pursuit of
religious truth. Nonetheless, by the eighth and ninth centuries the
attraction of Persian and Greek intellectual traditions proved
irresistible to many Muslims. As they had with architecture and music,
Muslim scholars in Persia, Spain, and Egypt began fusing the Greek
intellectual tradition with that of Persia and moving off in
distinctive new directions. Not coincidently Persian religious leaders
developed the madrasa, or local school for Islamic theological and
legal study. In this way Islamic culture kept the religious and the
philosophical/scientific worlds clearly separated. Meanwhile the House
of Islam continued to expand territorially, influencing and being
influenced by cultures in Central Africa, Inner Asia, and India.The Arab physician and scientist Abu Yusuf al-Kindi (801-873) lived in Baghdad and helped found there the Bayt al-Hikmah, or House of Wisdom, a facility developed by Caliph al-Mamun the Great (r. 813-833) for research and teaching in a wide range of secular studies. Al-Kindi supported the translation of Greek philosophical and scientific works into Arabic by Muslim scholars at the House. He also strove to reconcile the teachings of the Quran with Greek rationalist thought—in a sense, to Islamize Aristotle. Al-Kindi may be considered the first Arab philosopher, a self-described seeker after Truth wherever it might be found. He paid a price, though, as a later, less open-minded caliph had the sixty-year old philosopher beaten and his library confiscated.
From the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad served as a center for secular education and research unparalleled in the medieval West. Scholars representing many religions gathered here from all over the Muslim world, and from Central Asia and India. The caliphs supported a magnificent library and school where Plato, Hippocrates, Euclid, and Pythagoras, as well as Aristotle, were not only translated but studied and commented upon. Caliph Al-Mamun’s father, Caliph Harun al-Rashid, with the best wishes of the Byzantine emperor, had sent scholars to Constantinople and other Byzantine cities to collect philosophical and scientific manuscripts, which became the core of the new library. The translations, commentaries, and new scientific works written in Baghdad circulated throughout the Mediterranean since all literate Muslims knew Arabic from their study of the Quran. The introduction of paper-making into Baghdad from Central Asia about 794 aided this dissemination four centuries before Christian Europe made its first sheets. Though the House of Wisdom was destroyed in the Mongol invasion of 1258, secular schools like it thrived in such cities as Cordoba, Damascus, and Cairo, Egypt. Beginning in the eleventh century, small groups of Christians from Western Europe developed an interest in this literature, often through translations into Latin by Jewish scholars in Spain, Sicily and the Middle East. Adoption and study of these texts would have a profound and revolutionary effect on Western Christian philosophy and education in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Christian West received much of the Greek heritage of scientific, mathematical, philosophical, and medical literature through the medium of Arabic scholarship.
The first director of the House of Wisdom was a physician, Abu Zayd Hunayn bin Ishaq al-Ibadi (809-873), the son of an Arab Christian pharmacist. Though well educated in Arabic medicine, Al-Ibadi learned Greek and began translating classical medical texts into Arabic. Wanting to achieve the highest possible accuracy, he obtained multiple copies of each work, compared them, and created what he considered the best edition. His translations, and nearly thirty of his own medical works, set a high standard for Arab medical scholarship. Abu Bakr al-Razi (865-925) was an Arab physician who read but rejected the work of Galen (c. 129-199/229), the well-known Greco-Roman physician. Al-Razi, who had studied and practiced in Baghdad decided to rely on his own observations and conclusions rather than ancient authorities. In over 180 books he recorded his own findings on diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of diseases and ailments. Four hundred years later, during the Black Death (1348-1351), European physicians were still relying on al-Razi’s writings, which had been translated into Latin in the thirteenth century. His huge medical encyclopedia—“The All-encompassing”— was translated in 1279 by a Jewish physician, and a century later was printed for use by European medical students and physicians. In Cordoba, the surgeon Abu al-Qasim Khalaf bin Abbas al-Zahrawi (940?-1013) developed new procedures and treatments and recorded these in the first work in Arabic specifically on surgery. By building on the Greeks and relying on their own observations and experiences, medieval Muslim physicians pushed medical theory and practice to new levels of accuracy and effectiveness.
Abu Ali ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna (980-1037), was one of the greatest of medieval Muslim scholars and philosophers. By the age of ten he had memorized the Quran and was practicing medicine in Persia by age 17. He combined practitice and teaching, always seeking to verify his classical authorities, especially Galen, through his own observations and experience. His research on Aristotle’s natural philosophy led him to correct many of the Greek’s errors. This made Avicenna very important in the reintroduction of the Greek’s ideas into Islamic and Christian thought. While trying to maintain a balance between Islamic religious teaching and his own synthesis of Greek and personal thought, Avicenna preferred to rely on experience and the exercise of reason rather than Quranic revelation. But this led him to some rather non-Muslim conclusions, such as an eternal universe (i.e. no creation), no resurrection of the body, and no human immortality (whether in Paradise or Hell). While he always publicly accepted Islam, his philosophy contradicted many of its teachings. This led to the notion of a “double truth,” whereby revelation and rational thought could appear to be contradictory and yet true at the same time.
The Cordoban Ibn Rushd, or Averroes (1126-1198) in the West, studied Avicenna’s work and further adapted Aristotle to the medieval world. Though Averroes was an Islamic judge, astronomer, and physician to the Spanish caliph, he died in exile for his heretical views. His great contribution to the intellectual world is his commentary on Aristotle’s philosophy. For Averroes,
…the teaching of Aristotle is the supreme truth, because his mind was the final expression of
the human mind. Wherefore it has been well said that he was created and given to us by divine
providence that we might know all there is that might be known.
Right reason and Aristotle led to truth, but so did the Quran. According to Averroes and Avicenna, simple people needed the simplicity of the message revealed in the Quran, but the intellectually blessed had a right to demand demonstration, which only reason and experience provide. Intellectuals were to take the Quran allegorically, not literally, when it came into conflict with human experience. Despite Avicenna’s attitude to religious teaching, his commentaries became highly influential in both Muslim and Christian educational circles, and catalysed the development of the European University (see Chapter 12).
The contributions of medieval Islamic scientific culture to the modern world are enormous. “Arabic” numbers and the Hindu zero—both of which originated in India—allowed much more sophisticated mathematical calculation than the Christian world could manage with Roman numerals. The Islamic world developed algebra, itself an Arabic word, while Christian Europeans had to settle for arithmetic and Euclid’s geometry. “Alcohol,” “alkalide,” “nadir” and its opposite “zenith” are also Arabic at root and reflect Muslim advances in early chemistry and observational astronomy.
Al-Kindi on a Modern Egyptian Stamp
Teacher and Students at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad
Dioscorides, De material medica
A Sign of Avicenna's Long Shadow: Avicenna's Canon in a 1608 Latin edition from Venice
Muslim Astronomers at Work
Despite periods of stability, the House of Islam continued to expand. The spread of Islam in the along the coasts and among the islands of the Indian Ocean, across North Africa and down the East African coast meant that Central African kingdoms would soon hear the call of the Prophet. From the eleventh century Muslim merchants from East and North Africa brought Islam to the Kingdom of Ghana. By the thirteenth century the great Kingdom of Mali had replaced that of Ghana, and its rulers had accepted Islam. Acting like self-appointed caliphs, they fostered Islam throughout central Africa. The most famous ruler was Mansa Musa (1312-1337), who took the hajj with a huge entourage and over 600 pounds of gold to pay for expenses, impressing even the most jaded observers. Upon his return, being both spiritually renewed and much better informed about Islamic institutions, he built new mosques and religious schools and encouraged proper Islamic practice.
The peaceful spread of Islam among the African animists contrasts with the violent Muslim assault upon Hindu India. Tribal chieftains from Afghanistan had long raided northwest India, and conversion to Islam gave them a religious motivation for robbing and destroying Hindu temples with their images of many gods. Fierce warrior/thieves slaughtered or enslaved any Hindus who defended themselves. In the twelfth century Muslim Turks, fierce steppe nomads from Central Asia, drove deep into India, capturing major cities. The monumental Qutb Minar tower in Delhi, which resembles a huge minaret, celebrates Muslim control of the city The Turk Shamsudin Iltutmish (1211-1236), assumed the Arabic title sultan, or “man of power,” and gained recognition for his Sultanate of Delhi from the Caliph of Baghdad. He rejected his two sons as unworthy of the throne and named as his successor Raziya, his daughter. Raziya ruled for four years before being imprisoned by rebel troops, supposedly for allowing an Ethiopian slave to touch her in public. More likely it was because many in her army had never accepted a woman’s leadership. She was later murdered by a peasant during a robbery. Turkish-led Muslim armies continued southward, leaving only the southern tip of the subcontinent to local rulers. The mixing of Indian and Turkish culture with Islamic religion created a unique society freed from the caste system and fruitful in the arts, architecture, and literature. The way in which people were coerced into Islam, however, left a lasting resentment that still bitterly divides Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India.
When Babar (or Babur; 1483-1530), the Turko-Mongol Muslim ruler of Afghanistan, lost his throne in the 1520s, he moved to India and established the Mughal (Mongol) Empire, ruling from Delhi. Eventually Mughal political influence stretched the length of the subcontinent, developing a rich artistic tradition that blended elements of the Indian arts with Muslim form and function. The long-reigning third emperor, Akbar (r. 1556-1605), respected India’s cultural heritage and had classical literary works like the Ramayana translated into Persian, the Mughal court language. Akbar established royal artistic workshops that trained both Hindu and Muslim artists, producing colorful manuscripts and paintings along Persian lines, often in gouache – pigments in a medium of gum Arabic – on treated cloth or paper. His own conquests and successful diplomacy ensured that the court style would spread and put down roots over much of the subcontinent. Mughal painting differs from Indian aesthetic traditions by seeking a high level of realism in natural forms and spatial relationships; it differs from most Muslim traditions in being exclusively secular in content. Historical scenes served as propaganda for the regime, as did portraiture, which reached a high degree of sensitive realism. Akbar’s artists are best known for their great illustrated books, like Akbar’s own story, the Akbar Nama with its depictions of the ruler’s personal accomplishments. Over time, Mughal art began to reflect the stylistic influence of Renaissance European works that arrived in India, suggesting ever more natural settings and rational relationships among figures and the spaces they inhabited.
Islamic Indian architecture preceded the Mughals by three centuries. As elsewhere in the Muslim world, it married established Muslim elements, like the dome, with local craftmanship. Highly skilled Indian sculptors and masons produced stunning examples of mosques with ornately carved facades and domed tombs and shrines often in settings of great natural beauty. Mughal architecture’s greatest achievement is certainly the Taj Mahal, a mausoleum for the beloved wife of emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666). It epitomizes the most striking elements of Islamo-Indian design in its swelling dome, arched niches, and delicate surface carving. Like many earlier South Asian monuments it occupies a great rectangular platform, which forms a sacred precinct and whose corners are marked by graceful minarets. Like Shah Jahan’s palaces it is built of white marble whose surface is tinted by the colors of the daylit sky.
Muslim Turks also moved westward, attacking the eastern boundary of the Byzantine Empire, and annihilating the imperial army at Manzikert in 1071. They raced westward through the country to which they would give their name, soon reaching the outskirts of Constantinople itself. Turkish armies also struck southward toward Egypt, capturing Antioch in 1084 and establishing rule over Syria. Beginning in 1096 the Western Christian counterstroke known as the Crusades pushed the Turks back, allowing the Byzantine armies to contain them. In the end, however, the Europeans were beaten, the Byzantines weakened beyond repair, and the Turks marched into Constantinople.
The minaret of Sankore Mosque
in Africa
The Minaret of Delhi
The Famed Taj Mahal
In Byzantium, scholars, monks, and bishops developed Eastern Orthodoxy into a unique expression of Christianity. Church leaders harnessed the artsand philosophy to enrich and explain theology and ritual. Despite the dominance of Christianity, Eastern Roman people chose to retain much of their classical inheritance. The interplay of classical and Christian traditions resulted in a distinctive culture whose history was punctuated by classsical “renaissances.” Though the Byzantine Empire eventually disappeared, its religious and cultural influence spread far and wide—from the Orthodox Church of Russia to the intellectual and artistic Renaissance of Western Europe.
Islam’s prophet and founder, Muhammad, emerged from the Arabian culture of tolerant polytheism and long-distance commerce. When Muhammad submitted to Allah in the 610s, he began to redefine biblical monotheism, much as Moses, Jesus, and Paul had done in their turns. Muhammad believed Christ had been a prophet, but was in no way divine; like Yahweh, Allah was one, not three-in-one (a trinity). Muhammad believed that his message was shaped by God himself, whose very words he passed on and had recorded in the Quran. Muhammad’s task was to restore the one true message of the one true God.
Muhammad’s followers first carried his message out of Arabia and into the Empires of Persia and Byzantium. Conquered Christians and Jews were tolerated but socially and economically burdened. The expanding world of Islam was enriched by contact with the great civilizations of North Africa, the Middle East and Iran. Islam soon provided the spiritual and social basis for flourishing urban cultures from Baghdad to Spain. Like Byzantine intellectuals, sophisticated Muslims blended their spiritual lives with powerful secular influences, especially from the classical world. Valued as they were, however, the Greco-Roman tradition was merely the starting point for great advances carried out by medieval Persians, Africans, Arabs, Andalusians, and Turks. Architects and artists built and decorated mosques, religious shrines, and palaces of great beauty and refinement throughout the Islamic world. Muslim scholars taught Islamic law and theology at schools that became models for Western universities. Poets like Rumi and Omar Khayyam celebrated the life of the spirit and the body in verses that celebrated God and humanity. A person might travel from Spain to Afghanistan and never leave the jurisdiction of the caliph (ruler) in Baghdad, or miss spoken Arabic, or avoid Shariat law.
Islam’s expansion occurred despite the fragmentation of the early caliphate that prevented the creation of a monolithic Muslim state. In the thirteenth century a terrifying blow was struck by the Mongols, whose swift and relentless armies devastated Islam’s eastern reaches. Nonetheless, the impetus once in the hands of the Arabs passed to the Ottoman Turks, whose Muslim armies finished off Byzantium and eventually marched to the gates of Vienna. Their multi-ethnic empire would survive until its defeat in the First World War (1914-1918). Though neither the Islamic caliphate nor the Byzantine Empire has survived, the religious cultures that each created remain at the center of the lives of hundreds of millions of believers.