Islamic Civilization

The Scope and Accomplishments of Muslim Scholarship

The success of the Muslim renaissance, Sarton holds, was ‘essentially due to the wave of enthusiasm and energy which lifted these people up for a time almost above themselves.’[1] 

The life and works of the poet Abu'l Ala al-Ma’ari, briefly summarised by Durant, are quite edifying.[2] Abu ala al-Ma’ari (10^th-11^th centuries) was born at al-Ma’arat, near Aleppo . Smallpox left him blind at the age of four; nevertheless he took up the career of a student, learned by heart the manuscripts that he liked in the libraries, travelled widely to hear famous masters, and returned to his village. During the next fifteen years his annual income was thirty dinars (some twelve dollars a month), which he shared with servant and guide; his poems won him fame, but as he refused to write encomiums, he nearly starved. In 1008 he visited Baghdad , was honoured by poets and scholars before returning two years later to Ma'arat, became rich, but lived to the end with the simplicity of a sage. He was a vegetarian a l'outrance, avoiding not only flesh and fowl, but milk, eggs, and honey as well; to take any of these from an animal world, he thought, was rank robbery. On the same principle he rejected the use of animal skins, blamed ladies for wearing furs, and recommended wooden shoes.[3] He died at eighty four; and a pious pupil relates that 180 poets followed his funeral, and eighty four savants recited eulogies at his grave.’[4]

A similar picture, but at the level of royalty, is illustrated by the life of Abd Errahman III of Spain (r.912-961).[5] As a ruler, he fought and quashed the threats to the kingdom; from within and from without. Under his rule, commerce thrived and so did agriculture, horticulture and industrial production. His contribution to arts, learning, and civilisation was enormous and he was also known for his building of the famed al-Zahra (the Bright One) at Cordova. The mosques, schools, baths and gardens and scholarly circles of his time were only rivalled by those of Baghdad .[6] Then, Abd Errahman virtually abandoned the administration of the empire to his heir, Al-Hakem II. He renounced the frivolities of the court and attached himself to the ascetic Abu Ayub, in whose company he passed much of his time in fasting, prayer, and the distribution of alms. He focused his mind on learning and reading, drawn to intellectual curiosities of various sorts. After the king’s death, in a journal which recorded his most secret thoughts, were found his reflections on ‘the disappointments of life and the delusive attractions of human greatness and imperial ambition’:

‘I have reigned fifty years in peace and in glory, beloved by my people, feared by my enemies, respected by my allies. My friendship has been sought by the great kings of the earth. I have wanted nothing that the heart of man could desire, -neither renown, nor power, nor pleasure. During this long life, I have counted the days when I have enjoyed complete happiness- and they amount to only fourteen! Praise be to Him who alone possesses eternal glory and omnipotence, there is no other God than He!'[7]

Abd Errahman’s predilections for a sedentary life, and his intimate relations with the learned,’ Scott points out, ‘were viewed with contempt by the barbarous Christians, who considered war as the peculiar calling of a man of spirit, and the acquisition of knowledge as only fit for monks, an order whose pacific occupations did not, nevertheless, exclude even its members from the profession of arms.’[8]

Another figure from the scholarly world gives the same impression. Abbas Ibn Firnas  (d.887) of Cordova had such a boundless imagination and inventive faculty, he could decipher even the most incomprehensible hieroglyphics.[9] On one occasion, as Levi Provencal narrates:

‘When a merchant returned to Spain with Khalil's treatise on the Arab metrical system, nobody could make anything of these rules of prosody and scansion. Abbas had the manuscript brought to him, and betook himself with it to a corner of the palace, where he examined it and, quickly grasping its meaning, proceeded to explain it to a dumbfounded audience.’[10]

Ibn Firnas  was also a poet under three successive rulers, a mathematician, an astronomer and physicist. He built his patrons a mechanical clock and an armillary sphere (a combination of metal rings representing the sky and the movements of astral bodies).[11] He is also credited of having imported the Arabic numeral system after a trip to Iraq .[12] Ibn Firnas also invented spectacles, complex chronometers, and a flying machine.[13] He was accustomed with the scientific properties of glass, and contributed to early experiments with lenses and the idea of magnifying script by their use.[14] He also lent his skills to the glass making furnaces of Cordova, and made a representation of the sky in glass, which he was able at will to make clear or cloudy, with lightning and the noise of thunder at the press of a finger.'[15] He also made some of the earliest attempts at flying by building artificial wings.[16]

More extraordinary figures could be added, but one principal element common to many was their monumental written output. It was not just the better known figures of Ibn Sina  or Al-Razi , whose works The Qanun and The Continens were so voluminous they were never edited whole, or kept in one location, but many others slightly lesser known. Thus, Ibn Hayyan of Cordova (b.987-88 d. 1076), not to be confused with the earlier chemist, Jabir Ibn Hayyan, was the author of an immense history of Spain in 60 volumes (Kitab al-matin, Liber solidus) and of a shorter work, in 10 volumes, dealing with the biographies of Hispano-Muslim scholars (Kitab al-Muqtabis fi Tarikh al-Andalus).[17] Ibn al-Khatib of Cordoba , who died in the 10^thcentury, is credited with nearly 1100 works on metaphysics, history, and medicine, whilst Ibn Hassan composed 450 books on philosophy and jurisprudence.[18] Ibn Hazm (994-1064) lived for a considerable length in Xatiba, near Valencia , and in the Algarve, and died there; his writing included around 400 volumes, nearly 80,000 pages.[19] Al-Tabari, born in 839, in Amul, in the province of Tabaristan, which gave him his surname, commenced his studies in Amul, he then left for many cities: Ravy, Baghdad , Basra , Kufa, different Syrian centres of learning, then Fustat in Egypt , then back to Baghdad.[20] Al-Tabari, according to Yaqut (d. 1229), had planned a commentary on the Qur’an ten times more voluminous than the one he completed that is 30,000 pages rather than 3,000. It was only the anguished protests of his pupils that led him to smaller number.[21] Al-Tabari is also said to have projected the precise number of pages for his universal history, 30,000 only to reduce that to the same 3000, because of the same youthful protests.[22] Yaqut al-Hamawi himself managed altogether 33,180 pages on the poets and men of literature,[23] whilst Al-Marzubani, who died shortly before the year 1000, wrote over 37,580 pages, according to Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist.[24] According to the catalogue established by Al-Biruni  (973-1050), the writing by al-Razi (854-934-5) can be classified as follows: 56 medical works; 33 works on natural sciences; 8 on logic; 10 on mathematics; 17 on philosophy; 6 on metaphysics; 14 on theology; 23 on chemistry; 10 on varied subjects; and 7 on explanations or summaries of other philosophical or medical works.[25] Ibn al-Jawzi, an encyclopaedist (b. ca. 1115-d. 1201), was one of the most learned men of his time, and his immense literary activity was equalled in Islam only by al-Suyuti's (second half of the 15^th century.)[26] His almost innumerable writings treat of history, philology, biography, Hadith , Fiqh, the Qur’an, ethics, medicine, geography, etc. His most important work seems to be a history of the world from the creation to 1180, entitled Kitab al-muntazam wa multaqat al-multazam. He prepared a critical edition of al-Ghazzali's Ihya. He wrote a treatise on medical generalities called Luqat al-manafi fi'l-tibb, and another on spiritual medicine, Kitab al-Tibb al-Ruhani. Also a sort of autobiography in the form of a letter to his son, Liftat al-Kabid, followed by a list of his writings, he compiled two other lists of these.[27] Ibn al-Banna, also known as Abu'l-Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Uthman al-Azdi, was born in 1256 in the city of Marrakech , or the region of Marrakech.[28] Al-Banna wrote a large number of works, in fact 82 are listed by Renaud.[29] Based on the inventory that was made at the time by Ibn Hayder, Ibn al-Banna seems to be in fact the author of more than 100 titles, of which 32 concern Mathematics and Astronomy, the others being dedicated to disciplines very distant from each other, like Linguistics, Rhetoric, Astrology, Grammatics and Logic.[30] Al-Nuwayri (1279-1332), a close associate to the Mamluk Sultan al-Nassir, was deeply interested in the art of writing, writing eighty pages a day, completing an encyclopaedia entitled Nihayat al-arab fi funun al-adab, which aimed at encompassing all sociological sciences needed for the prominent secretaries.[31] Pursuing the tradition, Ibn Khaldun 's (1332-1406) Muqqadimma was not just immense in size, but also dealt with many subjects, covering subjects ranging from history, to political administration, economic and social institutions, etc.[32] And, of course, the sheer number of scholars themselves is quite impressive, Hammer Purgastall counted 5,218 Muslim authors who lived and wrote prior to the end of the 11^th century.[33] In his Geschichtschreiber der Araber, written in 1882, Wustenfeld counted no less than 590 historians who flourished in the first thousand years of Islam.[34]

‘Out of their different circumstances of life,’ [Jurji observes,] ‘the wielders of the new scientific style travelled their numerous pathways till they met together at a single crossroad. Common to most of them was the unwearied attempt to simplify and to make lucid. Herein resided their own unchallengeable genius. They could, despite certain persistent opinions to the contrary, make generalizations and propound a subtle synthesis. They had a solid mastery over their materials, necessary in creative work. They could classify and enumerate, above all, they possessed untarnished the simple gift of orderliness.’[35]

Organising, systematising, and classifying sciences was indeed a shared preoccupation of Muslim scholars, from Al-Farabi to Al-Ghazali , Ibn Sina , Ibn Hazm, and many more. Al-Farabi’s Ihsa al-Ulum (Catalogue of the Sciences, ca 900) was widely used by Muslim authors as an introduction to philosophical study and was twice translated into Hebrew, and into Latin  in the 12^th century by Gerard of Cremona.[36] The preface offers a classification of all the recognised sciences, or branches of learning, their parts, and their contents.[37] Al-Farabi identifies five major sciences: grammar, logic, mathematics, the science of physics and metaphysics, and political science, which includes the Islamic religious disciplines of jurisprudence (fiqh) and dialectical theology (kalam).[38] The preface concludes with some remarks on the purpose and utility of such an enumeration:

‘It will indicate the proper beginning and order of the study of the sciences and will orient the student to the study he is about to undertake; it will show him the relative value of various disciplines; and it will alert him to those who profess expertise in some or all of the sciences but who are in fact charlatans.’[39]

Prior to such classifications, sciences were a bulk of knowledge, where the scientific mingled with the folkloric, which was very obvious with both Greek and early Islamic learning. It was thus very common to find the chemist dabbling with the magician, and it was extremely hard to delimit the boundaries, or prevent the non scientific taking over the scientific. Sciences also had no distinct parameters within which they could be addressed. The Islamic classification of sciences thus somehow refined the whole matter, contributing to the emergence of what was centuries later to be our modern learning system in departments, faculties, and courses. And then, within the sciences, further subdivisions were made. Al-Razi  and Jabir Ibn Hayyan (722-815) performed it to perfection in chemistry. In his work Secret of Secrets,[40] Al-Razi, for instance, divided natural substances into earthly, vegetable and animal substances, to which he also added a number artificially obtained such as lead oxide, caustic soda, and various alloys. Al-Razi again, in his medical treatises gathered all knowledge, formerly disorganised, into a perfect synthesis, thus providing his users with a framework for learning, understanding, and developing medical subjects.[41]

The benefits of the dictionary are too well established to warrant any praise, but praise is due to Islamic scholarship, which brought us dictionaries in every form and format.  Islamic biographical dictionaries, for instance, as Young observes, combine and also anticipate the features of both Who's Who and works such as the Dictionary of National Biography.[42] Biography, Young explains, seeks to understand the individual and those features of character that make them unique, the space devoted to each being proportional to their importance. The most frequent matters included in the entries are the subject's date of death, their lineage, education and travels; appointments, their intellectual and moral qualities and interesting anecdotes related to them. Also included are philological notes on the form of the subject's name, a brief description of their physical appearance and, in the case of authors, a list of their works.[43] The earliest  biographical dictionary was the Kitab tabaqat al-muhaddithin of al-Mawsali, who died  in 800, but of which no copy is thought to have survived. Many more followed, and included not just the names of men but also of women; encompassing all classes of important people, as in such works as Kitab Wulat Misr was qudatiha (Book of the Governors and Judges of Egypt ) by Muhammad b. Yusuf al-Kindi (d 961) and Qudat Qurtuba (The Judges of Cordova) by al-Khushani (981).[44] The Fihrist, completed by the Baghdad  bookseller, Ibn al-Nadim, in 987,[45] gives the most detailed account of all works by Muslim scholars up to the last decade of the 10^th century.[46] It is divided into ten ‘discourses' the first, for instance, describing the language of both Arabs and non Arabs, the varieties of their scripts etc. The second mainly deals with grammar; the third with Belles Lettres, biography, genealogies etc. From al-Fihrist the scale of loss of Islamic works becomes obvious, for the majority of works it cites are no longer extant.[47] Ibn al-Asqalani in his al-Durar al-kaminah, has over 5000 entries, while al-Athir in his Usd al-ghalab fi maarifat al-sahabah has over 7000.[48] The most used Islamic Biographical sources are those of Ibn-al-Qifti (d.1248), who wrote The History of the Philosophers on the lives of 414 philosophers and scientists; Ibn-Abi-Usaybi'ah, who wrote the Tabaqat al-Atibba' (The Classes of the Physicians) (1242), and the bibliographer Hajji Khalifa (d.1658) whose work contains 18,500 indications of Oriental  works, with the names of the authors and a bibliography of each of them.[49] Ibn Khallikan (1211-1282) in his Wafayat al-ayan (Obituaries of Men of Note), wrote brief anecdotal lives of over 850 distinguished Muslims.[50] Whilst Durant finds the work remarkably accurate, Ibn Khallikan nevertheless apologised for its imperfections:

‘God has allowed no book to be faultless except the Qur’an.’[51]

The search for maximum accuracy was a constant concern in the endeavours of Islamic scholarship. So keen were biographers, for instance, to achieve accuracy that persons bearing the same name had whole books devoted to them, one such book being The Kitab al-Mushtabih fi asmaa al-rijal (Book of Names of Authorities Resembling Each Other) by al-Dhahabi (d.1348). Biographers also went to great lengths to differentiate between degrees of certainty, near certainty and doubt. Abd al-Ghani Hasan, hence, mentions the method of Yaqut in his Irshad al-Arib, whereby ‘he does not state something positively when he is not certain; only using ‘I think', ‘I reckon', and similar expressions indicative of mere supposition. On the other hand, when confident about the matter, he says: ‘that which I know is', ‘that with which I am acquainted is' and similar phrases indicative of certainty.[52] This keen search for accuracy follows on the legacy of Imam al-Bukhari.  Al-Bukhari (b. 810) travelled the length of the land of Islam, and for years, in search of accurate texts of tradition, selecting the 7,275 most trusted Prophet’s sayings out of an initial total of 300,000 of a more doubtful or spurious character.[53] All were classified according to the chapters of common law, and helped form a complete system of concrete jurisprudence. This approach was the earliest example of such critical activity in the world, with remarkably high standards of accuracy.[54] Such accuracy relied on an earlier oral tradition: recitation. Recitation alone gave the certainty of avoiding confusion, and in the words of Shwab, for whom oral transmission was the method of high fidelity as compared with ‘the professional blunderings of never ending copyists', the more so in view of the ‘heights of perfection long ago attained in memorizing techniques'.[55]

Islamic learning also distinguished itself in striking the perfect balance between authority and experiment. Ibn Hazm comments on reliance upon authority:

‘We know with certainty that never could man have acquired the sciences and arts by himself guided only by his natural abilities and without the benefit of instruction (this applies, for instance,) to medicine, the knowledge of the physiological temperaments, the diseases and their causes, in all their numerous varieties, and the invention of adequate treatment and cure of each of them by drugs or preparations, which could never have been actually tried out. For how could anyone test every prescription on every disease since this would take thousands of years and necessitate the examination of every sick person in the world? And what goes for medicine goes for other sciences.’[56]

The trust in authority, however, is balanced against the need for proof and experiment. For a long time, Jurji notes, interpretation was the Muslim’s legitimate monopoly. ‘Soaring high above the mean levels of confusion’ they did not seem satisfied till full proof and concrete evidence had been meticulously offered in their writings.[57] Thus, for al-Maqdisi:

‘He (the scholar) should not yield to bad habits or permit himself to be led astray by vicious tendencies. Nor must he turn his eyes from truth's depth. He should discriminate between the doubtful and the certain, between genuine and spurious, and should always stand firm by the clear light of reason.'[58]  

Checking, measuring, and experimenting to determine truth were thus central to Islamic learning, and affected all branches of sciences. Ibn al-Haytham (965-1039), for instance, was able to determine optical rules through experimentation rather than the speculative exercise current before him.[59] Muslim astronomers devised astronomical tables through observations and calculations, and using for the first time sophisticated apparatus for such operations.[60] In chemistry, the pioneering role in this goes to Jabir:

‘The first essential in chemistry is that you should perform practical work and conduct experiments, for he who performs not practical work nor makes experiments will never attain to the least degree of mastery. But you, O my son, do you experiment so that you may acquire knowledge.’[61]

Scientists delight not in abundance of material; they rejoice only in the excellence of their experimental methods.’[62]

And beautiful lines from al-Zamashhari:

‘Knowledge is for the practioner what the string is for the builder.

And practice for the learned what the cord is for him who hauls water.

            Without string building will not be exact.

            Without cord the thirst will not be slaked.

            Who aspires to perfection.

            Let him both be learned and practise.’[63]

An account by an early Islamic astronomer, Habash al-Hasib (9^th century), whose Kitab al-ajram wa al-ab’ad (Book of Bodies and Distances) is extant,[64] outlines this spirit of Islamic learning. The passage is as follows:

‘The commander of the faithful Al-Mamun desired to know the size of the earth. He inquired into this and found that Ptolemy mentioned in one of his books that the circumference of the earth is so and so many thousands of stades. He asked the commentators about the meaning of stade, and they differed about the meaning of this. Since he was not told what he wanted, he directed Al-Marwarrudhi, Isa al-Astrulabi, and al-Dhari with a group of surveyors and some of the skilled artisans including carpenters and brass-makers, in order to maintain the instruments which they needed. He transported them to a place which he chose in the desert of Sinjar. Al-Marwarrudhi and his party headed for the north pole of Banat Na’sh (Ursa Minor), and Isa and al-Dhari and their party headed to the south pole. They proceeded until they found that that the maximum altitude of the sun at noon had increased, and differed from the noon altitude which they had found at the place from which they had separated, by the amount of one degree, after subtracting from it the sun’s declination along the path of the outward journey, and there put arrows. Then they returned to the arrows, testing the measurement a second time, and so found that one degree of the earth was 56 miles, of which one mile is 4,000 black cubits. This is the cubit adopted by al-Mamun for the measurement of cloths, surveying of fields, and the distribution of way stations.’[65]

From this passage are obvious dominant elements of Islamic science (on top of the role of the rulers in the scientific drive): the involvement of teams of scholars in specific scientific tasks; the need to check and clarify extant knowledge; checking experiment, and, obviously, the importance of knowledge derived from such endeavours.

It is best to end this section with these lines for what meaning they carry; lines about the poet Saadi, narrated by Durant. Saadi knew every hardship, and all degrees of poverty; he complained that he had no shoes, until he met a man without feet, ‘whereupon I thanked Providence for its bounty to myself'.[66] In India  he exposed the mechanism of a miracle-working idol, and killed the hidden Brahmin who was the god of the machine; in his later rollicking verse he recommended a like summary procedure with all quacks:

‘You too, should you chance to discover such a trick,

            Make away with the trickster; don't spare him; be quick!

            For if you should suffer the scoundrel to live,

            Be sure that to you he no quarter will give.

            So I finished the rogue, notwithstanding his wails

            With stones, for dead men, as you know, tell no tales.’[67]