Three Essays

by Tahir Shah

  Yet, for me, the most exciting thing of all was the way that the scientists were polymaths, working in half a dozen areas of study at the same time. This all-rounder approach allowed them to harness breakthroughs in one area, and apply cutting-edge know-how to other completely unrelated fields.

  As I said, until very recently, Western science has tended to reject the Arab contribution, or even regard it as responsible for the destruction of Classical texts – rather than being their saviour.

  But new scholarship in the West has shown that, by harnessing existing knowledge, and building upon it, the Arab contribution allowed the European Renaissance to take root. Yet perhaps worst of all is that the Arabs are themselves often ignorant of the immensely important role they have played. They seem oblivious to the direct way their communal scholarship has made the modern world possible, almost as though they are toeing the Occidental line.

  So, how and where did it all begin – this amazing Arab contribution? What was the spark? Well, I’ll tell you. It started in present day Kyrgyzstan, in central Asia, on a crisp July morning in the year 751 CE. The location was a battlefield on the banks of the Talas River. And, it was there that the secret that made the rise of Arab learning possible, passed from the Tang Chinese to the Abbasid Arabs. That July morning was one of those pivotal moments in history, a moment that’s all too often forgotten.

  By chance, the Arab conquerors – sweeping eastward with Islam – won the battle. They weren’t expected to do so, and how they did is another story. The key point was that they took prisoners, Chinese prisoners, who knew a secret art, a technology that would change the world. It was the art of paper-making. This secret was, until then, known to a small elite fraternity, and was guarded day and night. Indeed, well aware of the value of this technology, the Arabs kept it secret from Europe for centuries. They built paper-making factories in the intellectual nerve centres of their new Islamic empire, at Baghdad, Damascus, Cordoba, Fès and Samarkand.

  For the first time, the Arabs could copy the Qur’an easily, as well as other books, books devoted to the sciences. Like a touchpaper being lit, it meant that knowledge could be multiplied and passed up and down the pilgrimage routes to centres of learning across the Islamic world. Paper quickly surpassed parchment and papyrus. It was far cheaper to make, and lightweight – so light that it could be conveyed by carrier pigeons. And it led directly to a vast library being built in Baghdad, to which I’ll come in a moment.

  And, as always with the golden age of Arab scholarship, the buzzword was ‘innovation’. The Chinese had been making rough paper from mulberry bark since the second century BCE. It was best suited to the use of brushes rather than nibs. Never satisfied with existing technology, the Arabs refined their paper and used cotton pulp rather than tree bark. And they changed the equipment – using their newly designed waterwheels to power the paper mills, instead of human labour.

  To understand the seismic change that was the golden age of Arab learning, you have to appreciate the time, the era of the Abbasids. After overthrowing the Umayyads, the second of the two great Islamic Caliphates, the Abbasids ruled from 750 CE. They moved the capital from Damascus to Baghdad. In the ninth century it was a city of eight hundred thousand souls, second in population to only Constantinople. And, it was ruled by one of the greatest leaders of all time, the Abbasid Caliph Harun ar-Rachid.

  The city was a melting pot of humanity, people hailing from Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor and Central Asia. And this crucible of cultures was one that had never really been known before in human society – because under the new Islamic faith, all men were equal. And, most surprising of all, they could all communicate through Arabic, the lingua franca of Islam.

  Harun, who tends to be remembered in the West above all else for his Alf Layla wa Layla, A Thousand and One Nights, set about accumulating books for a huge private library. He loved poetry, music and learning. Whenever he heard of erudite people, he invited them to his court. The idea of wisdom being rewarded for wisdom’s sake spread, and scholars made their way from all corners of the growing Islamic world, to Baghdad.

  In March 809 CE, Harun ar-Rachid died, leaving the future of the Caliphate hanging in deep uncertainty. He was succeeded by his son Al-Amin, but he was killed four years later, which only made the situation more precarious. All that had been achieved so far was weighed in the balance. But then, thankfully, Al-Amin’s half-brother, al-Ma’mun, became Caliph, and it is with him that our story really begins…

  Like his father, Ma’mun was fascinated by learning, and was eager to know how the world and the universe worked. He built up the library founded by his father, and brought together scholars from every corner of the world, from every known religion, speaking every language. He dispatched messengers to bring forth to Baghdad every book, document, and sensible man in existence – and convey them back to his centre of learning, which became known as Bayt al Hikma, ‘The House of Wisdom’.

  What had started as the Caliph’s private library, quickly became a translation centre, then a kind of think-tank, a repository of knowledge, with observatories and scientific centres attached. Hundreds of thinkers and scientists toiled away at the House of Wisdom, including some of the most important polymaths in human history, such as Al-Kindi and al-Khwarizmi.

  From the start, there must have been a sense that the House of Wisdom was different from anything that had come before, or at least since the great Library at Alexandria.

  The story goes that Caliph Ma’mun had a dream of white-haired Aristotle seated on a throne, a dream in which he was advised to begin a quest for wisdom through knowledge and reason. From the dream, Ma’mun interpreted that he should amass knowledge. Right away, he sent scholars to Byzantium to bring him academic texts, all of which were translated into Arabic.

  Then, archives were brought from Alexandria, Damascus, Cairo and Antioch. A great number of the first books that arrived were in Greek, Latin and Persian as well. They were all translated into Arabic, along with others from Turkish, Syriac, Aramaic, Sanskrit and Chinese.

  Over four centuries, scholars laboured away, translating collected knowledge and pushing forward the boundaries of science. The focus was very much on the cross-pollination of ideas, and thinking in new ways. After all, until that moment, the emphasis had been on the reproduction by rote of accepted values and ideas.

  Ma’mun led very much from the front. He funded the research and encouraged others to do so as well; and he also conferred formal prestige on scientists and intellectuals – lauding achievements with praise and financial remuneration.

  In 832 CE, the year before he died, he is said to have travelled to Egypt, where he ordered his army to breach open the Great Pyramid of Cheops. It was still covered in white polished limestone casing stones. His army supposedly broke through the granite plug blocking access to the upper chambers. He was searching for treasure – gold perhaps, but it is more likely that the treasure he sought was knowledge.

  For his sheer innovation Ma’mun was remarkable, as he was for his ability to locate brilliant minds. He rewarded experimentation and anyone who tackled an old problem in a new way. He included plenty of non-Muslims at the House of Wisdom, and was ready to learn from them. It was a rare moment in history.

  Through the House of Wisdom a model was created, one that was to be replicated again and again – such as at Dar al-Hikma, in Cairo, a blueprint for something we would come to know as the university.

  As I said, the great libraries that were established under the Abbasids came about owing to the existence of affordable paper, and growing literacy – a by-product of the fact that people were required to read the Qur’an. And, these libraries were enormous, even by modern standards. The tenth century Royal Library in Cordoba, for example, assembled under the patronage of Caliph al-Hakim II, boasted four hundred thousand books. The library’s directory stretched to forty-four colossal ledgers. Caliph al-Hakim II sent scholars across the East to buy and have copied important books
and, in so doing, he added to the expansion of knowledge.

  The library at Cairo is said to have encompassed two million books, and the one at Tripoli had three million, before it was destroyed by Crusaders.

  And, perhaps the greatest of all, that of the House of Wisdom itself in Baghdad, must have run into millions of volumes – before it was obliterated by the Mongol hordes.

  A vast number of Classical texts, which no longer exist in their original Greek or Latin, were brought to the Renaissance through their Arabic translations. The Arabs not only translated entire treatises verbatim, but they also reworked existing manuscripts. These new works drew on Greek and Roman classics, as well as Persian, Turkic and Indian sources. And, just as there are Classical Greek and Latin texts that were saved by their Arabic translations, a great many Arabic texts – translated into Latin during the Renaissance – saved a number of key Arab works, which didn’t survive in their original language.

  But, whereas in the Renaissance, Latin was the language of scholarship, the clergy, and the elite, Arabic was used by everyone during the golden age of Islam.

  The Arab polymaths corrected a lot of Greek misconceptions, ideas passed on from one generation to the next, ideas that had been essentially set in stone. The Greek idea, for example, that light is emitted from the eye, allowing us to see. It wasn’t until the tenth century CE that the Arab physicist al-Haytham (whose Latinized name is Alhazen) correctly stated that light bounces off an object in straight lines before striking the eye. He went on to develop the first camera obscura – which, centuries later, enabled photography.

  Just like the Classical world before it, and the so-called ‘Renaissance Men’ after, the golden age of Islam was championed by polymaths, whose works easily rival those of Aristotle, Da Vinci or Newton.

  The Arab polymaths arrived in the Renaissance under their Latinized names. As I said, al-Haytham was known as Alhazen. But there were many others, among them: Ibn Sina, who was known as Avicenna; Ibn Bajjah, known in the Occident as Avempace; Ibn Hayyan was Geber; and Ibn Rushd was Averroes. And, perhaps the greatest of them all, was Yakub Al-Kindi, known in the West as Alkindus.

  Using breakthroughs in one area of expertise, these polymaths pushed forward knowledge and understanding in another. Indeed, polymathy is a method that has almost been lost in the West, and is only now being rediscovered – so called ‘interdisciplinary’ study.

  I recently heard a piece on the radio about Stanford University’s new Bio-X Program. It brings together biologists, computer scientists, medical scientists and engineers, all of whom learn from each other’s fields. The reporter presenting the piece was droning on about this amazing ‘new’ way of working – learning from each other. I rolled my eyes, and thought, ‘haven’t you ever heard of the House of Wisdom, where scientists were learning from each other and solving huge problems more than a thousand years ago?’

  The scientists and polymaths from the golden age worked on areas of science that are familiar to us all, disciplines that are still being studied in schools and universities today. Indeed, it was they who brought classification to the specific disciplines, while introducing clear practices that were absent in the Classical age.

  For the first time there was clear scientific method – controlled experimentation and the idea of quantifying results. This new scientific method took off in a big way and was used across the board.

  The first ‘modern’ medical experiment is known to have been carried out by al-Razi in the tenth century, when he was trying to decide where to build his hospital in Baghdad. He hung pieces of meat all over the city, and observed where the meat decomposed least quickly. It was there that he built the hospital. Pure genius if you think about it.

  Another key piece of original Arab thinking was what we know as ‘peer review’. It was first described by al-Rahwi, who was working in Damascus in the ninth century. In his The Ethics of the Physician, he states that the physician must always make duplicate notes of a patient’s condition on every visit. So that when the patient has been discharged, or has died, one set of notes can be given to a local medical council, to ascertain whether satisfactory medical care has been provided. It marked the start of lawsuits for medical malpractice – more than a thousand years ago.

  Medicine was at the core of science then, as it is today. During the golden age, the first hospitals were created such as the one constructed by al-Razi. There were free public hospitals built across Baghdad and elsewhere – in Andalucía, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond. The main difference from the ‘sleep temples’ and asylums of the Classical era was that these hospitals were designed to treat and heal, rather than merely to isolate the infected and the sick. It was a revolutionary idea that caught on, and then spread to Europe, having been taken back there by the Christian Crusaders.

  These first hospitals featured competency tests for doctors and surgeons, as well as grading for purity and strength of pharmaceuticals, and separate wards for people with similar contagious diseases. The first real autopsies were carried out, too, to work out why someone had died. And, in what was a completely cosmopolitan setting, the hospitals treated patients of different religions and cultures. The surgical staff comprised Christians and Jews as well as Muslims, and there were female doctors and nurses for the first time as well.

  The rise in cheap paper, and literacy, meant that everything could be written down and passed to other cities along the pilgrimage routes, for others to learn from and master. This scholarship and know-how eventually reached Europe, where it was translated into Latin – although only the Latin-speaking elite could understand them.

  Early pioneering works included the thirty-volume medical encyclopaedia, the Kitab al-Tasrif, The Book of Concessions, written by al-Zahrawi, which was first published in the year 1000 CE. It was used for centuries in both East and West. And there was Ibn Sina’s The Canon of Medicine (written in about 1020 CE), still regarded as one of the most important medical textbooks of all time – it was used at the University of Montpellier’s medical department as late as 1650 CE, and was relied on across China well into the nineteenth century.

  Dozens of medical breakthroughs credited to the Renaissance, or to later scholars, had already been accurately described by the Arab polymaths of the golden age. Blood circulation, for instance, usually credited to the seventeenth century English physician William Harvey, had been studied and described by Ibn al-Nafis in the thirteenth century.

  The list of medical breakthroughs during this golden age is seemingly endless. The first inoculations against smallpox were carried out. There was the first description of micro-organisms, such as bacteria, centuries before the invention of the microscope. Dentistry, and pioneering work on dental fillings was done. Although, god help some of the patients. For example, Ibn Sina suggested that arsenic be boiled in oil and used to fill teeth!

  Caesarean sections were performed with pain control. Antiseptics were developed and the wounded were dressed with lint, sterilized with purified alcohol – itself an Arab discovery. Cataract surgery was performed, which used the first hollow metallic hypodermic needles and glass suction tubes, in about 1000 CE. Hundreds of other steel medical tools, such as scalpels, were pioneered – a result of sword-making breakthroughs and superior Damascene steel.

  The first psychiatric hospital was built in Baghdad in 705 CE. Shortly after its construction, music therapy was pioneered. The area of study included the work of the tenth century Persian music theorist al-Farabi, whose book Meanings of the Intellect discussed the effect of music on the soul. And, for the first time, specific diseases were isolated and studied, including diabetes, meningitis, and cancer, as well as rabies, smallpox, and forms of plague.

  Reading accounts from the golden age of the Abbasids, you get a sense that a wildfire of learning was roaring east and west, north and south. New methods and ideas were being swapped face to face in tea houses, just as they were being exchanged by correspondence, linking scientis
ts and polymaths all over the Islamic world and beyond. There was a sense of pure exhilaration, one that was mirrored later by the Renaissance, or by the Industrial Revolution and, more recently, by the birth of the Internet.

  New theories were hammered out and challenged, the most brilliant minds of the day working at fever pitch in the fledgling universities founded across the Islamic world. The theory of evolution, for example, was widespread by the twelfth century. One of the pioneers of such thinking was Al-Jahiz. Working in ninth century Baghdad, he wrote about the effect of the environment on an animal, and the animal’s chances of survival based on the environment. He came up with something he termed ‘the struggle for existence’, a forerunner of Darwin’s ‘natural selection’.

  During the golden age, the great thirst of scholarship was to understand the world around us, how it all worked, and how it was interrelated. As always, one question led to another, as did one answer to the next. Understandings relating to our environment and the natural world allowed for breakthroughs in agriculture. These included developing practices for pollination, pesticides, irrigation, grafting, crop rotation and soil preparation, as well as the classification of plants. Works, such as those by the thirteenth century Andalusian botanist al-Baitar, were used in Europe for centuries to come. His masterwork listed fourteen hundred plants (three hundred of which he discovered himself). Translated into Latin, it was kept in print until 1758, and used until the start of the nineteenth century. And, as ever, the knock-on effects continued. Breakthroughs in water technology and hydraulics, for example, meant that areas that had been barren could be irrigated, and man could control his environment in ways that had never been possible before.