Islamic Golden Age - Philosophy and Humanities

  

 Today, the religion of Islam boasts almost two billion followers. Still, the faith itself

comes from humble origins. Islam began as a religious movement turned small nation,

then empire in the Arabian peninsula in the 7th century, then, a sprawling multiethnic,

multicultural, and even multi-religious country at the crossroads of Eurasian trade and cultural

exchange. It's no surprise then that the ideas, cultures, and people moving through the Islamic

Empire, combined with a friendly theology and government, led to what's called the Islamic

Golden Age. This series will discuss the contributions made to humankind in this period, a time of

massive developments in science, philosophy, and medicine. Today, we're going to look at

the humanities and social sciences, as well as explain how this golden age came to be.

One major factor for how the Islamic Empire enjoyed such a blossoming of thought comes

from Islam itself. Somewhat unusually many parts of the Islamic holy texts, the Quran

and the Hadiths, place value on education and scientific discovery, regardless of the

information's origin. Muslim scholars did not by and large take issue with learning

from the works of non-muslims to advance their body of knowledge.

A Muslim scholar by the name of Burhan al-Din proclaimed that education should be prescribed

for everyone, a novel idea for the middle ages. Muslims would enjoy a high literacy

rate due to their emphasis on learning and education as part of a well-lived life. Schools

would not only give kids a good grasp of Islamic law and analysis, but bring young scholars

from different classes and backgrounds together to share ideas. In a state as large and diverse

as the Islamic Empire, this led to a lot of cross-pollination of ideas.

Later in the golden age, this process of education was formalized by schools known as Madrasas.

They were Mosques, boarding houses, and libraries in a single compound. Some of these became

the first universities to give out degrees. Additionally, the Muslim Empire invested massively

in the work of scientists and philosophers. The amount the government spent in translation

was massive, rivaling some of the research budgets of our times.

The symbol of this period would be the great House of Wisdom in Baghdad. A massive library

built by the Islamic Emperor Caliph al-Mansur. The House of Wisdom is so fundamental to the

Islamic Golden age that its construction and obliteration are viewed as the start and end

of it. It was one of the world's biggest assortments of rare books in Persian and Arabic.

The engine at the heart of this vast, growing golden age was the translation movement. The

Islamic Empire in most of its demesne contained 10% or fewer Muslims, and very few spoke Arabic.

As they expanded into the Sassanian Empire, they found a large class of Persian scholars,

as well as Greek academics who left the Byzantine Empire. The Caliphate connected them into

a vast network of trade and information, but also added Arabic into the linguistic stew.

Much of the information coming into the empire was in Persian, Greek or Arabic, but could

also be in Latin, Chinese, or any number of written languages from around Eurasia at the

time. Scientific advancement aside, if the Caliphate wanted to function as an empire,

it needed an army of translators to keep the flow of information running.

When it made Baghdad its new imperial capital, the elites were inspired by Persian and Hellenistic

ideas. It drove a desire to learn more from the classical Greeks. Furthermore, in the

aftermath of the battle of Talas in 751, the empire captured several Chinese prisoners

of war. What might seem like a banal event turned out to be one of the most important

breakthroughs, as it allowed for the translation movement, and possibly the whole golden age.

These prisoners knew how to make paper, which could make books easier than vellum or parchment.

The first significant translation projects included taking Islamic holy texts like the

Quran and translating them into various languages to spread Islam around the empire and the

world. Furthermore, the classical works of the ancient Greeks and Persian texts were

translated into Arabic, which would become a new lingua Franca around the empire. Proficiency

in Arabic allowed for a language between cultures. One particularly gifted linguist translated

well over a hundred works by famous authors like Galen and Hippocrates. In cases like

the work of Aristotle, the Arabic translations are how the work even survived to modern-day.

Places like the House of Wisdom had extensive translation departments, with subject experts

ready to work on pieces. These experts came from all over the empire, and many were Zoroastrians

and Christians working with Muslims. Once a work was translated they made several copies

for distribution, using scribes with especially good handwriting. This movement is the work

that kept the western canon preserved.

With that established, now we can look into the social sciences and the humanities, which

in the middle ages is just philosophy. The Social Sciences were a long way off from being

formalized. However, a man by the name of Ibn Khaldun who lived during the Islamic Golden

age is often considered the founder of many social sciences like Demography, Economics,

Historiography, and Sociology.

Ibn Khaldun was an upper-class Tunisian scholar. Due to the status of his family, he received

a top-tier classical Islamic education. This education would include Arabic, Quran and

Hadith studies, and law and jurisprudence study. He also successfully underwent the

tasks to become a Hafiz, which is a tortuous process very few Muslims do to memorize the

entire Quran. On top of this education, he learned maths, philosophy, and classical logic.

But Ibn Khaldun didn't get into all of his social science work until after he finished

a successful career as a politician in particularly unstable times in Tunisia. In the last years

of his life, he penned an autobiography, as well as a world history book called the Kitāb

al-ʻIbar, or the book of lessons. To this day, the book's chapters on the history of

North African Berber people are still used as a source.

In the book, he speaks of two different walks of life, both common in North Africa of his

day, that of nomadic and sedentary peoples. He wrote of the effects of the conquest of

a city on its inhabitants. Both are based on a central concept called 'aṣabiyyah,

or social cohesion. It might seem rudimentary, but this is considered some of the first works

of sociological research. As he broke down the concept, he spoke of social factors leading

to economic, political, and even psychological differences in cultures. This type of work

would not see serious scholarly development until the 19th century.

When discussing economics, it appears Ibn Khaldun is responsible for developing the

labour theory of value, a central concept of economics even today. Ideas like economic

growth, taxation, and GDP are centuries ahead of their time, if not a millennium. Lastly,

he made a strict bifurcation of what he called the nonreligious sciences and the religious

sciences. It was an attempt to settle a significant debate between those who wanted to focus on

science and philosophy, and scholars who promoted a mystic understanding of Islamic theology.

Where the Humanities shined, however, was in philosophy. Islamic Philosophy in this

age subscribed to one of two major currents. The first was Kalam which focused more on

questions to do with theology. This featured discussions about free will and rationality.

One sect which took a rigorous adherence to rationality as the proper way to understand

questions of theology were the Mu'talizilites [Mu'tazilites]. They in turn debated with

any other schools such as Maturidiyya, which did not see the hadiths as reliable texts,

at odds with reason, and largely believed in free will. Another major theological school

was the Ash'ari whose concepts of free will were limited to choosing possibilities outlined

for you by an all-knowing god.

Much of the logic and discussions these currents had with each other spoke of heavy influence

from Greek philosophers. One medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyyah even described many of these

discussions as Greek solutions to Greek problems which should never have concerned Muslims

in the first place. Ibn Tamiyyah's criticism speaks to another significant theological

divergence in Islamic philosophy. All of these schools used reasoned approaches to Islam,

and as such, rejected literalist interpretations. This did not go unopposed by some in the clergy,

who worried that this kind of thinking challenged their status in society.

However, the remnants of Kalam scholars still have a significant presence in the Islam of

today. Kalam is now merely the word for theology, and Islamic theology is still very academic.

The second major school of philosophy is what we might more easily recognize as philosophy

today. Even at the time they borrowed the word philosophy from Greek and called this

school Falsafa. These were the scholars who discussed and built upon the works of Aristotle,

Pythagoras, and Plato, publishing massive commentaries and philosophical texts. Some

of these scholars were responsible for introducing their ideas, as well as those of the Greeks

and Hindus, into Western Christian thought. This transfer of knowledge is one of the main

reasons Aristotle went on to play such a significant role in Christian theology.

One philosopher, Ibn Sina, broke ground in the realm of metaphysics. Metaphysics is the

area of philosophy which attempts to understand the fundamentals of reality — the study

of objects, properties, and existence itself. One major schism when it comes to the prominent

greek philosophers of Aristotle and Plato was a debate about forms. The form, or essence,

of something, is what makes an object fundamentally that sort of thing - its shape, highlights,

and so forth. A triangle is a triangle because it has three sides as a basic example. Plato

believed that all things, even abstract things, existed in a world of forms, where the perfect

idea of a thing exists. What we see are mere shadows of that thing.

Aristotle rejected this idea, opting to believe that an object’s form existed in this world

and that all objects were made of both object and form. Ibn Sina wanted to marry these two

ideas in an exploration of the soul and also to prove the soul exists. He did so with a

thought experiment. It's a famous one from philosophical history, the floating man. In

this, he wants to imagine a man falling freely in the air. With no ability to see other things

in reference to oneself, a person could still experience their presence and consciousness.

Ibn Sina believed this to be evidence that there is a soul, which is immaterial within,

showing both external properties, but also of another plane, attempting to marry the

two concepts. This idea is very similar to the famous starting point for Descartes, who

centuries later would become famous for his line Cogito [soft g] ergo sum, I think therefore

I am.

In the realm of epistemology, the philosophical work of understanding knowledge, learning,

and understanding, philosophers worked to understand the human mind. For the sake of

this video, let's discuss one back and forth in the realm of the story of self-education,

also known as autodidactism. Arab philosopher Ibn al-Nafis, to explore the idea of how one

might learn without any other humans, wrote a philosophical novel called Theologues Autodidacts.

This novel was a first on many fronts, founding many literary mainstays. It was one of the

first Arabic language novels ever made. It had a coming of age story long before that

was to become a popular theme. It took place on a desert island, of which it may have been

one of the first examples. It even had elements of the apocalypse and explaining the afterlife

with astronomy, biology and theology, which have led some historians to consider it a

very early inkling of what would become science fiction.

The novel itself is about a boy who spontaneously came to life on a desert island, and meets

castaways who wind up on his home. Ibn Al-Nafis wrote the main character Kamil to be a complete

human blank slate in which to observe the world. It's about how an uninitiated person

comes to find the necessity of God, Islam, and rationality. The character then explores

the sciences and philosophy. It's not a page-turner, but it acted as an essay to explore many different

ideas about the world Ibn Al-Nafis knew about as a polymath. It was a response to a desert

island book called Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, which itself was a response to The Incoherence of

the Philosophers. They were interested in which aspects of rational thought and belief

came innately from the human mind, and which had been learned. Theologues  Autodidacts and

Hayy ibn Yaqdhan both featured feral children who explored their various ideas on it.

These philosophers would have massive impacts on philosophers throughout the centuries.

Ibn Sina mentioned earlier is often called in the west Avicenna and is one of the greats.

Averoes or Ibn Rushd, as well as Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali, and Al-Kindi are all some of the

most revered philosophers in the history of ideas. Their work influenced how western Christians

came to conceive of God, the ways they argued his existence, and conceptions of the soul.

The translation projects brought the Greco-Roman philosophical works to the west, where it

otherwise might not have been preserved. It's tough to conceive of western civilization

without the contributions of the Muslim philosophers of the Islamic Go

lden Age.