Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (26 page)

To stay alive and relevant from one generation to the next, any system of thought needs a constant inflow of new ideas and lively discussion. Confucianism didn’t get that kind of active attention in the early Middle Ages. After a few centuries with no one minding the store, it began to seriously lose its mojo. By the ninth century, superstitious elements from Chinese folk religion had strangled the rational, secular life out of Confucianism, just as they had done with Buddhism and Taoism long before.

Fortunately at this point Neo-Confucianism was born, a philosophical movement to restore Confucianism to the rational, secular philosophy Confucius intended. Job One was cleansing it of supernatural and mystical ideas.

Chang Tsai (1020–1077), one of the most important Neo-Confucian thinkers, wrote a book called
Challenging the Unenlightened
to spell out his vision for restoring Confucianism as a system of reasoned ethics and self-improvement. I think he’d be pleased with the result: Since then, a mostly rational, mostly secular Confucianism has formed the heart of Chinese thought and ethics, straight down to the present.

Trash-Talking in Medieval Islam

Now step four centuries back to 622 CE and about three squares to the west into what is now Saudi Arabia. Muhammad was busily founding Islam, a religion that quickly became the mortar for a new empire. Just as a unified China emerged from countless tiny states a millennium earlier, Muhammad used Islam to knit the many tribes of the Arabian Peninsula into a political unit that immediately began conquering its way both eastward and westward.

By 750, after a century of violence and political uncertainty, one of the biggest empires in history sprawled over 5 million square miles from Spain through northern Africa and the Middle East, clear to the doorstep of India — all under the banner of Islam. These sections take a closer look at Islam and one of the most important “golden ages” in human history — one that included the small but vocal presence of religious doubt.

Kindling the Islamic Golden Age

As the new Islamic empire grew, it encountered and absorbed several thriving cultures, including Egypt and Syria. Both had been part of the extended Greek empire at one time, and both had kept the legacy of ancient Greek thought alive and carefully preserved in great libraries through the centuries.

Although an allergy to all things “pagan” had Christian Europe holding the works of ancient Greece at arm’s length like a moldy sock, Arab scientists and philosophers began translating those same texts into Arabic. Picking up where the Greeks left off, Arab culture made rapid advances in optics, physics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and the arts, igniting a period known as the Islamic Golden Age.

It’s called an
Islamic
Golden Age because the empire was unified under that religion, but Islam itself deserved little credit for the new flowering of learning. The Umayyad
caliphs
(Islamic clergy) shared Europe’s allergy to Greek ideas and vigorously opposed the translations out of concern that they might seriously challenge the house religion.

And right they were. Eager to dip into the well of Greek knowledge, scholars and translators made an end-run around the caliphs, enlisting the support of wealthy businessmen to fund the translations, and the Golden Age happened anyway. A vibrant culture of intellectual inquiry was born. And unlike much later Islamic history, the chorus included voices challenging the religious party line, up to and including the integrity of the prophet Muhammad and the very existence of Allah himself.

Not many voices were singing those particular tunes, to be sure, but enough to get the attention of modern scholars — as well as some furious theologians in their own day.

Things began to really take off around 750 CE when a new caliphate took the reins of the empire — the Abbasids of Persia. Theirs was a more open and intellectual government than the Umayyad caliphate had been. They preferred sayings like, “The ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr” over the less education-friendly platitudes of Muhammad. The Persians had been in touch with Greek ideas for centuries, after all, so the Abbasids quickly relaxed restrictions on the scholars’ work. They brought the translation of Greek works out of the shadows, and the Golden Age was fully underway.

Railing theologians: “Against the Unbelievers”

Even though the new caliphate opened up to Greek ideas about the area of a triangle and the nature of the stars and such, they still weren’t eager to tolerate full-throated challenges to Islam. As a result, virtually no texts from the agnostics and atheists of this period have survived.

Fortunately, just as in Judea and elsewhere, the outraged cries of their critics nicely confirmed their presence anyway. In fact, such cries were so common in this period that almost every major Islamic theologian of the time seemed to have written a treatise called, “Against the Unbelievers.” There’s no better testimony to the healthy supply of unbelievers, or
zendiqs,
than treatises addressed directly to them.

You can easily trip on the terminology here. Not all zendiqs are atheists. Just as in ancient Greece, it was common in medieval Islam for everyone whose beliefs were unorthodox to be called “unbelievers,” and modern scholars know that
heretics
— people who believed in an unorthodox creed — were among the intended targets of these treatises. But scholars also agree that heretics weren’t the only targets, because the theologians often wrote two separate, distinct arguments: one addressed to heretics, the other to outright unbelievers. One such work begins with a long proof that the world did in fact have a Creator — an argument generally intended for atheists rather than heretics.