The House of Wisdom Read online

  THE HOUSE OF

  WISDOM

  How the Arabs Transformed

  Western Civilization

  JONATHAN LYONS

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: Al-Maghrib/Sunset

  PART I: Al-Isha/Nightfall

  1 The Warriors of God

  2 The Earth Is Like a Wheel

  PART II: Al-Fajr/Dawn

  3 The House of Wisdom

  4 Mapping the World

  PART III: Al-Zuhr/Midday

  5 The First Man of Science

  6 “What Is Said of the Sphere …”

  7 “The Wisest Philosophers of the World”

  PART IV: Al-Asr/Afternoon

  8 On the Eternity of the World

  9 The Invention of the West

  Note to Readers

  Significant Events

  Leading Figures

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  A Note on the Author

  Imprint

  To the memory of my father, Will Lyons,

  who introduced me to the power of ideas.

  Prologue

  AL-MAGHRIB/SUNSET

  FEW HAD ANY doubts that God had sent the earthquake to punish Antioch for its wanton and profligate ways. The residents of this Christian outpost not far from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean were notoriously corrupt and flouted their solemn obligations to God. “Certain men who hated fasting and loved lavish banquets, slaves to gluttony for enticing foods, were eager to copy the life and life-style not of those who lived well but those who ate well,” scoffs Walter the Chancellor, a cleric and longtime Antioch functionary whose firsthand account of life in Antioch is dotted with references to Christian scripture and well-worn quotations from Ovid and Virgil.1 The women reveled in scandalous, low-cut tunics and draped themselves in unseemly adornment. Some—“or so gossip has it,” Walter says with a wink—even commissioned local artisans to have “coverings carefully made in Arab gold and a manifold of precious jewels for their shameful parts, not to clothe the appearance of their shame or to restrain the flame of lust, but so that that which was forbidden might inflame more hotly those people who did not desire legitimate pleasures.”2 Others prostituted themselves for sport, soliciting friends and neighbors alike from the town streets.

  If a plague of locusts two years earlier had failed to stem this tide of dissolution among these Western newcomers to the Near East, then perhaps the very tremor of the earth would command the attention of the wayward populace. On November 13, 1114, an earthquake struck the outlying town of Mamistra, inflicting great damage and foreshadowing the destruction to come. Sixteen days later, “in the silence at the dead of night, when human frailty was accustomed more suitably and sweetly to sleep,” Antioch itself felt the wrath of the Lord. “The city was a scene of destruction,” Walter tells us, “with many killed in their homes. Others, indeed, were terrified; they abandoned their homes, scorned their wealth, left everything, and behaved as if demented in the streets and squares of the town. They stretched their hands towards the heavens because of their manifold fear and powerlessness, and cried tearfully without ceasing in different languages: ‘Spare us, Lord, spare your people.’ ”3 The next morning, chastened survivors filed into the central St. Peter’s Church, miraculously untouched by the violent swaying of the ground, and forswore the pursuit of earthly pleasure.

  The Antiochenes were not the only ones to have their world turned upside down. Huddling for shelter on a stone bridge in Mamistra was a young country gentleman far from home. Adelard of Bath had not made the arduous journey from England’s West Country for the celebrated wedding of King Baldwin of Jerusalem to Adelaide of Sicily. He was not interested in the debaucheries of his fellow Europeans. Nor had he followed in the footsteps of the conquering crusaders sixteen years before him to Outremer, literally “the lands beyond the sea.” Unlike those fearsome holy warriors—that “race of Franks” unleashed by Pope Urban II—who had raped and pillaged their way across Central Europe even before they had gotten to the Holy Land, Adelard was determined to learn from the Muslims rather than kill them under the sign of the cross. Where the crusaders had seen only evil in the Muslim infidel, Adelard sought the light of Arab wisdom.

  Antioch—today the provincial Turkish town of Antakya—must have been irresistible for the restless Adelard, who as a young scholar had already decreed the value of traveling far and wide in the pursuit of learning: “It will be worthwhile to approach teachers of different people, to commit to memory what you may find is most finely expressed among each of them. For what the French studies are ignorant of, those across the Alps will unlock; what you will not learn amongst the Latins, eloquent Greece will teach you.”4 The city, founded in the fourth century B.C., had once been the leading metropolis of Asia. Its memory was particularly dear to the Christian world: Here the name “Christian” had first been applied, and Saint Peter had served as the city’s first bishop, a point the ever-touchy, status-conscious popes of Rome preferred to overlook.5 It had once flourished under Muslim rule but was now controlled by crusading Normans. This new principality of Antioch comprised the fortified central town, the surrounding plain, and the seaports of Alexandretta and St. Simeon. The land was very rich, its fortunes resting on the manufacture of fine silks, carpets, pottery, and glass.

  Like Adelard himself, the city that awaited him stood on the cusp between East and West. Antioch had long been an important stopover on the lucrative caravan trade route from Mesopotamia, traditional commerce that scrupulously ignored the inconvenient religious warfare of the Crusades and carried on much as before. Most of the city’s inhabitants were Christians—Eastern Orthodox, Jacobites, Nestorians, and Armenians. The predominant language was Arabic, but religious and cultural affinities also ensured a place for Greek and Latin, creating a living Rosetta stone that eased the exchange of books and ideas across sectarian, cultural, and ethnic lines. Now, the principality found itself a vital link between opposing worlds, thrust together by the religious and political struggle for control of the holy city of Jerusalem, almost three hundred miles to the south.

  A few years before Adelard’s arrival, combined Norman and Genoese forces had captured the nearby city of Tripoli from the Banu Ammar, its refined Muslim princes. The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, a contemporary Arab account, recorded that among the booty carted off from Tripoli by the victorious Christians were “the books of its college and libraries of private collectors.”6 Thousands of these works ended up in the hands of Antioch’s merchants, now within easy reach of the man from Bath.

  Still, nothing had prepared Adelard for what he found in his dogged pursuit of what he called the studia Arabum, the learning of the Arabs. Here at last were the secrets of the ages, buried for six centuries beneath the chaos of western Christendom. This peripatetic Englishman immediately grasped the power of Arab knowledge to remake the world as he knew it. Adelard left his native England a young scholar thirsting for wisdom only the Arabs could supply. He would return as the first Western man of science and help change his world forever.

  If, as Adelard now learned from his Arab teachers, the heavens moved to regular and immutable rhythms, then what role remained for God Almighty? Could he suspend these laws of nature? Did the universe have a beginning and an end, as written in the Bible and the Koran? Or was it eternal, neither created in time nor subject to change, as the Muslim philosophers said? If this “new logic” was correct, then what was one to make of the sacred teaching of creation? To Adelard, the world suddenly seemed a new and unfamiliar place. Such questions had engaged Arab thinkers for centuries, as they struggled
to fit their own monotheistic faith into a growing understanding of the universe around them. This great struggle between faith and reason was about to come crashing down on an unsuspecting Europe.

  The arrival of Arab science and philosophy, the legacy of the pioneering Adelard and of those who hurried to follow his example, transmuted the backward West into a scientific and technological superpower. Like the elusive “elixir”—from the alchemists’ al~iksir—for changing base metal into gold, Arab science altered medieval Christendom beyond recognition. For the first time in centuries, Europe’s eyes opened to the world around it. This encounter with Arab science even restored the art of telling time, lost to the western Christians of the early Middle Ages. Without accurate control over clock and calendar, the rational organization of society was unthinkable. And so was the development of science, technology, and industry, as well as the liberation of man from the thrall of nature. Arab science and philosophy helped rescue the Christian world from ignorance and made possible the very idea of the West.

  Yet how many among us today stop to acknowledge our enormous debt to the Arabs, let alone endeavor to repay it? How many recognize their invaluable bequest of much of our modern technical lexicon: from azimuth to zenith, from algebra to zero? Or the more mundane Arab influence in everything from the foods we eat—apricots, oranges, and artichokes, to name a few—to such common nautical terms as admiral, sloop, and monsoon? Even the quintessentially English tradition of the Morris folk dance is really a corruption of Moorish dancing, harkening back to a time when Arab minstrels entertained the nobility of Muslim Spain.

  The names al-Khwarizmi, Avicenna, al-Idrisi, and Averroes—giants of Arab learning and dominant figures in medieval Europe for centuries—today invoke little if any response from the educated lay reader. Most are forgotten, little more than distant memories from a bygone era. Yet these were just a few of the players in an extraordinary Arab scientific and philosophical tradition that lies hidden under centuries of Western ignorance and outright anti-Muslim prejudice. A recent public opinion survey found that a majority of Americans see “little” or “nothing” to admire in Islam or the Muslim world.7 But turn back the pages of time and it is impossible to envision Western civilization without the fruits of Arab science: al-Khwarizmi’s art of algebra, the comprehensive medical teachings and philosophy of Avicenna, the lasting geography and cartography of al-Idrisi, or the rigorous rationalism of Averroes. Even more important than any individual work was the Arabs’ overall contribution that lies at the very heart of the contemporary West—the realization that science can grant man power over nature.

  The power of Arab learning, championed by Adelard of Bath, refashioned Europe’s intellectual landscape. Its reach extended into the sixteenth century and beyond, shaping the groundbreaking work of Copernicus and Galileo. This brought Christian Europe face-to-face with the fact that the sun—not the earthly home of God’s creature, man—stood at the center of the universe. Averroes, the philosopher-judge from Muslim Spain, explained classical philosophy to the West and first introduced it to rationalist thought. Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine remained a standard European text into the 1600s. Arab books on optics, chemistry, and geography were equally longlived.

  The West’s willful forgetting of the Arab legacy began centuries ago, as anti-Muslim propaganda crafted in the shadow of the Crusades began to obscure any recognition of Arab culture’s profound role in the development of modern science. This message comprised four central themes, a number of which still resonate today: Islam distorts the word of God; it is spread solely by violence; it perverts human sexuality, either by encouraging the practice of polygamy, as in the famed harems of the sultans, or through repressive or excessively prudish attitudes; and its prophet, Muhammad, was a charlatan, a tool of the Devil, or even the Antichrist.

  The thirteenth-century philosopher Roger Bacon, one of the earliest Western proponents of the scientific method, praised the Muslims for their intellectual innovations, a subject he knew well: “Philosophy is drawn from the Muslims.”8 Yet the same Roger Bacon was just as enthusiastic in denouncing aspects of Muslim life of which he had no real knowledge or experience: The Arabs, he asserted confidently, “are absorbed in sensual pleasures because of their polygamy.”9 Soon such fanciful notions completely displaced all others in the popular imagination.

  These views gained further currency in the Renaissance, when the West increasingly looked for inspiration to an idealized notion of classical Greece.10 Eager to claim direct descent from the likes of Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Archimedes, Western thinkers deliberately marginalized the role of Arab learning. “I shall scarcely be persuaded that anything good can come from Arabia,” wrote Petrarch, the most prominent of the early humanists, in the fourteenth century.11 Western historians of science have largely carried on in this vein; many cast the Arabs as benign but effectively neutral caretakers of Greek knowledge who did little or nothing to advance the work of the ancients.

  Such accounts are grounded in the persistent notion of the West’s “recovery” of classical learning, with the clear implication that this knowledge was somehow the natural birthright of Christian Europe and was merely misplaced during the Middle Ages. They are also profoundly colored by a Western consensus, often invoked to explain the state of the Muslim world today, that Islam is inherently hostile to innovation and became all the more so from the early twelfth century onward.12

  PART I

  Al-Isha/Nightfall

  Chapter One

  THE WARRIORS OF GOD

  THEY COULDN’T EVEN tell the time—this uncountable army of believers.

  The warriors of God pushed on to the gates of the imperial city of Constantinople, their arrival heralded by a plague of locusts that destroyed the vines but left the wheat untouched. Their leader, an implacable cleric who had appeared from nowhere to great popular acclaim, exhorted his charges to holy war against the infidel with promises of a home in paradise. Disease and malnutrition were rife. Medical care often involved exorcism or the amputation of injured limbs. Torture and other ordeals settled criminal cases.

  Few had any learning at all. What education there was back home consisted of memorizing outdated texts under the watchful eyes of hidebound doctors of religion. They had no understanding of basic technology, science, or mathematics. They could not date their most important holy days, nor chart the regular movements of the sun, the moon, and the planets. They knew nothing of papermaking or the use of lenses and mirrors, and they had no inkling of the prince of contemporary scientific instruments—the astrolabe. Natural phenomena, such as an eclipse of the moon or a sudden change in weather, terrified them. They thought it was black magic.

  The arrival of this fanatical army horrified the locals. Who were these pale-skinned, blue-eyed barbarians, marching under the sign of the cross, and what did they want on Arab shores at the dawn of the twelfth Christian century?

  “The whole West, and much of the land of barbarian peoples as lies beyond the Adriatic Sea up to the Pillars of Hercules—all this … was bursting forth into Asia in a solid mass, with all its belongings, taking its march through the intervening portion of Europe,” records Princess Anna Comnena, daughter of the Byzantine emperor, in Constantinople, the empire’s capital.1 Among their ranks were true believers and righteous folk, notes the chronicler Albert of Aix, but also “adulterers, homicides, thieves, perjurers, and robbers.”2 Their leader, Peter the Hermit, rode a white mule and promised the remission of sins for all who joined the cause.

  A small, ugly man, Peter effortlessly touched the hearts of the common people, who snatched hairs from his lowly mount to preserve as holy relics as he preached the Crusade across northern France. Many sold what meager possessions they had and set out behind him for the ends of the earth. Some brought their entire families; others simply abandoned wives, children, and aging parents. Crops were left untended and chores unfinished in the haste to follow Peter’s call. The hermit kept his arms and feet bare,
and he wore a rough wool shirt, covered by a mantle that reached to his ankles. “He lived on wine and fish; he hardly ever, never, ate bread,” reports Guibert of Nogent, in one of the earliest accounts of the Crusades.3

  The diminutive monk appeared suddenly, voicing a populist echo of the great call to arms by Pope Urban II, who appealed to the princes of Christendom on November 27, 1095, in the French town of Clermont to end their ceaseless warring and turn their murderous energies on the unbelievers of the East. “Let those who have been accustomed unjustly to wage private warfare against the faithful now go against the infidels and end with victory. Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians,” the pope told an overflowing crowd gathered to hear his sermon. “Let those who have been serving as mercenaries for small pay now obtain the eternal reward.”4 Within months of Urban’s summons, as many as eighty thousand people, city residents and country dwellers alike, left for the East.5

  A combustible mixture of church politics, theological dispute, domestic concerns, and world affairs fueled Urban’s call to crusade. In recent decades the church had struggled with Europe’s secular rulers over rights and privileges, most notably the power to invest new bishops and outfit them with the symbols of office, the ring and staff. Urban and his supporters within the church saw the Crusade as a way to restore the authority of Rome at the head of the Christian world, without reliance on unruly monarchs.

  For some time now, a number of religious thinkers had been arguing that religious violence was both permissible and justified. Pope Gregory VII—Urban the Crusader’s mentor—had had a long-standing interest in warfare on behalf of the church, and he had even proposed the creation of a Militia of St. Peter composed of European knights, the need for which was made all the more pressing by the emerging struggle between secular kings and the papacy. Bishop Anselm II of Lucca, a loyal partisan of the pope, had collated the writings of St. Augustine on theories of just war in support of Gregory’s endeavors.6 These reformers were also influenced by the notion that the church had to bring itself closer to the people; this in turn supported the phenomenon of papal armies that could provide believers with the chance to defend the faith in return for the remission of sins.7