5. Islamic Philosophy

In the absence of a revolutionary alternative, the breakdown of slave society produced a frightful collapse of culture in Europe, the effects of which lasted for centuries. In the period known as the Dark Ages, the scientific and artistic achievements of Antiquity were largely lost. The flame of learning was kept alight in Byzantium, Ireland and, above all, in the Islamic world. The majority of Europe remained sunk in barbarism for a long time.

The religion of Islam arose in the seventh century in Arabia, in the period of the transition of the Arab people from the primitive communal system to class society. It signified the unification of the Arabs in a common state (the Caliphate). The advent of Islam radically transformed the lives of millions of people. At the time of the Hegira (Mohammed’s departure to Medina in 622 AD), the Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanid Persia were in crisis, exhausted by centuries of conflict, and their downtrodden subjects were crushed under the weight of taxation. With its simple, levelling message, it struck a responsive note especially among the poorest and most downtrodden layers of the population, who greeted the Arab invaders more as liberators than oppressors. In its origins, Islam represented a revolutionary movement and the awakening of the Arab nation. One of Mohammed’s last speeches ends with the following words: “Ye people! hearken to my speech and comprehend the same. Know that every Moslem is the brother of every other Moslem. All of you are of the same equality.”^[1]

Not unlike the Gothic invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries, the early Arab conquests swept away the rotten edifice of the imperial state. But unlike the Goths, who conquered a disintegrating and overwhelmingly rural economy, the Arabs took possession of the richest provinces of the Roman Empire, including the magnificent metropolises of Alexandria and Antioch. This produced a profound spiritual and intellectual awakening across this newly-formed empire, not least among the Muslim conquerors themselves. Despite frequent attempts by later so-called fundamentalists to interpret Islam in a narrow and fanatical spirit that denies independent thought and cultural inquiry, in its early period, the Islamic revolution gave a powerful impulse to culture, art and philosophy. In his classic Short History of the Saracens, Syed Ameer Ali has this to say about Ali, the nephew of the Prophet and head of the first Arab Republic:

While Islam was … extending its sway in distant parts, Ali was endeavouring in Medina to give a turn to the new-developed energy of the Saracen race. In the public mosque at Medina, Ali and his cousin, Abdullah the son of Abbais, delivered lectures on philosophy and logic, the traditions (history), rhetoric and law, whilst others dealt with other subjects. Thus was formed the nucleus of that intellectual movement which displayed itself in such great force in later times in Baghdad.^[2]

This was already the state of affairs in the seventh century. Contrary to the opinions of the modern fundamentalists, Islam, in its origins, was not equivalent to the worship of ignorance and narrow-minded fanaticism. In complete contrast to what passed for philosophy in the universities of medieval Europe, where it was utterly subservient to the Catholic Church, Islamic philosophy was not a handmaid of theology. The formative period of Islamic philosophy dates from the late eighth century to the mid-ninth century. Supported by the Caliphs, notably Ma’mun, it was known for its tolerance and freedom of scientific inquiry. Scholars from nations conquered by the Arabs were welcomed by state-endowed institutions. Free-ranging rationalist debate was encouraged. An important feature was the study of Greek texts in translation. At a time when Europe languished in the dark ages, the flame of culture and civilisation was kept shining brightly in the Islamic countries. Baghdad was the centre of a vast civilisation that extended from Cordoba in Spain to India.

This was a truly universal civilisation. Islamic thinkers such as Ibn Sina (known in the West by his Latin name Avicenna), who lived in Central Asia, in the important university town of Bokhara, was not only a philosopher but also a physician and natural scientist. Although faithful to Islam, he did much to spread the knowledge of the scientific and philosophical knowledge of Greek antiquity throughout the Arab world, and thence to Europe, which, for all its fear of Islam, looked to the Arabs as a source of knowledge and education. There were many other great thinkers, like Al-Farabi (who flourished in the late ninth and early tenth centuries), the author of the first works of political philosophy within the context of the religion of Islam (The Attainment of Happiness and The Political Regime). Ibn Sina and others like him helped to consolidate rationalist thinking and propagate natural science and mathematics – both fields in which the Arabs made great discoveries.

SPAIN AND THE ARABS

The conquest of Spain which began in 711 AD marked a turning-point in world history. The Arabs who made the first incursions from North Africa had only intended to make a plundering raid, but the inner rottenness of the Visigoth kingdom led to its speedy collapse. The Arabs – or Moors, as the Spaniards called them – conquered almost the whole peninsula and advanced deep into France. The speed of the conquest was mainly because the oppressed Spanish masses rallied to the invaders, who certainly treated them better than their fellow Christian landlords.

The Arabs appeared before the Spanish serfs as social emancipators, not foreign conquerors. They abolished the oppressive rights of the possessing classes – the feudal landlords and clergy – and replaced the crushing burden of taxes by a single tax which, as well as being relatively light, was not levied on women, children, the sick, the blind, beggars or slaves. Even the Christian monasteries were exempt. Most Spanish cities were granted favourable terms which were honourably kept by the conquerors. The only land that was confiscated was that of the nobles and clergy who had fled to join the enemy.

In essence, Islam contains a democratic and levelling idea which asserts the equality of all men, irrespective of race or colour. This was remarkably advanced for the period under consideration. Far from persecuting other faiths, the Arabs in Spain were far more tolerant than the Christians either before or after Arab rule. They protected all religions and immediately allowed the persecuted Jews to worship freely. Let us recall that the Spanish Inquisition later brutally expelled the Jews from Spain. Like the Mogul rulers of India, they encouraged intermarriage between the conquerors and the conquered in order to bring about the fusion of the two peoples. They advanced agriculture and created the architectural wonders of Granada, Cordoba and Seville. No wonder a large part of the Spanish population became converts to Islam, and demonstrated their loyalty by fighting to defend their homeland and freedoms against the armies of Christian-feudal reaction in the North.

W. C. Atkinson describes the impact of Islamic culture on the minds of the Spaniards in the words of the famous lament of Alvaro of Cordoba:

Alas, all the Christian youths who become famous for their talent know only the language and the literature of the Arabs; they read and study zealously Arabic books, of which by dint of great expenditure they form extensive libraries, and proclaim aloud on all sides that this literature is worthy of admiration.^[3]

The same author outlines the economic advance achieved by the Arabs in Spain:

Irrigation works, of which traces still survive today, made fertile wide areas of irregular or inadequate rainfall; rice, the sugar-cane, and other exotic crops were introduced; and although the Koran forbade the drinking of wine, the vine was cultivated on a large scale.

Industry enjoyed a parallel prosperity, that ranged through gold and silver mining, the weaving of wool and silk, the manufacture of paper, introduced into Europe by the Arabs, and of glass, invented in Cordoba in the ninth century, metalwork, ceramics, and leatherware. The fame of these products travelled far, and to handle the flourishing commerce that resulted there grew up a great trading fleet based chiefly in Seville, Malaga, and Almeria.^[4]

Thus began a period of economic and social advance that lasted for centuries, and with it a brilliant chapter in the history of human culture, art and science. One commentator writes:

The Moors organised that wonderful kingdom of Cordova, which was the marvel of the Middle Ages, and, when all Europe was plunged in barbaric ignorance and strife, alone held the torch of learning and civilisation bright and shining before the Western world.^[5]

Anyone who today visits the Alhambra in Granada or the Mosque at Cordoba will instantly understand that the Arabs of Spain were far in advance of medieval Europe, over which they excelled, not only in science and technology, but also in the fine arts, sculpture and painting. The Arabs’ cultural tradition was broad: it included the study of logic, the sciences of nature (including psychology and biology), the mathematical sciences (including music and astronomy), metaphysics, ethics, and politics. No town, however small, was without a school or college, while every principal town had its own university, including Cordoba (renowned throughout Europe), Seville (Ishbilia), Malaga, Zaragoza, Lisbon (Alishbuna), Jaen and Salamanca, which subsequently became the most prestigious of all Spanish universities. There were a galaxy of writers, poets, historians and philosophers.

Contrary to what one might expect, there were many famous women intellectuals. At a time when the notion of the equality of women would have been anathema in Christian Europe, many distinguished women poets and cultured ladies were held in esteem in Cordoba and Granada. Hassana at-Tamimiyeh, daughter of Abu’l Hussain the poet, and Umm ul-Ula, both natives of Guadalajara, flourished in the sixth century of the Hegira. Ammat ul-Aziz (a descendant of the Prophet, and therefore styled ash-Sharifa) and al-Ghusanieh, from the province of Almeria, were both women who were in the front rank of scholars at the time. There were many others. Mariam, daughter of Abu Yakub al-Ansari, was a native of Seville, where she taught rhetoric, poetry and literature, “which, joined to her piety, her good morals, her virtues, and amiable disposition, gained her the affection of her sex, and gave her many pupils.”^[6]

BACKWARD EUROPE AND ADVANCED ASIA

So, far from Islamic thought being limited to mysticism and religious fanaticism, it showed a natural inclination to rationalism and science, in which, for centuries, the Arabs led the world. Great advances were made, especially in mathematics and astronomy, but also in many other spheres of science and technology. This point is made by Alfred Hooper in his history of mathematics:

We have much for which to thank the Moors. They introduced new ideas about medicine and medical knowledge; they taught improved methods of working in metal and leather; they built waterworks, sluices and canals in Spain; in all, they brought the wisdom of India and the East to a Europe which had sunk back into ignorance and savage ways.

The Arabs were familiar with the work of the great Greek mathematicians who had built up the ‘Golden age of Greek mathematics’ before the fragile and wonderful civilisation of Greece was absorbed by the intensely practical and utilitarian Romans; they also introduced into Spain the new and revolutionary method of writing numbers that they had learned from the Hindus, a method that was to pave the way for our modern world of science and engineering and aeronautics.^[7]

Throughout the Middle Ages the only real advances in mathematics were made by the Indians and Arabs. It was they who discovered trigonometry. It was the Arabs who discovered algebra. The very word is Arabic – al-jabr – which, like so many other things, found its way into Europe from Spain. The Arab mathematician al-Khowarizmi, as well as writing a book on Hindu-Arab number systems (the Indians also played a vital role in developing mathematics, and the Arabs learned from them), wrote another book on the treatment of equations which he called al jabr w’al muquabalah – the reunion and the opposition. This was later translated into Latin and hence became accessible to Europeans.

Alfred Hooper comments:

The years from about 800 to about 1450, known as the Middle Ages, were marked by an almost complete stagnation of independent thought, which paralysed mathematical progress and cast its gloom over European mathematicians as over all other thinkers.^[8]

The same author adds:

Centuries after the Arabs had introduced the new number-symbols into Europe many people still clung to the old familiar Roman numerals and would have nothing to do with the new system, which they associated with traders and heathens. By the thirteenth century, however, the new system of writing numbers had become established in various parts of Europe. It was not until then that any real development in the number-reckoning we now call elementary arithmetic could take place.^[9]

The Medieval world gained access to the ideas of Aristotle and Plato mainly from Arab sources. Out of a host of brilliant thinkers who influenced medieval Europe, the most outstanding was Ibn Rushd Muhammed, known in the West by his Latin name Averroes. He was a scientist, a polymath and a courageous radical rationalist. This great Arab philosopher lived between 1126 and 1198 in Spain during the Caliphate of Cordoba. In his writings, we see the elements of a materialist philosophy, derived from a careful reading of Aristotle. Although he remained a devout Muslim, Ibn Rushd attempted to prove that matter and motion could neither be created nor destroyed, thus anticipating the conservation theories of modern physics. He likewise denied the immortality of the soul.

Averroes denied that the world had been created. Rather, he held that the world had existed eternally and, contrary to the myth of genesis, that there had never been a first human. He struck blow after blow against the teachings of official religion, arguing that human acts are not ruled by divine providence.

Following Aristotle, Averroes maintained that knowledge is derived from sense experience; a belief he openly contrasted to blind faith in religious institutions and scripture:

So we affirm definitely that whenever the conclusion of a demonstration is in conflict with the apparent meaning of Scripture, that apparent meaning admits of allegorical interpretation according to the rules for such interpretation in Arabic. This proposition is questioned by no Muslim and doubted by no believer.^[10]

By taking this position, Averroes relegated religious scripture to mere metaphors which should not be taken literally. This was an open attack on the religious officialdom who looked at Averroes with suspicion. So radical were these ideas, that his theories were persecuted by orthodox Muslims, and, as we shall see later, also by the Catholic church. The influence and importance of Averroes’ works cannot be underestimated. It was primarily through the work of this remarkable philosopher, particularly his commentaries on Aristotle, that Europeans initially became acquainted with the long-forgotten world of classical Greek philosophy.

The main fountainhead of this knowledge was Islamic Spain, which, until it was destroyed by the Christians, was a flourishing, prosperous and cultured nation. Granada, Seville and Cordoba were important and internationally renowned centres of learning. All religions were treated with enlightened tolerance – until the Spaniards, led by those narrow-minded and fanatical bigots Fernando of Castille and Isabelle of Aragon, set about reducing the flower of Al-Andalus to a heap of bloody ashes.

The so-called Crusades, about which so much romantic rubbish has been written, were just so many destructive and bloodthirsty raids of barbarians against people who were, in every respect, their superiors. One of the Christian chroniclers of the siege of Granada, Father Agapito, writes in contemptuous terms about the Arab habit of washing themselves:

[W]ater is more necessary to these infidels than bread, making use of it in repeated daily ablutions enjoyed by their damnable religion, and employing it in baths and in a thousand other idle and extravagant modes, of which we Spaniards and Christians make but little account.^[11]

The reactionary and barbarous nature of the Crusades has been sufficiently demonstrated by modern historians like Stephen Runciman. Here is a typical extract by another writer:

In each captured city the Tafurs [poor crusaders] looted everything they could lay their hands on, raped the Moslem women and carried out indiscriminate massacres. The official leaders of the Crusade had no authority over them at all. When the Emir of Antioch protested about the cannibalism of the Tafurs, the princes could only admit apologetically: “All of us together cannot tame King Tafur”.^[12]

And again:

The fall of Jerusalem was followed by a great massacre; except for the governor and his bodyguard … every Moslem – man, woman and child – was killed. In and around the Temple of Solomon “the horses waded in blood up to their knees, nay up to the bridle. It was a just and wonderful judgement of God that the same place should receive the blood of those whose blasphemies it had so long carried up to God.” As for the Jews of Jerusalem, when they took refuge in their chief synagogue the building was set on fire and they were all burnt alive. Weeping with joy and singing songs of praise the crusaders marched in procession to the church of the Holy Sepulchre. “O new day, new day and exultation, new and everlasting gladness… That day, famed through all centuries to come, turned all our sufferings and hardships into joy and exultation; that day, the confirmation of Christianity, the annihilation of paganism, the renewal of our faith!”^[13]

It is ironic that, to this day, Europeans still see themselves as the exclusive bearers of human culture when for the whole of the Middle Ages they acted as the grave-diggers of culture in the East. In reality the roles were opposite to the myths created by the West. It was in the Islamic world that the flame of art, science and philosophy were kept alive and slowly found their way into Europe as it began to emerge out of the Dark Ages.

Endnotes

[1] Quoted in A. C. Bouquet, Comparative Religion, p. 274.

[2] S. A. Ali, Short History of the Saracens, p. 47.

[3] W. C. Atkinson, A History of Spain and Portugal, p. 60.

[4] Ibid., p. 58.

[5] Quoted in S. A. Ali, Short History of the Saracens, p. 115.

[6] Ibid., p. 578.

[7] A. Hooper, Makers of Mathematics, pp. 24-5.

[8] Ibid., p. 84.

[9] Ibid., p. 26, my emphasis.

[10] Averroes, ‘The Decisive Treatise’, On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, p. 51.

[11] Quoted in W. Irving, The Conquest of Granada, p. 269.

[12] N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, pp. 66-7.

[13] Ibid., p. 68.