Sailing from Byzantium

by Colin Wells

  Most modern scholars have characterized al-Farabi's ultimate interests as social and political. Whereas al-Kindi had summarized an eclectic but largely Aristotelian body of scientific knowledge, and Rhazes had based his individualistic (and virtually atheistic) thought mostly on the writings of Plato, al-Farabi brought the full power of the Neoplatonic synthesis to bear on the question of what would constitute the ideal Islamic society, which he described as “the virtuous city.” Al-Farabi essentially took Plato's famous ideal of the “philosopher king” and equated it with the monotheistic ideal of the prophet. The prophet (or caliph, or imam), at once the receiver of divine revelation and the possessor of the highest reason, is also the ideal ruler—a pat blend of Neoplatonic utopianism and Islamic theocracy.

  The most influential faylasuf of all, Abu Ali ibn Sina, known to the West as Avicenna, built on al-Farabi's comprehensive working out of Neoplatonism, but was less interested in envisioning an ideal Islamic society based on it. Instead, he concerned himself more with how al-Farabi's Neoplatonism could relate to the particulars of Islamic society as it had actually developed, and especially with the sharia, Islamic law. Avicenna lived in the late tenth and eleventh centuries. He wrote close to three hundred works, yet it's not his productivity that sets him apart from the others. All of these faylasufs were awesomely prolific by modern standards. Avicenna's clear and elegant style gave his writings a literary appeal that transcended the narrow world offalsafa, and this wider readership meant that more of his work survived. It also meant that he became identified with Neoplatonism in a way that al-Farabi did not, even though Avicenna himself acknowledged his debt to his great predecessor.

  In contrast with al-Farabi, about whose life only the bare bones are known, Avicenna left an autobiography that gives us a fairly full picture of the man. A Persian, Avicenna was born near Bukhara in Central Asia (today's Uzbekistan), and by his own account he was recognized early on as something of a prodigy. His family moved to Bukhara when he was very young, and he studied religion, Arabic poetry, medicine, science, and mathematics there with a number of well-known teachers. He memorized the Koran by age ten, and by the age of sixteen, he tells us, he was being sought out for advice by older, established physicians.

  Avicenna came of age in the twilight of the Persian Samanid dynasty, one of the many regional powers that sprang up across the Islamic world as Abbasid power declined over the course of the ninth century. The Samanids, munificent patrons of learning and the arts, made their capital at Bukhara, and Avicenna tells us that he took advantage of their superb libraries, reading everything he could get his hands on. Despite his brilliance, however, the one area that remained a blank to him was metaphysical philosophy, and he reports that he read a translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times without making any headway. Only when he discovered al-Farabi's commentary on the book did its meaning suddenly fall into place. Al-Farabi would remain Avicenna's model, and by some assessments anyway Avicenna's most significant achievement was to refine and disseminate al-Farabi's ideas.

  Avicenna had won the patronage of the Samanid ruler Nuh ibn Mansur by successfully curing him of an illness. However, when Avicenna was still under twenty, the Samanids fell to the rising power of the Ghaznavids, a group of Turkish slave-soldiers who rose and claimed power in their own right. After a period of wandering, Avicenna found a place in the court of a Buyid prince at Hamadan in western Persia. He remained there, churning out a huge body of work over a career that amounted to a roller-coaster ride of palace intrigue, becoming vizier (prime minister) twice between periods of disfavor and even, once, prison. He worked out the tensions of this precarious existence by overindulging in drink and sex, dying at age fifty-eight after attempting an unconventional self-cure for stomach trouble.

  Avicenna's magnum opus was the Kitab al-Shifa, or Book of Healing, a massive fifteen-volume summary of Greek learning and its Arabic augmentation that would become known in Latin as the Sufficientia, and that Avicenna himself helpfully abridged under the title Kitab al-Najat or Book of Salvation. His introduction to the Book of Healing describes the work as expository in nature, an attempt to lay out the most important aspects of the philosophic and scientific tradition to date.

  Al-Ghazali and Averroës

  Western commentators have often blamed a leading writer of the next generation, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, for exalting mysticism and discrediting reason in the Islamic world, thereby bringing about the end of falsafa and the Greek legacy in Islam. Those same commentators have portrayed the twelfth-century faylasuf Abu al-Walid ibn Rushd, Averroës to the West, as opposing al-Ghazali and fighting a rearguard action for reason. Though it failed in the Islamic world, that effort had momentous consequences for Western civilization. Averroës’ thought—and the Aristotelian vision enfolded within it—was later taken up by Scholastics such as St. Thomas Aquinas.

  Al-Ghazali was born in Khorasan near the town of Tus, where he received a strong education in Islamic jurisprudence and theology (kalam). By his early thirties, he had won a coveted position as head of an important madrasah, or religious school, in Baghdad. He relates in his autobiography, The Deliverer from Evil, that while teaching upward of three hundred students he also spent three years mastering falsafa. But by the end he had descended into a desperate crisis of faith and found himself unable even to teach. His depression led him to leave his job at the madrasah and join a group of Sufis, the Muslim mystics whose traditions of contemplative communion with God make them the Islamic equivalents of Byzantium's Hesychasts. Al-Ghazali came out of his retreat with the Sufis a convert to the mystic path, essentially giving up on both theology and philosophy as inadequate, and settling on direct experience of the divine as the only viable way to approach God.

  Like Gregory Palamas nearly three hundred years later, al-Ghazali rejected the idea that reason can say anything meaningful about God at all; also like Palamas (and other Byzantine theologians) he suspected that the same was true of theology, which after all was influenced—contaminated, one might say—by rationalistic Greek strands in both religions. Al-Ghazali believed that mystical ability was like any other talent in that not everyone possessed it, and that anyone who didn't possess it could have little or no grasp of the divine. For those people, he allowed, theology might be of some limited use, as a pale substitute for the real thing, but only if handled with caution.

  Al-Ghazali's great attack on falsafa, especially falsafa as represented by al-Farabi and Avicenna, is called The Incoherence of the Philosophers. His critique, while devastating in exactly the way the title suggests, did not attempt to tear up falsafa root and branch. On the contrary, al-Ghazali conceded the limited usefulness of reason in areas where certainty can be achieved (such as logic and mathematics) or that have to do with understanding the material world (such as science and medicine). In the end, though, he insisted that it was best simply to accept the world as God's creation without trying to understand it.

  The faylasufs’ metaphysical claims especially irked al-Ghazali, since their attempts at such rationalistic speculation trespassed, as he saw it, on territory that properly belonged to religion. He leveled three main charges against the emanationist philosophers, errors that, he said, led them into heresy: first, they upheld the eternity of the world (which didn't leave room for a creator); second, they asserted God's knowledge of universals but not of particulars (which made God less than all-knowing); and third, they denied the resurrection of the body (which religious authorities said would occur for everyone at the Last Judgment). Such errors made falsafa dangerous, especially for the weak-minded masses. If hardly constituting a “deathblow” to falsafa, Al-Ghazali's widely read book soon became a classic, and did undercut the faylasufs’ prestige and enhance that of the Sufis throughout the Islamic world.

  A generation after al-Ghazali's death and almost exactly 3,000 miles away from Tus, on the far western edge of the Islamic world, the religious scholar and faylasuf known to the West as Averroës was born in Córdo
ba, the spectacular capital city of al-Andalus (Moorish Spain). His family was a prominent one in Córdoba's religious leadership, and his grandfather had been a leading qadi or religious judge. In keeping with the family tradition, Averroës studied kalam and Islamic jurisprudence extensively as a boy, along with medicine and Arabic literature. By his early forties he had won appointment as qadi of the nearby city of Seville, and a couple of years later he was named grand qadi in Córdoba.

  Averroës lived and worked in a cultural environment that was very different from that of the eastern Islamic lands. At first, as Baghdad and the wealthy eastern lands witnessed the translation movement and the rise offalsafa, al-Andalus remained an intellectual backwater under a surviving offshoot of the Umayyad dynasty. By the tenth century, however, Córdoba had grown into Western Europe's most vital city, studded with palaces and mosques (the Great Mosque of Córdoba was finished in 976) and famed for its luxury textiles, leatherwork, and jewelry. But the Umayyad dynasty dissolved by the twelfth century, and in Averroës’ time al-Andalus was ruled by puritanical Muslims called the Almohads, who called for a return to strict Islamic practices such as the veiling of women and abstinence from alcohol.

  Falsafa had finally established itself in al-Andalus by the time the Almohads came to power. Averroës’ teacher and patron, Ibn Tufayl, was the second major figure in the falsafa movement of al-Andalus, and served as court physician to the Almohad caliph. He struggled to reconcile al-Ghazali with Avicenna, accepting al-Ghazali's elevation of mystical enlightenment over reason, but defending Avicenna's thought against al-Ghazali's attack. Ibn Tufayl introduced Averroës at court, where Averroës would succeed him as physician after Ibn Tufayl's death. Averroës had already begun his study of Aristotle, and had also spent time as an amateur astronomer observing the heavens (he's credited with discovering a new star). His first Aristotelian commentary was on Aristotle's astronomy book On the Heavens.

  It was probably in 1159, the year Averroës wrote this work, that Ibn Tufayl brought Averroës to meet the future Almohad caliph Abu Yusuf, then governor of Seville. An appealing story depicts the young but already erudite Averroës as tongue-tied in the future ruler's presence, until the Almohad prince, himself knowledgeable on astronomical matters, broke the ice by launching into a lively discussion with Ibn Tufayl, whereupon Averroës relaxed and joined in.

  Later on, Ibn Tufayl is said to have persuaded Averroës to continue what would turn out to be his life's work, urging him that Aristotle's works badly needed someone who could “explain their meaning clearly so as to render them accessible to men!” The voluminous commentaries on Aristotle's works that resulted were essentially conservative, aiming to jettison the recent accretions to the tradition represented by faylasufs such as Avicenna and to recover the “purity” of Aristotle's actual thought. This approach allowed Averroës to deflect al-Ghazali's charges, which he did in a book whose title, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, made joking reference to al-Ghazali's earlier work. Where al-Ghazali insisted on the primacy of faith over reason, Averroës argued that reason and faith were two different ways of perceiving the same truth of God's creation, and that therefore they could never conflict with each other. There was no incompatibility.

  Averroës upheld the elitism implicit in the work of the earlier faylasufs, even extending it. Not only was falsafa difficult to understand, and thus too dangerous for the masses, but so were kalam (theology) and mysticism. Instead of searching out profound truths, he argued, most people were better off accepting certain points of dogma that Averroës maintained would secure their salvation. Formulating such dogma was the role of the faylasuf, who was the only person properly equipped to do so, based on a strict reading of the Koran.

  The way to salvation, in other words, was through dogma, a basic approach that was way out of step with the rest of Islamic thinking, but which would help make Averroës sympathetic to thinkers in the West. Within decades, Averroës and his commentaries, conveniently accessible in nearby Spain, had sparked the rise of Scholasticism; for Thomas Aquinas, who built his thought squarely on Averroës’ Aristotelian commentaries, Averroës was simply “the Commentator.” This marked the West's first rediscovery of the Greek legacy, before the broader access that came with the Renaissance.

  The Eclipse of Reason

  The expansive and confident outlook that at first characterized the High Caliphate eventually curled around the edges. Even in the time of al-Mamun, the Abbasids’ endemic political instability began to take its toll. Al-Mamun himself came to power only after a terrible civil war against his brother in which much of the Round City was destroyed.

  After al-Mamun, Baghdad fell into gradual decline. For much of the ninth century, the Abbasid caliphs ruled—or attempted to—from Samarra, in the north. Even after the caliphs returned, they left the Round City and set up their palaces on the east bank of the Tigris. Outside forces—the Buyids in the tenth century, the Turks in the eleventh— found it all too easy to take over the city and control the Abbasid caliphs, who became no more than figureheads. The careers of faylasufs such as Avicenna reveal how political power shifted more and more to regional princes. Al-Mansur's miscalculation caught up with his city and his dynasty.

  Although it took a bit longer, it also caught up with falsafa. As among the Christians, from the start there were voices among the Muslims that objected to the rationalism of the Greek heritage. Long before the translation movement ended, Islamic zealots had begun to attack it, foreshadowing later attacks they would make on the Arabic scientists and philosophers who built on the movement. As early as the ninth century, the religious scholars condemned the “rational sciences” (ulum aqliyya) as a deadly threat to their own “religious sciences” (ulum naqliyya).

  In an attempt to hang on to power and legitimacy in slippery Baghdad, al-Mamun tried to silence these critics by force, with disastrous consequences for the fate of reason in the Islamic world. Co-opting a rationalist version of Islam called Mutazilism, which was based on an infusion of Greek philosophy into Islam that in some ways resembled the same process in early Christianity, al-Mamun attempted to impose it on all Muslims. He undertook a rationalist inquisition called the Mihna, in which religious scholars were rounded up and forced to pledge their acceptance of Mutazilite doctrine. If not, they were tortured. He had the support offayla-sufs such as al-Kindi, but ultimately he failed, and after his death his successors were eventually compelled to abandon the Mihna.

  Al-Mamun's rationalist inquisition made it easier for the Islamic hard-liners to make their case against reason. In the coming struggle, they would repeatedly invoke the memory of the outrageous Mihna. Over the long term, their most powerful rallying point has been the martyrdom of their greatest hero, the jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the Mutazilites’ main opponent, who was imprisoned and tortured by al-Mamun and his successor al-Mutasim after refusing to recant his beliefs.

  Ibn Hanbal died in 855, several years after the Mihna was abandoned. But before he died he founded the severest branch of sharia law, the Hanbali school, which today is observed only in Saudi Arabia, and his thought has constituted a main source of the Saudis’ harsh Wahhabi brand of Islam. This xenophobic, hate-filled belief system in turn provided the “Islamic” ideological underpinning for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Thus have the ripples of the Mihna spread.∗

  Circumstances that favor the agendas of reason are relatively rare in history. As Baghdad declined, the Turks arrived and wrested leadership of the Islamic world from Arab hands. In the thirteenth century the Mongols shattered that world, destroying Baghdad and leaving a mountain of skulls behind them. Christian Europe finally rallied and went on the offensive, starting with the Crusades and the Reconquest of Spain. Prosperity and expansion swung to the West, which through these contacts with the Islamic world slowly realized the technological and scientific wealth to be found there.

  Constriction, adversity, and a loss of cultural confidence favor the appeal to religious zealotry, nativist parano
ia, and patriarchal authoritarianism. There are always those ready to promote themselves by making that appeal. After Averroës, throughout the patchwork of smaller worlds that made up the larger Islamic world, the enemies of falsafa gradually won the upper hand, successfully stigmatizing it as foreign and un-Islamic. Though falsafa carried on, it did so more and more on the edges of society, not at the center. As reason was marginalized, Arabic science fell into stagnation. Even today the Arab world has produced no large-scale history of its own creative contributions to science, once the glory of the Arabic Enlightenment.

  The Arabs had occupied Jerusalem and made it their own, but straitened circumstances led them, metaphorically, to abandon Athens. This was the same choice that the Byzantines themselves had already made once in the Dark Age, and would ultimately make again in the age of Hesychasm. In between these times, as the Abbasids waned, the Byzantines enjoyed their own era of expansion, in which they, too, had a reach that was once more broad enough to embrace both.

  *The adibs were those who cultivated adab, a sophisticated and self-consciously “aesthetic” lifestyle—Bloomsbury in Baghdad—that is sometimes rendered in English as “humanism.” However, adab has nothing to do with the classical revivalism that defined Western humanism.

  *Anselm, an eleventh-century founder of Scholasticism, proposed that a perfect God must exist, since if He didn't exist He wouldn't be perfect. Clearly, logic had a ways to go from here.

  *Wahhabism draws directly on the writings of ibn Hanbal and his fourteenth-century disciple Taqi ibn Taymiyya, who lived when the Abbasid decline had allowed a profusion of petty local rulers to spring up throughout the Islamic world. Ibn Taymiyya reacted to what he saw as their religious laxity by arguing that only strict adherence to Islamic teachings could give a ruler legitimacy This point resonates mightily in the Arab world today, beset as it is by corrupt, self-aggrandizing dictators and monarchs.