Science and Islam_A History_Icon Science

by Ehsan Masood

  Even so, the wealthy and politically powerful of Mecca found his ideas threatening, and in 622 Muhammad fled the city for Medina, an event called the hijra. Yet this proved to be just a temporary setback. Such was the appeal of his ideas that converts came quickly and in large numbers.

  Warriors and martyrs

  From the beginning, Islam’s survival depended not just on the mouth-to-mouth spread of ideas. Islamic tradition says that Muhammad tried to avoid armed conflict, but that he and his fledgling group of followers in Medina were forced early on to fight for their survival against attacks from the Meccan elite. A series of skirmishes culminated in the battle of Badr outside Mecca, the first battle for Islam, in which a small Muslim army triumphed over a much larger Meccan army. For the Muslims, this victory was powerful proof that God was on their side.

  The belief that God was helping them on to victory came to play a large part in success on the battlefield. Believing that they had a divine wind at their back gave the Islamic armies the extraordinary confidence that enabled them to sweep aside much larger and better-equipped forces. From the first accounts of the battle of Badr, Muslims who died fighting for the cause were considered martyrs, and as martyrs they would go straight to heaven. It is likely that some of the early Muslims were driven on, not just by the promise of the next world, but by the promise of rewards on earth too. Many of those who fought for Islam in the early years were among the poorest people in the region. The spoils of the Byzantine and Sassanian empires would undoubtedly raise their standards of living.

  The Islamic state

  Politics has always been important to Islam. From Muhammad’s time, the first Muslims found themselves ranged against those who held political power, initially because they were not allowed to preach openly, and later to defend themselves against attacks from the Meccan establishment. A decade after the first revelation, however, Islam would itself become the source of power. Muhammad would establish rules for a small Islamic city state in Medina, and later generations of Muslims would seek to use myriad interpretations of Islam as the basis for exercising power across the new Islamic empires.

  This political aspect of Islam would also help to drive the later championing of science. As in all empires, science and knowledge in the Islamic empires were all part of political power. Islam was both a faith and a political movement. Muhammad’s aim was not just to provide individuals with a new way of life, but to create a new vision of society – a new state and community. This is one reason why it has been so especially hard for those Muslims who were later colonised by the nations of Europe to live under the authority of the new rulers – rulers who Muslims believed did not share their view of a just society.

  After Muhammad

  When Muhammad died in 632, Sunni Muslims believe he did so without formally anointing a successor. Confusion about who should take over the leadership of the new movement caused many problems – problems so profound and lasting that they have led to many centuries of conflict and remain at the heart of many of the tensions that exist in the Islamic world today, including the divisions between Shia and Sunni Muslims.

  There were at least three groups from which a new leader could have been chosen: he could have come from one of the faithful Companions who had accompanied Muhammad from the earliest days; it might have been someone from the Quraysh tribe; or Muhammad’s own family – in particular, his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. Ali’s supporters would later establish Islam’s Shia branch, distinct from the Sunni majority. In the end, the role of Muhammad’s first khalifa (successor, or caliph) was given to one of his closest Companions and one of the first Muslims, Abu Bakr. Neither of the groups that lost out was completely happy about this. The first four caliphs – Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and finally Ali himself – were later called the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, and each caliph was chosen anew rather than the caliphate being passed on to their children. However, Abu Bakr was the only one of them who did not meet with a violent end.

  It was probably to stabilise that situation that a powerful Meccan family called the Umayyads, led by Muawiya, eventually took control after Ali was murdered in 661. The Umayyads moved the caliphate from Mecca to Damascus and with Muawiya established the first dynasty of caliphs, which was to last until 750 when they were ousted by the Abbasids, a family with connections to Ali.

  Yet despite the tensions at the top, in less than three decades under the first four caliphs, the forces of Islam had conquered both the entire Persian empire of the Sassanians and much of the Byzantine empire. Under Abu Bakr, in just two years after Muhammad’s death, they had consolidated their power over all Arabia, taken Iraq from the Persians, and won Damascus from the Byzantines.

  Perhaps the greatest of the Islamic victories was at Yarmuk in what is now Jordan in 636, in which an army of some 30,000–40,000 routed a Byzantine force of well over 100,000. At one point during the battle some of the Muslim soldiers withdrew, it is said, only to be met by their women who drove them back into the fray with tent poles, singing:

  O you who run from a constant woman

  Who has both beauty and virtue;

  And leave her to the infidel,

  The hated and evil infidel,

  To possess, disgrace and ruin.

  Without that kind of pressure behind them, perhaps it’s no wonder that the Byzantines were routed. The battle was a disaster for them, and the Byzantine emperor Heraclius fled by ship from Yarmuk back to Byzantium, apparently blaming the defeat on divine vengeance for his marriage to his young niece Martina.

  The Muslim victory at Yarmuk sent shockwaves around the world. Some time later, the monk St Anastasius noted from Mount Sinai that it was ‘the first and fearful and incurable fall of the Roman army’. After Yarmuk, the Byzantine empire quickly lost much of its territory and was reduced to a rump in what is now Turkey and around Byzantium. In 638, the Muslims captured Jerusalem, a moment of great symbolic importance. By 640, most of Syria was under their control. Two years later Byzantine Egypt fell, and within a few decades so had all of Byzantine North Africa as far as the Atlantic. Meanwhile, just a year after Yarmuk, the Persians had been defeated in their heartland of Iran after the battle of Qadisiyyah, and soon after, Muslims had pushed right through Persia to the borders of Central Asia.

  3

  Building Islam

  Even if you must go all the way to China, seek knowledge.

  The Prophet Muhammad

  By the time the Umayyad Caliph Muawiya came to power in 661, the task of the leader of Islam had changed dramatically. For the first few decades after the Prophet Muhammad had died, the new Muslims had been preoccupied with battles against their Persian and Byzantine neighbours. In later years, the caliph’s priorities changed and he turned his attention to administering an empire.

  He still needed an army to police the empire and defend its territory – but this would now be a professional army of paid soldiers from any religion or race, and not a voluntary army. The caliph also needed administrators to collect taxes and run local affairs, and he needed skilled men to maintain the empire’s infrastructure. And the caliph himself needed to be at the most practical place to run an empire – the major city of Damascus, at the centre of the empire, not Mecca, a small town on its south-eastern fringes. Damascus became the capital and very quickly this ancient city, already well over 6,000 years old, was the bustling hub of the Islamic world.

  The Muslims turned to the task of maintaining their new empire with the same energy that had driven them to creating it. The consensus among historians is that little real effort was made to convert those non-Muslims who found themselves citizens of the Islamic empire. As the experience of the Soviet Union and China amply demonstrates, lasting belief in a religion or an ideology can happen only through free will and cannot be forced. For a long while, less than a tenth of the Islamic world’s population was Muslim. The other 90 per cent was a mixture of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and those from other faiths. Christians in the Islamic empir
e on the whole found that they were treated better by the Muslims than they had been by their former Byzantine rulers. Byzantium adhered to a form of Christianity which insisted on a single interpretation of the nature of Christ, and they persecuted dissidents such as the Nestorians, who gradually escaped eastwards from Syria through Persia, eventually reaching China (the first Christians there). Nestorian and other Syriac-speaking Christians were later to play a key role in the project to translate works of learning from Greek to Arabic.

  Historians argue that the first Muslims were not keen on too many new converts partly because of money. The majority People of the Book – that is, Jews, Christians and others whose faiths were based on sacred texts – had to pay different taxes from Muslims, which would guarantee them the protection of the state and exempt them from military service. So encouraging a much larger number of Christians and Jews to become Muslim could have meant a loss of revenue for the rulers. However, Christians and Jews, by the standards of today, did experience discrimination. They were not allowed to stand for the highest office, and they were not entitled to free healthcare in some places.

  The Umayyad mosque

  In the meantime, such a multi-cultural and multi-religious atmosphere meant that many people were able to bring their energies to bear in the dynamic new empire. In few places is the uniquely Islamic mix of talents clearer than in the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. For the first 40 years in Damascus, Muslims simply shared a small church with the Christians. Then in 706, the Caliph al-Walid I bought the church from the Christians, had it demolished and built a mosque. This was the first great Muslim building. The ambition and organisational skill is clear in its scale.

  When Caliph al-Walid launched the scheme, he announced: ‘Inhabitants of Damascus, four things give you marked superiority over the rest of the world: your climate, your water, your fruits and your baths. To these I wanted to add a fifth: this mosque.’ What he gave them with the mosque was one of the biggest buildings that had been built since Roman times, and one that still looks striking after almost 1,300 years. Tellingly, maybe, for the future development of science, the mosque absorbed the latest classical architecture and then moved it forward. Al-Walid even shipped in 200 of the best Byzantine craftsmen to provide him with some wonderful mosaics. But then these elements were transformed into something new and uniquely Islamic. The confident expression of an entirely new Islamic style of building and decoration, from the elaborate geometric swirls to the richly coloured walls, the domes and minarets, is unmistakable.

  Progressing in faith and science

  Absorbing the best of other civilisations and then modifying and innovating with new ideas is the hallmark of science. It is also one of the characteristics of Islam. Muhammad made it clear that Islam was not a new religion. Christianity and Judaism both came from the same root, and like Islam they looked back to Abraham as their starting point. The Qur’an was not the only word, simply the last. In the Islamic tradition the Prophet made a miraculous night-time trip to heaven from Jerusalem, called the mi’raj. While in heaven, Muhammad met all the prophets, including Jesus, and led them in prayer. Islam’s calling-card was that it provided both a link to the past and a confident new future.

  During the years of the Umayyad caliphates, it seems that the administrative and practical machinery of the empire was developing rapidly. Moreover, there was a large economic stimulus. As Muslims spread out across the Middle East and into Africa, for instance, tent-cities were established at places like Basra and Kufa in Iraq and Fustat in Egypt. All these cities eventually became permanent – Fustat developed into Cairo – but from the beginning they needed supplying with all kinds of goods, and the new armies, administrators and their families had the money to pay for them.

  The farming revolution

  In particular, they needed food, and the fertile lowlands of Iraq, and later the plains of Egypt and Andalusia, became the focus of what can only be called an agricultural revolution. The Arabic-speaking peoples had always been great travellers, and as the empire expanded, they brought ideas from Morocco to Mongolia for boosting food production in their new homes. All these ideas were eventually incorporated into farming manuals.

  From Andalusia, for instance, the Muslims of Iraq discovered and then developed crop rotation. Previously, there had been just one harvest every year in winter. With crop rotation, they were able to obtain several harvests every year. But this innovation would not have been possible without another. The dry, hot weather that often afflicted the Iraqi lowlands would have made summer cropping impossible. So irrigation techniques were developed. Sugar, for instance, had to be watered every four to eight days in the summer, but astonishingly, the early farmers achieved it.

  The introduction of the famous ancient water tunnels or qanats from Iran was just one of their successes with irrigation. Even more impressive were their water-raising techniques, and in particular their norias or water wheels. The first mention of norias comes from the time of the Umayyad caliphates in connection with a canal being dug near Basra. Although the famous norias of Hama in Syria date back only to the 14th century, they are probably typical of countless water-raising machines that were soon in use all over the Islamic world. Water-raising later became the focus of some of the key technological achievements of the Islamic era, such as those by al-Jazari, the Turkish engineer, as we shall see later.

  New crops and new owners

  Besides new techniques and water management systems, crops were taken from one part of the world and introduced elsewhere. Oranges and lemons, for instance, came from India to the Middle East around the end of the 9th century and soon spread across the Islamic world and into Spain. In the same way, the empire cultivated and then spread sugar, pomegranates, figs, olives, cotton and many other crops far and wide.

  Many of these innovations needed another key development: this was the idea of property rights for small farmers. The Islamic empires were not feudal states, and individuals were allowed to own land so long as they paid taxes on it. This kept the cities well fed and also contributed to the exchequer. The new complexities of land ownership, calculating appropriate shares, working out tax bills and so on were probably also a key factor in the pressure from officials right up to the caliph to develop mathematical and computational systems to handle them. Many of the examples that the mathematician Musa al-Khwarizmi was soon to use to demonstrate his new technique of algebra come from the world of farming and landowning. And the need to get accurate information for planting and harvesting times may have had a similar effect on astronomy.

  A new language

  The administration of the Islamic territories was probably an equally important stimulus to scholarship and science. For the first few decades, the business of government was performed in the relevant national language, with the aid of interpreters. In the 690s, however, Caliph Abd al-Malik decreed that Arabic was to be used in all official documents. That meant that anyone wanting to work for the government – even conduct business with government officials – had to be able to write Arabic. The long-term impact of this simple measure was huge. Gradually, pretty much everyone from Andalusia to Afghanistan learned to speak a form of Arabic. For anyone who could write, Arabic became effectively a universal language right across the vast extent of the Muslim world. Just as English is the language of science today, so the spread of written Arabic allowed scholars from distant places and numerous different cultures to communicate their ideas easily and note them down for others to read. It’s probable that this, as much as anything, helped to enable and sustain Islamic science over so many centuries.

  Making a mint

  At around the same time, Abd al-Malik introduced another far-reaching measure. Just as with language, the Muslims had made do with existing Byzantine coinage in the early decades. Apparently, one story goes, the Byzantine emperor was unhappy with a mention of the Prophet in some official documents, and countered by threatening to have coins inscribed with words that would offend Musli
ms. So, the story goes on, Abd al-Malik asked for advice from a famous prince and scholar called Khalid ibn-Yazid. Khalid’s solution was simple – make your own coins. And from that time on, dinars, complete with an inscription praising God, became the currency for the new empire.

  Historian George Saliba suggests that events such as this might have proved a stimulus for the start of the movement to translate scientific texts into Arabic and for scientific experiment in general. ‘If this anecdote is taken together with Khalid’s expressed interest in alchemy,’ Saliba says, ‘we can see why such books on alchemy may have come in very handy to someone who was interested in striking new mint of gold coins. Who but the alchemists would be better prepared to identify pure gold, from other metals? And who but the alchemists would be the experts who could judge alloys and the like?’ Whatever the truth of Saliba’s suggestion, Khalid is generally thought to be the first of the Islamic alchemists, and among the first to initiate the translation of scientific texts into Arabic.

  The Umayyads and their discontents

  Despite the gradual economic development under the Umayyads, however, all was not well on the political front. In the east of the empire, especially the far east where the ancient Persian empire stretched into Central Asia, there were discontents. Some were those in Persia, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who disliked the hold on power by Arabic-speaking peoples. Some were those who felt that the family of Muhammad had been deprived of the caliphate by the Umayyads. Others just felt aggrieved about the relentless flow of cash and resources westwards to Damascus. In fact, there were probably innumerable reasons for discontent.