Islamic Enlightenment

* BOOKS
* FEBRUARY 14, 2009

The Islamic Enlightenment
Recalling an era when science and scholarship were prized

By ERIC ORMSBY

The House of Wisdom
By Jonathan Lyons
Bloomsbury, 248 pages, $26
Aladdin's Lamp
By John Freely
Knopf, 303 pages, $27.95
The first step in the construction of Baghdad 13 centuries ago involved casting a horoscope. The caliph al-Mansur, whose name means "the Victorious" -- and who was one of the founders of the mighty Abbasid dynasty -- called on the services of a Persian astrologer, who determined that the most propitious date for breaking ground for the city would be July 30, 762.

Istanbul University Library/The Bridgeman Art Library

A 16th-century depiction of astronomers at the Galata observatory in Istanbul.

The mile-wide site, with its four districts and numerous gates and towers, was marked out using geometrical principles gleaned from Euclid. Another four years would pass before the last mud-brick of the high triple walls was set in place. Still, this was city planning at its most efficient, based on time-tested methods. For the inner wall, which may have risen to more than 100 feet, the exact number of bricks required was calculated by mathematical computation, again derived from ancient sources.
The palace where al-Mansur and his successors nestled behind their bodyguards lay within the innermost wall. They would reign for half a millennium, but not even the stoutest walls could protect them. In 1258, the Mongols razed Baghdad and murdered the last ruler of the Abbasids. The caliph himself, "the shadow of God on Earth," was sewn into a sack and trampled by the conquerors' horses.
In two books about the vibrant intellectual tradition of early Islamic culture -- John Freely's "Aladdin's Lamp" and Jonathan Lyons's "The House of Wisdom" -- both authors make the founding of Baghdad central to their accounts. In particular, they focus on the establishment there of the famed House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma in Arabic), where respect for learning and scholarly achievement far outstripped anything known to the "West" of the time -- and even now stands in stark contrast to the theologically constricted learning of later Islam, up to the present day. Though the books overlap at many points, they could not be more different. Mr. Freely's "Aladdin's Lamp" is brisk and ambitious, indeed overly so. Mr. Lyons's "The House of Wisdom" is sophisticated and thoughtful, if at times given to special pleading.

Ericka Burchett

Mr. Freely begins with the ancient Greek philosopher Thales and concludes in the 17th century with Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution. But Mr. Freely's focus is consistently directed to Islamic contributions to the development of modern science -- contributions that he believes to be neglected in most accounts. Certainly the Abbasids -- along with such rival dynasties as the Umayyads of Spain and the Fatimids of Egypt -- were great promoters of learning. The arts and sciences flourished under their patronage. And medieval Muslim scholars not only assimilated the learning of the ancients but also transformed and extended it.
The House of Wisdom -- a royal library, not a "research institute," as Mr. Freely calls it -- was modeled, in its eighth- century form, on an earlier institution founded by the Sasanians, the Persian dynasty that Arab armies had overthrown a century before. Though holding thousands of Greek and Persian manuscripts, the House of Wisdom was no inert repository. Beginning under al-Mansur and continuing for two centuries, its collections -- containing virtually the entire corpus of Greek scientific and philosophical literature -- would be studied, commented upon and translated, with ever increasing refinement, into Arabic. These translations, later rendered into Latin and Hebrew, would have a decisive effect on Western thinkers, beginning with the Scholastic theologians of medieval Paris and Bologna and culminating in the revival of Greek learning in the Renaissance.
The impetus behind the Abbasid "translation movement" was pragmatic as well as pious. Astronomy was important because its observations made precise time-keeping possible -- essential for determining the times of the five daily prayers and the sacred seasons of the ever-shifting Islamic lunar calendar. Scrutiny of the planets, abetted by Arabic versions of Ptolemy, helped astrologers cast reassuring horoscopes for uneasy caliphs. Translations of works on medicine, logic, mathematics and natural science had immediate practical value.

“Seven years before the earthquake that shook the moral foundations of Crusader Antioch, Adelard surveyed the world around him and pronounced it rotten.
-- Read an excerpt from "The House of Wisdom"”

Mr. Freely, a professor of physics and the history of science at Bogazici University in Istanbul, is good on individual scientists, such as the ninth-century mathematician al-Khwarizmi, the inventor of algebra. (Our word derives from the Arabic al-jabr.) Or Ibn al-Haytham, the 11th-century physicist from Cairo who made pioneering advances in optics. Mr. Freely includes lucid diagrams, together with magnificent color plates taken from illuminated manuscripts. But his account is cursory; it has a potted feel, as though drawn from lecture notes.
Worse, it is marred by many errors; names are oddly lopped: He speaks of the literary critic Ibn "Qutayb" or the historian Ibn Abi "Usaybi," but the correct names are Ibn Qutayba and Ibn Abi Usaybi'a. He also misrepresents key works. The 11th-century Persian theologian al-Ghazali did not attack "rationalism" in his critique of philosophers; rather, in his scathing "Incoherence of the Philosophers," he set out to prove that the philosophers weren't rational enough. There are many such errors; thus, "The 1001 Nights," far from being "written" in Baghdad, as Mr. Freely claims, was in fact compiled centuries later in Cairo from anonymous, and largely oral, sources (though some of the stories are, of course, set in a highly fanciful "Baghdad").

Ericka Burchett

Jonathan Lyons tells the same story in a far more reliable way. In "The House of Wisdom," he shapes his narrative around the travels of the little-known but extraordinary Adelard of Bath, an English monk who traveled to the East in the early 12th century and learned Arabic well enough to translate mathematical treatises into English. The astronomical tables that he later devised were based on the earlier work of al-Khwarizmi.
Mr. Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant, though marred at times by tendentiousness. Medieval Muslims, as he says, did find Europeans uncouth as well as brutal. (Though Mr. Lyons doesn't mention it, medieval Muslims were shocked to realize that "the Franks" were ignorant even of such refinements as underarm deodorants.) Mr. Lyons is right to remind us of the spectacular savagery of the Crusaders who waded knee-deep in blood through the Holy Sepulchre and of the embarrassing inability of Europeans to tell time once the sun had set.
But he hammers the point too insistently, as if to elevate Islam by diminishing European civilization to crude farce, and at the very time when it, too, was beginning to launch its own projects of philosophical speculation and scientific inquiry. Indeed, his own example of Adelard of Bath makes this plain. Mr. Lyons denies that "Islam is inherently hostile to innovation" but fails to note that the very word for "heresy" in Arabic is bid'a, literally "innovation." Nor does he mention the fierce resistance to certain kinds of science within Islamic culture, even during its more enlightened era. "Greek medicine" was long viewed with suspicion, and it took three centuries for Aristotelian logic to be accepted, over the strenuous objections of pious clerics.

“When I first visited Miletus, in April 1961, it was completely deserted except for a goatherd and his flock, whose resonant bells broke the silence enveloping the ruins through which I wandered…
-- Read an excerpt from "Aladdin's Lamp"”

In the best account of the Abbasid translation movement, the classic "Greek Thought, Arabic Culture" (1998), the Yale scholar Dimitri Gutas calls the movement "epoch-making" and deems it as historically significant as Periclean Athens or the Scientific Revolution. As both of these books show, he is justified in doing so. The long-ago destruction of Baghdad didn't spell the death of scientific endeavor in Islam: Within a year the Mongol ruler Hulagu himself had an observatory built under the supervision of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, a Persian philosopher-scientist of genius. But a long decline did set in. Despite grand beginnings and momentous accomplishments, the Islamic house of science, if not its House of Wisdom, has stood almost empty for centuries since, and nobody can explain quite why.
Mr. Ormsby is the author, most recently, of "Ghazali: The Revival of Islam."