Since much of it happened by way of southern
Italy, I think I can justify sneaking it in, here.
This is an early-15th-century Persian copy of the
opening page of Book Four of Ibn Sina's (Avicenna) Canon of
Medicine, written in the 11th century, parts of which were used in
European medical schools as late as the 19th
century.
Dangling in the southern winter sky and very visible from my
balcony in Naples is the great equatorial constellation of Orion. The second
brightest star in that constellation is the red supergiant, Betelgeuse. (This is
the first of a few familiar names coming up that no one knows how to pronounce.
Another one is "Averroës.") Betelgeuse is 390 light years from my balcony and,
thus, remote from the various fields of human conflict that are responsible for
my knowing neither the pronunciation nor the original name of the
star—thus, our high school astronomy club's cutesy mnemonic of "Beetle
Juice." I don't recall ever learning that the name came from the Arabic bayt
al jauza, meaning "in the house of the twins," referring to the Heavenly
Twins, Castor and Pollux, hanging out right above Orion.
Speaking of high school, I did not do well in mathematics, but I am willing
to give Al-Khwarizmi (known to us as Algorizm!) (770 - 840) his credit if he
takes a bit of my blame. I will take all the blame for not knowing who Chaucer
was talking about in the CanterburyTales, when, in praising the
knowledge of the doctor on the trip, he reminded us that ye olde pilgrim
sawbones was familiar not only with Hippocrates and Galen, but "Rhazes, Hali,
Averroës and Avicenna."
It is convenient—but not a good idea—to pigeonhole our own
cultural history into tidy episodes: The Renaissance, The Age of Reason, The
Enlightenment, The This & That, as if they had happened all of a
sudden with no connection to anything else—as if Leonardo woke up one
fine morning in 1500, looked at his homemade (obviously) hour-glass and said
"Gee, it's the Renaissance; I'd better design a helicopter." The point of this
entry, then, is simply to draw your attention to how interconnected European and
Arabic culture used to be, and how there is a link between the glorious age of
Arab science and culture (800-1100) and the beginnings of the Italian
Renaissance. (I am not making the post hoc, ergo propter hoc mistake of
saying that that which comes first necessarily causes that which comes second. I
am simply saying it's a good idea to know what came before you—Bonum
est quod ante te evenit scire (I think) .
After Islam's rapid spread from Spain to India, Muslims founded the city of
Baghdad in 800, and it is here that the Muslim quest for knowledge begins, the
manifestation of an insatiable curiosity (to use Einstein's choice phrase
from many centuries later) "to figure out how the Old Man runs the universe." It
is in Baghdad that the Muslims founded their great school of translation,
the incredible ambition of which was to translate as much as they could find of
science, astronomy, mathematics, music, geography and philosophy—whatever
remained of Classical Greek knowledge. It meant going even further
afield—to India—to study the mathematics and philosophy of those
who had written in classical Sanskrit centuries earlier.
In 800 this was by no means an easy task. Much classical Greek writing had
not survived the centuries of neglect by Christians inimical to "pagan" thought.
As early as the year 500, the great library at Alexandria was a ruin and, a few
years later, Justinian closed Plato's Academy in Athens because it was a hotbed
of pagan (non-Christian) philosophy. Arab scholars, then, translated into Arabic
the few Greek texts that remained, or translated from languages into which the
Greek originals had previously been translated by scholars who had left Greece
for parts east. These were mainly exiled Nestorian Christians from Greece, and
Classical Greek scholars from Plato's academy who had fled to Persia, where they
founded a great center of learning at Jundishapur (before the coming of Islam)
and translated much of their material into Aramaic, the lingua franca of the
Middle East at the time. After Baghdad, the Arabs later started equally fine
centers of scholarship in Spain at Cordoba and Toledo.
Transmission of this glorious knowledge from The Muslim world into Italy
happened primarily through Spain and Sicily; that is, the great courts of
learning in Cordoba and the pre-Crusades court of Norman
Sicily in the 12th century. It is in Sicily, particularly, that Norman
tolerance provided for the coexistence of Byzantine Greek, Italian Christian,
and Arab scholars. It was, perhaps, the last great period of human tolerance in
European history.
Medicine
One of the great medical translators from Arabic into Latin was Constantine
of Carthage (known as "The African"). In the middle of the 11th century, he came
to teach at the medical school in Salerno
, the first of its kind in Europe, bringing with him his vast library of Arabic
medical works, including, no doubt, Avicenna's Canon of Medicine.
That work was translated into Latin and used as a text in European medical
schools well into the 17th century, and parts of it were current as late as the
early 19th century! In 1127, a European translator, Stefano of Pisa,
reported that scholars of medicine were all still found in Sicily and
Salerno, and were generally persons who knew Arabic. Again, we shouldn't set up
a necessary chain of cause and effect; yet, there is surely a link between
earlier Muslim medical thought (the view that "God has provided a cure for all
disease"; therefore, it is our rational duty to find those cures) and the final
abandoning by the Christian west of the view that prayer and mortification of
the flesh cured illness.
Frederick II
In Palermo, Emperor Frederick
II (1194-1250), in spite of the Crusades, was driven by his own
enormous intellectual curiosity to explore Arabic culture. He is known for his
exchanges of letters on philosophy and science with Arab scholars. A prominent
member of the court of Frederick in Palermo was the great Italian mathematician,
Leonardo Fibonacci, the inventor of the arithmetic series that bears his name.
(Quick! what is the next number in this series: 4, 1, 5, 6, 11, 17...)? He
had studied with Arab mathematicians, and he is also the reason you don't
have to do that last problem as "IV, I, V, VI, XI, XVII..."; that is, he
introduced "Arabic" numerals into Europe (they were really Indian numerals that
the Arabs had picked up in their wanderings).
Frederick’s court is also responsible for giving us a Latin translation (from
the Arabic translation of the Greek) of Ptolemy's Almagest, and for
translating the original works of the great Arab astronomer, Al-Farghini.
Frederick II's interests are so wide ranging that it is no wonder he was well
read in Arab philosophy and science. He expanded the medical school in Salerno
and started the University of Naples, which, today, still bears his name.
Michael Scot (1217-1240) was perhaps the finest mind at the court of
Frederick in Palermo. From Scotland, he had worked at the great Arab translation
center in Toledo and is responsible for giving us Latin versions of the
philosophical works of Avicenna and Averroës, particularly the latter's
commentaries on Aristotle. From royal courts to fledgeling universities, Italy
in the 1100s and 1200s, then, seems to be a scene of Europeans scurrying to read
the next installments of Arab works, particularly in philosophy, medicine and
astronomy.
Philosophy
Muslim religious philosophy is of particular interest. Al-Kindi (d.
after 870) was the first important Muslim philosopher. He held and taught that
revealed truth (religion) and rational truth were not in conflict, but were
complementary—even identical. Then, Al-Farabi (874-950) elevated
philosophy even above the revealed truth of the sharia, the religious law
of Islam, and held that our goal is to develop our rational faculty.
Ibn Sina (981-1037), known in the west by the Latin name, Avicenna, is often
called by Westerners the "Arab Leonardo" for the amazing breadth of his
knowledge in medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. In addition to
his Canon of Medicine (mentioned above), he is certainly one of the most
remarkable thinkers of the Middle Ages and the most important and original of
all Muslim phosphors. His held that religion was a kind of philosophy for the
masses; the goal of all revealed truth (including his own Islam) was to lead us
to our highest state—one of philosophic contemplation. He held the
particularly original idea that intellectual discovery implies an intuitive act
of knowledge. The idea of the intuitive intellect working outside of the
methodical process of collecting facts and deduction has again become quite
modern.
Perhaps Ibn-Rushid (Averroës) 1128 -1198 is also of great interest to
us. He wrote many commentaries on Aristotle and is known in Arab philosophy
simply as "The Commentator." His works in religious philosophy were widely read
in Europe, especially by Thomas Aquinas, the point, of course, being not that
one was right and the other wrong, but that one of the greatest of European
medieval philosophers honed his own sharp intellect by dealing with his Muslim
predecessor. Averroës' work in law, medicine, and astronomy were also highly
regarded.
Literature
Hardly mentioned at all when you read about the Arab influence in European
thought is the extent to which Arab literature might have had any influence on
European medieval literature. There are a number of possibilities. It may be
that the Arab habit of composing popular poetry in vernacular Arabic in Sicily
and Spain had some influence on the subsequent "vernacularization" of not only
European court poetry and song in the Provence (the Troubadours) and Sicily, but
even in the beginnings of great European vernacular literature.
In A History of Islamic Sicily, Aziz Ahmad dwells on the controversial
connection between Dante's Divine Comedy and prior Islamic works of the
same nature. There is no real conclusion to be drawn, except the possibility
that our great originator of non-Latin Romance literature got some inspiration
from somewhere. Dante certainly knew of Avicenna and Averroës through Latin
translation; in the Divine Comedy, he places them both in Purgatory with
the great pre-Christian scholars of ancient Greece. (Dante was not so kind to
Mohammed, himself, though, who, in Canto 28, is in Hell as a Sower of Discord).
Did Dante also know (through its Latin or Early French translations) of The
Book of the Scale, an earlier Arab eschatological work that has interesting
parallels in the Divine Comedy? Again, we should beware of post hoc
reasoning,but it is an intriguing possibility.
It was the contributions of minds such as those mentioned, above, that
prompted Robert Briffault (in The Making of Humanity) to write:
It was under the influence of the Arabs and Moorish
revival of culture and not in the 15th century, that a real renaissance
took place... After steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it
[Europe] had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when
cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova, and Toledo, were
growing centers of civilization and intellectual activity. It was there
that the new life arose which was to grow into a new phase of human
evolution. From the time when the influence of their culture made itself
felt, began the stirring of new
life.
Those are strong words that I do not entirely accept. Yet they remind us that
our ethnocentric view of our own cultural history as a straightforward chain of
events is not very helpful. Perhaps we should step back and view all of
culture as a vast web of ideas; they may spring forth in different places at
different times—or many of them at the same time, unnoticed elsewhere.
Here, read these. They will be on the midterm
exam.
Ahmad, Aziz. A History of Islamic Sicily. New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1979. Briffault, Robert.
The Making of Humanity. London: 1938. Gutas, Dimitri. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. London: Routledge,
1998. Lunde, Paul. “Ishbiliyah: Islamic
Seville.” Aramco World 44.1 (Jan/Feb) 1993. Marmura, Micahel E. "Avicenna." The Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
New York: MacMillan, 1967. Rahman, Fazlur.
"Islamic Philosophy." The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York:
MacMillan, 1967. Rosenthal, Franz. The
Classical Heritage in Islam. Trans. Emile and Jenny Marmorstein. In series:
Arabic Thought and Culture. London: Routledge, 1992. Sarton George. Introduction to the History of Science,
Vol. I-III. Baltimore: Wilkins and Wilkens, 1950 Tschanz, David W. “The Arab Roots of European Medicine.” Aramco
World May/June 1997. Unesco Courier,
The. September, 1986. Title of issue: "Averroes and Maimonides: Two Master
Minds of the 12th Century". Paris: Unesco, 1986. Wilson, N.G. From Byzantium to Italy; Greek Studies in the Italian
Renaissance. London: Duckworth, 1992.
Dangling in the southern winter sky and very visible from my
balcony in Naples is the great equatorial constellation of Orion. The second
brightest star in that constellation is the red supergiant, Betelgeuse. (This is
the first of a few familiar names coming up that no one knows how to pronounce.
Another one is "Averroës.") Betelgeuse is 390 light years from my balcony and,
thus, remote from the various fields of human conflict that are responsible for
my knowing neither the pronunciation nor the original name of the
star—thus, our high school astronomy club's cutesy mnemonic of "Beetle
Juice." I don't recall ever learning that the name came from the Arabic bayt
al jauza, meaning "in the house of the twins," referring to the Heavenly
Twins, Castor and Pollux, hanging out right above Orion.
