The Pope,
the Christians and the Muslims
Let the Dialogue Begin – Part 6 of 7
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
The
unmitigated military disasters of the thirteenth
century were a primary cause of the decay of empirical-rational
thought in the Islamic world. It was the physical
destruction of its intellectual centers and the
slaughter of its scholars, more than the dialectic
of al-Gazzali and Ibn Rushd, that was responsible
for the decline of exoteric sciences among the
Muslims.
The Crusades were a frontal attack on the Islamic
world in a broad geographical arc extending from
Spain to Syria. In the year 1212, the Castilians,
backed by contingents from other parts of Europe,
defeated the Almohads of the Maghreb at the battle
of Las Novas de Tolosa. Following this disaster,
much of Spain fell rapidly to the advancing Christian
armies. In 1236, Cordoba, the capital of the western
Caliphate was occupied. Seville held on a little
longer, but it too fell in 1248. Only Granada,
protected by the La AlPujarra Mountains, maintained
a toehold on the southeastern tip of the Iberian
Peninsula until 1492.
Simultaneously, a calamity of equal proportions
descended from the northeast. In 1219, Genghis
Khan and his Mongol hordes crossed the Gobi desert
and rapidly overran the fertile valleys of Central
Asia. The legendary cities of Samarqand, Bokhara,
Balkh, Neshapur, Kashgar, Kabul, Ghazna and Herat
were decimated. The Mongol advance continued after
the death of Genghis, culminating in the destruction
of Baghdad in 1258. To comprehend the magnitude
of this disaster one needs only to look at a map
of Asia. Included in the devastated lands were
the modern nations of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan,
Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Afghanistan, NW Pakistan,
Iran, Iraq, Syria and Palestine. Cities were leveled,
libraries burned, scholars butchered, dams flattened,
and over ninety percent of the population was
put to the sword.
Within a generation, between the years 1212 and
1258, more than half of the Islamic world was
put to the sword. The Latin west, sensing an opportunity
to deal a mortal blow to Islam, sought an alliance
with the Mongols. An alliance was indeed forged
between the Latins, the Armenians and the Mongols.
A confederate army of these three advanced upon
Egypt in 1261. They were met by the Mamluke (Turkish)
sultan Baybars on the plain of Tiberius near Jerusalem,
and at the critical battle of Ayn Jalut (1262),
were dealt a crushing defeat. The tide turned
and Cairo escaped the fate of Baghdad. Similarly,
India defended itself against Mongol raids under
the able leadership of the Mamluke sultans of
Delhi.
The simultaneous loss of Spain in Europe and Khorasan
in Central Asia was a blow from which the intellectual
life of Islam never fully recovered. Spain and
Khorasan were the principle centers of scientific
and cultural creativity. Their loss and destruction
meant the arrest of intellectual activity. The
curtain fell on the classical Islamic civilization
that had given birth to the empirical method and
had cultivated and embellished the Hellenistic
rational legacy. It was not the time to debate
“before and after,” “cause and
effect” “createdness or uncreateness
of the Word” and other speculative issues.
It was a time to survive.
In this hour of trial Islam looked to its intrinsic
spirituality for its renewal. The Sufis rose to
the challenge and not only succeeded in preserving
the faith but also in converting the conquering
Mongols and carrying the message forward into
India, Indonesia, Africa and Europe. The Islam
that emerged from the calamities of the thirteenth
century was a spiritual Islam, looking inwards
to its own soul, rather than the exoteric Islam
that animated the classical age of Islamic civilization.
Notwithstanding the rise of tasawwuf, the pursuit
of empirical-rational sciences did not entirely
disappear. The Timurids under Ulugh Bey of Central
Asia, the Moguls of India, the Safavids of Iran
and the Ottomans of Turkey kept alive the study
of both empirical science and philosophy.
In the fourteenth century, the Mu’tazalites
had a second chance to influence Islamic intellectual
life at the magnificent Tughlaq court of Delhi.
Following the containment of the Mongol menace,
the sultanate of Delhi turned its attention towards
southern India. By the year 1310 much of the subcontinent
was under its sway.
The tensions and debates between the rationalists
and the traditionalists that had existed in classical
Islam now migrated to the courts of Delhi with
the added elements injected by the rise of Sufism.
To sort out these tensions, Gayasuddin Tughlaq,
Sultan of Delhi, convened a conference of the
leading ulema, Qazis and philosophers at his magnificent
palace in the old fort of Delhi. Among the more
notable Mu’tazalite philosophers resident
in Delhi was Shaikh Ilmuddin, who had studied
in Cairo and had traveled extensively through
Persia, Iraq, Syria ad Egypt. The official Qazi
of the court was Shaikh Jalaluddin, who was a
follower of the Salafi thought advanced by Ibn
Taymiyah (d 1325). The two were invited to the
conference along with Nizamuddin Awliya, the denizen
of the Chishtiya Sufi order. It is noteworthy
that all three were well versed in the sciences
of logic and reason. Nizamuddin Awliya, in addition,
was a master of mathematics and astronomy.
The issue was to ban the sama’ (ecstatic
dance) of the Chishtiya Sufis. Shaikh Ilmuddin
argued passionately for the ban advancing rational
arguments that dance and music hurt social well-being.
Qazi Jalaluddin was even more passionate in the
debate. However, the emperor, in his wisdom sided
with Nizamuddin Awliya. The Sufis triumphed. Sama’
and Qawwali were rescued. The Mu’tazalites,
this time backed up by the Salafi ulema, lost
one more bout. Islamic thought stayed Sufic through
the seventeenth century when it was supplanted
by the regimentation of strict orthodoxy. It was
this orthodoxy, first noticeable in India in the
waning years of Mogul rule that spelled the final
death knell of rational thought in the Islamic
world.
While the Islamic world debated the place of reason
in its hierarchy of knowledge, first embracing
it headlong, and then relegating it to a supportive
role and finally abandoning it in favor of orthodoxy,
the Christian world was similarly confronted with
classical Greek thought. As Muslim Spain fell
to advancing Christian armies, the great libraries
of Toledo, Cordoba and Seville became accessible
to the Christians. The conquering Castilians,
encouraged by the Church, established schools
of translation from Arabic into Latin.
It was through Spain that classical Greek thought
was transmitted to Europe. The spark of learning
caught on. During the next two centuries, a galaxy
of universities sprang up in Sicily, Italy, France
and England. Among those that survive today, those
at Oxford (1167), Paris (1180) and Cambridge (1200)
are well known.
The Europeans were soon embroiled in controversies
similar to those in the Islamic world four centuries
earlier. Confronted with Greek rational thought,
Christian theology was compelled to explain its
beliefs in the light of reason while men of science
sought to understand the nature of the world around
them in a rational way. One of the most influential
of these theologians was Thomas Aquinas (d 1274).
Roger Bacon (d 1294) was one of the best known
scientists of medieval Europe.
The response of Latin Europe to the challenge
of Greek rational thought was different from that
of the Islamic world. While the Muslims demoted
rationalism to a role supporting empirical studies,
the Latins dissociated rational enquiry from Church
dogma and relegated it to the world of nature
and matters of state. Science and statecraft became
secular and bereft of the Grace of God while the
Church dogma stayed beyond the realm of reason.
Later centuries witnessed an evolution of this
bifurcation of knowledge into the secular and
profane domains. The humanist movement of the
sixteenth century which emphasized the autonomy
of man was essentially secular. The radical theology
of the twentieth century attempted to reincorporate
reason into theology, just as had Nietzsche in
the nineteenth century. But you cannot reintroduce,
in the middle of an argument, an assumption that
you had made at the beginning of the argument.
It is like trying to recover the influence of
the first gambit in a chess game towards the end
of the game. The result of the radical theology
was the absurd conclusion (to quote Nietzsche):
“God is dead”!
The invitation of Pope Gregory XVI to engage in
a dialogue across cultures based on Logos (reason)
is baffling considering that the church dogma
itself does not admit of a rational enquiry. (To
be continued)
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