Chapter 8
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLÁM
ISLÁM,
having lost a great part of its spiritual power and having to divert its
manifold energies chiefly to secular ends, went forward on its conquering
career, driving the Christians out of Palestine, out of North Africa, out of
most of Spain, but being stopped in France by the battle of Tours. Western
Christendom on the other hand sank back into the Dark Ages and languished in
semi-barbarism for Centuries.
‘Umar and the Caliphs who followed him rapidly extended
the Muslim empire from the Pillars of Hercules to Calicut. In the midst of a
dark and stagnant world there sprang up as if by magic a brilliant
civilization. In 760 A.D. its rulers moved their capital from Damascus to Baghdád
and founded on the site of an ancient Christian village a city which became at
once a world centre of culture and commerce, and so remained for five
centuries. All phases of civilization as then known were there found gathered
together and renewed, and in many cases carried to heights never reached
before: letters and language, the arts, the sciences, both practical and
abstract, trade, transport and seamanship, invention and industry,
jurisprudence and the arts of government. Because of the central position of the
Qur'án, revered as a literary miracle, and because of Arabian pride in their
language, which they held to be the one perfect tongue spoken by man and which
is indeed
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regarded by scholars to-day as one of the greatest intellectual achievements of
the race, literature in all its uses and forms was given a place of eminence.
Schools and universities were founded and thronged by students of many nations.
Great works were produced on all manner of subjects; great libraries were
collected containing hundreds of thousands of volumes. The Caliphs ransacked
the earth for knowledge, sending out expeditions of inquiry and making foreign
lands and distant ages give up their lore. An army of translators was employed,
rendering Greek, Egyptian, Indian and Jewish works into Arabic. Grammar and its
laws were studied with great elaboration. Dictionaries, lexicons and
encyclopedias on a vast scale were prepared. Paper was introduced from China; a
new system of numerals (usually known as Arabic) from India. Arabic became the
universal language. Caliphs would invite literary men of international repute
to the court. Scholars, philosophers, poets, grammarians from diverse lands
would find a meeting place in the great bookshops of the capital.
The pursuit of science, practical as well as abstract,
kept pace with that of letters. In experimental science, in medicine and
surgery, in chemistry and physics, in geography as well as in mathematics and
astronomy, the Arabs led the world of that day. They invented a new and
exquisite form of architecture, distinguished by its combination of airy grace
with solid strength, and by its use of light. The influence of this style can
be traced through India as far as Java, to China, to the Sudan and to the whole
of Russia. They developed many branches of industry and improved methods of
agriculture and horticulture. Introducing the use of the mariner's compass
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their ships traversed the seas while caravans maintained a trade between all
provinces of the empire, carrying produce from India and China, Turkistan and
Russia, from Africa and the Malayan Archipelago.
The glory of Baghdád with its mosques and palaces,
its temples of learning, its fragrant gardens, was reproduced in the lesser
centres of the world of Islám: in Basra, in Bokhara, in Granada and Cordoba. It
is written of the last-named city that at the height of its prosperity it
contained more than 20,000 houses and more than a million inhabitants and that
a man after sunset might walk in a straight line for ten miles along paved and
illuminated streets — yet in Europe centuries later there was not a paved
street in Paris nor a public lamp in London.
Cordoba was the first University founded in Europe, and in
its halls multitudes of Christian scholars received instruction, among them
being Gerbert who afterwards became Sylvester II, the brilliant Pope of Rome.
Inevitably, and in spite of the antagonism between
Christendom and Islám, this advanced civilization influenced the course of life
and thought in Europe. Through the Muslim outpost in Sicily and the
scintillating brilliance of Muslim Spain, through the intelligence of scholars
and the resources of the Muslim universities, through traders, through
diplomats and travelers, through soldiers, sailors and reconquered peasants,
new ideas, techniques and attitudes passed from Islám to Western Europe.
Then came the day in 1094 when the Pope called on the
chivalry and the faithful of Christendom to arouse themselves and go forth and
drive the Saracen hosts out of the sacred Christian shrine, which they had
seized,
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and reestablish the Christian Faith in its ancient home. Europe leapt up at his
word and for well-nigh two hundred years the vicissitudes of this colossal war
between Europe and Asia, the West and the East, Christian and unbeliever
continued to cause the loss of millions of lives, to spread infinite misery and
to squander immense treasure. The Christians ultimately withdrew in ignominious
and complete defeat and Islám remained in possession of all the Holy Places she
had owned before.
It was Europe, however, and not Arabia which gained from
the struggle, for the Crusades provided yet another channel through which
knowledge of the Muslim civilization flowed into Europe. For two hundred years
the leading men of Europe were constantly going to and fro between the two
continents gaining not only a first-hand knowledge of the great culture in
Syria but gaining too an immense emancipation of the human spirit.
Gradually, under, this many-pronged impulse from the East,
the obscurantism of the mediaeval Church in Western Europe gave way and
finally, at the Renaissance, went down to defeat. The Renaissance was truly an
expression of the joie de vivre which
Europe learned from the Arabs, and from the Renaissance flowed those features
of the Islámic culture with which the awakened Europeans began to build a
richer, happier, more eager civilization than they had ever before dreamed of.
Christendom has been slow to realize and to admit the debt
which our Western civilization owes to the East. But the facts of our borrowing
are written
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large in history and nothing but prejudice can lead us to minimize our
indebtedness.
"Let us examine the two civilizations" wrote
Seignobos in his Histoire de la Civilisation au Moyen Age, "which
in the eleventh century divided the ancient world. In the west —
miserable little cities, peasants' huts and great fortresses — a country
always troubled by a war, where one could not travel ten leagues without
running the risk of being robbed; and in the Orient — Constantinople,
Cairo, Damascus, Baghdád — with their marble palaces, their
workshops, their schools, their bazaars, their villages, and the incessant movement
of merchants who travelled in peace from Spain to Persia. There is no doubt
that the musselman and Byzantine worlds were richer, better policed, better
lighted than the western world. In the eleventh century these two worlds began
to become acquainted; the barbarous Christians came into contact with the
civilized musselmans in two ways — by war and by commerce. And by contact
with the orientals, the occidentals became civilized."[1]
1. See The Secret of
Divine Civilization by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, pp. 92-94 (Bahá'í Publishing Trust,
Wilmette, Illinois, 1957). For statement of specific gains from Islám see History
of Mediaeval Civilization by Charles Seignobos, pp. 117-118 (Unwin, London,
1908).
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