Contribution to Europe — II
By Dr Akbar Ahmed
American University
Washington, DC
Alhazen’s contemporary al-Zahrawi (Abulcasis) of Cordoba, considered the father of modern surgery, influenced generations of European physicians. He was the author of the main surgical textbook used in Europe for five centuries and was cited more than 200 times by Guy de Chauliac, the ‘most eminent authority on surgery during the Middle Ages,’ in the treatise he published in 1363.
Similarly, the main chemistry textbook used in Europe until the seventeenth century was the Summa perfectionismagisterii, a Latinized derivation of the work of the eighth- and ninth-century scholar Jabir ibn Hayyan of Persia, known as the father of chemistry.
Indeed, some of the greatest European figures who famously contributed to the creation of Western civilization were influenced directly or indirectly by Muslim thought. The subject merits further research, but let us briefly introduce some of them here. They include Aquinas, Dante, Da Vinci, Dürer, Copernicus, Descartes, Cervantes, Defoe, and Goethe.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Averroes’s philosophic arguments in balancing faith and reason were of enormous assistance to Christian scholars grappling with this same central dilemma. His translations of and commentaries on Aristotle and Plato were of such high caliber and so impressed Thomas Aquinas and other scholars that they assumed Averroes’s name needed no further elaboration and referred to him in their own work as “the Commentator.” Declared a saint by the Church, the immense contribution of Aquinas to Christianity and Europe had to do with his efforts to balance and reconcile Aristotle and Christianity in the manner that Averroes did in Islam and Maimonides in Judaism. Pope Leo XIII declared Aquinas, widely considered the Catholic Church’s greatest theologian, ‘patron of all Catholic universities, colleges, and schools throughout the world.’
In the landmark encyclical AeterniPatris (1879), Leo held up Aquinas as the model for Catholics engaging with ‘modern’ science, capturing the magnitude of the philosopher’s achievement concerning reason and faith, which was exactly the project of Averroes: “He joined them together in friendly union, preserving the rights and recognizing the dignity of each; so that reason, reared aloft on the wings of St Thomas, could scarcely soar higher, and it was almost impossible even for faith to be supported by additional or stronger aids from reason than had already been furnished by the Angelic Doctor.”
In his 1998 encyclical, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), Pope John Paul II similarly hailed Aquinas, speaking of “the dialogue which he undertook with the Arab and Jewish thought of his time. . .. Both the light of reason and the light of faith come from God, he argued; hence there can be no contradiction between them…. This is why the Church has been justified in consistently proposing Saint Thomas as a master of thought and a model of the right way to do theology.”
These popes and Aquinas were following in the footsteps of Pope Sylvester II, née Gerbert of Aurillac, the first French pope, who rose from humble beginnings to the papacy in the tenth century following his studies in Spain, possibly Cordoba, to which he travelled, it was recorded, because he was “thirsty for knowledge.” Gerbert, master at the French cathedral school of Reims and tutor to the son of Otto I, the Holy Roman emperor, who would become Otto II, ‘was the first Christian known to teach math using the nine Arabic numerals and zero,’ drawing on the work of al-Khwarizmi, known as Algoritmi, the founder of algebra who gave his name to algorithm. This numerical system would later be popularized in Europe by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci, who studied in Almohad North Africa. The abacus that Gerbert devised ‘has been called the first counting device in Europe to function digitally, even the first computer’ and other devices he constructed include an armillary sphere, ‘a primitive planetarium.’ Though Gerbert faced many challenges — he was called a devil worshipper and sorcerer, had to flee for his life under excommunication, and was twice accused of treason — he remained steadfast in his love of Islamic and Greek learning, which he felt was fully compatible with Christianity.
Dante Alighieri
According to many scholars, including the great Spanish scholar of Arabic Miguel Asín Palacios, Dante’s Divine Comedy is heavily influenced by Islamic tales of the Prophet’s mystical night flight, notably the Andalusian Arabic work the Book of the Ladder. At the time the Book of the Ladder was being translated at the court of Alfonso X in Spain, Dante’s teacher and guardian after his father’s death, BrunettoLatini of Florence, was at Alfonso’s court. While in the Book of the Ladder, the Prophet ascends through nine circles of heaven guided by the archangel Gabriel, who has been sent by God, Paradiso, the third part of the Comedy, finds Dante ascending through nine circles of heaven guided by the angelic Beatrice, who has also been sent by God. While Prophet Muhammad meets other prophets in the different circles of heaven, Dante meets various saints. There is also the use of numerous allegories, for example, as Palacios notes, when the Prophet and Dante each meet a woman who uses deception and charm to hide her considerable defects and ravaged body and attempts to seduce them — an encounter presented as a warning to avoid succumbing to the temptations of the world. The general outlines of the two episodes are clearly identical, concludes Palacios. The Book of the Ladder describes the moon as a dazzling precious stone, as does Dante.
In his account of paradise, ‘Dante makes use of the extraordinary sensuous nature of the Islamic paradise — its begemmed beauty, its overmastering luminescence — in his own depiction of the Christian heaven.’ There are also many similarities in the depiction of hell in both stories. In the Islamic tale, ‘the naked men and women writhing in a furnace inevitably suggest the adulterers in Dante who are incessantly swept on by the gale of hell. Even more striking is Dante’s adaption of the Moslem punishment of usurers to those who committed violence and deeds of blood. Submerged in the deep waters of a river of blood, they, like the usurers, strive to gain the shore, only to be forced back by the Centaur archers (who take the place of the simpler stone-throwers in the Moslem legend).’
Palacios additionally asserts that there are other important elements in the Divine Comedy that have ‘their precedents in Islamic literature, whether it be in the Koran, in the hadiths, in the Moslem legends of the final judgment, or in the doctrine of the theologians, philosophers, and mystics,’ particularly the towering Andalusian Sufi IbnArabi.
(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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