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The scholar F. R. Rosenthal526 has pointed out that the process of assimilation of the heritage of classical antiquity into Islam between the eighth and tenth centuries can justly be called the renaissance of Islam. It is unthinkable how Islamic civilization could have developed without the classical heritage. Rosenthal puts it in a forthright manner:
Islamic rational scholarship, which we have mainly in mind when we speak of the greatness of Muslim civilisation, depends in its entirety on classical antiquity, down to such fundamental factors as the elementary principles of scholarly and scientific research. More than that, the intellectual life of Islam in its most intimate expressions bowed to the Greek spirit.... However, in Islam as in every civilisation, what is really important is not the individual elements but the synthesis that combines them into a living organism of its own.... The indisputable fact remains, though, that Islamic civilisation as we know it would simply not have existed without the Greek heritage.
Islamic Philosophy
For many Western scholars and, more importantly, many Muslims, the very idea of an “Islamic philosophy” is a contradiction in terms: “Strictly orthodox sunni Islam has never welcomed philosophic thought.” Traditionists have always been hostile to philosophy, a “foreign science,” which led, they claimed, to heresy, doubt, and total unbelief. In this, the traditionists fears were well-founded, for many of the philosophers developed views that were far from orthodox, and others, “especially those hostile to the nascent Sunnism, committed themselves entirely to the guidance of reason as that was understood in Greek philosophy, and gave no more than lip service to Islamic religion.” Thus the story of Islamic philosophy is, in part, the story of the tension between reason and revelation.
Translations
Although translation of Greek scientific works may well have started under the Umayyads, it was the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun (ruled 813-833) who encouraged and sponsored the translation of Greek philosophy and science. Al-Mamun even established an institution, the House of Wisdom, as a center for research and translation.
The initial impulse for the translations was practical—the need for medical and astronomical knowledge. But prestige and, later, genuine intellectual curiosity also played a part in this feverish activity. Even before the efforts of the translators under al-Mamun, there had been Muslims who had realized the importance of philosophy and logic for the needs of polemics and apologetics.
Most of the translators were Christians. The one famous exception was Thabit b. Qurra, a freethinking pagan whose liberal philosophical opinions brought him into conflict with the pagan community of Harran. Mathematician, physician, and philosopher, Thabit b.Qurra was a highly important figure in this renaissance.
The Greek philosophers translated included Aristotle and his commentators such as Themistius, Simplicius, and Alexander of Aphrodisias; Plato, particularly the Timaeus, Republic, and Laws; Plotinus and Neoplatonists such as Proclus and Porphyry; pre-Socratics; Galen, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Euclid, and Ptolemy.
The First Period of Islamic Philosophy: AI-Klndl, Al-Farabl, Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
The first period of Islamic philosophy took shape in the East between the ninth and eleventh centuries with al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina (Avicenna). It is, as Arnaldez says, “a synthesis of Neoplatonic metaphysics, natural science and mysticism: Plotinus enriched by Galen and Proclus.”527
Al-Kindi was o ttally convinced that there was no fundamental disagreement between the findings of Greek philosophy and the revelations of the Koran, and he worked hard to reconcile the two. On the whole he seems to have believed in and actively defended most of the fundamental tenets of Islam and, thus, is less interesting for us, for, in this chapter, we have concentrated on those writers and thinkers who have challenged the very same tenets—the rationalists, heretics, agnostics, atheists, and freethinkers. However, this is not to deny his importance in the history of Islamic philosophy as an educator of Muslims in the Greek sciences, as an introducer of Neoplatonic ideas into Islam, and as a defender of reason.
AL-SARAKHSI (executed 899)
The spirit of philosophical inquiry did eventually however lead to a questioning of the fundamental tenets of Islamic belief, something which led people like al-Kindi’s pupil, Ahmad b. al-Tayyib al-Sarakhsi, into deep trouble. Al-Sarakhsi took an interest in Greek philosophy and was the tutor of the caliph al-Mutadid. Sarakhsi incurred the wrath of the caliph for discussing heretical ideas rather openly such that the caliph was obliged to order his execution. According to al-Biruni, al-Sarakhsi wrote numerous treatises in which he attacked the prophets as charlatans. Al-Sarakhsi was led into his religious skepticism by the rationalism of the Mu‘tazilites, with whom he sympathized, and his philosophical inquiries.
AL-FARABI
With al-Farabi (870-950), we do meet with ideas that seem incompatible with orthodox Islam. As Arberry528 points out, al-Farabi’s “conception of life after death appears to leave no room for the resurrection of the body.” But al-Farabi is far from consistent on this subject, and as Pines has suggested some of al-Farabi’s inconsistencies might be due to considerations of prudence: “But this is not certain, though al-Farabi was certainly not unaware of the necessity of being cautious. In fact, the seemingly deliberate abstractness, which occasionally calls to mind Spinoza’s way of expressing himself, may have meant to mask his intentions and the content of his reflections, many of which must have been unacceptable to even a very tolerant religious and political orthodoxy.”
Al-Farabi, following Aristotle, assigns immortality only to the intellectual part of the soul. But only those virtuous souls that have attained a certain degree of intellectual apprehension and perfection will find happiness. These virtuous souls lose their individuality after death and become part of the “active intellect” of the kingdom of heaven. Other souls will go through a cycle of rebirth or perish with the body.
Al-Farabi’s account of the active intellect, derived from late Neoplatonic speculation, also poses serious problems for the adherents of a rigid monotheism. Al-Farabi sees the active intellect “as a separate metaphysical entity, a kind of intermediary between the spiritual world above the moon and the human mind, through which both the human mind and the human imagination are linked with the divine.” Al-Farabi’s defense of reason and subordination of prophecy to philosophy also rendered him suspect in the eyes of the orthodox. For al-Farabi, only the perfection of the faculty of reason will lead to human happiness; “as the divine mind rules the universe, so reason should govern and control the life of man. No human faculty higher than reason can be conceived.”529Unlike al-Kindi, al-Farabi was not content to relegate philosophy to a secondary role as the handmaiden of theology. In any conflict in his philosophical system, it is reason that is the ultimate arbitrator, not revelation. “If the times were propitious, one universal world-state might come into existence; if not, several religions might exist side by side, and, if this also were impracticable, Islam at least might be reshaped according to the demands of the royal power of philosophy, which was the highest perfection of which man was capable.”530
IBN SINA (980-1037)
Ibn Sina (Avicenna), much influenced by al-Farabi, tried to reconcile philosophy and religion through allegorical interpretation. It is to be doubted whether his account of the afterlife would be found acceptable by the orthodox. Avicenna certainly rejects the idea of the resurrection of the body alone—what of the man eaten by a cannibal?—and of the resurrection of body and soul together. The personality of a man consists in his soul, not in his body, and it is through the soul that the individual personality survives death. A. J. Arberry is convinced that the whole history of Islam would have been different had Avicenna’s doctrine, a mixture of Aristotle and Neoplatonism, prevailed: “It is possible that Greek philosophy would have continued upon its vitalising course, and Islam might never have known a Dark Age.”531
The orthodox theologians did not accept Avicenna’s attempt at allegorization, which was fraught with danger. Nor were they reassured when these philosophers started talking about the necessity of having one truth for the masses, and another for the philosophically sophisticated. The orthodox guessed exactly where this kind of double talk would eventually lead. Thus, the only safe course was to return to the truth of the Koran.
AL-GHAZALI AND THE INCOHERENCE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS
Al-Ghazali is sometimes referred to as the greatest Muslim after Muhammad. His historical importance can hardly be exaggerated. His positive achievements include: providing Islamic theology with a philosophical foundation (he was much impressed with Aristotelian logic, and he was able to defend the central Sunnite dogmas by Neoplatonic methods and concepts); and bringing Sufism within the fold of orthodoxy.
But, as Amaidez532 says, some see al-Ghazali as a reactionary who brought to an end Islam’s love affair with Greek philosophy and rationalism and “made supreme a theology which was itself the slave of dogma.” His famous work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, attacked the philosophers whose doctrines were found to be incompatible with Islam. However, it is doubtful whether he was solely responsible for the disappearance of philosophy in Islam, since philosophy had already been in decline in the East from other causes before al-Ghazali wrote in 1095; whereas in the Islamic West philosophy in the Greek tradition continued until at least 1200. Nonetheless, Arberry is right in seeing al-Ghazali’s condemnation of philosophical speculation as a turning point in the intellectual history of Islam. As Arberry puts it, “the battle was over in the East. Thenceforward, the future belonged to revelation.”
Against the philosophers, al-Ghazali wrote, “The source of their infidelity was their hearing terrible names such as Socrates and Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle.” The latter’s followers delight to “relate of them how, with all the gravity of their intellects and the exuberance of their erudition, they denied the sacred laws and creeds and rejected the details of the religions and faiths, believing them to be fabricated ordinances and bedizened trickeries.” Al-Ghazali finds the arguments of the philosophers heretical on seventeen points, and on three others he regards the philosophers as infidels. He does not hesitate to demand the death penalty for anyone holding these opinions derived from the philosophers: “They are absolutely to be condemned as infidels on three counts. The first of these is the question of the eternity of the world, and their statement that all substances are eternal [the philosophers denied the creation ex nihilo]; the second is their assertion that God does not encompass in His knowledge particular events occurring to individuals; the third is their denial of the resurrection of the body.”
Such is al-Ghazali’s prestige that none dare criticize him. But even al-Ghazali is not above criticism—I believe that historically his negative influence prevailed and far outweighs his positive contributions. First, he led Muslims back to an unquestioning faith in the Koran that was to be accepted literally—thus all the gains made by the rationalist Mu’tazilites were squandered as Muslims were enjoined to bend their knees in total and abject submission to revelation. All the crass anthropomorphic passages of the Koran, and all the Koranic descriptions of heaven with its voluptuous houris and hell with its pathological imagery of torments were to be accepted as literally true. Worst of all, al-Ghazali reintroduced the element of fear into Islam; in his preaching, he emphasized the “wrath to come” and the punishments of hell.
Though al-Ghazali thought mathematics, logic, and physics were in some ways neutral, he was, nonetheless, apprehensive that their methods would be generalized “rashly,” and exceed their proper limits. He was thus opposed to the spirit of free inquiry, intellectual curiosity for its own sake. In section 7, chapter 2 of his Ihya ulum al-din, for instance, al-Ghazali tells us that certain of the natural sciences are contrary to the law and religion, and in chapter 3 he tells us to abstain from free thought and accept the conclusions of the prophets.
As to the metaphysics of the Greeks, it is the origin of “innovations and impieties since in this field logical reasoning is not infallibly applied.” Again and again, al-Ghazali emphasizes that unaided reason cannot attain truth, and only revelation provides certainty. It is a paradox that al-Ghazali should use reason and all the methods of the philosophers to attack unbridled reason and the speculations of the philosophers, in the name of revelation. Finally, should we applaud his tolerance in not branding as infidels those who held certain heretical propositions (seventeen in all), or rather condemn his intolerance for demanding “the execution of any man who made a public declaration that the body did not share with the soul in immortality”?
ABU BAKR MUHAMMAD B. ZAKARIYA AL-RAZI (865-925)
Perhaps the greatest freethinker in the whole of Islam was al-Razi, the Rhazes of Medieval Europe (or Razis of Chaucer), where his prestige and authority remained unchallenged until the seventeenth century. Meyerhof also calls him the “greatest physician of the Islamic world and one of the great physicians of all time”; while for Gabrieli, he remains the greatest rationalist “agnostic” of the Middle Ages, European and Oriental. Al-Razi was a native of Rayy (near Tehran), where he studied mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, literature, and perhaps, alchemy. It is possible that al-Razi studied under that shadowy figure, the freethinker Eranshahri, who, according to al-Biruni, “did not believe in any of the then existing religions, but was the sole believer in a religion invented by himself, which he tried to propagate.”533 Eranshahri may thus have influenced al-Razi’s rather similar dismissal, as we shall see later, of all religions. At Baghdad al-Razi learned his medicine. Baghdad at that time was a great center of learning, and al-Razi had access to libraries and well-equipped hospitals, one of which he later directed.
Al-Razi is credited with at least two hundred works on a wide variety of subjects, with the exception of mathematics. His greatest medical work was an enormous encyclopedia, al-Hawi, on which he worked for fifteen years, and which was translated into Latin in 1279. Al-Razi was a thorough empiricist, and not at all dogmatic. This is evident from his extant clinical notebook, in which he carefully recorded the progress of his patients, their maladies, and the results of the treatment. He wrote what was perhaps the earliest treatise on infectious diseases—smallpox and measles. It is based on his own painstaking empirical observations, not neglecting any aspect of those diseases that might help in their treatment—heart, breathing, and so on. He wrote on a vast number of medical topics: skin diseases, diet, diseases of the joints, fevers, poison, etc.
Al-Razi was equally empirical in his approach to chemistry. He shunned all the occultist mumbo jumbo attached to this subject and instead confined himself to “the classification of the substances and processes as well as to the exact description of his experiments.” He was perhaps the first true chemist as opposed to an alchemist. Al-Razi’s general philosophical attitude was that no authority was beyond criticism; he challenged tradition and authority in every field to which he turned his attention. Though he had great respect and admiration for the great Greek figures of the past, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, he was not at all overawed by them:
He does not hesitate either to modify their philosophical conclusions if he believes that he knows better, or to add to the store of accumulated medical knowledge what he has found out by his own research and observation. Whenever, for instance, he treats a particular disease he first summarizes everything he can find in Greek and Indian sources, ... and in the works of earlier Arabic doctors. He never fails to add his own opinion and his own judgment; he never adheres to authority as such.534
Like a true humanist, al-Razi has boundless faith in human reason. As al-Razi himself wrote in his book of ethics, the Spiritual Physick,
The Creator (Exalted be His Name) gave and bestowed upon us Reason to the end that we might thereby attain and achieve every advantage, that lies within the nature of such as us to attain and achieve, in this world and the next. It is God’s greatest blessing to us, and there is nothing that surpasses it in procuring our advantage and profit. By Reason we are preferred above the irrational beasts, ... By Reason we reach all that raises us up, and sweetens and beautifies our life, and through it we obtain our purpose and desire. For by Reason we have comprehended the manufacture and use of ships, so that we have reached unto distant lands divided from us by the seas; by it we have achieved medicine with its many uses to the body, and all the other arts that yield us profit, ... by it we have learned the shape of the earth and the sky, the dimension of the sun, moon and other stars, their distances and motions.
Al-Razi denies the Islamic dogma of creation ex nihilo. For him, the world was created at a finite moment in time, but not out of nothing. Al-Razi believed in the existence of the five eternal principles: Creator, Soul, Matter, Time, and Space. “The ignorant Soul having desired Matter, God, in order to ease her misery, created the world conjoining her with matter, but also sent to her the Intellect to teach her that she would be finally delivered from her sufferings only by putting an end to her union with Matter. When the Soul grasps this, the world will be dissolved.”536 Al-Razi seems to be even impugning the Muslim unity of God, “which could not bear to be associated with any eternal soul, matter, space or time.”
In his ethics, the Spiritual Physick, al-Razi is absolutely unique in not once referring to the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet—a practice common in such works—or to any specific Muslim doctrine. Arberry describes his attitude as “tolerant agnosticism” and “intellectual hedonism,” and “though its origins in classical philosophy are obvious, it reflects very characteristically the outlook of the cultured Persian gentleman, constantly down the ages informing Iranian thought and life.”537 He advocates moderation, disapproves of asceticism, enjoins control of one’s passions by reason, and under the influence of Plato’s Philebus, develops his theory of pleasure and pain: “pleasure is not something positive but the simple result of a return to normal conditions, the disturbance of which has caused pain.”
On life after death he reserves judgment and tries to allay the fear of death by reason, in a manner reminiscent of Epicurus. His attitude to death is summed up in a poem he wrote in old age:
Truly I know not—and decay
Hath laid his hand upon my heart,
And whispered to me that the day
Approaches, when I must depart—
I know not whither I shall roam,
Or where the spirit, having sped
From this its wasted fleshly home,
Will after dwell, when I am dead.538
This is like a breath of fresh air after the dogmatic certainties of al-Ghazali and his beloved, pathological imagery of the torments of hell.
At last, we come to those views of al-Razi that earned him from Muslims universal condemnation for blasphemy. Ibn Hazm, Nasir-i Khusrau, al-Kirmani, and even al-Biruni joined in the chorus of reproach. Unlike al-Kindi, al-Razi sees no possibility of a reconciliation between philosophy and religion. In two heretical works, one of which may well have influenced the European freethought classic De Tribus Impostoribus, al-Razi gave vent to his hostility to the revealed religions. Al-Razi’s heretical book On Prophecy has not survived, but we know that it maintained the thesis that reason is superior to revelation, and salvation is only possible through philosophy.
The second of al-Razi’s heretical works has partly survived in a refutation by an Ismaili author. Its audacity will be apparent as soon as we examine, with the help of Kraus,539 Pines, and Gabrieli, its principal theses.
All men are by nature equal and equally endowed with the faculty of reason that must not be disparaged in favor of blind faith; reason further enables men to perceive scientific truths in an immediate way. The prophets—these billy goats with long beards, as al-Razi disdainfully describes them—cannot claim any intellectual or spiritual superiority. These billy goats pretend to come with a message from God, all the while exhausting themselves in spouting their lies, and imposing on the masses blind obedience to the “words of the master.” The miracles of the prophets are impostures, based on trickery, or the stories regarding them are lies. The falseness of what all the prophets say is evident in the fact that they contradict one another—one affirms what the other denies, and yet each claims to be the sole depository of the truth; thus the New Testament contradicts the Torah, the Koran the New Testament. As for the Koran, it is but an assorted mixture of “absurd and inconsistent fables,” which has ridiculously been judged inimitable, when, in fact, its language, style, and its much vaunted “eloquence” are far from being faultless. Custom, tradition, and intellectual laziness lead men to follow their religious leaders blindly. Religions have been the sole cause of the bloody wars that have ravaged mankind. Religions have also been resolutely hostile to philosophical speculation and to scientific research. The so-called holy scriptures are worthless and have done more harm than good, whereas the “writings of the ancients like Plato, Aristotle, Euclid and Hippocrates have rendered much greater service to humanity.”
The people who gather round the religious leaders are either feeble-minded, or they are women and adolescents. Religion stifles truth and fosters enmity. If a book in itself can constitute a demonstration that it is true revelation, the treatises of geometry, astronomy, medicine and logic can justify such a claim much better than the Quran, the transcendent literary beauty of which, denied by Razi, was thought by orthodox Muslims to prove the truth of Muhammad’s mission.540
In his political philosophy, al-Razi believed one could live in an orderly society without being terrorized by religious law or coerced by the prophets. Certainly the precepts of Muslim law, such as the prohibition of wine, did not trouble him in the least. It was, as noted already, through philosophy and human reason that human life could be improved, not through religion. Finally, al-Razi believed in scientific and philosophical progress—the sciences progressed from generation to generation. One had to keep an open mind and not reject empirical observations simply because they did not fit into one’s preconceived scheme of things. Despite his own contributions to the sciences, he believed that one day they would be superseded by even greater minds than his. It is clear from the preceding account that al-Razi’s criticisms of religion are the most violent that appeared in the entire Middle Ages, whether European or Islamic. His heretical writings, significantly, have not survived and were not widely read; nonetheless, they are a witness to a remarkably tolerant culture and society—a tolerance lacking in other periods and places.
The Second Period of Islamic Philosophy
On the whole, the most important philosophers of the second period are to be found in the Islamic West—namely, Avempace (Ibn Bajja), Ibn Tufayl, and Averroes (Ibn Rushd).
IBN BAJJA(d. 1138)
Ibn Bajja was the least religious of the three philosophers, philosophy being but a vehicle for his moral criticism of the materialistic tendencies of his times. The philosopher should isolate himself from the masses and devote himself to the purely intellectual contemplation of the intelligible with a view to ultimate union with the active intellect. Bajja denies the resurrection of the body or the survival of the individual soul and believes only the intellect survives. But the intellect lacks any individual quality. Hardly any of this philosophy is likely to be of much comfort to the average Muslim—indeed, he may even find it heretical. Ibn Bajja’s enemies labeled him an atheist who had rejected the Koran and all the Muslim dogmas and these enemies may have poisoned him.
IBN TUFAYL (d. 1185)
Ibn Tufayl is famous for his philosophical tale “Hayy ibn Yaqzan.” The eponymous hero of the tale grows up alone on a desert island and gradually acquires skills to survive. He finally attains philosophical knowledge through unaided reason. Eventually someone called Asal, arrives from a neighboring island. Asal, who has been brought up by traditional religion, but is attracted to allegorical and esoteric interpretations of the scriptures, now wishes to devote himself to the contemplation of God in solitude. After having discussed their respective philosophical positions, they realize that Hayy’s philosophical religion and Asal’s allegorical interpretation of traditional religion are the same. Hayy returns to the inhabited island where people follow the traditional religion, with its literalism and avoidance of allegory. He tries to teach them his philosophical religion but without much success, and he finally realizes that not everyone is intellectually capable of grasping it. In fact the majority of the people of the inhabited island are no better than animals.
Ibn Tufayl was clearly defending the autonomy of philosophy, with Hayy representing pure philosophy and Asal philosophical theology. Though ostensibly defending the harmony of religion and philosophy, Ibn Tufayl shows that religious and philosophical truths are not really on the same level. For Hayy (and Ibn Tufayl), only philosophical truth arrived at by pure reason is worth having and reserved for the privileged few. Religious truth is for the unreflecting masses, who should restrict their activities to obeying the religious prescriptions and following the tradition. The ordinary Muslim is not likely to be flattered.
AVERROES (1126-1198)
Abu al-Walid Muhammad b. Ahmad ibn Rushd or Averroes came from a family of jurists, and he himself was trained in the legal sciences, later serving as a judge in Seville and Cordoba. He also studied medicine and philosophy and is considered one of the greatest commentators on Aristotle. His philosophical views are the subject of furious debate among the specialists, and the nonspecialist has to tread with care. It is on the very subject that concerns us, the relation between philosophy and religion, that the most diverse opinions exist on Ibn Rushd’s real position.
According to Ernest Renan, Averroes was a supreme rationalist who was opposed to all religious dogmas, and his theological writings were smokescreens to hide his true views from the intolerant orthodox doctors of law. Most scholars in the twentieth century have rejected this view and believe that Ibn Rushd was a sincere Muslim, convinced that philosophy and revelation were both true. Nor do the modern scholars accept the idea that Ibn Rushd propounded the theory of “double truth,” one for the uneducated masses and one for the cultured few. On the contrary, there exists a religious truth that is true for all men irrespective of education or status or understanding. In fact, Ibn Rushd attacks the theologians and their lucubrations, preferring the literal meaning of the Koran that seems to him wiser. The theologians are only likely to confuse people.
According to Ibn Rushd, the sharia commands the study of philosophy but only for those capable of understanding and using Aristotle’s demonstrative method. The Koran contains passages that are in need of interpretation, but this should only be attempted by those with a solid grounding in scholarship. Other parts of the Koran and other texts which form a part of the sharia are to be taken literally, to interpret them would amount to unbelief and heretical innovations.
It is difficult to know what Ibn Rushd’s views on the resurrection of the dead are, because he seems to have changed his mind or, at least, refined his theory. Scholars also seem to be divided in their opinions. For de Boer,541 Ibn Rushd believed in the “perishable nature of all that is individual, by which theory individual immortality is also taken away.” Whereas George Hourani542 believes that according to Ibn Rushd, “our physical bodies are dissolved at death, but we may receive new celestial ones in a resurrection, and these would hold our reconstituted individual souls.” While Marmura543 holds that in his technical writings (e.g., commentaries on Aristotle), Ibn Rushd’s theory left no room for the soul’s individual immortality, in his other writings, Ibn Rushd “affirms a doctrine of individual immortality, whether this is confined to the soul or involves bodily resurrection.” In yet another work, Ibn Rushd affirms a doctrine of bodily resurrection. For Fakhry,544 Ibn Rushd’s theory entails that “the only form of survival possible is intellectual, i.e., that of the material or ‘possible’ intellect, once it is reunited with the active intellect,” Hourani, Marmura, and de Boer seem to agree that Ibn Rushd’s theory was not likely to please the orthodox clergy; Mamura even goes back to a Renan-like hypothesis in claiming that Ibn Rushd was perhaps protecting himself against charges of unbelief in presenting different arguments to different audiences.
On another important issue—the position of women in Islam—Averroes’s opinion must have driven the orthodox wild. According to Averroes, much of the poverty and distress of the times arises from the fact that women are kept like “domestic animals or house plants for purposes of gratification, of a very questionable character besides, instead of being allowed to take part in the production of material and intellectual wealth, and in the preservation of the same.”545
Averroes had a profound influence on the Latin philosophers and scientists of the thirteenth century. A school of Averroists arose at the University of Padua where Averroes’s work on Aristotle was responsible for the development of the inductive, empirical sciences. And yet, Averroes had no influence at all on the development of Islamic philosophy. After his death, he was practically forgotten in the Islamic world. Philosophy itself went into a decline within Islam, which was now to be dominated by Ash’arism, with its attendant petrifying dogma. In the words of Arberry,
As for Islam, the sweet reason of Averroes’ patient voice would be silenced by the thunder of Ibn Taimiya’s uncompromising denunciation. By the time the illustrious Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) came to draw up his catalogue of the sacred and profane sciences, philosophy had fallen so far from grace as to be relegated to a string of contemptuous paragraphs following the discussion of magic, talismans and alchemy, and to share with astrology the signal honor of his summary refutation.”546
There was a rather misguided attempt by the Islamic renaissance movement, the Nahda, at the beginning of the century to take Averroes on board as an out-and-out rationalist who advocated a secular state. The movement was much influenced by Renan’s interpretation of Averroes, an interpretation that overemphasized Averroes’s rationality and belittled his religious and juridical work.
Greek Science and Islamic Civilization
Here in the domain of science, we come at last to the true greatness of Islamic civilization, its true universal nature. A brief glance at the words of Arabic origin that have entered European languages will reveal the extent of the influence of Islamic civilization on European science: alkali; zircon; alembic; sherbet; camphor; borax; elixir; talc; the stars Aldebaran, Altair, and Betelgeuse; nadir; zenith; azure; zero; cipher; algebra; algorism; lute; rebeck; artichoke; coffee; jasmine; saffron; and taraxacum. But of course Islamic science was founded on the works of the ancient Greeks, and the Muslims are important as the preservers and transmitters of Greek (and Hindu) learning that may well have been lost otherwise. Although the Islamic scientists did not often improve substantially on the works of the Greeks, they did make original contributions to trigonometry; indeed they are seen as the inventors of plane and spherical trigonometry; which did not exist among the Greeks. Original work was also done in optics by al-Haitham (Alhazen) (d. 1039) and al-Farisi (d. 1320). Islamic work on alchemy, magic, and astrology also played an important part in the development of European science—the idea of power over nature stimulated research and experimentation. Much work was also done in medicine, algebra, arithmetic, geometry, mechanics, and astronomy.
As Ibn Khaldun reminds us, Arabs did not play a great part in the original development of Islamic science: “It is strange that most of the learned among the Muslims who have excelled in the religious or intellectual sciences are non-Arabs with rare exceptions; and even those savants who claimed Arabian descent spoke a foreign language, grew up in foreign lands, and studied under foreign masters.” As Martin Plessner says, emphasizing the internationality and interreligiousnesss of Islamic science, most of the credit must go to Persians, Christians, and Jews:
Islamic science did not remain exclusively in the hands of Muslims, even after its “Arabization.” Christians and Jews continued to make so active a contribution that the Fons vitae of Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron) could pass for the work of a Muslim until the nineteenth century when S. Munk identified the author as Jewish. The medical works of Isaac Israeli and Maimonides are in no way different from the works of Islamic authors; the same is true of the scientific writings of the Christian bishop Barhebraeus.The very fact that the books of Islamic authors could be translated into Hebrew and Latin without significant changes demonstrates the “interreligiousness” no less than the internationality of Islamic science.547
Plessner goes on to make two important points that are the main thrust of my arguments on Islamic science:
Science was perhaps the one cultural area that was least accessible to “Islamization.” Moreover, the continued and undiminished hostility of official orthodoxy against the ancient sciences remained as characteristic of Islam as it was of Christianity until deep into the Middle Ages, and of orthodox Jewry to the very threshold of our present time. Knowledge not founded on revelation and tradition was deemed not only to be irrelevant but to be the first step on the path to heresy.548
There is a persistent myth that Islam encouraged science. Adherents of this view quote the Koran and hadith to prove their point: “Say, shall those who have knowledge and those have it not be deemed equal?” (Koran 39.12); “Seek knowledge, in China if necessary”; “The search after knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim.” This is nonsense, because the knowledge advocated in the preceding quotes is religious knowledge. Orthodoxy has always been suspicious of “knowledge for its own sake,” and unfettered intellectual inquiry is deemed dangerous to the faith.
The Muslims made a distinction between the native or Islamic sciences and foreign sciences. Islamic science consisted of religion and language (Koranic exegesis, the science of hadith, jurisprudence, scholastic theology; grammar, lexicography, rhetoric, and literature). The foreign sciences or “the sciences of the ancients” were defined as those common to all peoples and religious communities, as opposed to such sciences whose development was peculiar to Islam. As Grunebaum says, the foreign sciences are primarily the propaedeutic, physical, and metaphysical sciences of the Greeks: the various branches of mathematics, philosophy, natural history (zoology, botany, etc.), medicine, astronomy, music, magic, and alchemy.
But as Grunebaum says, the study of these foreign sciences was always looked upon with suspicion and even animosity, which increased in the later Middle Ages. A part of the hostility can be attributed to the fact that the ancient authorities were non-Muslim and foreign. All foreign sciences endangered the faith.549
The sciences were also seen as praiseworthy, blameworthy, or neutral. All sciences are blameworthy that are useless for acting rightly toward God. The Prophet is reputed to have prayed to God to protect him from useless knowledge. Useful knowledge was that which was necessary or helpful for the practice of religion. Eventually the ancient sciences were to lose out in this perpetual battle between the theological and the philosophical-scientific approach, since they were not required for the realization of the kind of life that God had ordained. Thus, despite the contributions of the Muslim scholars and scientists, these sciences had no root in the fundamental needs and aspirations of Islamic civilization. Islam considered the main task and aim of man to be to serve God, to which end the native sciences, history, and geography, were, of course essential. Any effort beyond that, e.g., the natural sciences, is not essential to the central cultural task and thesefore can be discarded.
Both Grunebaum and Renan make the same point that Islamic science developed for a while despite Islam. Grunebaum puts the matter thus: “Those accomplishments of Islamic mathematical and medical science which continue to compel our admiration were developed in areas and in periods where the elites were willing to go beyond and possibly against the basic strains of orthodox thought and feeling.”550
Renan makes a similar point:
Science and philosophy flourished on Musalman soil during the first half of the middle ages; but it was not by reason of Islam, it was in spite of Islam. Not a Musalman philosopher or scholar escaped persecution. During the period just specified persecution is less powerful than the instinct of free enquiry, and the rationalist tradition is kept alive, then intolerance and fanaticism win the day. It is true that the Christian Church also cast great difficulties in the way of science in the middle ages; but she did not strangle it outright, as did the Musalman theology. To give Islam the credit of Averroes and so many other illustrious thinkers, who passed half their life in prison, in forced hiding, in disgrace, whose books were burned and whose writings almost suppressed by theological authority, is as if one were to ascribe to the Inquisition the discoveries of Galileo, and a whole scientific development which it was not able to prevent.551
Not only did orthodoxy stifle the research of the scientists but it was also obvious “that their researches had nothing to give to their community which this community could accept as an essential enrichment of their lives.” For us, looking from the outside, this loss of scientific endeavor is an impoverishment of Islamic civilization, but for the Muslims there was no loss since this science did not serve the Muslim aim of serving God. The idea of knowledge for its own sake was meaningless in the Muslim context; Sarton in his history of science gives the example of Muslim zoology: “One can find in many Arabic and Persian writings speculations on the order of nature as far as the distribution of the three kingdoms is concerned. The Muslims, with but few exceptions, were hardly interested in the scientific aspects of these matters, but rather in their theological implications; they were not thinking so much of evolution from the human or naturalistic point of view as of creation from the divine one.”552
As an example of the persecution of the scientists that Renan alluded to previously, we might cite the case of Ibn al-Haitham (Alhazen), whose works were branded as heretical and then forgotten in the Muslim East.
A disciple of Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher, relates that he was in Baghdad on business, when the library of a certain philosopher (who died in 1214) was burned there. The preacher, who conducted the execution of the sentence, threw into the flames, with his own hands, an astronomical work of Ibn al-Haitham, after he had pointed to a delineation therein given of the sphere of the earth, as an unhappy symbol of impious Atheism.553