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The continuity of science and philosophy from Egypt, India, and Babylonia through Greece and Byzantium to Eastern and Spanish Islam, and thence to northern Europe and America, is one of the brightest threads in the skein of history.
These astronomers proceeded on completely scientific principles: they accepted nothing as true which was not confirmed by experience or experiment.
Avicenna was the greatest writer on medicine, al-Razi the greatest physician, al-Biruni the greatest geographer, al-Haitham the greatest optician, Jabir probably the greatest chemist, of the Middle Ages; these five names, so little known in present-day Christendom, are one measure of our provincialism in viewing medieval history.
They protested their respect for Islam’s holy book, but they argued that where it or the Hadith contradicted reason, the Koran or the traditions must be interpreted allegorically; and they gave the name kalam or logic to this effort to reconcile reason and faith. It seemed to them absurd to take literally those Koranic passages that ascribed hands and feet, anger and hatred, to Allah;
Like Aristotle, al-Farabi carefully managed to make himself unintelligible on immortality.
Al-Farabi counters this view with an appeal to his fellow men to build a society not upon envy, power, and strife, but upon reason, devotion, and love.
Sidjistani Society—for the discussion of philosophical problems. No questions were asked as to the national origin or religious affiliation of any member.
These “Brethren of Sincerity” or Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa) were alarmed by the weakening of the caliphate, the poverty of the people, and the corruption of morals; they aspired to a moral, spiritual, and political renovation of Islam;
They conceived friendship as a collaboration of abilities and virtues, each party bringing to the union a quality of which the others had lack and need; truth, they thought, comes more readily from a meeting of minds than from individual thought. So they privately met and discussed, with fine freedom, catholicity, and courtesy, all the basic problems of life,
The Supreme Intelligence sees all things—past, present, and future—not in time or sequence but at once; their occurrence is the temporal result of His timeless thought.
But God does not directly cause each action or event; things develop by an internal teleology—they have their purposes and destinies written in themselves. Therefore God is not responsible for evil; evil is the price we pay for freedom of will; and the evil of the part may be the good of the whole.
It is a pity that we know these three centuries (750–1050) of Arabic efflorescence so imperfectly.
What we know of Moslem thought in those centuries is a fragment of what survives, what survives is a fragment of what was produced; what appears in these pages is a morsel of a fraction of a fragment.
At their peak philosophy and religion meet in the sense and contemplation of universal unity.
“What I see he knows,” and that the philosopher said of him, “What I know he sees.”
“Say Allah! then leave them to amuse themselves in their vain discourse.”
God opens to man one gate after another. First the gate of repentance, then the gate of certainty, so that he accepts contumely and endures abasement, and knows for certain by Whom it is brought to pass…. Then God opens to him the gate of love; but still he thinks, “I love.” … Then God opens to him the gate of unity … thereupon he perceives that all is He, all is by Him … he recognizes that he has not the right to say, “I” or “mine” … desires fall away from him, and he becomes free and calm…. Thou wilt never escape from thy self until thou slay it. Thy self, which is keeping thee far from God,
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Day by day the religion that some philosophers supposed to be the product of priests is formed and re-formed by the needs, sentiment, and imagination of the people; and the monotheism of the prophets becomes the polytheism of the populace.
Next to the Bible (itself Oriental), the Fables and the Nights are the most widely read books in the world.
Probably no civilization or period—not even China in the days of Li Po and Tu Fu, nor Weimar when it had “a hundred citizens and ten thousand poets”—ever equaled Abbasid Islam in the number and prosperity of its bards.
The Caliph Hisham, wishing to recall a poem, sent for the poet Hammad, who luckily remembered it all; Hisham rewarded him with two slave girls and 50,000 dinars ($237,500);97 no poet will believe the tale.
lift my voice to utter lies absurd; but speaking truth my hushed tones scarce are heard.”
Everything in Persia—patriotism, passion, philosophy, pederasty, piety—now blossomed into verse.
a poetry of abstract forms
The mosques of Medina, Mecca, Jerusalem, Ramleh, Damascus, Kufa, Basra, Shiraz, Nishapur, and Ardebil; the Mosque of Jafar at Baghdad, the Great Mosque of Samarra, the Zakariyah Mosque of Aleppo, the Mosque of Ibn Tulun and the el-Azhar in old Cairo, the Great Mosque of Tunis, the Sidi Oqba Mosque of Qairuan, the Blue Mosque of Cordova—we can do no less, and no more, than name them, for of the hundreds such that were built in this period only a dozen remain distinguishable; indiscriminate time has leveled the rest through earthquake, negligence, or war.
Art is significance rendered with feeling through form; but the feeling must accept discipline, and the form must have structure and meaning, even if the meaning outreach the realm of words. This is the art of illumination, as of the profoundest music.
The people, always healthier in their conduct than in their creeds, held it as a proverb that “wine is as the body, music is as the soul, joy is their offspring.”
Every conquest creates a new frontier, which, being exposed to danger, suggests further conquest.
Egypt with its capital at al-Fustat, Ifriqiya with its capital at Qairwan, Maghreb (Morocco) with its capital at Fez.
But nothing fails like success.
The Moslem flair for fine dress, brilliant jewelry, and the arts of decoration made for a life of otium cum dignitate—leisure without vulgarity.
Gebel al-Tariq, the Mountain of Tariq, which Europe compressed into Gibraltar.
I have now reigned above fifty [Mohammedan] years in victory or peace…. Riches and honors, powers and pleasures, have waited on my call; nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen. O man! place not thy confidence in this present world!
Like Sulla, al-Mansur never left a favor unrewarded, nor an injury unavenged.
But the ardor that destroys is seldom mated with the patience that builds.
“Never was Andalusia so mildly, justly, and wisely governed as by her Arab conquerors.”
We may judge the attractiveness of Islam to Christians from a letter of 1311, which gives the Mohammedan population of Granada at that time as 200,000, of whom all but 500 were descendants of Christians converted to Islam.55 Christians frequently expressed their preference of Moslem to Christian rule.
Here, says al-Maqqari, were 200,077 houses, 60,300 palaces, 600 mosques, and 700 public baths;62 the statistics are slightly Oriental.
so the good, the true, and the beautiful fluctuate with the fortunes of war.
It was a common saying in Moorish Spain that “when a musician dies at Cordova, and his instruments are to be sold, they are sent to Seville; when a rich man dies at Seville, and his library is to be sold, it is sent to Cordova.”
Nizam wrote down his philosophy of government in one of the major works of Persian prose—the Siyasat-nama, or Book of the Art of Rule.
In 1256 the Mongols under Hulagu captured Alamut and other Assassin centers; thereafter the members of the order were hunted and slain as nihilist enemies of society.
It was a brilliant decay.
As in Rome and Baghdad, so in Cairo the guards became the kings.
and philosophers were protected on the quiet understanding that they would make their works unintelligible.
Giralda at Seville. The new architectural style is often called
where all is ornament the eye and soul grow weary even of beauty and skill.
A silver salver engraved with ibexes, geese, and the name of Alp Arslan, and dated 1066, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, has been judged “the outstanding silver piece of the Islamic period” of Persian art, “and the most important single object surviving from Seljuq times.”
“Imagination,” said a Persian poet, “cannot grasp the joy that reason draws from a fine-drawn line.”
It has passages of great beauty, but a thing of beauty, laden with words, is not a joy forever.
