Islamic Civilization

Institutions of Higher Learning

 Haskins  observes that, throughout the earlier Middle Ages, the chief centres of culture had been the monasteries. `Set like islands in a sea of ignorance and barbarism, they had saved learning from extinction in Western Europe.’’[1] Not all such monasteries were centres of light and learning, though, he points out; learning, which in most instances, primarily consisted of the Opus Dei, daily chanting of the office in the choir, then study and meditation on the Bible or the fathers.[2] Libraries  were equally meagre in content (as already contrasted with the Muslim world in the first part). Learning only concerned a minority of ecclesiastics, and  until late in the high Middle Ages, it `had few friends and many detractors,’ notes Daniel.[3]Within the Church, some complained that those who spent their lives learning were wasting time, living in ivory towers, and concentrating on the wrong issues.[4] New religious orders in the period often began by shunning academic life, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), despite his own extensive learning, derided the new approaches of the secular schools, which he said `blocked divine illumination and distracted from the truth,’ whilst Francis of Assisi held that knowledge beyond Christ's gospel message was superfluous.[5]The Church, Daniel reminds, was almost the sole patron of scholarship and learning in medieval Europe,[6] and cathedral schools had a narrow objective consisting in the preparation of clerics and priests.[7] The level of scientific learning consisted of basic arithmetical computations, the propositions of Euclid  (without the proofs), and astronomy based mainly on the folklore of Germanic tribes, rudimentary geometry and chemistry consisting of basic metallurgy and the dyeing of cloth.[8] Nevertheless, Hill  rightly points out, it was from the cathedral schools that the universities were to be established, and it was mainly from the cathedral schools and early universities that Islamic knowledge was to enter the Latin  West.[9]

It was, indeed, the cathedral schools, and some pioneering figures of the Church, John of Gorze and Gerbert , most particularly, who triggered the beginnings of Middle Ages learning in the West. It was the schools of Lorraine , and subsequently the transfer of Lotharingians to the Cathedral schools of England , above all, which promoted the first elements of mathematical and astronomical knowledge; a learning that was, however, Islamic in essence and content.[10]Because of that, understandably, the progress was slow, yet advances were made with Walcher of Malvern, Petrus Alphonsi , and Adelard of Bath .[11]12^th century translations, of primarily Islamic science , armed cathedral schools: Laon, Chartres , Rheims, and Paris, with greater prominence; the number of students attracted to them increasing greatly.[12]

Universities , too, as Haskins  expands upon, emerged in the 12^th century, primarily. The Greeks and the Romans, Haskins, says, strange as it may seem, had no universities in the sense in which the word has been used for the past seven or eight centuries.[13] Clagett points out that it was in the last quarter of the 12^th century that the universities of Bologna and Paris took form.[14]The roots of others, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Angers, and Padua, can be found in the latter part of the 12^th or early 13^th.[15] Sarton , too, notes, that by the end of the 12^th century, five universities were at different stages of development: two in Italy: Salerno  and Bologna, two in France: Paris and Montpellier , and one in England : Oxford. Among the new universities of the first half of the 13^th, the most important were Padua, a daughter of Bologna, born in 1222; Naples deliberately established by Frederick II  in 1224; the law schools of Orleans and Angers; Cambridge, issued from Oxford in 1209.[16] Rome, Pisa , Avignon, Prague, Vienna, and Cracow were all founded in the 14^th century;[17] Rome by Pope Boniface VIII in 1303; Avignon (1303); Perugia (1308). Grenoble was established in 1339 by Benedict XII for all faculties except theology; Pisa receiving the privileges of a studium generale only in 1343 from Clement VI; and the same Clement VI establishing Prague in 1347 and Florence in 1349; Perpignan receiving a new charter and a new lease on life from Pope Clement VII in 1379.[18] In Spain, Campbell notes, thanks primarily to the Islamic influence, there were sixteen of them before the end of the 15^th century.[19]

How, and why did such universities rise at this juncture is what is seen in the following.

The Rise of Western Universities , and the Islamic Role

The Islamic role can be traced in two principal ways:

-Islamic learning, firstly, triggered both birth and functioning of such universities, whose outbursts coincide precisely (as on the Salerno  model) with translations from Arabic.

-Secondly, Islam supplied Western universities with formal and institutional models and organisation.