LEARNING AND ISLAM
Ptolemy II, who became the ruler of Egypt after Alexander the Great in the third century B.C., was a great patron of learning, and founded a library in Alexandria, which contained about 500,000 books on different subjects. It is this collection, which is known in history as the great library of Alexandria.
It has been alleged—wrongly, as it happens—that this library was burned down at the behest of the second caliph, ‘Umar Farooq. It had, in fact, been destroyed much earlier, in the fourth century A.D., long before the advent of Islam. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “The library survived the disintegration of Alexander’s empire (1st century B.C.) and continued to exist under Roman rule until the third century A.D.”14
The truth is that one half of this library was burnt by Julius Caesar in 47 B.C. In the third century, Alexandria came under the domination of the Christians. With reference to the survival of existing institutions, the Encyclopaedia Britannica states that “the main museum and library were destroyed during the civil war of the third century A.D. and a subsidiary library was burned by Christians in A.D. 391.”15
This same work, however, erroneously links the final destruction of the library with the Muslim period. In its article on censorship, it has this to say:
There are many accounts of the burning, in several stages, of part or all of the library at Alexandria, from the siege of Julius Caesar in 47 B.C. to its destruction by Christians in A.D. 391 and by Muslims in 642. In the latter two instances, it was alleged that pagan literature presented a danger to the Old and New Testaments or the Quran.16
The above attribution of the destruction of the Alexandria library to Islam has no basis in fact. The first two extracts quoted above from the Encyclopaedia Britannica clearly refute this. Islam by its very nature, encourages the acquisition of knowledge. It has never been its aim to suppress or discourage it.
Philip Hitti states in his book, History of the Arabs:
The story that by the caliph’s order ‘Amr for six long months fed the numerous bath furnaces of the city with the volumes of the Alexandrian library is one of those tales that make good fiction but bad history. The great Ptolemaic library was burnt as early as 48 B.C. by Julius Caesar. A later one, referred to as the Daughter library, was destroyed about A.D. 389 as a result of an edict by the Emperor Theodosius. At the time of the Arab conquest, therefore, no library of importance existed in Alexandria and no contemporary writer ever brought the charge against ‘Arm or ‘Umar. ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, who died as late as A.H. 629 (1231 AD), seems to have been the first to relate the tale. Why he did it we do not know; however, his version was copied and amplified by later authors.17
Islamic civilization is based on monotheism and, as such, is quite distinct from other ancient civilizations. It gave man freedom of thought—a freedom which was hitherto totally lacking. Thanks to this freedom, learning had every opportunity to flourish. In other older civilizations, learning and learned people were commonly subjected to oppression. It follows that the attempt to place Islamic civilization on a parallel with other civilizations is a clear historical injustice. This is not all that there is to the matter. The truth is that it was actually Islam, not Europe, which heralded the age of modern science. This is an undeniable historical event. During the Islamic period, learning was actively encouraged, and all fields of learning produced scholars and researchers of repute. This has been generally acknowledged by historians.
In an exhaustive book on the history of Islam, The Cambridge History of Islam, produced by Professor P.M. Holt and other orientalists, there is an article in volume 2-B, entitled “Literary Impact of Islam in the Modern West,” which shows the far-reaching influence exerted by Islam in the past on the learning and civilization of the western world. The chapter concludes with these words: “.... during the Middle Ages the trend was almost entirely from East to West (when Islam acted as the teacher of the West).”18
Another orientalist, the French Baron Carra de Vaux, underlines the achievements of the Arabs by stating that “the Arabs have really achieved great things in Science.” “However,” he goes on to say, “We must not expect to find among the Arabs the same powerful genius, the same gift of scientific imagination, the same enthusiasm, the same originality of thought that we have among the Greeks; their science is a continuation of Greek science which it preserves, cultivates, and on a number of points develops and perfects.”19
Montgomery Watt, however, in his book entitled The Majesty That Was Islam, states that there is a tendency to belittle the work of the Arabs and to regard them as no more than transmitters of Greek ideas. He says that Arabs were much more than transmitters and that Arab science and philosophy contributed greatly to developments in Europe.20
This same author, however, makes another point, which is more open to objection than the remark that Arabs were mere transmitters. He writes: “Science and philosophy in Arabic came into existence through the stimulus of translations from Greek.”21
This statement that Greek science provided the stimulus to Arabs, so far as scientific ideas are concerned, is simply not true. It is not true to say that the Arabs read Greek translations, which resulted in their beginning to think scientifically. The truth is that scientific thinking came to them through the Quran and the concept of monotheism. Later, they began studying translations of books from Greek and other languages, from which point they went on to the study of science and philosophy by carrying out their own research.
Historians have said that there is, of course, no denying the fact that the Arabs were the pupils of the Greeks in science and philosophy, but it is also true that once they had assimilated what was to be learnt from the Greeks, they went on to make important advances.22
Medicine was probably the first Greek science to attract the Arabs because of its obvious practical importance. Then they developed it to the extent of establishing medical colleges and hospitals, which did not exist in Greece. Not merely was it taught in the colleges of Iraq, but the teaching was accompanied by a flourishing medical service. The first hospital in Baghdad was founded about the year 800 on the initiative of the Caliph Harun al Rashid, and records have been preserved of the founding of four other hospitals there in the first quarter of the tenth century. A thirteenth century hospital in Cairo is said to have had accommodation for 8,000 persons. It had separate wards for male and female patients, as well as for different categories of ailment. The staff included physicians and surgeons, pharmacists, attendants of both sexes and administrative officers, and, besides store-rooms and a chapel, there were facilities for lecturing and a library.23
The Arabs thus made extraordinary advances in medicine through their research. The first important physician was Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya ar-Razi (d. 923), known in Europe as Rhazes. He wrote voluminously on many scientific and philosophic subjects, and over fifty of his works are extant. His greatest work, Al-Havi, was translated into Latin as the Continens, (the comprehensive book). It was the first encyclopaedia of all medical science up to that time and had to be completed by his disciples after his death. For each disease he gave the views of Greek, Syrian, Indian, Persian and Arabic authors, and then added notes on his clinical observations and expressed a final opinion.
The greatest writer on medicine was Ibn Sina or Avicenna. He was also one of the two greatest Arabic philosophers. His eminence in medicine was due to his ability to combine extensive theoretical knowledge and systematic thought with acute clinical observation. His vast Canon of Medicine (Al-Qanun fi’t-Tib) was translated into Latin in the twelfth century and was used much more than the works of Galen and Hippocrates. It dominated the teaching of medicine in Europe until at least the end of the sixteenth century. There were sixteen printed editions of it in the fifteenth century, one being in Hebrew, twenty editions in the sixteenth century and several more in the seventeenth. Roughly contemporary with Avicenna was the chief Arabic writer on surgery and surgical instruments, Abul Qasim az-Zohrawi (d. after 1009), usually known in Latin as Abulcasis.
While Arabic medicine thus reached its highest point in the early eleventh century, it continued to hold sway for many more centuries. The gift of careful observation did not disappear and certain fourteenth century Arab doctors in Spain wrote knowledgeably, about the plague as they had experienced it in Granada and Almeria.24
Abdullah ibn Baytar (d. 1248) was the best-known botanist and pharmacist of Spain, in fact, of the Muslim world. He travelled as a herbalist in Spain and throughout North Africa, and later entered the service of the Ayyubid al-Malik al-Kamil in Cairo as chief herbalist. From Egypt he made extensive trips throughout Syria and Asia Minor. One of his two celebrated works, Al-Mughni fi al Adwiyah al-Mufradah, is on materia medica. The other, Al-Jami’ fi al Adwiya al-Mufradah, is a collection of “simple remedies from the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds embodying Greek and Arabic data supplemented by the author’s own experiments and researches.” It stands out as the foremost medieval treatise of its kind. Some 1400 items are considered, of which 300, including about 200 plants, were novelties. The number of authors quoted is about one hundred and fifty, of whom twenty were Greek. Parts of the Latin version of Ibn al Baytar’s Simplicia were printed as late as 1758 at Cremona.25
After materia medica, astronomy and mathematics, the Arabs made their greatest scientific contribution in chemistry. This brought chemistry out of the sphere of alchemy and gave it the status of a regular science based on observation. In the study of chemistry and other physical sciences the Arabs introduced the objective experiment, a decided improvement over the hazy speculations of the Greeks. It was through them that the world was first introduced to the scientific method.
After al-Razi, Jabir ibn Hayyan (721-815) is ranked greatest in the field of medieval chemical science. He more clearly recognized and stated the importance of experimen-tation than any other early alchemist and made noteworthy advances in both the theory and practice of chemistry.26
Jabir’s books were held as the final authority on chemistry in Europe up till the fifteenth century. The initial ladder to the modern western chemistry of the eighteenth century was produced by Jabir. It is believed that Jabir wrote two thousand books on different sciences. So many scholarly books had never been written before the Muslim epoch by any single writer.
These are only some scattered and incomplete references. They are, however, enough to show that Islam, far from being hostile to learning, is keenly supportive of it. In ancient times, the anti-learning tradition was laid down by those religions, which were based on polytheism and superstition. Islam ended polytheism and superstition and established religion on the basis of pure monotheism. There is, therefore, no question of Islam becoming the enemy of knowledge and research.
The progress of learning is anathema to polytheism. Polytheistic religions, therefore, attempt to block its path. Monotheism, on the contrary, takes a very different stand, for the progress of learning verifies monotheism, thus establishing it all the more soundly. That is why monotheistic religion gives it every encouragement.
