Book of the month

Lost History: The Enduring Legacy Of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, And Artists

by Michael Hamilton Morgan (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Press, 2007)

Reviewed by David Levering Lewis

David Levering Lewis is the Julius Silver University Professor at New York University and a two–time Pulitzer Prize winner for his groundbreaking biographies of W.E.B. DuBois. Lewis’ most recent book is God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570–1215 (2008).

France’s professoriate was roiled early this year by a capaciously sourced polemic masquerading as a major work of revisionist intellectual history. According to the startling thesis propounded in Lyon University Professor Sylvain Gouguenheim’s Aristote au Mont Saint–Michel: les raciness grecques de l’Europe (Seuil, 2008), the revival of learning in Europe had little to do with Islam’s transmission of Hellenic philosophy and science. Indeed, Professor Gouguenheim believes that, given Islam’s inculcation of revealed authority, Muslim scholars could not have really assimilated the intrinsic rationalism animating Greek thought. Rather, he attributes the preservation and translation of that learning into Aramaean and Syriac by Christian holy men living under the protection of Muslim caliphs. He follows the documentary underground of Syriac translations to a handful of receiving stations in Dark Ages Europe, of which the great Norman bastion of Mont St–Michel was one of the most important. The Renaissance for Sylvain Gouguenheim, then, mainly amounts to the splendid work of a few assiduous Catholic monks restoring the lost corpus of classical antiquity to the West long before those Arab scholars to whom most contemporary historians give credit had achieved real mastery of Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, and Euclid.

In France, where willful historical distortion can be punished by law, informed academic reaction to Aristote au Mont Saint Michel was quite censorious. The book will likely have a more favorable reception in the United States, where innocence of the fruitful cohabitation of Islamdom and Christendom in the millennium after the collapse of the Roman Empire is widespread and deep. As Michael Hamilton Morgan reminds us in Lost History, his interpretively venturesome and felicitously written panorama of Islamic thought and science, “most Westerners have been taught that the greatness of the West has its intellectual roots in Greece and Rome, and that after the thousand–year sleep of the Dark Ages, Europe miraculously reawakened to its Greco–Roman roots.”[p. xv] The more general problem of agnosticism about the historic interaction of Islam and the Occident has been compounded in America by the Huntingtonian thesis of civilizational clash and the ascendancy of a neo–conservative scholarship and policy agendas clamorously asserting an oil–and–water incompatibility of the culture of the West and that of the Muslim world. In this conception of the Muslim “problem” (of “what went wrong?” in Bernard Lewis’s famous interrogation), Muslim retrogression into radical religious fundamentalism and political terrorism is stipulated as having been inevitable, notwithstanding the acknowledgement of various important Muslim contributions to the post–Roman West. Islam’s long ago remarkable attainments merely serve as ammunition to indict a civilization deemed to have forfeited the post–industrial world’s confidence.

Lost History is an anti–text to the literature of inevitable decline and titanic clash, a robustly researched work of popular history, the author of which announces from the outset a game choice “to emphasize the bright side of a very complex [Muslim] civilization.”[p. xiv] Mr. Morgan proceeds from the Meccan origins of the world’s third Abrahamic monotheism to its irrepressible advance across the Fertile Crescent at a pace that mimics the jihad launched in 636 C.E. by the “rightly guided” Umar, Islam’s second caliph. One world empire (Sassanian Iran) crashes upon contact; the other (Greco–Roman) survives territorially much reduced and on life support for another eight centuries. Jihad, as the author makes clear, obeyed the Prophet’s Qur’anic interdiction of forced religious conversion. The poll tax (jizya) exacted from nonbelievers also powerfully incentivized a policy of religious laissez faire. That many of the conquered peoples looked upon Muslim rule as preferable to the religious oppression or labor exploitation they knew previously explains both their readiness to surrender and to convert. Think of the analogy of the Roman Empire ruling a heterogeneous mass of humanity and demanding respect for its laws and remission of taxes, but otherwise indulgent of cultural variety and accepting a high degree of local autonomy.

A mere 79 years after Muhammad’s death, the Muslim Empire leapfrogged in 711 from North Africa to a Mediterranean beachhead and on to the swift occupation of Iberia after defeating its brutal and fiercely anti–Semitic Visigoth oligarchy. Germanic–Latin Iberia became Muslim al–Andalus in a flash, after which the jihad swept over and around the Pyrenees on its seemingly unstoppable course of conquest and incorporation. In 732, a large Muslim expeditionary army encountered a much smaller Frankish force on the old Roman road to Poitiers. “For some reason,” observes Morgan of books written by countless generations of European historians, “this particular struggle will be painted in apocalyptic terms.” Although he mistakenly believes that the actual site (viz., the tiny village of Moussais–la–Bataille) “cannot be located on a map,” the author reconstructs the Battle of Poitiers with a cinematic detail of considerable plausibility.[p. 4] As for what it all meant – Dark–Ages Christianity saved by a wily German tribal chieftain; Muslim occupation of Gaul temporarily interrupted; a quest for booty gone awry? — Lost History decides that “this debate will never be settled.” [p. 32]

It seems clear, however, that, whether or not the Umayyad caliphate planned to add the lands beyond the Pyrenees to the dar al–Islam (Morgan thinks not), Europe has drawn vastly more significance than Muslims did from Charles the Hammer’s victory. Indeed, the neologism “europenses” first applied by an Andalusian scribe to the Poitiers winners comported with a civilizationist mindset of perpetual clash that would become dogma for Westerners by the 11th century. More to the point, the Carolingian regime founded by Charles and his descendants on the mythos of Poitiers and in alliance with the Catholic papacy shaped a future of militant Christianity in which no other faiths were tolerated and a master–class of cavalrymen ruled by intimidation and slaughter (though not with the newfangled Arab stirrups Mr. Morgan erroneously believes the Hammer’s men stripped from fallen Andalusian cavalry.) A major skirmish devoid of religious animus between Arab and German warriors at the foot of the Pyrenees became the signature of a civilization. Poitiers was traumatic, writes Morgan, “leaving a wound that has never fully healed.” [p. 32]

But if the Pyrenees traced a scarlet cicatrice on the European continent, a Muslim civilization of cultural sophistication and fabulous prosperity evolved west of the mountain range. Although roiled for more than a decade by sanguinary violence that obliterated the 100–year–old Umayyad dynasty, Umayyad rule eventually returned to the Iberian peninsula in the remarkable persons of Abd al–Rahman I and III, whose policies fostered the legendary convivencia that could have served as model for an alternative Europe of interfaith tolerance and philosophical rationalism. Lost History engagingly recycles the familiar story of Cordoba, “the ornament of the world,” with its lighted streets, bath houses, and large libraries, its chess–playing cosmopolites, Sephardic notables, and Arabized Christians. A vignette unexpected by this reader was Mr. Morgan’s account of the late ninth–century aerial feat of one Abbas ibn Firnas, a septuagenarian polymath whose winged flight over Cordoba from the Sierra Morena Leonardo da Vinci would have envied. Cordoba cradled the high philosophizing of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Musa bin Maimun (Maimonides) – both of whom made reason revelation’s handmaiden – as well as the medical ingenuity of al–Zahrawi, whose forceps transformed pediatrics and experimental mastectomies into advanced surgery. The translation from Greek into Arabic of Diascorides’s De Materia Medica by a Byzantine Greek, a Muslim scholar, and a Catholic priest under the direction of Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a Cordoban Jew, was an inconceivable undertaking in Christian Europe.

Mr. Morgan’s “lost history” of Abbasid Baghdad undermines Professor Gouguenheim’s claim of indispensable Syriac scribes and merely imitative Muslim thinkers. Rising on the banks of the Tigris under the command of the second Abbasid caliph, al–Mansur (712–775), Baghdad surpassed Constantinople in scale and wealth. By comparison, Umayyad Cordoba was only a simulacrum. With Gundeshapur, the destroyed Iranian Empire’s city of science and medicine, as prototype, Caliph Harun al–Rashid is said to have inaugurated Baghdad’s House of Wisdom (Bayt al–Hikma), the Muslim world’s great research center from which almost four centuries of caliphal patronage nurtured breakthrough achievements in astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Royal patronage of learning being a standard feature of empires, it was not incumbent upon Mr. Morgan to do more than to describe examples of it. Hence, in contrast to George Saliba’s recent Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (2007), we encounter few real–world facts of life in Morgan’s book that necessitated and incentivized the Umayyad and Abbasid regimes’ investment in the sciences: the role of the zero, decimals, and simple Hindu numerals in order to pay soldiers’ salaries and circulate standardized specie, for example, or the mathematics and rudimentary astronomy involved in aligning lunar and solar calendars or in plying Indian Ocean trade routes.

Mr. Morgan’s strength is the captivating descriptive flair with which he recounts histories of patronized achievements. Summoned from remote Khurasan by the scholarly Caliph al–Mamun (813–833), Muhammad al–Khwarizmi, eponymous father of the algorithm and re–discoverer of the Hindu zero and the Babylonian sixty–second minute, distills his lifetime epiphanies into the House of Wisdom algebraic masterwork Al–Jabr wa al–Muqabala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing.) Soon after the House of Wisdom opened its doors, a peripatetic Uzbekistan stargazer named al–Farghani rendered the first Arabic summary of Ptolemy’s foundational Almagest. Another wandering genius recruited to al–Mamun’s House of Wisdom, Jabir ibn Haiyan of Yemeni descent, mixed alchemy and chemistry so liberally that the author tells us Jabir is the source of the word “jibberish.” Although he fails to transmute gold from lead, Jabir creates aqua regia that dissolves gold and platinum, discovers hydrochloric acid, originates the concept of alkali, and, as Christian Europe’s “Geber,” achieves renown as a father of alchemy and chemistry.

By no means does Baghdad capture all the best scientific talent, especially not after the Abbasid caliphs become pawns of their Buyid and Mamluk ancillaries and then ciphers under the conquering Seljuk Turks in the 11th century. From the House of Knowledge of the upstart Fatimid caliphate of Egypt came Ibn al–Haytham’s rejection of Ptolemy’s theory that light rays emanate from the eye. Christian Europe knew him as Alhacen, author of the arbitral Book of Optics. From sophisticated Isfahan, another 11th–century center of power and learning, came Omar Khayyam’s demonstration of the rotating axis of the earth and calculation of the year almost as precise as the length established eleven hundred years later by the Hubble telescope. Another Isfahan scholar, Ibn Sina, identified tuberculosis as a virus and assembled the known medical knowledge in his Canon of Medicine, an ecumenical commentary that would hold sway in the medical schools of Europe for centuries. Taken to India by warring Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, the captive scholar, Raihan al–Biruni, learned of the Hindu theory of lunar tides. Lost History reproduces al–Biruni’s diagram of a lunar eclipse. Southeast of Anatolia, another genius in service to a warrior Seljuk sultan designed revolutionary machines and instruments (the crankshaft, giant water pumps). The author tells us that, although parts of it became known, al–Jazari’s remarkable Book of Ingenious Mechanical Devices was only translated into English in the 20th century. Otherwise, al–Jazari “would be as well known to the world as Leonardo da Vinci.”[p. 172]

It has become a commonplace observation among Western scholars that the cause of much of the disjunction between the Western democracies and the Muslim world lies in the latter’s failure to experience a religious upheaval analogous to the European Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries. However, as Mr. Morgan’s second chapter reminds us, the umma experienced a comparable philosophical and theological upheaval some six centuries before Europe did. A dozen or more competing schools of traditionalist and radical philosophy, theology, and law – Hanafites, Hanbalites, Mutakallimun, fuqaha – contended for primacy in Abbasid Baghdad. Citing the translated writings of Aristotle and Plato in support of their causes, learned men such as al–Kindi and al–Farabi not only argued that no conflict existed between reason and revelation (“the work of God and the word of God,”) those like Ibn Sina, belonging to the Mu’tazalite school, claimed that the Qur’an was created in time and that Aristotelian reason was the path to revealed truth.

Before the rationalist wave broke against traditionalist outrage in the early 11th century, some Mu’tazalites even proposed to interpret parts of the Qur’an metaphorically. But while the work of astronomers, mathematicians, chemists, and physicians progressed apace, independent rational inquiry (ijtihad) formally ended in caliphal proscription in the reign of al–Qadir (991–1031). Ijtihad survived somewhat longer in al Andalus and was even tolerated by some of the Almohad caliphs. In a book that is avowedly celebratory, it may not surprise us that the fateful “closing of the gates of ijtihad” passes as a dutiful observation rather than as an opportunity to explore its immense cultural ramifications. Writing of the deaths within eight years of each other of three of Islam’s greatest rationalists — Andalusis al–Bitruji, Ibn Rushd, and Maimonides – Morgan might have made more of their adversity than the understatement that “their deaths mark a passing and the beginning of even more turbulent times to come.” [p. 138]

The Mongol tsunami that rolled across Mesopotamia in 1258 killed the last Abbasid caliph, obliterated Baghdad, decimated its population, and wiped the empire from the face of the earth. Two years later, the Mongol steamroller commanded by Hulegu, Genghis Khan’s grandson, was stopped against all odds by the Mamluk rulers of Egypt at the battle of Ain Jalut in Palestine. Ain Jalut was “the Battle of Poitiers cubed” in terms of civilizational meaning. The Mongol rupture and the aftermath of relatively short–lived Mongol–Turkic sultanates eventually divided the dar al–Islam into three principal civilizations: Sefavid Persia; Mughal India; and Ottoman Asia Minor and North Africa. Each of these empires was larger, richer, more powerful, architecturally superior, and, arguably, more civilized than the warring, religiously divided nation–states of Europe. Lost History resumes its endlessly engaging story of scientific, intellectual, and artistic achievements in the grand capitals of Isfahan, Samarkand, Delhi, Maragheh, and Istanbul. From his observatory in Mongolian Azerbaijan, one of the few survivors of Baghdad scans the heavens and calculates precisely the two equinoxes. Muhammad al–Tusi dedicates his catalog of stars to his master, Hulegu the Ilkhan, tries to square Ptolemy’s geocentric universe with observed discrepancies, and leaves to Copernicus’ time his influential Memoir on the Science of Astronomy. In later times, Portuguese mariners will tack down the African coast in caravels modeled on the Muslim qarib with its lateen sails. Ottoman armies will besiege Vienna with Chinese rockets less than a century after capturing Constantinople. To call the 16th century “the century of Suleiman the Magnificent” would not be an overstatement.

In the end, Morgan offers no explanation for the asymmetrical development of Europe and the Muslim world, resulting in the West’s primacy, although he seems tempted to stress the importance of the terrible 13th–century Mongol body blow. Yet, from the abundance of his own examples of imperial magnificence and sustained technological achievements well into the 17th century, it seems that substantial recovery after Ain Jalut – such as Muzaffar Iqbal’s in his fine theoretical work, Islam and Science (1998) – is more likely than not. Michael Hamilton Morgan’s Lost History leaves us better informed and intellectually stimulated, but still at an explanatory loss. It is clear, though, that he believes that deterministic thinking is the bane of historiography. “History might have taken another course,” he hypothesizes:

At that moment of rare equipoise between China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe in the late 15th and 16th centuries, any one of Europe’s rivals could have made the same fateful decisions that Spain, Portugal, and England undertook to support voyages of exploration and conquest. . . Christianity could have become ever more locked in anti–materialism and zealotry; a few blips in royal succession could have brought the Inquisition to England; and Oliver Cromwell could have become the key patron of English political philosophy and not John Locke. In this parallel universe, the Muslim world could have led and enjoyed the benefits of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment it seeded. . . This author does not believe there was any inevitability to the rise of the West. [p. 290]

This is a fine antidote to the hubris of our post–9/11 era. Yet, if we cannot predict the past, does that leave us facing a future in which little can ever be said to be certain?

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