Quranic Foundations And Structure Of Muslim Society
THE ISLAMIC CIVILISATION IN IT’S AGE OF GLORY
“Chemistry as a science was almost created by the Moslems … the Saracens introduced precise observation, controlled experiment, and careful records. They invented and named the alembic (al-anbiq), chemically analyzed innumerable substances, composed lapidaries, distinguished alkalis and acids, investigated their affinities, studied and manufactured hundreds of drugs … The most famous of the alchemists was Jabir ibn Hayyan (702-65), known to Europe as Gebir … The hundred or more works attributed to him … were translated into Latin, and strongly stimulated the development of European chemistry …
“… (Moslems) developed in alchemy that experimental method which is the greatest pride and tool of the modern mind. When Roger Bacon proclaimed that method to Europe, five hundred years after Jabir, he owed his illumination to the Moors of Spain, whose light had come from the Moslem East.
“The remains of Moslem biology in this period are scant. Abu Hanifa al-Dinawari (815-895) wrote a Book of Plants … adding many plants to pharmacology. Mohammedan botanists knew how to produce new fruits by grafting … Othman Amr al-Jahiz (d.869) propounded a theory of evolution like al-Masudi’s: life had climbed ‘from mineral to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to man’. The mystic poet Jalal ud-din (Rumi) accepted the theory …
“… The Moslems established the first apothecary shops and dispensaries, founded the first medieval school of pharmacy, and wrote great treatises on pharmacology. Moslem physicians were enthusiastic advocates of the bath, especially in fevers and in the form of the steam bath. Their directions for the treatment of smallpox and measles could scarcely be bettered today. Anaesthesia by inhalation was practised in some surgical operations; hashish and other drugs were used to induce deep sleep … Medical instruction was given chiefly at the hospitals. No man could legally practice medicine without passing an examination and receiving a state diploma; druggists, barbers, and orthopedists were likewise subject to state regulation and inspection, The physician-vizier Ali ibn Isa organized a staff of doctors to go from place to place to tend the sick (931), certain physicians made daily visits to jails; there was an especially humane treatment of the insane.
“… Ali ibn Isa, greatest of Moslem oculists, whose Manual for Oculists was used as a text in Europe till the eighteenth century.
“The outstanding figure in this humane dynasty of healers was Abu Bekr Muhammad al Razi (844-926), famous in Europe as Rhazes … he … wrote some 131 books, half of them on medicine, most of them lost. His Kitab al-Hawi (Comprehensive Book) covered in twenty volumes every branch of medicine. Translated into Latin as Liber continens, it was probably the most highly respected and frequently used medical text book in the white world for several centuries; it was one of the nine books that composed the whole library of the medical faculty at the University of Paris in 1395. His Treatise on Smallpox and Measles was a masterpiece of direct observation and clinical analysis; it was the first accurate study of infectious diseases, the first effort to distinguish the two ailments. We may judge its influence and repute by the forty English editions printed between 1498 and 1866. The most famous of al-Razi’s works was a ten-volume survey of medicine, the Kitab al-Mansuri … Gerard of Cremona translated it into Latin: the ninth volume of this translation, the Nonus Almonsoris, was a popular text in Europe till the sixteenth century.
“… Islam knew its greatest philosopher and most famous physician as Abu Ali al-Husein ibn Sina (980-1037) … he found time … to write a hundred books, covering nearly every field of science and philosophy … He translated Euclid, made astronomical observations, and devised an instrument like our vernier. He made original studies of motion, force, vacuum, light, heat and specific gravity. His treatise on minerals was a main source of European geology until the thirteenth century. His remark on the formation of mountains is a model of clarity: ‘Mountains may be due to two different causes. Either they result from upheavals of the earth’s crust, such as might occur in violent earthquake; or they are the effect of water, which, cutting for itself a new route, has denuded the valleys. The strata are of different kinds, some soft, some hard; the winds and waters disintegrate the first kind, but leave the other intact. It would require a long period of time for all such changes to be accomplished … but that water has been the main cause of these effects is proved by the existence of fossil remains of acquatic animals on many mountains’.
“Two gigantic productions contain Avicenna’s teaching: the Kitab in al-Shifa … an eighteen-volume encyclopedia of mathematics, physics, metaphysics, theology, economics, politics, and music; and the Qanun-fi-l-Tibb, or Canon of Medicine, a gigantic survey of physiology, hygiene, therapy, and pharmacology, with sundry excursions into philosophy … He conceives medicine as the art of removing an impediment to the normal functioning of nature … The Qanun, translated into Latin in the twelfth century, dethroned al-Razi, and even Galen, as the chief text in European medical schools; it held its place as required reading in the universities of Montpellier and Louvain till the middle of the seventeenth century.
“… Avicenna … His influence was immense: it reached out to Spain to mold Averroes and Maimonides, and into Latin Christendom to help the great Scholastics; it is astonishing how much of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas goes back to Avicenna. Roger Bacon called him ‘the chief authority in philosophy after Aristotle’; and Aquinas was not merely practicing his customary courtesy in speaking of him with as much respect as of Plato.
“… Abu Yusuf Ibn Ishaq al-Kindi was born in Kufa about 803 … studying everything, writing 265 treatises about everything —arithmatic, geometry, astronomy, meteorology, geography, physics, politics, music, medicine, philosophy … he struggled to reduce health, medicine, and music to mathematical relations. He studied the tides, sought the laws that determine the speed of a falling body, and investigated the phenomena of light in a book on Optics which influenced Roger Bacon.
“Thirty-nine works of al-Farabi survive … One work … strikes us with its original force: Al-Madina al-Fadila—The Ideal City. … the only right is might. 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.
“… From the Alhambra in Spain to the Taj Mahal in India, Islamic art overrode all limits of place and time, laughed at distinctions of race and blood, developed a unique and yet varied character, and expressed the human spirit with a profuse delicacy never surpassed.
“Moslem architecture, like most architecture in the Age of Faith, was almost entirely religious … Nevertheless, though the remains are scant, we hear of bridges, aqueducts, fountains, reservoirs, public baths, fortresses, and turreted walls built by engineer-architects … The Crusaders found excellent military architecture at Aleppo, Baalbek, and else where in the Islamic East, learned there the uses of machicolated walls, and took from their foes many an idea for their own incomparable castles and forts. The Alcazar at Seville and the Alhambra at Granada were fortresses and palaces combined.
“We probably owe this splendor of ornament to the Semitic prohibition of human or animal forms in art: as if in compensation, the Moslem artist invented or adopted an overflowing abundance of non-representational forms. He sought an outlet first in geometrical figures—line, angle, square, cube, polygon, cone, spiral, ellipse, circle, sphere; he repeated these in a hundred combinations, and developed them into swirls, guilloches, reticulations, entrelacs, and stars; passing to floral forms, he designed, in many materials, wreaths, vines, or rosettes of lotus, acanthus, or palm tendrils or leaves; in the tenth century he merged all these in the arabesque; and to them all, as a unique and major ornament, he added the Arabic script.
“The brightest name of Moslem Egyptian science is that
of Muhammad ibn al-Haitham, known to medieval Europe as Alhazen … We know al-Haitham chiefly
by his Kitab al-Manazir, or Book of Optics; of all medieval productions this is
probably the most thoroughly scientific in its method and thought. Al-Haitham
studied the refraction of light through transparent mediums like air and water,
and came so close to discovering the magnifying lens that Roger Bacon, Witelo,
and other Europeans three centuries later based upon his work their own
advances toward the microscope and the telescope. He rejected the theory of
Euclid and Ptolemy that vision results from a ray leaving the eye and reaching
the object; rather ‘the form of the perceived object passes into the eye, and
is transmitted there by the transparent body—the lens. He remarked the effect
of the atmosphere in increasing the apparent size of sun or moon when near the
horizon; showed that through atmospheric refraction the light of the sun
reaches us even when the sun is as much as nineteen degrees below the horizon;
and on this basis he calculated the height of the atmosphere at ten (English)
miles. He analyzed the correlation between the weight and the density of the
atmosphere, and the effect of atmospheric density upon the weight of objects.
He studied with complex mathematical formulas the action of light on spherical
or parabolic mirrors, and through the burning glass. He observed the half-moon
shape of the image, during eclipses, on the wall opposite a small hole made in
the window shutters; this is the first known mention of the camera obscura, or
dark chamber, on which all photography depends. We could hardly exaggerate the
influence of al-Haitham on European science. Without him Roger Bacon might
never have been heard of; Bacon quotes him or refers to him at almost every
step in that part of the Opus maius which deals with optics; and Part VI rests
almost entirely on the findings of the Cairene physicist. As late as Kepler and
Leonardo European studies of light were based upon al-Haitham’s work.
“Never was Andalusia so mildly, justly, and wisely governed as by her Arab conquerors’. It is the judgment of a great Christian Orientalist, whose Faith, enthusiasm may require some discounting of his praise; but after due deduction his verdict stands … al-Maqqari gives a hundred examples of the justice, liberality, and refinement of the Umayyad rulers of Spain … they were certainly an improvement upon the illiberal Visigothic regime that had preceded them. Their management of public affairs was the most competent in the Western world of that age. Laws were rational and humane, and were administered by a well-organized judiciary. For the most part the conquered, in their iternal affairs, were governed by their own laws and their own officials. Towns were well policed; markets, weights and measures were effectively supervised. A regular census recorded population and property. Taxation was reasonable compared with the imposts of Rome or Byzantium. The revenues of the Cordovan caliphate under Abd-er-Rahman III reached the 12,045,000 gold dinars ($57,213,750)— probably more than the united governmental revenues of Latin Christendom; but these receipts were due not so much to high taxes as to well-governed and progressive agriculture, industry, and trade.
“… The Arabs for the most part left the actual work of agriculture to the conquered; however, they used the latest manuals of agronomy, and under their direction agricultural science developed in Spain far in advance of Christian Europe.
to be continued . . . . .
Quranic Foundation & Structure Of Muslim Society In The End Times
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