youngalexander

Try The Quest for the Historical Muhamad (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Islam was a work in progress from 7th to 9th or perhaps upto 12th century CE.
Regretably, it has progressed little ever since.

countjulian

I never said that. Obviously Muslims scholars and doctors did acheive great things. But, especially in the early years, all of Islam's achievements were built upon the shoulders of its conquered people. You've offered no historical facts to the other point. Merely shouting "racist! bigot!" won't get you any where.

You're strawman is ridiculous anyway. Were the Europeans not responsible for the enlightenment because it came from Greek scholars and Greco-Roman materials? Of course not.

countjulian

It wasn't so much that the language was new, it was actually very old, but that a written form of it, the Aran alphabet, was relativly new. As for the pagans of Harran, just check the Wikipedia article; for more info, look up "Thabit" and "Baghdad School of Wisdom" in Google.

Wisdumb

"You've offered no historical facts to the other point. Merely shouting "racist! bigot!" won't get you any where."

"As for the pagans of Harran, just check the Wikipedia article; for more info, look up "Thabit" and "Baghdad School of Wisdom" in Google."

You're a funny dude! You actually have the nerve to tell me to provide historical facts when you're sources are google and wikipedia.....come on. And you're basing your theory that "especially in the early years, all of Islam's achievements were built upon the shoulders of its conquered people." on the basis of two obscure, insignificant groups and events: "Thabit" and "Baghdad School of Wisdom"

Solo

The Arabic bedouin culture had always struggled with modernity. Whether or not caliph Umar ordered the burning of the Great Library in taking Alexandria, and his reason that "Quran is the only book the world needs" is legend, the fact remains that the conquerors themselves produced very little in terms of arts and science and the burgeoning Islamic civilization Baghdad under Abbasids was preceded by large-scale vandalizing of the Mediteranean Roman culture and pre-islamic Persia. If the Islamic learning flourished, it was thanks to its conquered people. There were two great suppliers of Islamic learning, Persia and Andalus, and this fact is more or less reflected in the identities of Abu Ali Sina (Avicenna), who was Persian and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) who came from a family of Berbers settled in Cordoba.

With the advent of Wahhabi traditionalism, which eventually gave rise to the house of Saud, the traditional near-absolute rejection of modernity became once again an article of militant export. There is a lovely, and historical, anecdote on just how "traditional" the bedouins are. When in the early twenties, the first radio station was installed in Riadh, the shaiks were greatly panicked and appealed to Abdul Aziz (the first Saudi king) to dismantle the Satanic tool. If the Quran did not say anything about Allah carrying human voice over the desert and putting it in boxes, it must be the devil working through the infidel. The king in turn provided an exquisite proof that radio represented Allah's will. He had the radio station read the Quran.

Jiri

Bede

CJ asked for my opinion on the debate here.

First, the myth about Umar burning the Alexandrian Library is a myth. Even bringing it up is poisoning the well. Second, Wahhabism dates from the 18th century so is utterly irrelevant to the case. Islamic science was on the downturn long, long before.

Of course, Islam built on the culture of the people it conquered. But, this is notable in itself. The barbarian tribes who invaded the Western Empire took far longer to start building on classical culture than Islam did. This might be because the barbarians were mainly (although not all) pagans for several more centuries after their invasions. Clearly, early Islam was open to other cultures in a way that pagan Saxons, Lombards, Franks and Huns were not.

CJ's point about the Harran pagans is very intesting and not something I have heard before. I'd be very grateful for a reference to a book or paper on the topic (sorry if such references are found at the links, I haven't had time to review them).

When it comes to Avicenna, Rhazes, Averroes, Al-Tusi and later Islamic thinkers, it hardly matters what their racial origin was. They were Moslems educated in a Moslem culture. It seems to me very likely that Islam, interpreted in a particular way, must have been highly condusive to science. Unfortunately, that interpretation of Islam disappeared or became marginalised after about 1200AD.

Best wishes

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

Solo

Well, most people nowadays think it's a myth. As for "poisoning the well", apparently the source for the tale was impeccably Islamic (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3517)

I was not talking about Islamic science but about the contribution of the original Islamic conquerors to it.

Yes, the Islam of Abbasids, a dynasty despite its nominal link to Mohammed, founded by the disaffected non-Arabs and Shi'ites, was much more open and international in scope than anything Europe saw until the Renaissance. But that changes nothing on the fact that the first conquest to Maghreb in the West and to Afghanistan in the East was the work of hyper-militaristic culture (based on the system of garrison towns known as "ansars") which devastated ancient cultures in its path.

That does not sound like coming from someone with much understanding of cultures, loyalties and the psychology of conquered people. V.S.Naipaul's brilliant study Beyond Belief (or via: amazon.co.uk) should be a required read for anyone who for whatever reason falls for the Islamic version of multi-culti agitprop.

What "interpretation" of Islam ? Whatever are you talking about ? The four legal schools of the Sunni faith are with us to this day, as are the Shi'ites. Sufism was not yet blooming in 1200.

What destroyed the Abbasid empire and its culture was not an interpretation of Islam but the Mongols.

Jiri

Roger Pearse

CJ asked me to look at this. I wonder if I might mention the important word "Syriac" at this point? This is the key to answering this question. It's a little involved, and everyone will know some parts of this but not others, so please pardon me if I take it step by step.

As I'm sure everyone knows, the Eastern Roman empire included some areas where the native language was Aramaic. From the second century on, these areas spoke the late Aramaic dialect of Edessa, which is called Syriac. This language area included parts of what is now Eastern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Persia.

In the late empire from 400AD on, no political dissent whatever was tolerated. But a certain amount of theological dissent was tolerated, at least until a council of the bishops had pronounced on it. As you may imagine, every political or personal disagreement therefore manifested itself as a 'theological' disagreement about some niggling point of Christology. And since the New Testament doesn't go into these, what they all had to do was use Greek philosophical methods to hoke up these arguments -- specifically the dialect of Aristotle. (And, hey, they were all Greeks anyway, so they all loved the idea of getting together in agoras, whoops, councils, and arguing over philosophy, whoops, theology, and ostracising, whoops, anathemising each other... well, see what I mean?).

Since the Syriac-speaking areas were part of the same Christian empire, they shared the same ideological space. But of course they couldn't take part in the arguments unless they understood Greek well enough to understand nuances of Aristotle. So what happened was that all the works of Aristotle were translated into Syriac -- twice, in fact, by different factions -- and likewise the technical handbooks of Galen, the astronomical handbooks of Ptolemy, and all the other bits that helped them to be part of what was going on.

This wasn't idle interest. Get on the wrong side in these arguments and all sorts of nasty things could happen.

Because all this translating was going on, from the 5th century onwards, in the Syriac monasteries standard techniques were developed to translate from Greek (a non-semitic language) into Syriac (a semitic language). The translations of this period tend to be of a fairly high standard, and improved over time.

By the middle of the 7th century, there were many centres for Greek learning in the Syriac speaking world. One of the most important of these was the monastery at Kinnesrin (the Eagle's Nest) in Iraq, where Severus Sebokht was bishop. The overwhelming majority of his works are astronomical (NOT astrological -- he was hostile to astrology), and he was the first to mention what we today call Arabic numbers coming west, in an argument with Greeks of Cyprus about scientific achievement. (The work in which he did this has never been printed or translated, but is to be found in Ms. Paris. Syriaque 346). The only work of his available in English is his treatise on the Astrolable, which I have online here. (I am really rather interested in Severus Sebokht, so can give you whatever info there is about him). Another graduate of the same school was George, Bishop of the Arab tribes, who also wrote a number of scientific treatises.

At this point the Arabs invade, and by sheer luck conquer the whole near east. They don't try to rule it -- they're just bare-assed bandits straight off the desert -- but instead simply demand money to support themselves, and otherwise couldn't care less. They do impose discriminatory taxes on non-Moslems, and make them second-class citizens, but while there are so few Arabs this hardly matters. So this culture continues, and of course there are also Greek cities studded throughout this area of Syria, Iraq and Persia, with Greek manuscripts.

The next stage is that the Arabs start wanting medical experts. These are all Syriac-speaking Christians, and they are all using the texts of Greek medics such as Galen -- in Syriac translation. This goes on for a little while.

But as Arab culture begins to take off, Syriac naturally begins to decline, as the culture of the conquered always does. So there is incentive to translate stuff into Arabic, but between 700-900 there doesn't seem to be a lot. After all, the Arabs didn't care, and the Syriac people didn't expect the Arabs to be around that long.

But this process really does gets going in the 10th century, and the important name is Hunain Ibn Ishaq, who was a Syriac-speaking Christian. He knew of over 100 works of Galen, and translated a lot of them into Arabic. But invariably he first translated them into Syriac, if they did not already exist. The reason for this was that there was this set technique for doing so, and then the transition from one semitic language to another was, by comparison, trivial. He also went hunting for Greek manuscripts. The same process was undertaken with Aristotle, again driven by technical considerations. (Hunain was eventually murdered in an oriental intrigue, which thus illustrates the downsides of Arab rule as well).

This is how the Arabs got hold of Greek technical knowledge. They were able therefore from this period on to make some advances in it. The reconquest of Spain brought the Latins into contact with this sort of stuff in Arabic, which was therefore translated into Latin in the 12th (?) century (I'm less clear on this end of the transactions). Finally of course the renaissance brought an interest and the return of Greek to Italy.

The story of how Greek science got to the Arabs is part of the study of Syriac, but this is not really very available to anyone. The best short summary on Syriac and its literature and translations is in Sebastian Brock's "A brief outline of Syriac Literature" which was published in Kottayam in Kerala in India, and was described (by SB himself to me) as a bibliographical rarity. The interest of people like myself in Syriac is precisely because of stuff that has made it into Syriac and been preserved, while being lost in Greek.

I hope that helps.

All the best,

Roger Pearse
PS: Here are some notes in progress on Severus Sebokht.

Bede

Roger, that is all fascinating stuff. I've bookmarked the page on Severus.

Jiri, you are being too unfocused to make much of a point. All that is coming through is that you don't like Islam much. I don't understand the relevance of whether Moslems were Arabs or not.

CJ, anything on the pagan of Harran who founded the House of Wisdom? I thought the work was done by Roger's Syriac speaking Christians and would appreciate more details. Of course, the House of Wisdom was not a university in the modern sense. They only appear in Western Europe in the 12th century.

Best wishes

James

Roger Pearse

This is interesting, although it comes from Wikipedia and so is probably very garbled. (The idea that the philosophers from the closing of the academy in Athens under Justinian settled in Harran is a new one on me!).

All the references that I could find online seem to be related to Turkish guidebooks. I found this from a call for papers:

At the turn of the 8th century, a school came to existence in Harran, where the books of ancient Greek Philosophers such as Platon, Aristotle, Plotinos, Hippocrates, Galenos, Batlamyus were translated from Greek to Syriac and Arabic. Along with the view points of Greek Philosophers, those of Egyptian, Assyrian and Sumerian scholars were transmitted to the next generations. Afterwards, this school produced very important Muslim intellectuals in religion, astronomy, medicine, mathematic, and philosophy. Among them are: Thabit b. Qurra, Al-Battani, Ali b. Isa, Jabir b. Hayyan, Sinan b. Thabit b. Qurra, Thabit b. Sinan b. Thabit, Yunus al-Harrani, Abu Ishaq Ibrahim b. Hilal al-Sabii, Hilal b. Muhassin al-Sabii, Yuhanna b. Haylan. The school which reached its peak in the 8th century lost its popularity when Baghdad started to become the centre of science.

In order to discus and establish the significance of the Harran school, which was the centre of science between the 8th and the 10th centuries, in the world of science, we decided to hold an international symposium. We are expecting the scholars to participate in the symposium with a paper.

Harran is 27 miles from Edessa, "the Blessed City", the birthplace of Syriac.

I was able to find a little more in Wright's "Short History of Syriac Literature":

The writings of the Syrian heathens, such as the so-called Sabians of Harran, which were extant, at least in part, even in the 13th century[1], seem to have now wholly disappeared.

[1] Bar Hebraeus, Chron. Syr.

And this from the 1911 Britannica:

Of the pagan Syriac literature which issued mainly from Harran, a city about one day's journey south of Edessa, not a single example appears to have survived. From Christian writers we learn that Harran continued to be a seat of pagan worship and culture down to and even later than the Mahommedan era. A native of the city, Thabit ibn Kurra, in a passage from a Syriac work of his (now lost) quoted by Barhebraeus, [2] speaks of the paganism of Harran as distinguished by its steadfast resistance to Christian propaganda. " When many were subdued to error through persecution, our fathers through God were steadfast and stood out manfully, and this blessed city has never been defiled by the error of Nazareth. " He goes on to attribute the world's science and civilization to pagan inventors; but it is not clear whether in this he is alluding specially to the culture of his own city. Anyhow, it is much to be regretted that no Syriac writing from Harran has survived.[3]

2 Chron. syr., ed. Bruns, p. 176, ed. Bedjan, p. 168. Thabit was the author of about 16 Syriac works, of which the majority survived in the 13th century, but all are now lost. Of his 150 Arabic treatises a few at least survive; see Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, i. 217 seq.

3 On this subject, see especially Chwolsen's Ssabier and Ssabismus. latter qualities are even more apparent in poetry than in prose.

A little bit more on this:

http://www.al-bushra.org/mag08/earbxt.htm

But here seems to be the origin of this idea:

Donald H. Frew, Harran: last refuge of classical paganism in The Virtual Pomegranate 9.

and some queries on it, and Frew on the queries:

http://chass.colostate-pueblo.edu/na...d/POM11a4.html

I'm not at all sure that these are intended to be available online, so grab your copies now. The 'journal' has a bogus look to it, to my eyes at any rate. But that does not deprive it of utility as a source of texts to look at.

This one has a biblio on the Sabians, some in English:

http://www.hurqalya.pwp.blueyonder.c...NS%20HANIF.htm

Here's some (real) stuff on this Thabit character:

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac...es/Thabit.html

Apparently he revised at least one of Hunain Ibn Ishaq's translations. Article on Hunain:

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac...es/Hunayn.html

I'd like to know more about this, I must say. I suspect that the paganism of Harran is real, and attested by Old Syriac inscriptions; the survival to the mid-7th century likewise; the transmission of texts is a confusion with the general role of Syriac texts, amplied by Harran being the seat of the Caliphate in the mid-9th century, and the Caliph founding a school there at that time. But that is just my vague feeling at the moment.

All the best,

Roger Pearse