For Lust of Knowing Page 5

  Avicenna’s Qanun was an unoriginal compilation which drew heavily upon Galenic medical misapprehensions. ‘No personal experiences of the author and no new ideas are found in it,’ according to Manfred Ullman. Avicenna does not seem to have carried out any dissections and, in fact, Islamic law bans the dissection of human bodies. The Qanun’s chief value lay in the way it laid out older materials in a systematic fashion. But much of the material so presented was both bizarre and useless. For example, Avicenna, following his predecessors, declared that madness was caused by an imbalance in the biles. In particular, a predominance of black bile was the cause of melancholia (though Avicenna accepted that jinn (demons) could also cause melancholia). Excessive hairiness was one of the symptoms of this sad affliction. Lycanthropia, or werewolfism, was another possible version of melancholia. It is unlikely that Avicenna ever had to treat a werewolf; rather he was unthinkingly transmitting a piece of ancient Greek folklore that had found its way into the medical textbooks. According to Galen and to Avicenna following him, bleeding was a cure for all sorts of diseases (and one wonders if, in an age before sterilization became the norm, more people did not die of the cure than the complaint). Cauterization was another painful but trusted standby in this sort of medicine. The activities of the jinn apart, Avicenna denied that there were magical causes and cures and he also wrote a refutation of astrology. However, though he sought to adopt rationalist positions, his great medical work was really an antiquarian and bookish reworking of Greek learning that had little practical relevance to the real health problems of the medieval Near East – or those of Europe.34

  A loosely analogous problem arose regarding the transmission of Greek astronomical learning via the Arabs to the West. It was essentially the Ptolemaic system that was being transmitted, studied and elaborated upon and the problem with this picture of the universe was that it was predicated upon the assumption that the earth was at the centre of the universe, so that the sun and the rest of the planets circled around it, with the sphere of the fixed stars serving as the universe’s outer shell. This system was set out in the immensely influential Almagest of Claudius Ptolemy (c. AD 100–178). The Ptolemaic system had the advantage of providing a framework for observations and calculations, even if the system was over-elaborate and based on a false premise. The Almagest (which was translated from Arabic by the tireless Gerald of Cremona) was an extremely complex work. Although it did allow one to predict the position of stars from year to year, in fact most medieval students of astronomy (including Dante) preferred to use abridged or simplified versions of Ptolemy’s work written by other hands. Not until the sixteenth century did figures like Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus succeed in thinking their way out of the increasingly unwieldy Ptolemaic model. In the Middle Ages Ptolemy’s astronomy tended to be bundled in with his astrology.35 Like the writings of Galen and Avicenna, the Ptolemaic treatises gave aspiring scholars something to exercise their minds on, but, at the end of all the mental exercising, not so very much was likely to have been achieved. Translations of scientific works from Arabic, which had begun in the twelfth century, petered out in the early thirteenth century. After the fourteenth century, there were no more such translations. Greek learning, mediated by Arab scholarship, had provided stimulus and misinformation in equal measure.

  AVERROES AND THE LATIN AVERROISTS

  To return to philosophy, the impact of Averroes on Western scholastic philosophy was in some respects even greater than that of Avicenna. Averroes (the name is a Latinate distortion of the actual Arabname Ibn Rushd) was born in 1126 in Cordova and died in 1198 in Marrakesh. Like Avicenna, Averroes, who was known as the ‘Commentator’, was chiefly valued in the West for his expositions of Aristotle’s philosophy. What was distinctive in his thinking was that he held (or at least was thought to hold) that there was no necessary harmony between faith and reason. He taught that the existence of God could be proved by reason and that the world had always existed and he rejected the immortality of the personal soul. Averroes was translated into Latin in the early thirteenth century by Michael Scot and, from the 1230 s onwards, Averroism was an important and somewhat contentious issue first in Paris and then in Oxford. Averroist Christian philosophers, like Siger of Brabant, believed that Averroes had demonstrated the unity of the intellect shared by all humanity. Also Siger and his partisans argued that, though the Averroist interpretation of the world might not be correct, it was the correct reading of Aristotle. Although Aquinas fiercely opposed Siger’s interpretation of Averroes, Dante decided retrospectively to smooth over their differences and placed them side by side in the Heaven of the Sun in Paradiso, where Aquinas is made to praise Siger’s logic. Averroes’s writings attracted careless readers and partisans on both sides and, for a while, anybody suspected of any kind of freethinking was likely to be labelled an Averroist. Curiously, despite the denunciations and attempts to ban the teaching of Averroism in the universities, his views were actually more widely known and discussed in Christian Europe than they were in the Islamic world.36

  Despite Averroism’s association with suspect and vaguely atheistic ideas, nevertheless the Arabphilosopher was studied with great attention and respect by perfectly orthodox figures like St Thomas Aquinas and Dante. In his massive theological treatise, Summa contra Gentiles, Aquinas proposed to use reason rather than scripture to convert the unbelieving and Averroes was cited 50 3 times in the course of the Summa’s arguments. (Impressive although this was, it is doubtful whether a single infidel has ever been converted by wading through Aquinas’s Latin.) In the Summa, chapter 6 of book 5 dealt with Islam. Predictably Aquinas presented Muhammad as the founder of a heresy who cunningly made use of both truth and falsity. Muhammad delivered his message first to ‘men not learned in divine method… but bestial people living in deserts’.37 Although Averroism was for a while the rage among high-flying scholastics, from the mid-fourteenth century onwards it was on the wane and, more generally, there was a steep decline in Arabic studies. In the fifteenth century, as we shall see, several leading humanist thinkers went out of their way to express doubts about the reliability or value of studying Greek philosophy via what were usually inelegant and inaccurate Arabic translations. A great deal of Aristotle and his Arab commentators had been badly translated into barbarous Latin of a sort that made the fastidious Latin stylists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries wince. After Averroes had been rendered into Latin, there were no important translations from Arabic until the seventeenth century.

  THE CRUSADERS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS

  Most of the translation work was done in Spain and, to a lesser extent, in Sicily. It might have been thought that the establishment of the Crusader principalities in the eastern Mediterranean in the twelfth century might have served as a channel of cultural influence that would have allowed Franks or Westerners to become more familiar with Arabic and Islamic high culture. However, scholars tended not to go on Crusades or settle in the East and a Paris-trained intellectual, like William Archbishop of Tyre, was a rarity. The twelfth-century scientific translator Adelard of Bath also seems to have visited Crusader Syria, though there is no evidence about what he did there. It was also the case that, unless the Franks had chosen to interest themselves in the study of the Qur’an and the orally transmitted traditions concerning the Prophet Muhammad and his contemporaries, there was probably not so very much they could have learned from their Muslim subjects and neighbours in the twelfth century. The places that the Crusaders had conquered in Syria and Palestine were small towns that traded in soap, leather and glass. These places were intellectual backwaters and a long way from the great Islamic cultural centres of Baghdad or Isfahan. The last great age of cultural efflorescence in Syria had taken place under the Hamdanid princes in Aleppo in the tenth century. The famous poets al-Mutanabbi and Abu Tammam, the philosopher al-Farabi, the preacher Ibn Nubata and many others had flourished under the benign patronage of this great Arab dynasty. By the 1090 s, Syria and Palestine boasted no ph
ilosophers, scientists, poets or historians of any real eminence or originality. Doubtless the cultural decline was exacerbated by the coming of the Crusaders, as the latter killed scholars and either destroyed libraries or redistributed their contents. (We know that they ransomed the Arabic books looted in Jerusalem to the Fatimid garrison in Ascalon.)

  Proximity to the Muslims in Palestine and Syria did not at first encourage any understanding of Islam. In his early twelfth-century chronicle of the First Crusade, Gesta Dei per Francos, Guibert of Nogent, when he came to write about the career of Muhammad, observed that ‘it is safe to speak evil of one whose malignity exceeds whatever ill can be spoken’. In other words, when faced with something so bad, it was not necessary to check one’s facts and Guibert seems to have relied on misinformation brought back by pilgrims from the Holy Land. However, Guibert was at pains to correct one popular misconception, as he pointed out that it was not true that Muslims regarded Muhammad as God.38

  In the thirteenth century, prominent thinkers such as Roger Bacon and Ramon Lull came to advocate preaching and conversion as the way for Christianity to triumph over Islam. Also, the preaching orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans sent out preachers to the Middle East and other infidel regions. It was inevitable that those preachers had to acquire some knowledge of Islam and Arabs in order to inform their preaching. Though James of Vitry (c. 1160–1240) was not a friar, he was primarily a preacher and he had travelled up and down the coast of the Crusader principalities, preaching especially to the Muslims before he was appointed Bishop of Acre in 1219. He claimed to have converted a few and he suggested that more would have come over but for the contrast Muslims saw between the earthly delights offered by their religion and the stringent demands made by Christian morality. Presumably James of Vitry preached to the Muslims in Arabic, though this is not clear. Although he had some knowledge of Muslim beliefs, this was not due to systematic study. Rather he relied on scraps of oral information, not all of which were accurate. For example, he claimed that Muslims secretly worshipped an idol of Muhammad that was kept inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.39

  William of Tripoli, a missionary based in the Dominican convent in the Crusader city of Acre, certainly knew Arabic very well. His Tractatus de Statu Saracenorum (1273) was a guide to Islamic beliefs and customs. He had read the Qur’an and he was particularly interested in the account the Qur’an gave of Jesus. However, he also accepted such familiar anti-Muslim libels as the story that the heretical monk Bahira taught Muhammad heresy, as well as the story that Muhammad only banned alcohol after getting disgracefully drunk himself. William claimed to have baptized more than a thousand Muslims (which seems wildly improbable) and he did not think that most Muslims were far from salvation, for he saw that Islam had a great deal in common with Christianity. Moreover, he thought that Islam was close to collapse and then the Muslims were bound to convert to the true faith. He had heard that this had been foretold by Muslim astrologers. Therefore there was no need for another crusade. William’s view of the way things were shaping up in the East was unusually sanguine. Less than twenty years later, in 1291, Muslim armies under the command of the Mamluk Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil overran Acre and the rest of the Crusader cities and castles on the Syro-Palestinian littoral.40

  Ricoldo da Monte Croce, a Dominican missionary, was in Iraq at the time of the fall of Acre. He saw the Christian captives being brought into Baghdad to be sold as slaves and he speculated about the fate of any nuns who might have been captured. (According to the folklore of the period, nuns were especially sought by the masters of harems because they were reputed to breed exceptionally fine warriors.) Ricoldo was baffled at the success and wealth of the Muslims. Why had God granted them all these things? All the same, he was exceptional in the depth and detail of his knowledge of Islam and also in his favourable estimation of Muslim manners and customs. In his Itinerarius, or ‘Journey’, he had much praise for the Arabs: ‘We therefore report certain Muslim works of perfection thus briefly, rather to shame the Christians than to praise the Muslims. For who will not be astonished if he carefully considers how great among these same Muslims is the attention to study, the devotion in prayer, pity for the poor, reverence for the name of God and the prophets and the holy places, their serious ways, their kindness to strangers, and their concord and love towards each other.’ Gravitas was a leading feature of Muslim life.

  Ricoldo was also particularly impressed by their madrasas, or religious colleges, and he correctly identified the two main ones as the Nizamiyya and the Mustansariyya. Ricoldo’s homiletic contrast of virtuous Saracens with sinful Christians was to be taken up by other Christian writers, including John de Mandeville. Though the Saracens’ devotion was admired, it was still, as far as Ricoldo was concerned, a devotion to a false faith and he excoriated their holy law as confused, obscure, lying, irrational and violent. (He had been attacked by Muslim Mongols when he left Baghdad. They beat him, tried to force him to convert to Islam and made him work as a camel driver. These things may have prejudiced him against the religion.) Later, in 1310, he also wrote a refutation of the Qur’an entitled Improbatio alchorani. Writing of his experience as a missionary, he observed that it was very difficult to convey a correct idea of the Trinity to a Muslim audience and that it was easier to attack Islam than to defend Christianity.41

  THE WICKED CHRISTIANS

  Ricoldo (and John de Mandeville after him) only praised Muslim manners and customs in order to make his fellow Christians feel ashamed of their shortcomings and, in general, it must be evident from much of the above that Christian polemicists made only perfunctory attempts to understand their Muslim adversaries. The Muslims reciprocated and wrote their own inaccurate and libellous polemics about Christians and Christendom and, if Christians accused Muslims of worshipping idols, it was also the case that Muslims accused Christians of polytheism. The Andalusian jurist and belletrist Ibn Hazm (994 – 1064) wrote a delightful treatise on courtly love called Ring of the Dove. But he also wrote the lengthy and rancorous Kitab al-Fisal fi-al-Milal wa-al-Ahwa’ wa-al-Nihal, or ‘Book of Distinction in the Religions, Heresies, Sects’, in which he sought to demonstrate the superiority of Sunni Islam to all other faiths and sects. The Kitab al-Fisal included a long and fierce attack on Judaism and Christianity. According to Ibn Hazm, Christians had tampered with the New Testament and removed prophecies concerning the coming of Muhammad. They corrupted the Gospels with lies. ‘All this shows the Christian community is altogether vile.’42

  The rigorous Muslim jurist and theologian Ibn Taymiyya (1263 – 1328) similarly considered the Christian scriptures to have been carelessly corrupted.43 It was a commonplace of Muslim polemic to denounce Christian sexual freedom and lack of sexual jealousy. According to Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, writing in Islamic Spain, Slavic men divorced their women if they discovered them to be virgins. The same source denounced the Christians of Galicia in northern Spain as men who washed at most only twice a year. (Of course, he may well have been right about the second point.) The Persian al-Qazwini’s thirteenth-century Cosmography made the same claim about Franks in general. (Qazwini died in 1283.)44 The anonymous Sea of Virtues, written in twelfth-century Syria, mocked the Christians for worshipping someone who was incapable of saving himself from execution. Moreover ‘anyone who believes that his God came out of a woman’s privates is quite mad’. According to the anonymous author, unmarried women are allowed to fornicate with whomever they like, but sleeping with priests in churches was regarded as especially meritorious.45 Ibn ‘Abdun, inspector of markets and morals in early twelfth-century Seville, after decreeing that Christians and Jews were not allowed to employ Muslim servants, continued: ‘Muslim women shall be prevented from entering their abominable churches, for the priests are evil-doers, fornicators and sodomites. Frankish women must be forbidden to enter the church except on days of religious services or festivals, for it is their habit to eat and drink and fornicate with the priests, among whom there is not one who has not
two or more women with whom he sleeps.’46

  At a more popular and entertaining level, Arabic folk epics about legendary and quasi-legendary heroes such as Antar, Sayyid Battal and Baybars presented the Franks as vainglorious and cowardly warriors and portrayed Europe as a region of sorcerers, poisoners and pirates.47 Western epics tended to present a reversed mirror image of this, in which the Christians were paladins and the Saracens were the bad guys. It is important to remember that for much of the Middle Ages Christendom was on the defensive and, for example, the Chanson de Roland commemorates defeat, not victory. In the Chanson, which was written perhaps towards the end of the eleventh century, the heroic knight Roland and his small army is lured by an evil and treacherous counsellor, Ganelon, into a Saracen ambush in the Pyrenees. Subsequently Roland’s liege lord the Emperor Charlemagne takes vengeance on the Saracens. Their commander, King Marsilion, is treacherous, but the Saracens are shown to be brave warriors and appreciated as such:

  From Balaguet there cometh an Emir,

  His form is noble, his eyes are bold and clear,

  When on his horse he’s mounted in career

  He bears him bravely in his battle-gear,

  And for his courage he’s famous far and near;

  Were he but Christian, right knightly he’d appear.48

  Whoever composed the Chanson was not in the least interested in the realities of Islam. Just as the Christians worship the Holy Trinity, so the Saracen paynim, or pagans, worship their own dark trinity of idols: Mahound (a corruption of Muhammad), Termagant and Apollyon. Since the Christians have the Bible, it is (rightly) assumed that the Muslims too have a holy book. Saracen society appears to be feudal and chivalric, just like that of France under Charlemagne. There is no significant sense of the ‘Other’. The Chanson de Roland and other similar heroic poems of medieval France dealt in fantasy and those who composed those fantasies felt no need to consult any Latin translation of the Qur’an or Cluniac polemic in order to find out what Islam was really like. The Saracens were stock fantasy villains and, as such, the precursors of the Red Indians and the Daleks.49