Islam’s Contribution to Europe - IV
By DrAkbar Ahmed
American University
Washington, DC
The fundamental concept of the “mind/body problem” in Western philosophy associated with René Descartes—dealing with the relationship between perception and objects, mind and matter, soul and body, and “how meaning, rationality, and conscious experience are related to a physical world”— can be traced back to the eleventh-century scholar Avicenna. Avicenna was the Latin name of Ibn Sina, who “foreshadowed Francis Bacon and René Descartes by half a millennium when he claimed” that “the universality of our ideas is the result of the activity of the mind itself.” This principle was also quoted by Averroes and the scholastics of the medieval universities of Europe, especially the German scholar and saint Albertus Magnus, the teacher of Thomas Aquinas.
The similarity of Avicenna’s thinking to that of Descartes—widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy—who posited the primacy of the intellect in his famous dictum cogito ergo sum, or “I think, therefore I am,” has been noted and explored by many scholars. Avicenna argued that if a man were to have no perception of the external world or his own physical body, “He will not doubt that he affirms the existence of his self.”Descartes also wrote of the nature of the self, of what could be known with certainty, the soul, and God. Like Avicenna, he “distinguishes between the intellect and the brain.”
The concept of representation, according to which what a person perceives is only representative of external phenomena, has a similar lineage and was “of vital importance for philosophical psychology as it has developed from Descartes onward.”Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault hailed Descartes as initiating the “age of representation” and modernity itself. The concept of “representation” “seems to have its origin in the Latin translation of the works of Avicenna,” who was “the initiator of this representational theory of cognition.”
Miguel de Cervantes and Daniel Defoe
Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe—routinely cited as among the greatest novels of all time, for example by the Guardian in 2003—bear the mark of Islamic culture. Miguel de Cervantes opens Don Quixote (1605–15) by disclosing, with tongue in cheek, that it is a manuscript written by an Arab called CideHameteBenengeli (Sir Hamid Aubergine) and that his book is a translation into Spanish of the original Arabic. Don Quixote “is born of ideas latent in extinct, condemned texts, whether Arabic or chivalric,” the critic Edward Rothstein wrote in the New York Times.
Ibn Tufail’s twelfth-century novel Hayy ibn Yaqdhanis about a man who finds himself on a desert island along with a companion and raises philosophical questions about the relationship between the individual and society, man’s capacity to survive in a “natural state,” religion and inter-faith toleration, and the pursuit of knowledge (English translations were published from a Latin version in 1674 and 1686 and the original Arabic in 1708). The novel bears striking similarities to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which is commonly regarded as the first novel in the English language. The protagonists of both novels invent their own tools, make their own weapons, a club, construct a storehouse for food, dress in animal skins, and tame and keep animals. While Hayy has horses, birds of prey, and chickens, Crusoe has a dog, parrot, cats, and goats.
Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, which was brought to England from Aleppo in the seventeenth century by Edward Pococke, Oxford’s first chair of Arabic and John Locke’s favorite professor, caused a sensation among European intellectuals and became the third-most translated Arabic text after the Qur’an and The Arabian Nights. John Locke spoke eagerly of a meeting to discuss Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, which was translated by Pococke’s son. Baruch Spinoza had it translated into Dutch, and it was twice translated into German and was celebrated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Ibn Tufail’s book “could be considered one of the most important books that heralded the Scientific Revolution.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe was profoundly impressed by Islam and was influenced by it in his work. Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan is inspired by the Persian poet Hafez; major European composers set music to its verses, among them Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, and Richard Strauss. Johannes Brahms called Schubert’s Suleika I, adapted from the Divan and the name of a figure in the Qur’an, “the loveliest song that has ever been written.” In West-Eastern Divan, Goethe made the enigmatic comment that expressed his admiration for Islam: “If ‘Islam’ signifies ‘submitting to God’ / In Islam, we all live and die.” Goethe also wrote “Mahomet’s Song,” a powerful poem dedicated to the Prophet of Islam.
Most Germans we met during our fieldwork for our European project, while aware of Goethe’s stature as the Shakespeare of the German language, had no idea of his relationship to Islam.
This general lack of knowledge is widespread and as a result a great deal of Islamophobic prejudice that portrays Islam as a “culture of barbarism” is allowed to go un-challenged. If the West acknowledges its debt to Islam, perhaps it will treat Muslims with respect and not as unwelcome guests. The onus is on Muslims to pursue knowledge as they are commanded to do in their holy book and share that with confidence and good-will with the world.
(The writer is an author, poet, filmmaker, playwright, and the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American University in Washington, DC. He formerly served as the Pakistani High Commissioner to the UK and Ireland. He tweets @AskAkbar)
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