Quranic Foundations And Structure Of Muslim Society
THE ISLAMIC CIVILISATION IN IT’S AGE OF GLORY
“… Christians and Moslems intermarried freely; now and then they joined in celebrating a Christian or Moslem holiday, or used the some building as church and mosque … Clerics and laymen from Christian Europe came in safety and freedom to Cordova, Toledo, or Seville as students, visitors, travelers.
“… Cordova … extraordinary general prosperity … streets were paved, had raised side walks, and were lighted at night; one could travel for ten miles by the light of street lamps, and along an uninterrupted series of buildings … was the focus and summit of Spanish intellectual life, though Toledo, Granada, and Seville shared actively in the mental exhilaration of the time. Moslem historians picture the Moorish cities as beehives of poets, scholars, jurists, physicians, and scientists; al-Maqqari fills sixty pages with their names. Primary schools were numerous, but charged tuition; Hakam II added twenty-seven schools for the free instruction of the poor. Girls as well as boys went to school; several Moorish ladies became prominent in literature or art. Higher education was provided by independent lecturers in the mosques; their courses constituted the loosely organized University of Cordova, which in the tenth and eleventh centuries was second in renown only to similar institutions in Cairo and Baghdad. Colleges were established also at Granada, Toledo, Seville, Murcia, Almeria, Valencia, Cadiz. The technique of paper-making was brought in from Baghdad, and books increased and multiplied. Moslem Spain had seventy libraries; rich men displayed their Morocco bindings, and bibliophiles collected rare or beautifully illuminated books … Scholars were held in awesome repute in Moslem Spain, and were consulted in simple faith that learning and wisdom are one.
“… Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Hazm (994-1064), besides serving as vizier to the last Umayyads, was a theologian and historian of great erudition. His Book of Religions and Sects, discussing Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and the principal varieties of Mohammedanism, is one of the world’s earliest essays in comparative religion … Maslama ibn Ahmad (d.1007), of Madrid and Cordova, adapted the astronomic tables of Khwarizmi to Spain … Ibrahim al-Zarqali (c.1029-87) of Toledo made an international name by improving astronomical instruments; Copernicus quoted his treatise on the astrolabe; his astronomical observations were the best of his age, and enabled him to prove for the first time the motion of the solar apogee with reference to the stars; his ‘Toledan Tables’ of planetary movements were used throughout Europe. Abul Qasim al-Zahrawi (936-1013), physician to Abd-er-Rahman III, was honored in Christendom as Abulcasis; he stands at the top of Moslem surgeons; his medical encyclopedia, al-Tasrif included three books on surgery which, translated into Latin, became the standard text of surgery for many centuries. Cordova was in this period the favorite resort of Europeans for surgical operations.
“… Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Baalbek, Aleppo, Damascus, Mosul, Emesa, Tus, Nishapur, and many other cities boasted of colleges; Baghdad alone had thirty in 1064. A year later Nizam al-Mulk added another: the Nizamiya; in 1234 the Caliph Mustansir founded still another, which in size, architecture, and equipment surpassed all the rest; one traveler called it the most beautiful building in the city. It contained four distinct law schools, in which qualified students received free tuition, food, and medical care, and a monthly gold dinar for other expenses; it contained a hospital, a bath-house, and a library freely open to students and staff. Women probably attended college in some cases, for we hear of a Shaikha—a lady professor—whose lectures … drew large audiences (c.1178) … Muhammad al-Shahrastani, in a Book of Religions and Sects (1128) analyzed the leading faiths and philosophies of the world, and summarized their history; no contemporary Christian could have written so learned and impartial a work.
“Europe knows Persian Poetry chiefly through Omar Khayyam. … His Algebra, translated into French in 1857, made significant advances both on al-Khwarizmi and on the Greeks; its partial solution of cubic equations has been judged ‘perhaps the very highest peak of medieval mathematics’. Another of his works on algebra (a manuscript in the Leiden Library) studied critically the postulates and definitions of Euclid. In 1074 the Sultan Malik Shah commissioned him and others to reform the Persian calendar. The outcome was a calendar that required a day’s correction every 3770 years—slightly more accurate than ours …
“Jalal-ud-Din Rumi (1201-1273) … wrote several hundred poems. The shorter ones, collected in his Divan or Book of Odes, are marked by such depth of feeling sincerity, and richness, yet naturalness, of imagery as place them at the top of all religious poetry composed since the Psalms. Jalal’s main work, the Mathnawi-i-Ma‘nawi (Spiritual Couplets), is a … religious epic outweighing in bulk all the legacy of ‘Homer’.
“The Moslems continued, in this period (1057-1258), their unchallenged ascendancy in science. In mathematics the most signal advances were made in Morocco and Azerbaijan; we see here again the range of Islamic civilization. In 1229 Hasan al-Marraqushi (i.e., of Marraqesh) published tables of sines for each degree, and tables of versed sines, arc sines, and arc cotangents. A generation later Nasir ul-Din al-Tusi (i.e., of Tus) issued the first treatise in which trigonometry was considered as an independent science rather than an appendage to astronomy; his Kitab shakl al-qatta remained without a rival in its field until the De Triangulis of Regiomontanus two centuries later. Perhaps Chinese trigonometry, which appears in the second half of the thirteenth century, was of Arabic origin.
“The outstanding work of physical science in this age was the Kitab Mizan al-hikmah … written about 1122 by … Abu’l Fath al-Khuzini. It gave a history of physics, formulated the laws of the lever, compiled tables of specific gravity for many liquids and solids, and proposed a theory of gravitation as a universal force drawing all things towards the centre of the earth. Water wheels … were improved by the Moslems; the Crusaders … introduced them into Germany.
“In 1081 Ibrahim al-Sahdi of Valencia constructed the oldest known celestial globe, a brass sphere 209 millimeters (81.5 inches) in diameter; upon its surface, in forty-seven constellations, were engraved 1015 stars in their respective magnitudes. The Giralda of Seville (1190) was an observatory as well as a minaret; there Jabir ibn Aflah made the observations for his Islah al-Majisti, or Correction of the Almagest (1240). The same reaction against Ptolemaic astronomy marked the works of Abu Ishaq al-Bitruji (Alpetragius) of Cordova, who paved the way for Copernicus by destructively criticizing the theory of epicycles and eccentrics through which Ptolemy had sought to explain the paths and motions of the stars.
“The age produced two geographers of universal medieval renown. Abu Abdallah Muhammad al-ldrisi was born at Ceuta (1100), studied at Cordova, and wrote in Palermo, at the behest of King Roger II of Sicily, his Kitab al-Rujari (Roger’s Book). It divided the earth into seven climatic zones, and each zone into ten parts; each of the seventy parts was illustrated by a detailed map; these maps were the crowning achievement of medieval cartography, uprecedented in fullness, accuracy, and scope. Al-ldrisi, like most Moslem scientists, took for granted the sphericity of the earth. Rivaling him for the honor of being the greatest medieval geographer was Abu Abdallah Yaqut (1179-1229) … he completed his Mu‘jam al-Buldan (1228)—a vast geographical encyclopedia which summed up nearly all medieval knowledge of the globe. Yaqut included almost everything—astronomy, physics, archaeology, ethnography, history, giving the co-ordinates of the cities and the lives and works of their famous men. Seldom has any man so loved the earth.
“Botany, almost forgotten since Theophrastus, revived with the Moslems of this age. Al-ldrisi wrote a herbal, but stressed the botanical rather than merely the medicinal interest of 360 plants. Abu’l Abbas of Seville (1216) earned the surname of al-Nabati, the Botanist, by his studies of plant life from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Abu Muhammad ibn Baitar of Malaga (1190-1248) gathered all Islamic botany into a vast work of extraordinary erudition, which remained the standard botanical authority till the sixteenth century, and marked him as the greatest botanist and pharmacist of the Middle Ages. Ibn al-Awan of Seville (1190) won a like pre-eminence in agronomy; his Kitab al-Falaha (Book of the Peasant) analyzed soils and manures, described the cultivation of 585 plants and fifty fruit trees, explained methods of grafting, and discussed the symptoms and cures of plant diseases. This was the most complete treatment of agricultural science in the whole medieval period.
“In this as in the preceding age the Moslems produced the leading physicians; of Asia, Africa, and Europe. They excelled especially in ophthalmology … Operations for cataract were numerous. Khalifah ibn abi-Mahasin of Aleppo (1256) was so confident of his skill that he operated for cataract on a one-eyed man. Ibn Baitar’s Kitab al-Jami’ made medicinal-botanical history; it listed 1400 plants, foods, and drugs, 300 of them new; analyzed their chemical constitution and healing power; and added acute observations on their use in therapy. But the greatest name in this acme of Moslem medicine is Abu Marwan ibn Zuhr (1091-1162) of Seville, known to the European medical world as Avenzoar. He was the third in six generations of famous physicians, all of one family line, and each at the top of his profession. His Kitab al-Tasir, or Book of Simplification of Therapeutics and Diet, was written at the request of his friend Averroes, who (himself the greatest philosopher of the age) considered him the greatest physician since Galen. Ibn Zuhr’s forte was clinical description; he left classical analyses of mediastinal tumors, pericarditis, intestinal tuberculosis, and pharyngeal paralysis. Translation of the Tasir into Hebrew and Latin deeply influenced European medicine.
“Islam led the world also in the equipment and competence of its hospitals. One founded by Nurud-din at Damascus in 1160 gave free treatment and drugs during three centuries: for 267 years, we are told, its fires were never extinguished. Ibn Jubayr, coming to Baghdad in 1184, marvelled at the great Bimaristan Adadi, a hospital rising like some royal palace along the bank of the Tigris: here food and drugs were given to the patients without charge. In Cairo, in 1285, Sultan Qalaun began the Maristan al-Mansur, the greatest hospital of the Middle Ages.
Within a spacious quadrangular enclosure four buildings rose around a courtyard adorned with arcades and cooled with fountains and brooks. There were separate wards for diverse diseases and for convalescents; laboratories, a dispensary, outpatient clinics, diet kitchens, baths, a library, a chapel, a lecture hall, and particularly pleasant accommodation for the insane. Treatment was given gratis to men and women, rich and poor, slave and free; and a sum of money was disbursed to each convalescent on his departure, so that he need not at once return to work. The sleepless were provided with soft music, professional story-tellers, and perhaps books of history. Asylums for the care of the insane existed in all the major cities of Islam.
“… Mohammedanism produced its greatest theologian, the Augustine and the Kant of Islam. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was born at Tus in 1058 … wrote his most influential book— Tahafut at-Filasifa (The Destruction of Philosophy). All the arts of reason were turned against reason. By a ‘transcendental dialectic’ as subtle as Kant’s … seven centuries before Hume, al-Ghazali reduced reason to the principle of causality, and causality to mere sequence … In his Ihya Ulum al-Din (Revival of the Sciences of Religion) he expounded and defended his renovated orthodoxy with all the eloquence and fervour of his prime; never in Islam the sceptics and the philosophers encountered so vigorous a foe …
“Abu Bekr (Europe’s Abubacer) ibn Tufail (1107-1185) … found time to write, among more technical works, the most remarkable philosophical romance in medieval literature (Hayy ibn Yaqzan). It took its title from Ibn Sina, and (through Ockley’s English translation in 1708) may have suggested Robinson Crusoe to Defoe.
“… known to Islam as Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd (1126-1198), and to medieval Europe as Averroes—the most influential figure in Islamic Philosophy … In 1169 Averroes was appointed chief justice of Seville; in 1172 of Cordova … His work in medicine has been almost forgotten in his fame as a philosopher: he was, however, ‘one of the greatest physicians of his time’, the first to explain the function of the retina, and to recognize that an attack of smallpox confers subsequent immunity. His encyclopedia of medicine (Kitab al-Kulliyat fil tibb), translated into Latin, was widely used as a text in Christian universities … he added several works of his own on logic, physics, psychology, metaphysics, theology, law, astronomy and grammar … Maimonides followed in Averroes’ steps in seeking to reconcile religion and philosophy. In Christendom the Commentaries (of Averroes), translated into Latin from Hebrew, fed the heresies of Siger de Brabant, and the rationalism of the School of Padua, and threatened the foundations of Christian belief. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote his Summae to stem this Averroistic tide; but he followed Averroes in the method of his Commentaries, in divers interpretations of Aristotle … Roger Bacon marked Averroes next to Aristotle and Avicenna, and added … ‘The philosophy of Averroes today (c.1270) obtains the unanimous suffrage of wise men’.
“The influence of Islam on Europe was varied and immense.”
to be continued . . . . .
Quranic Foundation & Structure Of Muslim Society In The End Times
