contact: Jeff Matthews

Beetle Juice, anyone?

Since some of this 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 Canterbury Tales, 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 build a helicopter." The point of this entry, then, is simply to draw your attention to how interconnected European culture and Islamic culture (not all Arabs, by the way) used to be, and how there is a link between the glorious age of Muslin science and culture (800-1300) and the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance. (I'm not making the mistake of saying that if something comes first it necessarily causes that which comes second, just that it's a good idea to know what came before you.

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. They called their great school the "House of Wisdom."

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 they 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 Muslims 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 Muslim scholars. It was 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.  [Also see 2011 update in bibliography, below.]

added Oct. 2020. The Canon of Medicine contains a number of miniature illustrations, one of which is the shown here (right). It is essentially a tribute to the great Medical School of Salerno, near Naples, of the 10th century. An extensive extensive description of that "first European university" is here.

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, which the Arabs had picked up in their wanderings. *[The name is short for filius Bonacci ('son of Bonacci'). There is more on Fibonacci in the box directly below, as well as a link to "Islamic Science's India Connection".]

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 Muslim 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 fledgling universities, Italy in the 1100s and 1200s, then, seems to be a scene of Europeans scurrying to read the next installments of works translated from Arabic, particularly in philosophy, medicine and astronomy. Scot also assisted Frederick II in the drawing up of the Constitution of Melfi.

(this box added -  Sept 29, 2017) It is commonplace to view the insatiable Muslim quest for knowledge as an extraordinary combination of saving (through translation) the ancient knowledge of the Greeks and original contributions by home-grown natural scientists and philosophers, some of whom are mentioned in this entry. We have, however, already noted that the Muslims even went to India to study and bring back with them the formidable mathematical advances of the the Hindus. Such treatises went from planetary motions to the development of the decimal system—the 10-digit, base-10 system of numbering that serves the world as the alphabet of all calculation and even work on the difficult problem of determining longitude. (There is an excellent article called “Islamic Science's India Connection” at this link) (details in the bibliography, below)

(this box added -  Dec 9, 2020) on Fibonacci, excerpt from the BBC article How Modern Mathematics Emerged from a Lost Islamic Library by Adrienne Bernhard  7th December 2020 (Please read the original article here, off-site. You won't regret it.) For hundreds of years until the ebb of the Italian Renaissance, one name was synonymous with mathematics in Europe: Leonardo da Pisa, known posthumously as Fibonacci. Born in Pisa in 1170, the Italian mathematician received his primary instruction in Bugia, a trading enclave located on the Barbary coast of Africa (coastal North Africa). In his early 20s, Fibonacci traveled to the Middle East, captivated by ideas that had come west from India through Persia. When he returned to Italy, Fibonacci published Liber Abbaci, one of the first Western works to describe the Hindu-Arabic numeric system. When Liber Abbaci first appeared in 1202, Hindu-Arabic numerals were known to only a few intellectuals; European tradesmen and scholars were still clinging to Roman numerals, which made multiplication and division extremely cumbersome (try multiplying MXCI by LVII!). Fibonacci’s book demonstrated the use of numerals in arithmetic operations – techniques that could be applied to practical problems like profit margin, money changing, weight conversion, barter and interest.      Monument of Leonardo da Pisa (Fibonacci), by Giovanni Paganucci, completed in 1863, in the Camposanto di Pisa. Fibonacci’s great genius was not just his creativity as a mathematician, however, but his keen understanding of the advantages known to Muslim scientists for centuries: their calculating formulas, their decimal place system, their algebra. In fact, Liber Abbaci relied almost exclusively on the algorithms of 9th-Century mathematician Al-Khwarizmi. Because of his discoveries in the field, Al-Khwarizmi is often referred to as the father of algebra – a word we owe to him, from the Arabic al-jabr, “the restoring of broken parts” Al-Khwarizmi’s treatise introduced the Muslim world to the decimal number system, and others, such as Leonardo da Pisa, helped transmit it across Europe. Fibonacci’s transformative influence on modern mathematics was thus a legacy owed in great part to Al-Khwarizmi. And so two men separated by nearly four centuries were connected by an ancient library: the most celebrated mathematician of the Middle Ages stood on the shoulder of another pioneering thinker, one whose breakthroughs were made at an iconic institution of the Islamic Golden Age. This year marks the 850th anniversary of Fibonacci’s birth. It could also be the moment that threatens to undo the journeywork of Roman numerals. In the UK, traditional time-pieces have been replaced with easier-to-read digital clocks in school classrooms, for fear students can no longer tell analogue time properly. In some regions of the world, governments have dropped them from road signs and official documents, while Hollywood has moved away from using Roman numerals in sequel titles. The Superbowl famously ditched them for its "50th" game, worried it was confusing fans.   Leonardo da Pisa’s most enduring mathematical contribution is something rarely taught in schools. That story begins in a palace library nearly a thousand years ago, at a time when most of Western Christendom lay in intellectual darkness. It is a tale that should dismantle our Eurocentric view of mathematics, shine a spotlight on the Islamic world’s scientific achievements and argue for the continued importance of numerical treasures from long ago.

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" (although he was Persian!) 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 philosophers. 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.

Averroës

Ibn-Rushid (Averroës) (1128 -1198)  is also of great interest to us. He wrote many commentaries on Aristotle and is known in Islamic philosophy simply as "The Commentator." His works in religious philosophy were widely read in Europe, especially by Thomas Aquinas; the point is not that one was right and the other wrong, but that a great European medieval philosopher honed his own sharp intellect, dealing with his Muslim predecessor. Averroës' works in law, medicine, and astronomy were also highly regarded.

                                    [The painting, above, is by Andrea Bonaiuto di Firenze, active from 1343-77, d. 1379.]
                                                                                    [The statue is in Cordoba, Spain.]

Abubacer (c. 1105 – 1185) Abubacer Ibn Tofail was an Andalusian Muslim writer, philosopher, Islamic theologian and  physician. He is most famous for his philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, also known as Philosophus Autodidactus in the Western world. It is considered a sort of prototype Robinson Crusoe and tells the story of a feral child living alone on a desert island, who, without contact with other human beings, discovers ultimate truth through a systematic process of reasoned inquiry. It was widely read in translation in Europe and had a  profound influence on Renaissance thinkers such as Pico della Mirandola, who is thought to have made the first translation from Arabic into Latin. It was admired by such as Baruch Spinoza and is considered influential in the emergence of European rationalism and empiricism. (Also noted under 'Literature,' below.)

Ibn Khaldun (b. 1332, Tunis -d.1406, Egypt) – a strange case of no influence! (I include this only because it's unbelievable.) (Thanks to Prof. Warren Johnson for calling this to my attention.)

It seems strange that one of Islam's greatest minds, Ibn Khaldun, now widely held to be the founder of historiography, sociology and economics —centuries before Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Vico, Durkheim, Marx, Weber or anyone else for that matter— had no apparent influence on the Italian Renaissance! His great work was the Muqaddimah, often referred to as the Universal History.) Its sections are:

Human society, its kinds and geographical distribution; - Nomadic societies, tribes and  savage peoples; -  States, the spiritual and temporal powers, and political ranks; - Sedentary societies, cities and provinces; - Crafts, means of livelihood and economic activity; - Learning and the ways in which it is acquired.

Historian Arnold Toynbee said of the Muqaddimah that it “was undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place.” But unlike the works of other great Arab thinkers, the Muqaddim does not appear to have reached Europe until the early 19th century when some of it appeared in French translation. (A complete French translation was not available until the 1860s.) There had been some translations into Turkish by 16th- and 17th-century Ottoman scholars, but there was no earlier translation done into Latin, as one might have expected. How could they have missed him?  (image, right, statue of Ibn Khaldun in Tunis)

 

Charles Burnett of the Warburg Institute in London has spoken of the...

 ...lamentable tendency of many Western scholars to restrict the study of Arabic science and philosophy from the classical period to the 12th century and not take any notice of what happened in the Islamic world after the 12th century, which is after the death of Averroes in 1198. Averroes...was regarded by Medieval Europe as the greatest scholar of the Muslim world....but the reverence for this undoubtedly great scientist and thinker had a down side in that it imposed a self-limiting approach based on the assumption that scholarship in the Islamic world climaxed during his lifetime and came to an end with his death. As a consequence, Arabic authorities were simply not considered important as reference points after the 12th century...

In other words, he was too late. Indeed, Ibn Khaldun came at the twilight of the great Arab/Islamic culture started by the founding of Baghdad. But 'twilight' is much too romantic a word —it was a violent and brutal nightfall. Ibn Khaldun, himself, lived to see Tamerlane destroy both Damascus and Baghad and then butcher the inhabitants.


Europeans had become swiftly aware that Islam was a dynamic and powerful military force. When the Muslims then founded Bahgdad as a giant clearinghouse of knowledge, translating and also adding original works of their own, Europeans then knew that Islam was a great cultural force, as well. Translation began in earnest just before the year 1000 with Constantine the African (noted above). The burst of translations lasted into the 1300s, and though there are translations later than that from Arabic, somehow they missed Ibn Khaldun. Burnett's suggestion that he was just too late is not a very satisfying one, but I have no alternative.

Architecture

European fascination with Arab and other Muslim architecture, from the Alhambra to the Taj Mahal to the simple kiosk (from the Turkish word for "pavilion") has been very evident since von Erlach's general history of architecture in 1721. That work included examples of Arab, Turkish and Persian architecture and led to the design of several "Oriental" structures in Europe. But within the "Renaissance" scope of this article, can we say that there is earlier influence?

Since Islam forbids depictions of God and, indeed, discourages rendering any human or animal life at all, there developed great attention to geometric design in Arab art and architecture. It is the same principle that led to the various schools of intricate and flowing —but abstract— Arabic script used to write the Koran. Obviously, a similar proscription is not part of Christianity or the art of the European Renaissance.

The mixture of those two approaches to faith and art is fascinating. The most obvious place in Europe to look for Muslin design —mixed with Christian— is in Sicily well before our Renaissance, the so-called Arab-Norman-Byzantine school (from the 11^th century), manifestations of which, among many others (photo, above) are the cathedral of Palermo and the tomb of Holy Roman emperor Frederick II. Even with the reconquest of Sicily and the gradual re-Christianization of the population, the ornate geometries of the Muslims remained and their evidence is seen throughout southern Italy. When I look at the restored, original version of the church of Santa Chiara —a Gothic box with a roof on top— and compare it to excessively ornamental design of the votive spires in Naples and the decorative geometries of churches built in the Renaissance (and after) in Naples, I recall Christopher Wren's (the architect of St. Paul's cathedral in London) judgment on Muslim architecture and its relation to our own :

...let us appeal to any one who has seen the mosques and palaces of Fez, or some of the cathedrals in Spain, built by the Moors: one model of this sort is the church of Burgos; and even in this island there are not wanting several examples of the same: such buildings have been vulgarly called Modern Gothic, but their true appellation is Arabic, Saracenic, or Moresque. This manner was introduced into Europe through Spain; learning flourished among the Arabians all the time that their dominion was in full power; they studied philosophy, mathematics, physics, and poetry. The love of learning was at once excited, in all places that were not at too great distance from Spain these authors were read, and such of the Greek authors as they had translated into Arabic, were from thence turned into Latin. The physics and philosophy of the Arabians spread themselves in Europe, and with these their architecture: many churches were built after the Saracenic mode... (Cited in, Wren, Christopher, the Junior (1675-1747), Parentalia: or, Memoirs of the family of the Wrens, viz. of Mathew Bishop, printed for T. Osborn; and R. Dodsley, London, 1750.)

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.

[See the paragraph on Abubacer a few paragraphs above this one in the section on Philosophy. His Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is the prototype for all subsequent novels, from Robinson Crusoe to Tarzan, that deal with the isolated individual alone in the world, coming of age and reason.]

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. (The Book of the Scale is the common English translation of Liber Scale Machometi, the Latin translation of the Arabic Kitab al Miraj, the Muslim book about Muhammad's miraculous night journey into the heavens. The Latin version would have been available to Dante; the graphic descriptions in the book of the punishments in Hell are what have lead some scholars to make the comparison to The Divine Comedy. Also see the entry on Enrico Cerulli.)

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.

Bibliography & sources:

Ahmad, Aziz. A History of Islamic Sicily. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1979.
Bernhard, Adrienne. How Modern Mathematics Emerged from a Lost Islamic Library. BBC, 2020.
Blair, Sheila S. & Jonathan M. Boom. The Art and Architecture of Islam, 1250-1800. Yale University Press, 1994.
Briffault, Robert. The Making of Humanity. London: 1938.
Dannenfeldt, Karl H. "The Renaissance Humanists and the Knowledge of Arabic". In Studies in the Renaissance,
        Vol. 2 , pp. 96-117. University of Chicago Press. 1955.
Gutas, Dimitri. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. London: Routledge, 1998.
Kumar, Alok and S. Montgomery. "Islamic Science's India Connection" in Aramco World, Sept/Oct 2017.
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.
Saab, Hassan. "Ibn Khaldun."  The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: MacMillan, 1967.
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.

2011 update: See "Pioneer Physicians" by David Tschanz in the journal, Saudi Aramco World, January/February 2011.

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