God's Battalions (8 page)

Even many of the most partisan Muslim historians, including the famous English convert to Islam and translator of the Qur’an Mar-maduke Pickthall (1875–1936),
²⁸
agree that the sophisticated Muslim culture originated with the conquered populations. But what has largely been ignored is that the decline of that culture and the inability of Muslims to keep up with the West occurred because Muslim or Arab culture was largely an illusion resting on a complex mix of
dhimmi
cultures, and as such, it was easily lost and always vulnerable to being repressed as heretical. Hence, when in the fourteenth century Muslims in the East stamped out nearly all religious nonconformity, Muslim backwardness came to the fore.

ISLAM AND ARISTOTLE

Underlying the belief that the Muslims were more learned and sophisticated than the Christian West is the presumption that a society not steeped in Greek philosophy and literature was a society in the dark! Thus for the past several centuries many European writers have stressed the Arab possession of the classical writers, assuming that by having access to the advanced “wisdom” of the ancients, Islam was the much superior culture. Although medieval European scholars were far more familiar with the “classics” than was claimed, the fact is that because of the persistence of Byzantine/Greek culture in most of the conquered Arab societies, the most-educated Arabs did have greater knowledge of the work of classical Greek authors such as Plato and Aristotle. What is less known is the rather negative impact that access to Greek scholarship had on Arab scholarship.

The works of Plato and Aristotle reached the Arabs via translations into Syrian late in the seventh century and then into Arabic by Syrians in, perhaps, the ninth century. However, rather than treat these works as
attempts
by Greek scholars to answer various questions, Muslim intellectuals quickly read them in the same way as they read the Qur’an—as settled truths to be understood without question or contradiction—and thus to the degree that Muslim thinkers analyzed these works, it was to reconcile apparent internal disagreements. Eventually the focus was on Aristotle. As the respected Muslim historian Caesar Farah explained, “[I]n Aristotle Muslim thinkers found the great guide; to them he became the ‘first teacher.’ Having accepted this a priori, Muslim philosophy as it evolved in subsequent centuries merely chose to
continue
in this vein and to enlarge on Aristotle rather than to innovate.”
²⁹
This eventually led the philosopher Averroës and his followers to impose the position that Aristotle’s physics was complete and infallible, and if actual observations were inconsistent with one of Aristotle’s teachings, those observations were either in error or an illusion.
³⁰

Attitudes such as these prevented Islam from taking up where the Greeks had left off in their pursuit of knowledge. In contrast, knowledge of Aristotle’s work prompted experimentation and discovery among the early Christian scholastics. Indeed, then as now, one’s reputation was enhanced by disagreeing with received knowledge, by innovation and correction, which motivated scholastics to find fault with the Greeks.
³¹
And there were many faults to be found.

BOOKS AND LIBRARIES

As noted, central to all claims concerning the superiority of Muslim culture has been their possession of translations of many books by classical authors. But books must be kept somewhere, and large collections of books can be identified as libraries—whether these are the collection of books belonging to individuals or are institutions devoted to acquiring and preserving books. There is sufficient evidence of the existence of both kinds of libraries in Islam, dating back to early days. Indeed, libraries confronted the conquering Muslim armies all across the Middle East and North Africa. Some of these libraries had survived from pagan times; others were created by Christians and Jews. Among the Copts in Egypt, “every monastery and probably every church once had its own library of manuscripts.”
³²
All across Byzantium, the Orthodox clergy sustained libraries. At their great centers of learning, the Nestorian Christians maintained huge collections of books. There seems to have been nothing very unusual about the story of a Nestorian monk who checked out a book from the monastery library every week and devoted most of his waking hours to pondering and memorizing it.
³³
Thus it was demonstrated to the early Muslims that if they “were to make use of the diversified knowledge to which they fell heir, they must have books, preferably in the Arabic language, and these books must be preserved in safety and rendered accessible to readers.”
³⁴

However, the notion that Muslims valued libraries is contrary to the controversial claim that they burned the huge library at Alexandria.
³⁵
The story is told that after the conquest of Alexandria, the Muslim commander inquired of the caliph ‘Umar back in Damascus as to what should be done with this immense library, said to contain hundreds of thousands of scrolls. ‘Umar is said to have replied, “[I]f what is written in them agrees with the Book of God [the Qur’an], they are not required: if it disagrees, they are not desired. Therefore destroy them.”
³⁶
Thus the general distributed the scrolls to the four thousand baths of the city to be used as fuel, and the burning took six months.

This story has provoked very angry responses from many admirers of Islam despite the fact that the leading Western historians (including Edward Gibbon) have rejected it, most being satisfied with the tradition that the library was burned by accident when Julius Caesar conquered Egypt. Nevertheless, Asma Afsaruddin angrily charged that the story reflects nothing more than Christian hatred of Muslims,
³⁷
ignoring the fact that the story first appeared in the thirteenth century in an account written by a Muslim Egyptian historian! It was then repeated by other Muslim writers, including the famous Ibn Khald
n.
³⁸
That the charge that the caliph caused the great library to be burned was leveled by Muslims does not increase the likelihood that it is true; the first account was written about six hundred years after the alleged event. But that the story was believed by so many Muslim intellectuals suggests something far more interesting: that many Muslims, including heads of state, were hostile to books and learning!

This anti-intellectual attitude seems obvious if one reads Muslim political history rather than accounts of the glories of Muslim science. The former notes that when Mutawakkil became caliph in 847 he immediately “began to stifle independent research and scientific inquiry and increase the suppression of religious dissent by force.”
₃₉
So did his successors. Then with the collapse of the caliphate, it no longer was possible to apply any policies—whether “enlightened” or “repressive”—to a Muslim empire now shattered into a mosaic of emirates, subject to a series of internal invasions. From then on, some Muslim rulers were more tolerant than others of scholars, their books, and their learning, but most were not very tolerant. Indeed, Saladin, the famous twelfth-century Muslim hero so greatly admired by Western writers, closed the official library in Cairo and discarded the books.
⁴⁰
All of this would seem to indicate a prevailing tension between the sophisticated, so-called Muslim culture sustained by the
dhimmis
and the actual culture of the Muslim elites.

THE MYTHICAL DARK AGES

The claim that Muslims possessed a more advanced culture also rests on illusions about the cultural backwardness of Christendom—on the widespread but unfounded belief that subsequent to the fall of Rome, Europe regressed into the Dark Ages and thus lost the cultural heritage that still was thriving in Islam. Voltaire (1694–1778) claimed that after Rome fell, “barbarism, superstition, [and] ignorance covered the face of the world.”
⁴¹
According to Rousseau (1712–1778), “Europe had relapsed into the barbarism of the earliest ages. The people of this part of the world…lived some centuries ago in a condition worse than ignorance.”
⁴²
Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) also pronounced this era as the “triumph of barbarism and religion.”
⁴³

Not surprisingly, this became the received wisdom on the matter. Thus, in his bestselling book
The Discoverers
(1983), Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) included a chapter titled “The Prison of Christian Dogma,” in which he claimed that the “Dark Ages” began even before the fall of Rome. “Christianity conquered the Roman Empire and most of Europe. Then we observe a Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia, which afflicted the continent from
A.D.
300 to at least 1300.” This occurred because “the leaders of orthodox Christendom built a grand barrier against the progress of knowledge.”
⁴⁴
And in the words of the distinguished historian William Manchester (1922–2004), this was an era “of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness…The Dark Ages were stark in every dimension.”
⁴⁵

Some of these claims are malicious, and all are astonishingly ignorant. Granted, like the Muslim conquerors, the Germanic tribes that conquered Roman Europe had to acquire considerable culture before they measured up to their predecessors. But, in addition to having many Romans to instruct and guide them, they had the Church, which carefully sustained and
advanced
the culture inherited from Rome.
⁴⁶
What is even more significant is that the centuries labeled as the “Dark Ages” were “one of the great innovative eras of mankind,” as technology was developed and put into use “on a scale no civilization had previously known.”
⁴⁷
In fact, as will be seen, it was during the “Dark Ages” that Europe began the great technological leap forward that put it far ahead of the rest of the world.
⁴⁸
This has become so well known that rejection of the “Dark Ages” as an unfounded myth is now reported in the respected dictionaries and encyclopedias that only a few years previously had accepted and promulgated that same myth. Thus, while earlier editions of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
had identified the five or six centuries after the fall of Rome as the “Dark Ages,” the fifteenth edition, published in 1981, dismissed that as an “unacceptable” term because it
incorrectly
claims this to have been “a period of intellectual darkness and barbarity.”

As has been evident, the claims concerning a more advanced and sophisticated Muslim culture are often based on “intellectualism.” But there is far more to culture than books or “book learning.” No one can learn how to farm, sail, or win battles by reading Plato or Aristotle. Technology, in the broadest sense of the word, is the stuff of real life that determines how well people live and whether they can protect themselves. And whatever Muslim intellectuals did or didn’t know about Aristotle’s science or Plato’s political philosophy in comparison with the knowledge of the learned Christian scholastics, Islamic technology lagged well behind that of Byzantium and Europe.

CONTRASTS IN TECHNOLOGY

It is far more difficult than it ought to be to contrast Christendom and Islam in terms of important technology, because the subject is dominated by Muslim authors who are too much given to absurd claims. Thus one can “discover” that “Ibn Firnas of Islamic Spain invented, constructed, and tested a flying machine in the 800s.”
⁴⁹
European shipbuilders did not invent the rudder; Muslim shipbuilders did. (Which Muslim shipbuilders were these?) The Chinese did not invent the compass; Muslims did. And on and on.
⁵⁰

Transport

What we do know with absolute certainty is that following the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the rest of North Africa, and Spain, the
wheel
disappeared from this whole area!
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For centuries there were no carts or wagons. All goods were hand-carried or packed on camels, donkeys, or horses. This did not happen because the Arabs lacked knowledge of the wheel, but because they thought it of little use. In their judgment, wheels required streets and roads. Camels and pedestrians required neither. Moreover, given their disdain for the wheel, it is doubtful that Muslims knew how to construct a proper harness to hook draft animals to carts and wagons.

In contrast, sometime early in the “Dark Ages,” Europeans were the first to develop a collar and harness that would allow horses rather than oxen to pull heavy wagons—with a very substantial gain in speed. Properly harnessed, one horse could pull a wagon loaded with about two thousand pounds,
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a burden that would require at least four pack camels and probably five.
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The pulling capacity of European horses was increased again when, in the eighth century, iron horseshoes were invented and came into widespread use by the next century. Horseshoes not only protected the horse’s hooves from wear and tear, especially on hard surfaces; they also allowed the horse to dig in on softer surfaces and gain better traction.
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In addition, tenth-century Europeans were the first to discover a harness that would allow large teams of horses or oxen to be lined up in a column of pairs, as opposed to hooking them up abreast. This permitted the use of large numbers of draft animals to pull a single load,
⁵⁵
such as giant catapults or assault towers during a siege.