by Robert Irwin
Nevertheless, in general, the caliphate of Cordova was a remarkably tolerant regime under which Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims, were able to prosper, though, as in Umayyad Syria, there were limits to that tolerance and the Christians and Jews were discriminated against in all sorts of ways.13 The caliphate of Cordova fell apart in the early decades of the eleventh century and towards the end of the same century Spain was occupied by the Almoravids, Moroccan Berbers who espoused a much more bigoted form of Islam. Both Christians and Jews were intermittently persecuted by the new masters of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain). In 1066 there was a massacre of Jews in Granada.14 A number of Christian churches were demolished and many Christians and Jews were deported to North Africa. The old convivencia, or tolerant mode of co-existence, was under strain.
It was not only Christians, like Alvarus, who worried about their co-religionaries immersing themselves in Arabic books. Muslims were suspicious too. Ibn ‘Abdun, a market inspector in Seville writing around the year 1100, warned his fellow Muslims against the selling of Arabic books to Jews and Christians, because, he claimed, they translated those books and then claimed their authorship as their own.15 In the twelfth century Toledo became the chief centre for Christian translations and studies of Arabic materials. In 1085 this important Muslim city had fallen to the army of Alfonso VI of Castile. One of the important consequences of this was that large numbers of Arabic manuscripts came into Christian hands. Raimundo, Archbishop of Toledo (1125–51), encouraged scholars to come to Toledo and work on the Arabic texts.16 Raimundo’s project received powerful encouragement from one of the most influential churchmen in Europe, Peter the Venerable, the Abbot of Cluny. Having visited Cluniac houses in northern Spain in 1142, Peter was distressed that the Cluniac monks were making so little effort to combat the ideological threat posed by Islam: ‘I was indignant that the Latins did not know the cause of such perdition and, by that ignorance could not be moved to put up any resistance.’17
THE TRANSLATION MOVEMENT
At Peter’s behest the Qur’an was translated into Latin for the first time in 1143 by an Englishman, Robert of Ketton. (It should be noted that, according to Islamic doctrine, the Qur’an, the Word of God, is strictly untranslatable; only approximations are possible.) A Muslim, a certain Muhammad, was also hired to ensure the accuracy of the translation. Robert of Ketton’s rendering, though soon forgotten, was rediscovered in the sixteenth century and it then held the field until the seventeenth-century translations of Du Ryer and Marracci appeared in French and Latin respectively. Of course, Peter had only commissioned the translation of the Qur’an the better to refute it and, at around the same time, Robert of Ketton and his scholarly colleague Hermann of Carinthia were also commissioned to translate other works for polemical purposes. Al-Kindi’s debate between a Christian and a Muslim was a natural choice to be translated and the Latin version was given the title Epistola Saraceni. Fabulae Saracenorum, put together by Robert, was a collection of Islamic traditions on a wide range of topics. Hermann of Carinthia produced Liber Generationis Mahumet, a translation of a treatise on the Prophet’s genealogy. He also translated The Questions of Abdallah ibn Salam as Doctrina Mahumet, a rather curious didactic dialogue, in which ‘Abdallah the Jew questioned the Prophet Muhammad about cosmology, numerology, the Afterlife and sundry other matters’ (and throwing in a few riddles as well). At the end of the interrogation, the Jew is so satisfied with the answers he has received that he converts to Islam.18
Apart from the Qur’an, the materials that the Toledo group chose to translate were rather folkloric in nature. They made no attempt to come to grips with the strong scholastic tradition of Islamic theology and philosophy. In correspondence with the great Cistercian, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter confided that he was still undecided whether the Muslims were heretics or pagans. Bernard (and he probably represented majority opinion in this respect) was hostile to Peter’s interest in Islamic lore. Bernard seems to have thought that the best way of dealing with Islamic doctrine was to ignore it altogether.19 In the centuries to come there would be many Christians who argued that those who studied and translated the books of the Muslims ran the risk of being infected by them.
Peter also wrote a refutation of Islam, The Abominable Heresy or Sect of the Saracens, in which he addressed the Muslims as follows: ‘I approach you not with arms but with words; not with force but with reason; not in hatred but in love.’20 (In fact it is clear from letters written to other Christians that Peter was keen on using force of arms to deal with the threat of Islam and he supported the Reconquista and the Crusade.) Peter’s treatise, which was formally addressed to the Muslims, was in any case a fairly pointless exercise, for it was drafted in Latin and was never translated into Arabic. It is important to bear in mind that in an age of manuscripts it was one thing to write a treatise, but another to get it circulated. Christians outside the Spanish peninsula had little interest in Islam and therefore manuscripts dealing with the subject tended to languish in single copies. As for Robert of Ketton’s translation of the Qur’an, few medieval scholars even knew of its existence and in 1209 or 1210, Mark of Toledo, unaware that the work had already been done, translated the Qur’an all over again (and his version attracted even fewer readers).21 Robert of Ketton’s translation only achieved a wider readership when it was printed in Zurich in 1543, some four hundred years after its original draft.
Though Peter had hired his translators to provide materials with which to combat Islamic doctrine, Robert of Ketton and Hermann of Carinthia seem to have been primarily interested in scientific, mathematical and divinatory works. Robert was to translate works on alchemy, algebra and the astrolabe. Hermann translated various works on astronomy. A great deal has been written about the impetus that translations from the Arabic gave to Western mathematics, science and philosophy from the twelfth century onwards, and this is correct.22 Translations of Arabic treatises on mathematics were especially important. Arabic texts were the main channel for introducing Euclid’s mathematics to the West and this was to be of crucial importance for the later development of Western science. Moreover, there were also Arabic mathematicians who were of importance in their own right. The ninth-century mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi’s treatise on algebra, Hisab al-Jabr wa almuqabala, was the first Arabmathematical work to be translated into Latin and was of fundamental influence for the development of mathematics in the West. In particular, the celebrated Pisan mathematician Lionardo Fibonacci drew heavily on al-Khwarizmi and other Arabmathematicians in his own work. Al-Khwarizmi also wrote On Indian Calculation (the Latin title was Algoritmi de numero indorum), which introduced readers of the Latin version to the use of what today we call ‘Arabic numerals’, though, as the title of the treatise indicates, such numerals actually originated in India. ‘Arabic numerals’, including the crucial zero, allowed much more sophisticated calculations than had been possible for the greatest mathematical minds of previous centuries. Yet, despite the obvious advantages it offered, there were widespread prejudices against the new-fangled notation and it was centuries before it replaced the cumbrous Roman numeral system in most European countries. Finally al-Khwarizmi produced the Zij, a set of astronomical tables that was much studied in the West. Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–1039), who was known in the West as Alhazen, produced a major work on optics and the application of mathematics to such optical problems as refraction. Ibn al-Haytham demonstrated that light travels from the object to the eye, whereas previously Ptolemy and Euclid had argued that the eye perceived things by sending rays out to the objects. Al-Khwarizmi and Ibn al-Haytham were studied and commentated on in the West, but there were other even more sophisticated mathematicians in the medieval Islamic world whose work remained unknown in Europe until modern times.23
The medieval Arabcontribution to the development of European philosophy was no less significant. Scholars in Paris, Oxford, Bologna and elsewhere became acquainted with the works of Aristotle mostly via translations from the A
rabic. Gerald of Cremona (c. 1114–87), who worked in Toledo and who was perhaps the most important translator of scientific works, also translated several of the most important works of Aristotle from Arabic. Arabic commentaries on Aristotle were hardly less important in their impact on the teaching of philosophy and theology in Paris and Oxford. The eleventh-century philosopher Ibn Sina, or Avicenna as he was known to the Latinists, was far and away the most important of the commentators on Aristotle. As Bertrand Russell observed, Avicenna ‘spent his life in the sort of places that one used to think exist only in poetry’, as he grew up and studied in Bokhara, Khiva, Khorasan and Tehran.24 In his copious writings Ibn Sina sought to reconcile Greek philosophy with Islamic theology in a way that was to have a massive impact on the development of European scholasticism, as Christian thinkers used variations of Avicenna’s arguments to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Christian doctrine.
The works of Avicenna started to be translated in Toledo in the late twelfth century. At first Western scholastics had some difficulty in distinguishing his ideas from those of Aristotle. Furthermore, when they came to translate the Sufi mystic al-Ghazali’s polemical attack on Avicenna, they misinterpreted it as merely a synopsis of Avicenna’s philosophy. Despite these difficulties, as well as those inherent in translating complex philosophical terms, Avicenna’s way of reasoning about the universe and ultimate things seemed to open up exciting perspectives. It dominated thirteenth-century philosophizing. It provided both material for scholastic disputations and an armoury of debating strategies. ‘The importance of Avicenna’s thought for the West cannot be overestimated’ as Gordon Leff put it. However, Leff went on to suggest that there were negative as well as positive aspects to this. In particular, Christian thinkers had difficulties with Avicenna’s determinism, for, since he taught that everything was both necessary and determined, this appeared to deny God free will.25
It would be easy to adduce other examples of sensible, worthwhile and even brilliant examples of Arabic scholarship that had a crucial influence on the evolution of culture and technology in medieval Christendom. However, it is worth pausing to consider whether much of what was translated was of any value at all. The trouble with Islamic science was that much of it was not particularly scientific, even though enthusiastic translators in Spain evidently thought that it was. They translated works on astrology, alchemy, numerology, scapulimancy (divination from the cracks on scorched sheep’s bones), geomancy (divination from marks in the sand), haruspication (divination from entrails), and similar recondite practices. The earliest translations in Spain from Arabic all dealt with divination or with those parts of mathematics that would be necessary to practise divination.26 In the long run, some Western thinkers would use mathematics for architecture, engineering and ballistics, while others would develop it as a purely speculative system of thought. In the shorter term, however, sophisticated mathematical operations were mostly used as the handmaidens of astrology, in order to determine by astrological means the fates of dynasties, love affairs and harvests.
Only a few examples will be given here of Arab occult works that were translated into Latin, but they are all important ones. Jabir ibn Hayyan can be charitably described as the ‘father of modern chemistry’. However, ‘Jabir’ was not really a single person, but rather a corpus of effectively anonymous literature and, moreover, that literature mostly dealt with such occult matters as the making of talismans and recipes for poisons that could allegedly kill at a distance.27 The Ghayat al-Hakim, translated into Latin in the thirteenth century as Picatrix and spuriously attributed to a famous Spanish Arab mathematician, al-Majriti, was even more sinister in its intentions. It is a collection of rather malevolent spells using disgusting ingredients.28 The ninth-century polymath Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi studied and wrote in Baghdad and Basra. (This al-Kindi is not to be confused with the much less impressive Christian polemicist discussed earlier.) According to Fritz Zimmerman, al-Kindi ‘wrote on questions of mathematics, logic, metaphysics and ethics, but also on perfumes, drugs, foods, precious stones, musical instruments, swords, bees and pigeons’ – and much else besides. Al-Kindi used astrology to determine the duration of the Arabcaliphate and, in general, his writings were pervaded by occult beliefs and practices. In De Radiis (‘On Rays’), a treatise that has survived only in its twelfth-century Latin translation, al-Kindi expounded an essentially magical view of the universe, in which occult radiation from the stars influenced human affairs. Each star exercised an influence on a special group of objects. Although stellar rays were most important, everything in the universe emitted rays. Also, according to De Radiis, words possessed magical powers, particularly if uttered under particularly favourable stellar conjunctions and combined with the use of talismanic images and the magical sacrifice of animals. Despite al-Kindi’s attempt to present his material in a way that looked logical and scientific, it was still only scientific in the broadest and woolliest sense. Other works by al-Kindi that were translated dealt with the predictive power of dreams and with astrology.29
The early translators were keen to translate Aristotle, for he enjoyed enormous prestige, as he was known to have been Alexander the Great’s tutor. However, they were poorly equipped to judge what had actually been written by Aristotle and what had not. A great deal of what they translated was not by Aristotle but was drafted by other, crazier hands. Among the many pseudepigrapha that were claimed to be by Aristotle were a Neoplatonist Theology, an alchemical treatise, On the Twelve Waters of the Secret River, an astrological Book on the Properties of the Elements and of the Planets, and above all the Secreta Secretorum (‘Secret of Secrets’), which, before being translated into Latin, had circulated widely in the Arabworld under the title Sirr al-Asrar. In Europe too it became a popular and influential work and more than two hundred manuscripts of the Latin version have survived. The Secreta Secretorum, which originally was put together in Syriac in the eighth century, is an encyclopedic treatise that deals with politics, ethics and medicine, but it also put forward astrological notions, and a belief in the occult virtues of plants and stones pervades its treatment of many subjects. The book is full of quaint stories, including that of the legend of the poison maiden. The poison maiden was a carefully dosed-up young woman who was sent to Alexander by a hostile potentate and her toxic embrace would certainly have killed Alexander had not the cunning plan been detected by the watchful Aristotle.30
AVICENNA IN THE WEST
There were also problems with regard to Aristotle’s commentator, Avicenna, and the reverence with which he was treated. Avicenna wrote about two hundred books and many of them dealt with occult matters. Avicenna argued in Liber de anima (‘The Book of the Spirit’) that the imagination could work on a body at a distance, and hence real powers could be ascribed to the evil eye.31 This theme was to be taken up by Christian occultists. Given the quantity of occult material being translated and studied in Toledo, it is not surprising that the city acquired a reputation for magic and the black arts. According to Charles Homer Haskins, ‘Spain became the scene of visions and prophecies, of mystifications like Virgil of Cordova, of legends like the university of demonology at Toledo.’32
Avicenna was as famous as a medical authority as he was as a philosopher and student of the unseen. His al-Qanun fi al-Tibb (‘The Canon of Medicine’), which was translated by Gerald of Cremona in the twelfth century, became a standard textbook on medicine in medieval Europe. With the advent of printing in the fifteenth century, there were sixteen editions in that century alone. Much of what Avicenna recycled in the Qanun derived from the Greek physicians Hippocrates (c. 460– c. 370 BC) and Galen (AD 129–99). Nothing written by Hippocrates survives, but his medical doctrines were known through the summaries provided by Galen. The latter was a Greek surgeon who had operated on gladiators before becoming Marcus Aurelius’s physician. Galen, in his various treatises, compiled the observations and theories of his predecessors and his medical views were shaped as much by p
hilosophy as they were by clinical observation. Galenic medicine was based on the theory of the four humours (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile) and diseases caused by an imbalance between those humours. The health of the body depended upon maintaining the correct balance between hotness, coldness, dryness and wetness. Consequently medicines were divided into four basic types: warmers, coolers, purges and sudorifics (substances that cause the body to sweat). Galen viewed the heart as a furnace (rather than a pump, which would be a more accurate analogy). Galen’s version of how the body worked was fundamentally mistaken and Galenic medicine did not actually help anyone to get better.33 It was a systematic way of misunderstanding the world and, in general, a sick person was probably better off going to a wise woman than consulting a learned physician who had immersed himself in Galen.