His investigations center on the heart and brain:
It became clear to him that every animal, although apparently a multiplicity—if one considered in all its apparent organs, senses, and movements—was really a unity …
Each such organ has other organs serving it and no action takes place in any organ except from impulses of spirit conveyed along routes called nerves … These nerves channel the spirit from the depths of the brain but the brain, like all the other organs, receives its spirit from the heart.
From his discovery of the nerves and the living unity of the body, he next concludes that the hearts of animals of the same species are so alike, they could be said to share the same spirit, and make among themselves a concord of forms. From there, he see that all animals, however distinct their form, are so akin to one another that the likeness makes for a further unity, more enveloping and powerful.
He goes on to consider plants, stones, clay, water, and works out the difference between form and essence, cause and effect, mass and weight, then goes on to conclude calmly that the earth is round. In all this, we follow him and have the privilege to share in a journey of unabashed hopefulness: a man alone on earth, longing to understand, seeking order in the world, and full of thankfulness for the chance.
Later, as he comes to contemplate the stars, the world of his understanding comes into a more far-reaching unity.
… he realized that … all the bodies he had considered before, earth, air, fire, water, plants, animals, etc., were all within the firmament and not apart from it. In its entirety it was not unlike an animal organism, the luminous stars being the creature’s senses … He realized that the whole universe, when he applied to it the same outlook that he had applied to objects of the earth, had the nature of a single being.
From this exaltation he moves to matters of spirit—to the consideration of the source and origin of life. He decides that just as he is different from what he makes with the means and intelligence he has, so our created world must be made by a power different from the world. And such a formative power would not be physical, nor comely, perfect, good, and beautiful, but rather is the source of such qualities: the permanent reservoir of those qualities, from which they take form in the physical world. And in these deductions, he comes to his understanding of the divine, as Cause, Necessary Being, Creator. And sees that he could not have such a conception unless there was in him some essence, something that partakes of a permanent world.
Hai ibn Yaqzun sees that his task is to perform a great work—to develop the finer part of himself—so as to learn and to witness beauty, in hopes to understand the source of beauty. And just when you think the story is going to go off into the ethereal, Hai does something extraordinary: he turns with love and thankfulness to the physical world. He wants to learn, yet only in unity with creation. And as the animals had a divine creation, and he is partly an animal, he will imitate and care for animate creation. As stars are pure and illuminate the earth, he spins in imitation of the stars, so as to refine himself into a fateful purity. He hopes by his closeness and his care for creation to bring himself into harmony with the source of life.
He gives himself with kindness, in a spirit of service and of humility, in faith that he can witness the truth shown in the lovely details of creation. The narrative is practical and lovely, even when he is wondering how to eat:
he would select only those things whose destruction by him would offer least opposition to the intention of the Creator … for example ripe fruit whose seeds would still be available to reproduce their kind … or he would use vegetables which had not reached the limit of their growth … he would confine himself to those which were most abundant, and most capable of further reproduction and would be careful not to destroy their roots and seeds. He … would be careful never to wipe out a whole species.
… he imitated the heavenly bodies by imposing upon himself an obligation to help, whenever he was able, anything hurt or injured or in need; and to remove or reduce any impediment from which an animal or plant was suffering … If he saw a plant being weighed down by the growth of another plant, he would gently separate them … If he saw an animal suffering from hunger or thirst, he did all in his power to help.
When he spun rapidly enough all sensory things faded away … Awareness of his essence, which is innocent of the body, would then increase. From time to time he would be cleansed of all impurities …
It is strange reading: a mystical ecologist in a text of the twelfth century. He struggles, he works, he loves, he carries out his work of care. And one day he is called, and vanishes into the truth, and nothing of him remains but what is permanent.
Immersed in this state, he saw what eyes have not seen nor ears heard, neither has the human heart experienced.
It is his unity with the divine, beyond description and measure, “too fine to be clothed in letters or sound.” In sixty-odd pages, we go from an abandoned baby on an island to a man of revelation. It is a classic of Al-Andalus: the journey of life transformed by work and love into a homecoming of soul.
We have had altogether too brief a sojourn among the poets and storytellers of these centuries; but now that you know them, reader, you can take their work into your own hands and travel with them.
THE BLESSINGS OF REASON UNITED WITH THE LABORS OF FAITH
Let us turn to philosophy, for here too the labors of our compatriots in Al-Andalus helped to shape our minds, our books, our lives. The period has its logicians, its theologians and mystics, and we must choose among the riches offered.
We will visit Seville, in the year 1169, and attend to a judge at work in the city. Conflicts are presented to him; he questions, hears evidence, considers facts, offers judgment, often on cases of consequence. Some may involve debts between those of different faith, or the ownership of land or details of inheritance, or accusations of blasphemy or murder. He judges the most important cases, because he is the qadi—chief judge of this resplendent, powerful Andalusian city. All his life, he will be immersed in the daily life of the communities where he lives.
He is the young friend of Ibn Tufayl, and his name is Ibn Rushd; he will be called Averroes in the West. He has a long family history in Al-Andalus. Some generations back, his ancestors probably were Muwallads—Christians who had converted to Islam, becoming “protected ones.” Many of his predecessors were judges or legal scholars, and as a boy, he is trained in the Hadith (the verified statements of Muhammad while he lived) and in the Koran and in theology. But that is not all: he studies, as well, the law, philosophy, medicine, and what we may call Arabic belles lettres.
There are numerous contemporary accounts of Averroes, and one reads them and wants him for a neighbor. He is accounted as generous, humble, soul-searchingly fair. And he carries these qualities to the court of the sultan, as well as to the people on any street. Though his ideas were attacked, sometimes viciously, he was never accused of the least dishonor. More than one account mentions his frayed clothes.
Frayed clothes or not, his work was a gift to history, and to all of us. It is not easy to portray the scope of that work, since he was not only the chief judge of Seville and later of Córdoba; he was also a renowned physician, in fact physician to the sultan himself. All the while, he carried on with his legal scholarship and study of the sciences and then marshaled his knowledge to make himself the greatest philosopher of Al-Andalus. What he learned, he set forth in more than eighty books.
What are his books? He begins with introductory books on logic, physics, and psychology and then turns back to medicine, studying Galen and the great Avicenna and writing a commentary: the Kulliyat, a grand, useful synthesis of the medical understanding of the times. This he follows up with a treatise devoted wholly to antidotes against poisons. Afterward, he deepens his studies in the law, writing over the years about the philosophy of law and developing a way to compare different legal theories throughout the history of Islam; his summary book, the Bidyadat, has been called “a mon
ument of logical explication of Muslim law.”
After being confirmed in 1180 as grand qadi of Córdoba, he took up the work that would become the basis for scholastic and theological study in Europe in the following centuries: the detailed commentaries on the entire work of Aristotle, and his separate commentary on Plato’s Republic. It was not just the texts themselves, and the incomparable riches of Greek philosophy that Averroes delivered to Europe. His commentary is shaped by his own values: above all, his devotion to reason and science, and his decisive turn away from fundamentalism in religious faith.
In his day, the Koran ruled Islam, just as the Bible ruled Christianity. If we grant that there is truth in scripture, how are we to evaluate the truth we are led to by reason? Averroes answered this question, and his answer forged a hinge in history that opened a door into a new world. Averroes taught that reason leads us to a truth that has equal standing with that of scripture, and that can always be reconciled with scripture. This sounds simple, but it is a momentous declaration of intellectual and spiritual liberty. For if the course of reason can lead us to truth, and we may follow that course wherever it may lead us, then the work of the mind may take up with fierce energy and freedom any subject at all in the world. We may follow a course of observation, and study, of logic and exploration. And we may do this in full faith and conscience, knowing that to seek the truth through reason is a blessed enterprise.
What if the truth we find by reason is in conflict with the truth we find in scripture? Averroes taught us the answer: if there is a conflict, then we must reexamine scripture and seek a new meaning in the text that will be in harmony with the truth of reason. It follows that the sacred texts must be open to interpretation as time passes, and as we investigate the world, examine nature, and test experience, then scripture will be made richer and more complete by our attempts to bring it into concord with the conclusions of reason.
To many of us, these ideas are familiar and straightforward, and it is easy to forget that someone, sometime, had to conceive them. Averroes did so, in Córdoba and Seville in the twelfth century, and sent history off on another course altogether. He offered more than a political declaration of independence. He proposed a declaration of independence for the mind itself. He taught that the world had a rational organization, and that it was our responsibility to understand it. It was more than our responsibility, it was a spiritual obligation, since we are endowed by the heavens with reason, and so must use our reason to light the torch of understanding and hold it high that all around may see.
And that was not all. Averroes wanted more for us than freedom. He wanted us to consider the consequences of freedom. Having brought reason and revelation into harmony by claiming equal status for reason and proposing a more fruitful and wide-ranging study of scripture, he asked us also to consider the use of reason: What, after all, is the point of philosophy? And he answered: it is to use the understanding we gain in service of the whole human community. In this way, as knowledge of the world is gained from personal and empirical studies, the benefit is to everyone, and the free practice of philosophy takes on a real, material beauty, because by its nature it must be shared.
This is the new world sketched for us by a judge in frayed clothing in Al-Andalus. He worked to honor an idea about why we are created: we are created to know, to learn, to observe and study, to attend carefully to the reality shown to us in the workings of nature and of society. And he taught that our reason, working openly and in liberty, can lead us to truth that benefits humankind and works in concord with spiritual understanding.
The ideas of Averroes shook the world. He addressed a key juncture in human experience, and he gave us his answers. Suddenly, humankind had a chance and a work that had been always present, but never set forth so clearly by someone of his religious authority. The challenge he set forth riled Islam and Christianity, since it sets aside the infernal habit of fundamentalism everywhere: a fixed, literal-minded reading of scripture. Averroes addressed directly the fundamentalists of any religion: they were encouraged to study and obliged to read their sacred texts anew, with a flexibility of mind and an openness to the world around them, so as to explore how they might align their holy books with the open conclusions of science and study. We have been, in the ensuing centuries and in the present day, treated often to the horror visited upon societies when this teaching of Averroes is forgotten. He foresaw a plague of ignorance and barbarity, and he worked for a world in which clarity and freedom coexist with religious practice, for the benefit of all.
The day would come when the books of Averroes would be burnt by his fellow Muslims. But that is another story.
MAKING NUMBERS, UNDERSTANDING THE STARS
Given such engagement with the power of reason, what progress was made in Al-Andalus in science and mathematics?
It was a period of rambunctious investigation. We take for granted the use of Hindu-Arabic numbers, whose ease of calculation made possible the tremendous advancement in science and technology in the last many centuries. But that system came to Europe from the Near East. As the system was tried out in the Arab world in the seventh and eighth centuries, the forms and names of the numbers evolved by fits and starts, as books were written to try to codify the rules of this new method of making quantitative sense of the world. As these texts were translated in Al-Andalus, the system was used, discussed, studied, and developed. And as we work every day with numbers, in whatever walk of life, we would do well to remember the prodigious labor of translation and calculation in Al-Andalus. We are all in their debt; in fact, the numbers 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 0 all took on their final form, the one we use today, in the books of Al-Andalus.
Once again, we are indebted to the indefatigable translators of Alphonso the Wise, who turned the essential Arabic texts into Latin, allowing for their rapid spread through Europe. Not that it was easy: the numbers took on the name Toledan numbers, and they were popularly regarded as strange and potent, the medium for magical powers. We need only consider the story of Gerbert of Aurillac, a French Christian who became Pope Sylvester II. He learned his Hindu-Arabic numbers early, in Catalonia in the tenth century, and his knowledge so flummoxed his compatriots that he was thought to have sold his soul to the devil. In the bargain, he learned his math, and, as a bonus, the ability to fly through the air. He also, by popular repute, constructed a talking head that he kept on his desk. The head could prophesy and, happily, solve mathematical problems. These labors he undertook when he was not with his mistress, a witch. Reading such accounts, we sense how one could go far in the Middle Ages, once in possession of basic numerical prowess.
Leonardo of Pisa, known to many as Fibonacci, is the man usually credited with the most thorough introduction of Hindu-Arabic numbers to the West. Yet he took much of his work from Abraham Bar Hiyya, a twelfth-century Jewish mathematician of Al-Andalus who wrote on arithmetic, ratio, proportion, and geometry and their use in commerce and surveying.
Once in use, how was the new number system put to work in Al-Andalus? With curiosity, with élan, with aggressive experimental devotions. In astronomy, scientists began refining devices to assist in the study and measurement of the heavens, chief among them the astrolabe. These lovely instruments have been handed down to us: built of brass, they are early and efficient examples of a working analog computer. They were understood and improved in Toledo, in Seville, and in Granada, where there was active interest in astronomy and astrology, and they were used for calculation of latitudes and longitudes of the sun. You can calculate the times of sunrise and sunset and determine the position of stars on any date and time of the year, as well as the altitude of the sun on a given date and time. All this nicety of calculation can of course be related to the signs of the zodiac and positions of the moon and planets. So the astrolabe could be used in a host of ways—to navigate, to set the times for prayer, to cast a horoscope, and the like. All in all, not bad for a medieval computer, all of six and a half inches in diameter. They are beautiful
and useful, and even Geoffrey Chaucer felt moved to write a treatise on them, for his young son Louis.
One of the major contributions of Al-Andalus was the so-called universal plate, whose addition meant the astrolabe could be used at any latitude. It is pictured in the Book of Astronomical Knowledge, which came, once again, from the school of translators of Alphonso the Wise. From his court, as well, came the famous astronomical tables that revolutionized the study of the subject in Europe when they were translated by Gerard of Cremona at the end of the twelfth century. They were a synthesis of tables taken from the work of Arabic astronomers working principally in Baghdad. But the astronomers of Al-Andalus added corrections, editing and polishing, all due to their scientific practice. Ibn Al-Zaqullah, a brilliant instrument maker and astronomer, studied and measured the position of the moon for thirty-seven years and the sun for twenty-five years. The tables themselves permit calculation and prediction of planetary motions, eclipses, conjunctions of the planets, meridians, and with one in hand an ephemeris could be written out, setting out the positions at any time of a given heavenly object. The original tables were compiled in the twelfth century and continuously sharpened with additional observation. For three centuries, this work was the foundation for astronomical study in Europe. Even Copernicus had a copy on his shelf. They show us a moving example of the convivencia of Al-Andalus: the work of Arabic astronomers, with the ardent sponsorship of a Christian king, refined and extended by two Jewish scholars, whose work in 1483 gave to the world the final version of centuries of collaborative labor.
The Alfonsine tables were not the only showing of mathematical expertise. Another astronomer, Ibn Mu’adh, wrote the first book in the West on spherical trigonometry. In Saragossa in the eleventh century, Arab scientists assembled a wonderfully complete library of classical work on mathematics, from Euclid forward, as well as the texts of the great Arab mathematicians like al-Kwarizimi. With these achievements in hand, they carried on their own studies on conic sections, the ideas of ratio and proportion, and number theory. All this work, in part or in whole, directly or by quotation and summary, found its way to Western Europe and had a most salutary effect on studies there for the ensuing centuries.
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