam, including public hospitals and libraries. The medicine of Hussain ibn-Sina (Avicenna) was Europe’s default medical system up until the discovery of germ theory.
The cultures of Islam nurtured – and continue to have – a deep and rich tradition of love songs, poetry and romantic literature, some of which would undoubtedly have crossed over and synthesised with similar literary traditions in Europe. These traditions include the idea of doomed love – an early example of which is the 7th-century story of Layla and Majnoon and its countless variants, including of course Romeo and Juliet.
All of this might seem to have nothing directly to do with science, but the connection is important. Once you begin to appreciate something of the scope of the many links between Islamic and European cultures, it seems almost perverse to imagine that Islamic science and technology had no real effect on Western learning, and vice versa.
Part I
The Islamic Quest
2
The Coming of the Prophet
How could naked men, riding without armour or shield have been able to win … and bring low the proud Persians?
Christian monk John Bar Penkayë, Turkey, 680 CE
The speed of the spread of Islam seems as astonishing today as it must have done when it happened in the 7th century. Alexander the Great and the Mongols also conquered vast areas very quickly. Yet both these conquests were short-lived and had little, if any, lasting effect. Islam seemed to change forever virtually every area it went to – from the west of China to the south of Spain, and including much of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Many of the lands that eventually came under Muslim rule would adopt Arabic and Persian as working languages, and Islam would become the new religion – permanently. Only Spain returned to Christianity after Muslims and Jews were driven out in the 15th century. However, the Arabic language has fared less well, and both Arabic and Persian today are confined to the countries of the Middle East and North Africa. The majority of the Islamic peoples use indigenous languages, as well as European languages such as English and French.
Even more remarkable than the speed and permanence of Islam was the fact that it was achieved without a professional army: instead, Islam spread far and wide through the efforts of untrained men, often mystics, on camel and on foot. It’s no wonder that they believed, as did many who witnessed it, that they were driven by a divine wind. The energy and vision which powered Islam’s spread may well be the same motor that drove learning and science in the Islamic world, so it’s worth looking at how it all began.
A lonely desert
In the early 7th century, the Middle East was dominated by two giant empires, the Sassanid empire of mostly Zoroastrian Persia in the east and the Christian Byzantine empire to the west. Both sprawled over vast areas – the Persian empire stretched far across Central Asia to the Himalayas, and the Byzantine empire wrapped almost right around the Mediterranean – and they had seen few challenges to their dominance for centuries. But rivalry, and perhaps a series of plague epidemics, had sapped their strength. Byzantium had only just recovered, after a long and bloody struggle, the former territories in the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean, that it had lost to the Sassanians. And maybe they were too preoccupied with each other to pay much attention to their southern fringes.
Here, sandwiched between them, lay the lands of the Arabic-speaking peoples. Arabia was then, as it is now, vast yet sparsely populated, much of it desert where rainfall is almost as low as anywhere in the world. The few precious patches of green are almost lost amid swathes of scorched sand and gravel, and barren, buff-and-grey plateaus, cliffs and gorges. By day, the sun blazes down here relentlessly and twice every year, for a month or more, winds blow from the north, picking up hundreds of millions of grains of sand and dust. These storms billow and roar across the desert in a blinding, stinging cloud, or spin off into vicious little whirling, twisting dust devils named djinn, after the magical spirit-beings of Arabian folklore, known in English as genies.
It is perhaps no wonder, then, that neither Persia nor Byzantium felt the need to conquer this challenging land. And so the empty spaces of Arabia were left largely to the peoples of the desert, described by Western scholars as the Bedouin. Some moved from oasis to oasis with their livestock, while the few permanently settled areas and towns were occupied by clans or tribes. Uninterested, the empires simply relied on intermediaries to keep these tribes in line.
Both the nomadic and the settled populations worshipped a range of lesser gods that they believed were subordinate to a supra-God, whom they called Allah, the High God. They had a network of leaders; and boys and young men were taught from an early age how to ride and were expected to become skilled swords-men and archers. At the same time, a rich tradition of romantic oral poetry glorifying military heroism also emerged. This pre-Islamic warrior culture was later described by the Muslims as the jahiliya, or age of reckless ignorance.
Trouble in Mecca
As the Sassanian princes reclined on their carpets and cushions in Ctesiphon, the Persian capital, and the Byzantines sucked on the fruits of empire in Byzantium, they probably thought little of the effects of their taste for luxuries. Yet across the Persian Gulf, the trade in spices and precious metals and gems through the Arabian peninsula was having a hugely disruptive influence on Arabia. As merchants competed for business in trading towns, an uncomfortable social divide was opening up between rich and poor.
It was in one of these towns, Mecca, that a young merchant called Muhammad, born in 570, began to worry about the consequences of the pursuit of wealth for its own sake. Historians disagree over whether or not Mecca was a spice town, although it was certainly a thriving trading centre and Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraysh, had something of a monopoly over the goods caravans that moved between Syria in the north and Yemen to the south. But Mecca had another, more significant claim to fame.
The stone and the well
Although not far from the Red Sea port of Jeddah, Mecca was not what would you call a verdant oasis, located as it was in a desolate valley between mountains. But most people didn’t come to Mecca for the scenery; they came as pilgrims to visit the Ka’bah. The Ka’bah is now the most sacred place on earth for Muslims, located right at the heart of the Sacred Mosque, and it is towards this that they turn when they say their daily prayers. But it was a sacred spot long before the coming of Muhammad, and is believed by Muslims to have been built by Abraham as a place to worship a single God. Outside the cubic shrine are the remains of a black meteorite called the Black Stone of Mecca.
Just a few metres from the Ka’bah is another sacred site, the ancient well of Zamzam. According to Islamic tradition, the well was miraculously revealed to Abraham’s second wife Hagar 4,000 years ago. The family paused here on a journey south while the ageing Abraham went back for his first wife Sarah. But the place where he left her was dry, and Hagar was soon desperate for water for her infant son Ishmael. As she scoured the area in a panic, Ishmael began to dig the ground with his foot. The result of this was that water gushed from the ground and Hagar had to build a dam of sand and stone to stop it flowing away. The name Zamzam comes from the phrase zomë zomë, meaning ‘stop flowing’. When Abraham returned, it is said, he built the Ka’bah nearby.
The young reformer
So, Mecca was a place of pilgrimage long before the coming of Islam. The city is also mentioned in the Bible in Psalm 84, as the well of Baca. But by Muhammad’s time, belief in a single God was replaced by belief in many, which was reflected in the fact that the Ka’bah contained representations of these many
deities.
Muhammad is described in Islamic literature as being an idealistic, upright, but trusted young man born to the Quraysh elite. He is said to have hated the venality and superficiality of Mecca even before revelation. He and his friends would often do things to help the poor and the old: widows, orphans and slaves. A wealthy widow named Khadija, clearly struck by the honesty and integrity of this young merchant, employed him as manager of her business affairs, and later proposed marriage to him. The marriage was long and is said to have been a happy one. Yet he continued to be repulsed by the greed and poverty he saw in his home city, and as he approached middle age, he became increasingly upset by it.
Revelation
In 610 CE, when Muhammad was 40, he was sitting in the cave beyond the city limits on Mount Hira where he often retreated to meditate. It is here that Islamic tradition says he saw a vision that turned out to be the angel Gabriel. The angel said to Muhammad:
Read in the name of your Sustainer who created you.
Who created humans from congealed blood.
Read and your God is most bountiful.
Who taught through the pen.
Who taught humans what they did not know.
(Qur’an, verse 96)
The angel’s words would later become an anthem for science and learning in the Islamic world.
More revelations came, and Muhammad began to preach to members of his family and then to others in Mecca. He called on them to accept a single, all-powerful God, to reject the need for intermediary gods, and also to do away with greed and to treat fellow citizens with justice and to give them dignity. Khadija immediately joined him and Muhammad quickly found other followers, drawn by his denunciation of greed and his vision of equality. He stressed from the start that he was not starting a new religion, but was simply reminding people to revert to the teachings of prophets who had come before him, and that Allah was the God of Abraham, Jesus and Moses.