Where Thought Flowered (The West Owes a Great Debt to the Intellectual Scholarship of Arabs)

Baltimore Sun ^ | April 5, 2009 | Stephen O'Shea

[nickcarraway]

The House of Wisdom
By Jonathan Lyons
Bloomsbury / 272 pages / $26

Dust will never gather on Jonathan Lyons' lively new book of medieval history - the opening page of his The House of Wisdom cites a cleric scandalized by the Crusader ladies of Antioch and their penchant for the plunging neckline and the bejeweled merkin. If this is the Middle Ages, thinks the reader, bring it on! But this pleasure gradually gives way to another beguilement, to be found in Lyons' subtitle: "How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization." That phrase suggests a brave viewpoint for a historian nowadays, one at odds with the us-vs.-them mentality copied from the Cold War and pasted on to any consideration of things Islamic.

Whether it's the ecstatic Lt. Gen. William Boykin claiming his Christian God is "bigger" than the Muslim God, or the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington peddling, like some harebrained imam, an inevitable "clash of civilizations," the twain of East and West has seldom seemed less likely to meet than in the past few years.

For Lyons, a former Reuters reporter who roved the Middle East for two decades, the task is much greater than reminding the general reader of the splendors of Umayyad Cordoba. He is out to reverse a long-standing prejudice regarding the stupendous flowering of scholarship in medieval Islam.

Even when that flowering is recognized - but does anyone really remember learning about it in school? - it is usually brushed off as an unfortunate hiccup in the transmission of classical Greek thought to the Renaissance. In this view, the translators and scholars of Baghdad,Cairo andToledo were mere copyists or, at best, librarians, unwittingly preserving the genius of antiquity's philosophy and science in their dimly lit mosques - until the West recovered its brilliance.

[BenLurkin]

BINGO!

Post Ptolemaic Egypt and the largely Hellenic intellectual community at Alexandria is one example.

[CaptainMorgantown]

Much of that scholarship had been flowering under the Byzantine (or eastern Roman) empire until the Muslim conquerers took their libraries and best minds.

Sort of like us asking the Germans to thank us for the flowering of American rocketry under Werner von Braun.

[Mad Dawg]

A friend has likened the Muslim custodianship of the classics to a blind man given custody of a lamp. As things have turned out, they seem to have been unable to profit from the great thoughts the transcription of which they had in their care.

There were some greats. I, who am no scholar, know of Ibn Rushd (aka Averroes) of Andalusia. But something happened that led to a long slow decline. And good arguments have been made that the "something" was the rise of an anti-intellectual strain of theology. I dunno, but it sure seems likely to me.

[rlmorel]

See my post at #17.

[Mad Dawg]

Yeah, but what HAPpened? We call Ptolemy’s astronomical work the Almagest because we got it from them, and many of the stars have Arabic names (”Alcor”,”Alkaid”, “Zubenelgenubi” and the like) . Alchemy? Of course it looks like algebra started in the Indies and only “passed through” Arabian culture. So it leads one to think that around the 13th century somebody slammed on the brakes.

[rlmorel]

Right. What happened is that they thought there was no culture that had anything to contribute to them, so they became completely insulated.

As the West went through the Renaissance, people in the West were learning and discovering all kinds of new things, taking the best of all the societies around them and so on, Islam was in a situation where someone had to make a ruling and issue a fatwa if an idea was proposed on how to make their ships better, but that idea came from an infidel vessel.

[Vigilanteman]

I've been friends and co-workers with both Arabs and Iranians (Persians) from a previous life. What each has to say about the other is not printable here.

The right type of leadership in Iran could make the Arabs largely irrelavant despite their vast oil resources . . . and vice versa.

[Dr. Ursus]

Good point. Thanks

[SunkenCiv]

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	Gods Graves Glyphs	Thanks nick! As rats do, Moslem Arabs fouled more than they ate; they (as had Constantinople and various western monasteries; and more to the point, a monastery in what is now Iran) preserved fragments of classical learning, and that is most of their contribution to modern thought. The practice of law in Europe became much more systematized when a surviving copy of the digest of Roman law emerged from the reconquest of Iberia; the Muzzies had taken over in the 9th century and it took the various Christian kingdoms about six hundred years to kick them out again. Don't ask me for names, but modern methods of the diagnosis of disease owe something to a Muzzie-era doctor; the study of optics had an important medieval middleman in the Moslem world; the use of the lateen sail is often attributed to Arab sources (Phoenicians), but the Greeks and Romans of the early centuries A.D. were already using them, as well as the with-the-wind square sails (European Age of Sail ships used both, and crew size skyrocketed). To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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[colorado tanker]

I think I'll take Bernard Lewis’ scholarship over some Rooters reporters’.

[Fred Nerks]

You’ll find Peter BetBasoo’s brilliant reply to that speech by Carly Fiorina on my home page.

[CaptRon]

That phrase suggests a brave viewpoint for a historian nowadays, one at odds with the us-vs.-them mentality copied from the Cold War and pasted on to any consideration of things Islamic.

The Muslims preserved much knowledge they got from conquered countries (is it ok to say conquered?), but real advances? Not so much.

[CaptRon]

“Zubenelgenubi”

Thought that was a goat stew.

[Citizen Tom Paine]

Read the book “What Went Wrong” by Bernard Lewis. It takes about 7 hours and is very interesting. Then draw your own conclusions,

[ZULU]

The fact of the matter is that Islamic expansion created the European Dark Ages. The loss of communication and trade via the Mediterranean when the Mohammedans seized all of North Africa from the Christians, along with the Levant, Sicily, Southern Italy, Spain, Portugal and Southern France prevented the exchange of ideas, trade and information via the easiest method of communication.

Constantinople alone managed to hang on as a civilized state while the Mohammedans in TYPICAL Muslim style bankrolled their “empire” by looting, plundering, slave dealing and warfare with one another and their Christian neighbors.

Islam is a piratical faith and a piratical culture.

This book is just so much pablum for politically correct imbeciles. If the Muslims had not turned the Mediterranean into no man's land for western Christians they could jolly well have gotten all the Roman and Greek Culture they needed from the Byzantines, without having it distilled through Islamic hands.

[Mad Dawg]

What happened is that they thought there was no culture that had anything to contribute to them, so they became completely insulated.

I get it. Kind of like Ivy Leaguers from the Northeast. They can't possibly learn from anybody else -- they know everything worth knowing.

[Mmogamer]

We owe far more to Byzantium than we will ever owe the Islamic culture anything.

[Mad Dawg]

Mmmmmm. Goat stew! Mmmmmmmm.

[PapaBear3625]

As I understand it, the “intellectual scholarship” of Islam was merely permitting the intellectuals of the subjugated nations to continue to practice their professions. It had nothing to do with anything Islam brought to the equation. Much like “Islamic architecture” and “Islamic engineering” and “Islamic art” were merely coopted from the conquered peoples.

The Islamic "Golden Age" occurred during their period of expansion, where there was a steady influx of loot and slaves who knew how to run a civilization. As soon as their expansion was stopped, and they had to survive on their own productivity, Islamic "civilization" went into steep decline. It was only resurrected when a new source of unearned wealth (oil discovered and drilled by Western companies) came along.

[PapaBear3625]

The fact of the matter is that Islamic expansion created the European Dark Ages.

The Dark Ages of Western Europe began with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire around 400 AD. (Note, however, that the Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople, survived just fine well into the Middle Ages). Islam was not founded until the 7th Century.

There were lots of problems with barbarians, and the Islamic contribution definitely kept things bad for Western Europe for more centuries than would otherwise have been the case.

An interesting aspect to the fall of Rome was that it happened during a Global Cooling period, when dropping temperatures produced lower harvests (and thus less revenue to support the Legions), plus causing mass migrations of barbarian people looking for better farmland.