Islamic Civilization: A Traditionalist’s Perspective
by Dr. Robert D. Crane
I. Centers of Islamic Civilization
There have been many civilizations throughout human history. Some scholars conclude that there are at least half a dozen distinct civilizations in the world today, including the Islamic. A civilization may be defined as the highest level of human self-identity other than the human species itself. A civilization may include many levels of community within itself, of which the highest may be considered to be the nation.
The Islamic civilization, because of its very name, refers to a community of nations whose identity is the religion Islam, composed of people who call themselves Muslims. Because of its global character, there are many distinct peoples or nations within the Islamic civilization, each centering on a major city that best represents both the generic identity of Islam and the particular identity of a local culture.
Perhaps the most famous such centers, with their dates of flourishing, are Baghdad (762-1030), Cordoba (929-1242), Timbuktu (1100-1433), and Delhi (1206-1526 and 1526-1707).[1] Among these centers of civilization two are celebrated in the West as centers of an Islamic Golden Age. These two are Baghdad and Cordoba, which were the capitals respectively of the Abbasid and Andalusian empires.
The Abbasid Empire, the second of the Muslim empires, succeeded the first one, the Umayyad, which was founded by Muawiyah in bitter conflict with the Hashimites of Madinah. Within a hundred years by 750 A.C. the Umayyad had become the sixth largest empire in human history, extending from India to the Atlantic Ocean. The Abbasid emperors ruled thereafter for two centuries and nominally for another century until 1020 in a losing confrontation with rival local empires, especially the Mamluk, Buwayhid, Fatimid, and Seljuk, which held the real military and political power.
A Western extension of the Ummayad Empire gathered strength after the Arabs recruited a Berber army to invade Spain from Morocco in 711. This army reached southern France by 719 and occupied what is now southwestern France for thirteen years until defeated at the Battle of Poitiers in 732. As the Muslim rulers adapted to local conditions and grew further in strength they declared an independent western emirate in 756, headquartered in Cordoba, six years after the overthrow of the Ummayads by the Abbasid Empire in the east. Although nominally subordinate to the Abbasid Empire in Baghdad, the Emir Abd al Rahman, who had deep blue eyes and golden hair and took power in 911 at the age of twenty-two, finally cut ties with Baghdad and in 929 formally declared the Caliphate of Cordoba as a reality.
Under his administration, the city of Cordoba rapidly became the largest and most illustrious city in the world, exceeding even the great Byzantine city of Constantinople and rivaling and in some ways exceeding even the great cities of China at the time. It is said to have had more books in its great libraries than in all the rest of the world combined, which led to and resulted from its role as a global center of learning in philosophy, jurisprudence, the medical sciences, astronomy, art, architecture, and every known field of knowledge.
Cordoba and the various centers of Islamic civilization were famous for their richness in polymaths, those who are experts in all fields of knowledge. For example, the Jewish scholar, Ibn Maymun (Maimonides), was a well-known physician but has never been equaled as a master of the Talmud. Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who is today known only as a philosopher, produced one of the milestones in medical history with his book Kulliyat fi al Tib (The Universal Principles of Medicine). His friend, Tufail, the universal genius in all branches of science, was a renowned physician, though his books on this subject were lost during the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain. Another of his friends, Ibn al Arabi, was present at Ibn Rushd’s funeral, because they were both mystics of the highest order and devout Muslims in the search for knowledge in both the transcendent and immanent orders of reality.
Only a century later in 1036 this new Andalucian empire collapsed due to endemic internal corruption, including the ostensible rule by a caliph for twenty years after he in fact had died. Half a century later in 1086, the Berber Almoravids from North Africa came to the rescue but the decline continued until another Berber force, the Akmohads, invaded Spain in 1145 and ruled for more than half a century until they too were expelled in 1212. This spelled the end of Cordoba as a center of civilization, though the last Muslims survived in a sliver of the former empire, known as Grenada, for three centuries until they too were expelled in 1492, the year the Spaniards “discovered” America.
The remarkable aspect of both these eastern and western empires was the fact that culturally these civilizational centers prospered precisely when politically they were already in fatal decay. This is a phenomenon exhibited throughout the long history of Islam. Islam as a religion and dynamic culture spread most rapidly when the various empires in Islamdom were weak and spread most slowly when they were strong.
II. Causes of the Islamic Renaissance
The six centuries from the Year 800 to the Year 1400 are known variously as the Golden Age or The Islamic Renaissance both in Islam as a religion and in Islamdom as a secular power. This period brackets also what is known as the Classical Period in Islamic normative law.
From the historiographical perspective two questions arise. First, whence or “how come”? Why did human creativity in all fields of human endeavor prosper as the core of Islamic civilization during this period, and, second, why did its role in the world suddenly decline to little more than a peripheral force. Why were Baghdad in the East and Cordoba in the West the leading centers of global civilization, and why are they now merely distant memories cultivated by those Muslims who seek an identity only in the past?
At least four answers are obvious but are based somewhat on circular reasoning as to cause and effect. These are:
1) Free trade. During this period a great global empire was created without internal boundaries and largely free from attack, which permitted trade in both ideas and goods to flow freely across the Asian continent and beyond. Knowledge in all fields of human thought and action from India and China mingled with that of Persia, ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt.
2) Good governance. Open-ended borrowing was encouraged among a loose commonwealth of civilizations, each of which under Muslim rule remained more or less administratively and intellectually intact.
3) Common language. Arabic became a universal language over most of the “known world.” In Andalucia (Muslim Spain), Maimonides, the great Jewish scholar, spoke Hebrew but he wrote in Arabic, as did almost all the great Muslim scholars even in Persia. This powerful vehicle of thought and expression facilitated communication and innovation in all fields, including every field of science and every field of humanistic thought, especially, philosophy, the arts, law, and theology.
4) Free thought. The Muslim leaders sought out the knowledge and skills of their component civilizations both for purposes of enhancing material power and for the pursuit of knowledge as an ultimate good in itself. This was in accordance with the teaching of the Prophet Muhammad that, “The ink of scholars is more precious than the blood of martyrs.”
Despite the inevitable extremist movements found in every civilization, when Muslims were laying the foundations of Islamdom as a civilization they welcomed and sought the knowledge and wisdom of other civilizations, including the basis of all wisdom in the various religions of the world. This was in keeping with the principles laid down in the Qur’an:
Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from error… (Surah al Baqara, 2:256)
If it had been your Lord’s Will, they would all have believed, all who are on earth! Will you then compel people, against their will, to believe! (Surah Yunus, 10:99)
Say: “We believe in Allah, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Isma’il, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that given to (all) Prophets from their Lord: we make no difference among any of them: and we submit to Allah (in Islam). (Surah al Baqara, 2:136)
…Had not Allah checked one set of people by means of another there would surely have been pulled down monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, in which the name of Allah is commemorated in abundant measure… (Surah al Hajj, 22:40)
The American historian, Draper, wrote: “During the period of the caliphs, the learned men of the Christians and the Jews were not only held in high esteem but were appointed to posts of great responsibility, and were promoted to high ranking positions in government. Harun Rashid appointed John, the son of Maswaih, to be Director of Public Instruction with all the schools and colleges under his charge. He (Caliph Harun) never considered to which country a learned person belonged nor his faith and belief, but only his excellence in the field of learning.”[2]
Liefy Brutistal wrote in his book, Spain of the Tenth Century, “Often the scribe writing out the terms of a treaty was a Jew or a Christian. Just as many Jews and Christians [as Muslims] held important posts in the government. They were vested with authority in the administrative departments, even in matters of war and peace. And several Jews acted as ambassadors of the Caliph in European countries.”
The first rule of both sociology and historiography is that new ideas and new institutions never appear out of nowhere. They always result from further development of the past. The dynamics of their origin can be explained by Arnold Toynbee’s theory of challenge and response, whereby the challenges and responses must be balanced just right, with neither too much nor too little of either. The permanence of creative change results best when creative individuals bring out the best of the past in the present in order to build a better future.
III. Contributions of the Islamic Civilization
What were the great creations of the Muslim world that helped to both cause and sustain the six centuries of the Islamic Renaissance? Especially, what were the major scientific discoveries and contributions of the Islamic civilization? These can be grouped by field of discovery and by a chronology of the discoverers:
1. Medicine
Massive translation and copying projects made Greek, Roman, Hellenic, Persian, and Hindu sources on medicine available to Arabic-speaking scholars across the empire and across time to Europe. Building on the best of the past, Islamic scholars further developed this in the most creative ways. Perhaps their most significant single achievement was the establishment of medicine as a science based on observation and experimentation, rather than on conjecture. Islamic scientists developed what later would be called the scientific method.
Seventy-five years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the first of many free public hospitals was opened in Damascus. Asylums were maintained throughout the empire for the care of the mentally ill. In the early 10th century, Spanish physician Abu Bakr al-Razi introduced the use of antiseptics in cleaning wounds, and also made the connection between bacteria and infection. Al-Hasan published a definitive study on optics (the science of light and vision) in 965. The thirteenth-century Muslim physician Ibn al-Nafis discovered and accurately described the functioning of the human circulatory system. Islamic veterinary science led the field for centuries, particularly in the study and treatment of horses.
2. Chemistry
Muslim alchemists (early forerunners of modern chemists) in the 10th to14th centuries, inspired by ancient chemical formulas from China and India, are famous for the endless experiments they performed in their laboratories. Their goals ranged from pursuit of a chemical elixir bestowing enhanced life to the transformation of base metals to gold. Although they never succeeded in their immediate goals, they did make numerous valuable discoveries—among them the distillation of petroleum and the forging of steel.
3. Optics
Roman techniques of manufacturing glass lenses stimulated Al-Hasan’s breakthrough in the field of optics (the science of light and vision), which demolished Aristotle’s theory that vision was the result of a ray emanating from the eye, encompassing an object, and bringing it back to the soul. Al-Hasan’s Book of Optics, published in 965, was the first to document sight as visual images entering the eye and made perceptible by adequate light. This book remained the pre-eminent text in its field until 1610, when the work of European Johannes Kepler surpassed it.
4. Mathematics
Muslim mathematicians refined algebra from its beginnings in Greece and Egypt, and developed trigonometry in pursuit of accurate ways to measure objects at a distance. Muslim scholars also made important and original contributions to astronomy. They collected and corrected previous astronomical data, built the world’s first observatory, and developed the astrolabe, an instrument that was once called “a mathematical jewel.”
5. Architecture
Muslim architects borrowed heavily from the Byzantine Empire which used domes and arches extensively throughout their cities. An example of this use can be seen in the Dome of the Rock, a famous mosque in Jerusalem.
6. Astronomy
Avid students of both the heavens and the earth, Muslim scholars made detailed and accurate maps of both. They accurately mapped distances around the earth and refined longitude and latitude for geographical exploration across continents. The twelfth-century Persian, Omar Khayyam, developed a calendar so reliable that over 500 years it was off by only one day.
IV. Spiritual Framework of the Islamic Renaissance
The most profound answer to the “why” of the so-called Islamic Renaissance will not come from the circular question-and answer approach, which traces its origin to free trade, good governance, common language, and free thought. A more basic approach would trace its origin to its higher paradigmatic purpose, which resides not in the immanent here and now but in the transcendent beyond space and time.
As explained above in Chapter 3 on “Universal Principles of Human Rights and Responsibilities in the Shari’ah,” in the section on the Maqasid al Shari’ah as the purpose of theocentric law shared by all religions, in classical Islam the ultimate framework for philosophy, sociology, biology, mathematics, and physics, as well as political economy, is the Will of God, which is another word for natural law and theocentric justice. The Will of God is not something arbitrary but derives from the nature of God as the all-powerful, all merciful, and all wise.
This reflects the wisdom of the universe contained in the concept of tawhid, which emphasizes the totality of reality as an expression of the Oneness of God. What is known in the secular world as science is in the Islamic view merely another form of art, which, in turn, expresses what cannot be captured within the limitations of a secular mindset. From this ultimate paradigm of thought come four premises that give rise to the flourishing of Islamic science and art.
1. Ontological. The first of the four essential premises of Islamic thought is its holistic ontology embodied in the term tawhid, according to which the entire created world exists in unitary harmony. The things and forces we can observe, such as mass and energy, are real, but their existence comes from God. They do not exist independently of His purpose, which is intimately related to God’s love for every person.
This is the basis of the prayer offered by the Prophet Muhammad and by countless generations of Muslims for fourteen hundred years, “Oh Allah! I ask You for Your love and for the love of those who love You. Grant that I may love every action that will bring me closer to your Love.” Prominent among these actions, in addition to contemplative prayer, is scientific study of the physical world as manifestations of God’s higher reality, whereby ordered diversity in creation points to the coherent Oneness of the Creator.
The basic distinction between theocentric science and utilitarian science is ultimate purpose. Theocentric science seeks truth and from it the principles of balance and justice. Utilitarian science seeks human power, ultimately as an end in itself and thereby often at the expense of truth and justice.
2. Esthetic. The nature of transcendent reality, and of all Being, is Beauty, which precedes and is independent of cognition. The flower in the desert is beautiful even if no person sees it. Beauty, and necessarily therefore all science and normative law, consists of unity, symmetry, harmony, depth of meaning, and breadth of applicability. The greatest beauty is the unitive principle of tawhid itself, because without it there could be no science and no human thought at all. This means that the over-arching framework of both science and art should be simple, symmetrical, deep, and comprehensive.
3. Epistemological. The third premise is epistemological. All knowledge is merely a derivative and an affirmation of the unitary harmony inherent in everything that comes from God. All Creation worships God because He is the unitary source. Every person is created with a need and a corresponding intuitive capability to seek and to know transcendent reality as a source of the immanent and to submit lovingly to God in thought and action. This premise reinforces the first two, because it indicates that science of every kind serves to give meaning to everything man can observe.
4. Axiological. The fourth premise of Islamic thought is it purposive, goal-oriented nature, which seeks out the practical ethical meaning of all human endeavor.
V. Spiritual Sources of Islamic Art and Architecture
The answers to whence, what, and why provide a framework to explore the nature of Islamic art, which, in turn, provides a framework for the study of the physical sciences.
Many or even most Nobel Prize winners credit their often counter-intuitive breakthroughs in scientific thought to their awareness of beauty in what they have observed. Only after they have perceived the beauty of truth did they then do the rigorous work in proving the validity of their insights. Even Albert Einstein said that no human mind through its own rationality could have reasoned to his General Theory of Relativity, because it makes no sense unless one already understands it. He concluded therefore that his breakthrough discoveries came from God.
Among the most profound students of Islamic art are the Swiss scholar, Fritjhof Schuon; the well-known Iranian scholar, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, most recently the author of The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity; and the somewhat lesser known scholars, Titus Burckhardt, a German-Swiss, best known for his book in English, Mirror of the Intellect: Essays on Traditional Science and Sacred Art, and Rene Guenon, author of the masterful book, Crisis of the Modern World. Each of these authors wrote a shelf of books on human knowledge, science, and art.
Professor Nasr on pages 228-229 of his book The Heart of Islam notes the Hermetic saying, “That which is lowest symbolizes that which is highest.” He explains, “By virtue of belonging to the physical level of reality, the plastic and sonoral arts are able to symbolize and reflect the highest level of reality, which is the Divine Realm. Far from being something peripheral, Islamic art is a central manifestation of the Islamic religion. It not only plays a decisive and essential role in the life of Muslims, but is also a key for the understanding of the deepest dimensions of Islam, if one is willing to seek beyond mere formal appearances.”
“Of course,” he writes, “each civilization has its hierarchy of arts based on the formal structure of the religion that created that civilization. … For Islam the highest art is, as in Christianity, related to the Word of God, which for Islam, however, is not a person named Christ, but a book known as the Qur’an. The writing of the Word of God, that is, calligraphy, and chanting of it, that is, Qur’anic psalmody, stands at the top of the hierarchy of the arts.”
The concern about reverencing persons through sculpture is culturally bound. Nasr writes, “The prohibition of non-naturalistic paintings has been strongest historically among Arabs, who as Semites are in greater danger of confusing image and idol than most other ethnic groups.”
The Arabic words for art are fann and sina’ah. The first refers to the know-how in doing or making anything correctly and must be combined with wisdom, or hikmah, to become operative as art. Nasr writes, “In traditional Islamic society art was life itself and not a particular activity, and everything from sewing to cooking, to playing music or composing poetry had it own fann.” The second word, sina’ah, like the Latin ars, means simply to make something according to correct principles.
The debauchery of most modern art, copied by many Muslims educated in the West, is reflected in the colloquial borrowing of the phrase, “No problem,” ma mushkila, which is often a synonym for “O.K.” In secular thought, a problem is something that must be overcome, often by brute force. The classical Arab word mushkilah is related to the verb sha-qah, which means to split or tear apart, with the noun shi-qaq meaning discord or internal disharmony. The word sha-ka-lah, from which mushkilah directly derives, means to hobble or disable a horse and to be dubious and ambiguous. A “problem,” according to classical Arab thought, therefore can be effectively overcome only by restoring internal harmony through the wisdom of addressing cause, rather than mere effect, and by applying principles of natural law and normative justice.
Fritjhof Schuon taught that art “is the quest for – and the revelation of – the center, within us as well as around us. Art is an activity, an exteriorization, and thus depends by definition on a knowledge that transcends it and gives it order.” He writes, “Apart from such knowledge, art has no justification: it is knowledge which determines action, manifestation, form, and not the reverse.”
In linking science and art, Schuon writes, “Authentic and normative art always tends to combine intelligent observation of nature with noble and profound stylizations in order, first, to assimilate the work to the model created by God in nature and, secondly, to separate it from physical contingency by giving it an imprint of pure spirit, of synthesis, of what is essential.”
From the perspective of moving from the transcendent to the immanent, instead of the immanent to the transcendent, Schuon writes, “The essential function of art is to transfer Substance, which is both one and inexhaustible, into the world of accident and to bring the accidental consciousness back to Substance. One could say also that sacred art transposes Being to the level of existence, of action or of becoming, or that it transposes in a certain way the Infinite to the world of the finite, or Essence to the world of forms; it thereby suggests a continuity proceeding from the one to the other, a way starting from appearance or accident and opening onto Substance or its celestial reverberations.”
In simpler terms, Schuon taught that the mission of art is “to remove the shells in order to reveal the kernels; to distill the materials until the essences are extracted.” This contrasts with its opposite in secular art, “where a subjective and conjectural valuation is substituted for an objective and spiritual one, … as if talent could have meaning apart from the normative constraints that are its criteria. … The purpose of art is not a priori to induce aesthetic emotions, but to transmit, together with these, a more or less direct spiritual message, and thus suggestions emanating from, and leading back to, the liberating truth. … Sacred art is Heaven descended to earth, rather than earth reaching towards Heaven. … In brief, the image must be sacred in its content, symbolical in its detail, and hieratic in its treatment; otherwise it will be lacking in spiritual truth.”
For those who understand the perennial philosophers, best represented perhaps by Schuon, Nasr, Burckhardt, and Guenon, their explanation of science and art and their mutual interdependency is easy to understand. For others, the most one can do is recognize that there may be another dimension to reality that has always been basic to all the world religions but is now beyond the comprehension of the secular mind.
Schuon adds, “The definition, laws, and criteria of art cannot be derived from art itself, that is from the competence of the artist as such; the foundations of art lie in the spirit, in metaphysical, theological, and mystical knowledge, not in knowledge of the craft alone nor yet in genius, for this may be just anything; in other words the intrinsic principles of art are essentially subordinate to extrinsic principles of a higher order.”
He concludes, “Sacred art is made as a vehicle for spiritual presences, it is made at one and the same time for God, for angels, and for man; profane art on the other hand exists only for man and by that very fact betrays him. Sacred art helps man to find his own center, that kernel of nature of which is to love God. … The artist beings the divine into the world; the mystic reintegrates the world – his soul – into the divine; always with the help of Heaven, for ‘Without me ye can do nothing’.”
VI. Conclusion
The common thread or theme in all the centers of Islamic civilization was the primacy of tawhid, which inspires reverence for the coherence of the universe as a purposeful manifestation of God. This was the governing paradigm for the civilization’s creativity in science, art, and architecture, which focused on the transcendent rather than on the immanent. This contrasted with the European civilization where the governing paradigm was more clearly to control and exploit the material world as the center of reality.
The Islamic civilization, building on the early Greeks and Chinese, developed the scientific method, which was important for its rise, but its guiding purpose was to seek truth. The West, on the other hand, borrowed the scientific method from the Islamic civilization and further developed it in the search for power. One can debate which civilization was most successful in pursuing its reason for being and whether the two are compatible and should be combined.
Maintaining the balance between the transcendent and the immanent is the key to understanding the dynamics of civilizational rise and fall and is the key to civilizational challenge and response. Science at its creative best is the product of a search for knowledge of reality in all of its totality. At its worst, without art and ethics and without a commitment to peace, prosperity and freedom through compassionate justice, science can become a source of alienation from spirituality and a slave of those engaged in the race for producing the deadliest weapons of mass destruction.
Endnotes
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[1] As discussed in Chapter 10 below, Section XII, entitled “The Spread of Islam in India and Pakistan”, the famous Mughul Empire, ruled by six emperors, Babur (1526-30), Humayun (1530-56), Akbar (1556-1605), Jahangir (1605-27), Shah Jahan (1627-58), and Aurangzeb (1658-1707), is usually considered to be the height of the Muslim civilization in South Asia. It was preceded, however, by a similar Muslim civilization consisting of five Delhi-based sultanates, starting with the Turkic general from Central Asia, Qutb al din Aybak, who declared himself sultan in 1206 and thereby established the first Delhi sultanate, which lasted for almost a century until 1290. Over the next two centuries, it was succeeded by four other Delhi sultanates, the Khalji (1290-1320), Tughluq (1320-1413), Sayyid (1414-51), and the Lodi or Ghur’iat (1451-1526).
[2] John William Draper, History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, 2 volumes, Harper & Row, 1904 (1876), 438 pages.