What Islamic Civilization?

Islam is unusual in that it’s the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there’s an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it’s possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

—Salman Rushdie, novelist1

Since the Muslims were relatively unlettered at first, it is hardly surprising that many of the scholars and scientists active within [their] civilization were Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, or recent converts to Islam whose ideas still bore the stamp of their former religions.

—Arthur Goldschmidt Jr., historian2

Islam was not a torch, as has been claimed, but an extinguisher. Conceived in a barbarous brain for the use of a barbarous people, it was—and it remains— incapable of adapting itself to civilization. Wherever it has dominated, it has broken the impulse towards progress and checked the evolution of society.

—Andre Servier, historian of Islam3

On June 4, 2009 President Barack Obama delivered a speech aimed at redefining the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world at Cairo University in Egypt. The president called for a “new beginning… based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” As has become typical of such speeches, his words included glowing praise of Islam’s contributions to world civilization:

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam—at places like Al-Azhar—that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities … that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires.4

Had the president been a better student of history, he would have known that algebra was extensively developed by Mesopotamians millennia before Islam was even born and that it is absurd to give Islam the credit for developing it at any stage. He would have known that the magnetic compass was developed by the Chinese Han Dynasty in the third century BC and was mostly developed in Western Europe. He would have known that the most significant contributions to medicine made in Islamic lands came from non- Muslims. That the majestic arches and soaring spires of Islamic culture were developed by Babylonians and Assyrians and built in imitation of Byzantine Christians. He would have known that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment owe nearly nothing to Islam.

Of course, President Obama’s goal in Cairo was not an honest assessment of Islamic contributions. His goal was to flatter his Muslim audience. Unfortunately, the terms of his flattery have become far too widely accepted in the West by well-meaning people who want to believe that Islam is something other than it is. Since the 9/11 attacks, there has been a marked tendency among Western elites to go out of their way to praise Arab or Islamic civilization the way President Obama did. The claims that get made about Arab- Islamic contributions to world civilization are usually tossed around without any critical examination.

Five years after President Obama’s speech we can well ask what such flattery has achieved. Since his speech the Egyptians have deposed a secular dictator in favor of an Islamic one—only to repent of their decision and remove the Muslim Brotherhood from power. The country now stands on the brink of civil war, with Islamist radicals and the Egyptian military in the thick of it. If we are to understand what is going on in Egypt and the Muslim world we need to look beyond empty flattering words.

THE MYTH OF ARAB-ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION

President Obama’s Cairo speech didn’t arise on its own. It was based in part on a popular academic myth about the glorious “Golden Age” of Arab-Islamic civilization during the European Middle Ages. The central pillar of this myth is the idea that while Europe was languishing in cultural decline, the Islamic world was a model of pluralism and enlightenment within which the achievements of classical Greece and Rome were preserved.

A typical expression of this myth can be found in the work of Professor of Islamic Studies Jane Smith, who writes in The Oxford History of Islam:

It has long been recognized that one of the most significant and lasting contributions of the medieval Muslim world to Christendom was to provide access for western scholars to the great classics of Greece and Rome by their translation into Arabic, from which they were rendered into European languages. Most of the works of Plato and Aristotle were known to Arab Muslims.5

Another example can be seen in the work of Professor Salim al-Hassani, a notable contributor to a National Geographic exhibition on Islamic civilization. Professor al- Hassani claims:

For centuries after the fall of Ancient Rome, scientific progress in western Europe slowed almost to a standstill. In the developing Muslim world, however, a golden age of discovery flourished from the seventh century until the sixteenth century.6

Studies by scholars such as Smith and al-Hassani are the origin of the myth President Obama’s Cairo speech was based on.

Unfortunately for the scholars and the president, the claims they make are inaccurate. An investigation by the Skeptical Inquirer uncovered that most of the “thousand and one inventions” Professor al-Hassani’s exhibit are based on were either “purely fictional elaborations” or which contribute to a “mass of distortions.” And as we shall see below, most of the transmission of classical knowledge that took place during Islam’s “Golden Age” was carried out almost entirely by non-Arabs and non-Muslims.

Most of the claims that are raised on behalf of Arab-Islamic civilization boil down to cases of plagiarism, appropriation, and simple transmission rather than genuine cultural production. The classical wisdom allegedly preserved in the Islamic world went largely unused and unheeded and could be more accurately described as plunder than as original work. With all due respect to Professor Smith, even if the works of Plato and Aristotle were known to Arab Muslims, those works had almost no impact on their culture.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

As is described in detail in the chapter on Universal Jihad, Islam was spread primarily through the sword—by conquering territory and imposing harsh sanctions (such as the jizya tax) upon the survivors to induce conversion or impose submission. What is remarkable about this process is the enduring desire among Muslims both to claim credit for the accomplishments of conquered peoples while at the same time erasing the distinct (i.e. pre-Islamic) existence of those peoples.

Take the case of Islamic architecture. The forms we associate with Islamic building styles were derived from the two major empires Islam first attacked in the seventh and eighth centuries—the Persians and the Byzantines.7 As Oleg Grabar explains, a key motivation behind the use of the art and architecture of conquered peoples was to emphasize their Islamization:

One first motivation to be detected in the formation of Islamic art was that of symbolically or practically expressing the appropriation of a given territory with its body of traditions.8

The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, an enormously symbolic and influential building in Islamic architectural history, is a case in point. The Dome was built using Byzantine Christian artists to create its mosaics and follows the pattern of contemporary Christian architecture.9

Or take the case of Arabic translations of classical texts. “The most celebrated of all the translators of Greek scientific works into Arabic was Hunayn ibn Ishaq,” an Assyrian Christian who learned Arabic late in life and whose linguistic skills allowed him to make the corpus of Greek medical scholarship available to his region’s new Islamic masters.10 In doing so, he was following the pre-Islamic Nestorian traditions of his people. The Nestorians had been engaged since the 5th century in preserving Greek texts, including those of Galen and Hippocrates.11 It was texts preserved and translated by Assyrian Christians according to their own traditions which were later translated from Arabic into Latin by a Benedictine monk.12 Giving Islam credit for this “preservation” is rather far-fetched.

We see a similar story with Arab-Islamic literature. The standards for classical Arabic were set by a Persian convert, Abu Muhammad ibn al-Muqaffa. His contribution was a rich collection of fables and folk tales translated from Persian into Arabic. The collection itself, however, was based on ancient works originally written in Sanskrit. Perhaps the two best-known works of Islamic literature are the prose and verse collection known as The Thousand and One Nights and the poet Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. The former is a collection of tales taken from cultures ranging from Egypt to India and cannot be called a product solely of Arab-Islamic civilization. Indeed, many of the tales rely on elements which are forbidden in literal Islam—drinking alcohol, men and women conversing together freely, and so on. Ferdowsi’s poem is a Persian epic chronicling the pre-Islamic history of the kings of Iran. It contains more than one expression of dismay at the way Islamic culture is displacing Persia’s native traditions. Therefore, neither work could simply be called an expression of Islam or Islamic culture.

The origins of some cultural contributions were obscured or erased by Arab-Islamic conquest. This is what happened to some of the most remarkable peoples of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians. Around 2000 BC the Sumerians developed a sexagesimal system (i.e., a numeral system with 60 as its base) which has retained usefulness down to our own time, evolving into our division of time into 60-second minutes and 60-minute hours.13 The Sumerians and Babylonians made enormous advances in mathematics between 3000 and 1500 BC, including algebraic methods, geometrical rules for measuring volumes and areas, and arithmetic rules for calculating fractions and exponents. Fundamental rules of mathematics mastered by the Mesopotamian peoples thousands of years before they were expropriated by Arab Muslims. It was only after the 19th century discoveries of numerous clay tablets dating back to around 1800-1600 BC that these contributions were truly recognized.

In some cases, Arab-Islamic civilization is given credit simply because it transmitted learning from Asia to Western Europe like cultural middlemen. Perhaps the greatest example of this is the common number system that Western people typically refer to as “Arabic numerals.” The system was actually developed by Indian mathematicians sometime in the 6th century AD. The efficiency of the Indian system was so clear, it soon spread across Asia and into the Middle East. By the 9th century, the “Hindu numerals” system was used throughout Islamic lands. While living in Muslim Spain in the 10th century, a French monk (who later became Pope) named Gerbert of Aurillac encountered the numeral system. Finding it much more flexible and useful than the cumbersome Roman system, Gerbert spread word of what he knew as “Arabic numerals” throughout the West.14

The Islamic move toward cultural appropriation is deeply rooted. It is part of Islam’s scriptural tradition, which retroactively views Jewish and Christian religious traditions as Islamic or as deviations from Islam. Abraham being described as the first Muslim is an example of this kind of retroactive appropriation at work. M.A. Khan describes this as a drive to replace the past of other peoples with the past of the Arab people:

The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only [the Arabs] … a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages, and earth reverences… It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism.15

The pride Pakistan’s Muslims take in having last names of Arabic rather than Hindu origins is another example of this kind of imperialism of the mind.

THE MYTH OF THE CULTURAL MIDDLE-MEN

The contention that the Islamic caliphates form a necessary bridge between a forgotten classical past and the later advances of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment is based on a number of false ideas. Chief among them is the assumption that classical knowledge was simply lost to the European civilization of the Middle Ages. This common misconception is actually proof of the success of Islamic jihad in appropriating and erasing the Byzantine Empire from our cultural memory. The classical learning of Greece and Rome was well known to the Greek-speaking and highly cultured Byzantine scholars.16 In fact, it was after the Muslim conquest of Constantinople that many volumes of the classical wisdom that Christian Byzantium possessed came streaming into Western Europe. It came on the backs of refugees from Islamic jihad. In most cases, European scholars were able to translate classical works directly from Greek to Latin; it was only a few portions of the classical tradition which survived only by Arabic preservation.17

The bulk of the classical tradition preserved by Arab-Islamic society consisted of texts involving medicine, physics, and mathematics. Almost the entirety of the poetic, dramatic, political, and historical texts were ignored.18 Homer’s epics weren’t translated into Arabic until the 20th century. The only Platonic work translated into Arabic was The Republic, and this work (along with the rest of the Platonic corpus) was translated into Latin from Greek manuscripts produced and preserved by the Byzantines.19 Roman works were almost entirely unknown in the Arab-Islamic world. Professor Smith’s above- mentioned claim that Islamic scholarship provided access to the great classics of Greece and Rome is simply inaccurate.

An instructive example of Western scholarship bringing classical works from little- known Greek into widely-used Latin is the 13th century Flemish monk William of Moerbeke. William had access to Greek manuscripts which he used to produce Latin translations of authors such as Archimedes, Galen, Ptolemy, Proclus, and Aristotle. Many of the works he translated hadn’t even appeared in Arabic when he was working.20 William’s landmark translation of Aristotle’s Politics was enormously influential on St. Thomas Aquinas. It was his translations and Aquinas’ commentary which became widely diffused among European centers of learning.21 Simply put, Renaissance Europe did not suddenly discover a forgotten treasure trove of classical texts in Arabic translation. When Renaissance scholars sought more and more accurate Greek knowledge, they found it not in Islamic Spain or in Baghdad but in Constantinople. In 1205, when Pope Innocent III encouraged the learned of Paris to revive the study of literature he asked them to go to Greece. The king of France at the time sought to add to his nation’s prestige by building a college on the Seine to attract Byzantine Greek scholars to come learn Latin.22 It was only after the forces of jihad finally toppled Byzantium and captured Constantinople that the stream of classical learning heading to the West became a flood.

In 1453, the Ottoman Empire seized Constantinople after a month-long siege. Thousands of Greek refugees poured into the West seeking refuge from the Islamic armies that had destroyed their homeland. Venice was a favorite stop. One great scholar, Cardinal Basilios Bessarion, brought an enormous collection of 600 Greek manuscripts with him and donated them to the Venetian Senate—a generous bequest which formed the basis of a public library.23 In short order, Venice became the home to several such collections of manuscripts and a haven for the Greek scholars, editors, and copyists who could make full use of it.24

The influx of Greek manuscripts coincided with the development of a crucial Western invention: the printing press. Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg perfected the use of a movable type press that would lead to massive and widespread dissemination of knowledge. Before the end of the century, Greek grammars and manuscripts were being edited and printed, allowing for wider knowledge of Greek among Western scholars. According to historian William McNeill, “the learning of Western Europe was fundamentally and permanently enriched by the easy access to the Greek classics.” This enrichment was made possible through a combination of text availability, widespread knowledge of the language, and the publishing and commercial acumen of the Venetians.25

Put simply, the notion that Arab-Islamic scholarship was a necessary intermediary for the preservation of classical knowledge is a myth. It ignores the many and multifarious intra-European connections which persisted throughout the so-called golden age of Islamic scholarship. The majority of the classical corpus became accessible in Western Europe not due to but in spite of Islamic practices. Indeed, the most significant contribution to widespread dissemination of classical texts was not Islamic scholarship but Islamic jihad.

FAILURE TO DEVELOP

Even if one allows the Arab-Islamic world more credit for preserving and disseminating classical knowledge than the facts warrant, an inconvenient problem remains. If Islamic civilization was so essential in building the modern world, why did modernity develop so prominently outside of that civilization? Why were Islamic scholars unable to build upon, correct, or develop the classical thought available to them? Merely translating texts is not nearly as significant, culturally speaking, as developing a constructive relationship with them. It was just such a constructive relationship to the classical past which characterizes the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe. In large part, this relationship did not develop in lands under the sway of Islam.

Consider the example of medical knowledge preserved in Greek scholarship. The works of Galen form the core of this knowledge, and some of Galen’s works were preserved in Arabic translation. But Galen’s medical data was gathered from actual observations— including observations collected from dissected human cadavers. Islamic culture placed a taboo on dissection even of the dead, meaning that it had to take most of what Galen had to say (including his errors) on faith.26 By contrast, at the universities of Padua and Bologna in Renaissance Italy, the emphasis was not on memorization of texts but on empirical observations. When Vesalius (a Bolognese professor) dissected human and animal corpses in the 1530s he soon discovered a number of discrepancies between Galen’s text and observed reality. Vesalius published his improved understanding of human anatomy in a textbook which transformed anatomical knowledge in Western Europe.27 Europeans like Vesalius did not merely rely on textual authorities, they made systematic empirical investigations of their own. These investigations enabled them to modify and correct authorities such as Galen—and eventually to transcend them.

When the Muslim world did make progress in medicine, it was due in large part to the efforts of the (Christian) Assyrians. Beginning in the 4th century AD, the Assyrians began a systematic translation of Greek knowledge into their own language. After the Arab conquest, this translation effort was extended from Assyrian into Arabic. It was Assyrian translations into Arabic that the Muslims brought with them into Spain and from there into Western Europe.

In order to make academic progress, a high degree of freedom of inquiry is necessary. With some individual exceptions, such freedom has never been a hallmark of Arab-Islamic civilization. While some Islamic philosophers, such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes made productive intellectual use of classical learning, none of these was Arab, and none founded a philosophical school along the lines of Plato or Aristotle. Instead, their most influential contributions were almost inevitably contributions to Islamic metaphysics or theology. Their attempts at philosophical syntheses of ideas never took root in the Islamic world.

Averroes represents the typical fate of Islamic efforts at philosophical synthesis. He spent most of his life’s work combating the scathing attack against philosophy and rational thought launched by a Muslim scholar named al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali was inspired by a notion which has popularly recurred throughout Islamic intellectual history: the idea that everything people need to know is contained in the Qur’an and the Hadith.28 Living in supposedly “enlightened” 12th century Islamic Spain, Averroes tried to argue that there was no necessary opposition between rational inquiry and revealed religion. In 1195, his home town of Cordoba banned and burned his books and banished him to a Jewish village.29 After his death, Averroes’ seminal commentaries on Aristotle were available only in Latin translation.30 It was Western philosophers, not the Islamic world, which saw value in Averroes’ teaching about rational inquiry and faith. The opinions of al-Ghazali, by contrast, were almost universally accepted as completely orthodox and even admirable.

It is instructive to compare the epistemological rigidity of Islamic thinkers such as al-Ghazali with the relative freedom of religious philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was able to use the concept of “secondary causes” to allow good Christians to believe in the sovereignty of God while also believing that there were many things they could best learn by observing the workings of nature. For Aquinas, the world was run according to fixed laws (secondary causes) established by God (the first cause). Because these laws were eternal, it was possible to learn about them through observation and reasoning.

Islam did not develop such a notion. For al-Ghazali and other orthodox believers, a notion such as Aquinas’s was unacceptable because it would “limit the absolute freedom of Allah to bring about whatever events he wills. Effects are brought about, not by causes, but by the direct will of Allah.”31 This view is known as “occasionalism”—the belief that the world is eternally subject to the creative and unpredictable power of God. In Islam, belief in God entails a more fatalistic view of the world, where God acts as he will and no man can really affect the course of events. The ultimate effect of such notions has been to freeze Islamic thought in dogmatic stasis. With the orthodox view established as occasionalism, as Jonathan Carson explains, “science in the Islamic world could only develop in opposition to a fundamental tenet of Islam.” Modern science instead arose in the West, where thinkers were able to delve much deeper into scientific inquiry while remaining acceptably orthodox. Islam has maintained a view that makes life’s occurrences ultimately inscrutable, making counter- factual speculation of equal validity to rigorous empirical observation.32

CULTURAL WILDERNESS

Given the above, it is unsurprising to find contemporary Islamic societies lagging behind much of the world in both intellectual achievement and cultural development. When Arab-Islamic forces first spread across the Middle East and beyond, they typically replaced urban-based cultures with the hegemony of a backward and tribal people. Regarding science, “the Arabians had no previous knowledge on which to build.”33 Therefore, on many matters involving worldly learning the Arab-Islamic world was largely dependent on the skills and heritage of the peoples they subjugated.

According to the pioneering scholar of Arab culture Philip Khuri Hitti, “in no branch of pure or physical science was any appreciable advance made after Abbasid days.”34 When the West was exposed to classical knowledge, it sparked an explosion of intellectual activity. With Islam, the tendency was always to slip back into comfortable isolation. Consider the extensive record of intellectual and cultural activity throughout Mesopotamia, the Cradle of Civilization. For more than two millennia prior to the coming of Islam, this region was the center of enormous activity in every field of human endeavor. During the so-called Golden Age of Islam this enormous cultural wealth was well spent—but did Arab-Islamic civilization replenish the stores? Today, what does Arab-Islamic civilization in Syria and Iraq produce?

The centers of learning which developed in the Arab-Islamic world were not in Mecca or Medina—the spiritual home and birthplace of Islam. Instead, it was the captured capitals of infidels, places like Baghdad or Cordoba, which became centerpieces. Even today, Mecca and Medina make a sorry showing when it comes to displaying the supposed grandeur of Islamic civilization. Yet these cities are probably more accurate as representing the civilizational achievements of Islam.

The true cultural legacy of Arab-Islamic civilization can be seen in the orientation of the Arabs today. For some, enormous oil wealth has produced a veneer of sophistication. But this veneer hides a culture in which tribal loyalties and religious affiliations remain paramount and which together produce a singular rejection of outsiders and unbelievers.35 Where oil wealth is limited or nonexistent, Arab societies are often reduced to crude zero-sum games in which domination and revenge preclude possibilities of pluralism and power-sharing.36

The vision of an Arab-Islamic civilization that is compatible with democracy and modernity is really a pipe dream. Arab-Islamic civilization itself is primarily a chimera. Its grandest achievements are borrowed or stolen from conquered peoples—and the fact that such achievements are usually rejected by Islamic societies testifies to a backward and ossified culture that rejects pluralism in favor of coerced compliance in an epistemological echo-chamber.

The most notable building blocks of Arab-Islamic civilization are three: Muhammad, the Qur’an, and jihad.