Islamic scholars Essay

Western philosophy of religion, as the basic ancestor of modern religious studies, is differentiated from theology and the many Eastern philosophical traditions by generally being written from a third party perspective. â€Å"Islamicization of the West†, is the diffusion and assimilation of Islamic culture in the West. This is distinct from Islamization that means the conscious acceptance and implementation of the ideal Islamic cultural patterns by non-Muslims and nominal Muslims. Islamicization is sociologically similar to, though not identical with, Westernization subject to the limits and conditions of imitative- innovative social change. The Islamicization of the Medieval West, occurred, first, during the period ending around the middle of the eleventh century before systematic translations from Arabic into Western languages began; secondly during the age of Arabic translations coinciding with the little Renaissance of the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries; and third, during the Catholic-Protestant Reformation and Renaissance of the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The transformation of the West during these centuries until the sixteenth, passed through several stages of contact and conflict with Islamic culture. The West resorted to various strategies. Until about the end of the eleventh century, the Western views of ideal Islam and its cultural and military triumphant civilization were fostered by sheer ignorance, fanaticism, hatred toward Islam and the Muslims, Biblical exegesis, and relative intellectual and physical isolation. This led to the expected apogee of Western Zealot type response: the Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The extensive contacts with the superior Islamic culture and Muslims during the Crusades ushered in a new era in Western self-consciousness, and awakened responses to Islamic culture. The highest intellectual achievements of the West during these two centuries, twelfth and thirteenth comprised the imitation of Islamic science and learning. Universities were found in the West patterned on the Muslim universities to assimilate the new knowledge made available by translations of the works in Arabic and, to a lesser extent, of Greek classics, which have been superseded by the Muslims. The main philosophical influence on the Christian thought at this period was Avicenna and Averroes, the two Muslim philosophers commenting Aristotle and building their philosophical systems on or against the Greek philosopher. Aristotle presented to the Christian scholars the opportunity to escape from the Muslim thought as such. Aristotle belonging to the classical past (Greek and Roman) of Europe was a positive complement to the Muslim sciences towards which the Christian scholars had turned to acquire their knowledge. He began a new era by pointing inwards at Christians and their own deficiencies as an explanation for their lack of success compared to the Muslims’ one. He believed the cause of Muslims’ success was their religion, which sanctioned worldly pursuits, self-will and secular dominion. How Islamic scholars first translated Aristotle and then how Western Christians came into possession of them. Muslim philosophy influenced Western thought in several ways, it initiated in the West the humanistic movement; introduced the historical sciences and the scientific method; helped the Western scholastics in harmonizing philosophy with faith; stimulated Western mysticism; laid the foundations of Italian Renaissance and, to a degree, moulded the modem European . The Muslims were the first humanists and they gave a humanist bend to the Western mind. They were the first to reveal to the West that outside the prevailing Catholic Church it was not all darkness and barbarism but untold wealth of knowledge. They captured and further developed all the intellectual achievements of Greece and transmitted them to the West before any direct contact between the Greek intellect and the Western mind was established. It was through their influence that ancient and contemporary men outside the Christian West also began to be looked upon as human and even possessed of higher civilizations. To the Arabians, Aristotle represented and summed up Greek philosophy. They adopted the doctrine and system, which the progress of human affairs had made the intellectual aliment of their Syrian guides. It was a matter of historical necessity, and not an act of deliberate choice. When the need of scientific culture awoke amongst them, they accepted Aristotle. From first to last Arabian philosophers made no claim to originally, their aim was merely to propagate the truth of Peripateticism as it had been delivered to them. In medicine and astronomy, as well as in philosophy, they entertained an almost superstitious reverence for their Greek teachers. It was with them that the deification of Aristotle began. And from them the belief that in him human intelligence had reached its limit passed. Abul Walid Mohammad Ibn Rushd was the ultimate rationalist, the Aristotelian heretic of the medieval Islam and Christianity. His singular influence in stimulating the Western Renaissance is acknowledged as the landmark in the history of Western civilization. Along with Ibn Sina, he is the greatest name in Arabian philosophy whose influence spread, in many directions, through the duration of the Middle Ages, then in the epoch of the Renaissance up to the very threshold of modern times. Indeed, he was the greatest Muslim philosophers of the West, and one of the greatest of medieval times. Ibn Rushd came from a family of Cordoban scholars and was a trained lawyer and a physician; his role initiated him into philosophy. He wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle, and others. His philosophy was in the tradition of prevailing Islamic scholasticism, with attempts to synthesize Islamic faith and reason in light of the available Greek heritage. His Commentaries on Aristotle were translated into Latin and Hebrew. The works of Aristotle and Ibn Rushd in their Latin translations were used not only in the curriculum at Naples, but were also sent to the Universities of Paris and Bologna. Once the rediscovery of Aristotle through Ibn Rushd’s writings was complete, the philosophers and theologians alike found themselves in possession of the greatest intellectual reservoir ever developed up to that time. Ibn Rushd â€Å"the Great Commentator. Influenced by his writings, philosophers and theologians split into two major groups; the liberal, with Siger of Brabant at their head, and the conservative, with St. Thomas Aquinas of the Dominician Monks at their head. The issues for the split where metaphysical, philosophical, and practical. However his critics, did not escape his influence, and their understanding of Aristotle was conditioned. When Ibn Rushd died in 1198, he bequeathed to his successors the ideal of a purely rational philosophy, an ideal whose influence was to be such that, by it, even the evolution of Christian philosophy was to be deeply modified. Gilson attributes to Ibn Rushd the recognition, which became pivotal to St. Thomas’ own philosophy, that nothing should enter the texture of metaphysical knowledge save only rational and necessary demonstrations. However, unlike some of his adversarial Latin Averroists, St. Thomas was not willing to concede that either Aristotle or Ibn Rushd were infallible. The enthusiasm in Paris during the thirteenth century for Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelian Commentaries brought serious questions as to the compatibility of Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelianism with the Christian doctrine. In the thirteenth century, Papal Inquisition against the Christian heretics came under condemnations with the focus mainly on Latin Averroists, led by Siger of Brabant, who was suspected of subscribing to the double-truth doctrine. Ibn Rushd himself did not subscribe to such a thesis, it is doubtful, according to Gilson, and other medievalists that even Siger himself did so. This doctrine, however, was a godsend for the scientifically minded people in the West, who were condemned and persecuted by the Church and the State. They found their best support in this and other â€Å"Averroisms†. The Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelian commentaries and his own contributions rapidly became the ruling mode of social thought in the West. Scholars of medieval Europe were provoked and inspired by Ibn Rushd’s writings. Whereas some Muslim scholastics and their Latin successors tried to â€Å"Islamise† and â€Å"Christianise† Hellenism, Ibn Rushd’s commentaries and rationalism seemed to excessively â€Å"Hellenise† Islam and Christianity. Thus, his Muslim contemporaries persecuted him while Muslim posterity almost ignored him, allowing his works to be lost. However, Jews preserved many of them. In Latin Christianity, the commentaries were translated into Latin from the Hebrew, fed the heresies of Siger of Brabant and the rationalism of the Italian school of Padua, and threatened the foundations of Christianity. St. Thomas recognized that some parts of religion were beyond reason and must be accepted by faith alone. The aim of his life was to reconcile Aristotelianism and Muslim knowledge with Christian theology and Thomas Aquinas was led to write his document to halt the threatened liquidation of Christian theology by Arabic interpretations of Aristotle. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Latin orientated-Averroism had far-reaching consequences for medieval and modern social thought, hardly foreseeable by the medieval scholastics. It established a tradition in which it became possible to question the status of religion and from the end of the twelfth century to the end of the sixteenth century Averroism remained the dominant school of thought, in spite of the orthodox reaction it created first among the Muslims in Spain and then among the Talmudists, and finally, among the Christian clergy. These centuries witnessed revolutions in the evolution of social thought, with medieval Islamic sources always providing the background. As the Greek heritage â€Å"had aroused the great age of Arabic science and philosophy, so now it would excite the European mind and inquiry and speculation would crack stone after stone of that majestic edifice to bring this collapse of the medieval system in the fourteenth century, and the beginnings of modern philosophy in the ardor of the Renaissance . The results were monumental in Western history. It is suggested that Harold Nebelsick puts it well. He discusses the achievements of the Arab-Islamic scholars and how they appropriated, appreciated and preserved Greek classical learning and built upon it and thus, laid the foundations for a quite unprecedented revival of learning in Europe, and the results were the Renaissance in the thirteenth century, the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, and eventually the rise of modern science in the seventeenth. Even in our own time the contributions of those scholars, in the world of Islam and in the Christian West, represent the source of the most beneficent form of intellectual enlightenment. For Ibn Rushd, the primacy of reason is unquestioned but compatible with faith, and for this Gilson regards him as the herald of rationalism long before the Renaissance. In his Harmony of Philosophy and Religion, which was not available to St. Thomas, Siger of Brabant or their contemporaries in Latin, Ibn Rushd maintains a position which may be called the harmony of truth, philosophical and theological. Thus, philosophical truth, although superior to religious truth, is not really incompatible with, or even different, from it. The only difference is the path to truth philosophical and the theological. The Islamicisation of intellectual culture in Spain as early as the ninth century was described by Alvaro, a contemporary Cordovian bishop, the Christians loved to read the poems and romances of the Arabs, theologians and philosophers. Young Christians read and studied with enthusiasm the Arab books, and gathered immense libraries at great expense and despised the Christian literature as unworthy of attention. This refinement of life gradually spread northwards from Spain and Sicily. The experiences of the Crusaders in Islamic lands doubtless contributed something to the spread of Arab culture in Western Europe. The notion of â€Å"the miracle of Arabic science† circulated most unfortunately by Sarton, the Historian of medieval science, is false. The explanation of the â€Å"phenomenon† of the sudden birth of Islamic science lays down in the living Islamic ethos of those times; its dogmas and its gamut of culture; the all- pervading Islamic law which forged strong bonds of social co-operation among the Muslims, and between the Muslims and non-Muslims, citizens and resident aliens of the vast Islamic society of bewildering religious, ideological, national, racial and linguistic diversity. This Islamic ethos in action rekindled the dying members of the pre-Quranic ancient sciences and worldwide civilization. These mechanisms operate only in a cultural and political milieu of propitious dogmas, laws, values, cosmological doctrines, attitudes and efforts, all of which existed in the progressive period of medieval Islamic civilization. Conclusion Muslims gave a humanist bend to the Western mind. They revealed to the West that outside the prevailing catholic church it was not all darkness and barbarism but immense wealth of knowledge. Before any direct contact between the Greek intellect and the Western mind was established, Arabs had captured and further developed all the intellectual achievements of Greece. It was also due to their influence that men outside the Christian West began to be considered as human and even possessors of higher civilizations. The Muslims absorbed the best in the existing sciences and civilizations consistent with Islam and developed them, thanks to the intensely developed Islamic consciousness and conditioning, based on a remarkable Islamic system of education. There was great flexibility in horizontal and vertical mobility of people as nationalistic and hedonistic evils were held in check. Prerequisites for science and civilization were there: invention and innovation based on original thought; social mindedness and utilitarianism of individual efforts as well as in the organization of state and its educational and other programs; political stability, the rule of law and constitutionalism. All these mechanisms and conditions are necessary for the genesis, development, diffusion and application of science and technology. This fact of medieval Islamicization of the West needs to be fully researched, accepted and incorporated in specialized works and in the teaching materials of schools and colleges around the world. The consequences of this will be far reaching in understanding the socio-cultural rejuvenation and modernization of the developing nations, in building up a genuine and universally acceptable theory of social action, and in ridding sociology of ethnocentrism; in removing the burdens of historical romanticism and apologetics imposed upon the underdeveloped nations and suppressed minorities as a reaction to the cultural arrogance of nations and ethnic groups which are highly developed today but had their own dark ages at some other time and in promoting international understanding and co-operation for development and world peace. As a whole, various possible relationships between ideas of Muslim scholars, Greek philosophy and Christianity hence scholastics’ stand towards borrowing without acknowledgement or rejection Muslim scholars tried to interpret Greek ideas to establish a synthesis if possible. Otherwise, they criticized and refuted them. Since Christianity also faced the same problems, scholastic scholars borrowed those arguments, if they found them favorable in their case also, without acknowledgement. In this category generally come philosophical and metaphysical ideas Thomas Aquinas was led to write his Summa to halt the threatened liquidation of Christian theology by Arabic interpretations of Aristotle’ ‘Indeed the industry of Aquinas was due not to love of Aristotle but to fear of Averroes’. . It was an acknowledgement but with ill intention. Such references are not uncommon even in the contemporary texts that fully ignore Muslim scholars’ contributions to economic thought; scholastics borrowed without hesitation and preferred to refer to Greek scholars if they felt such a need. There was a spontaneous and determined general agreement about what to take and what to reject; what was taken was always either culturally common, or culturally neutral. The body of scientific knowledge was culturally neutral. Its cultural bearings were easily absorbed, because they were part of the common inheritance of the Arab world and of Europe. In times that are more recent a large number of Western scholars, together with Muslim scholars writing in Western languages, have been bringing out the diffusion of Islamic science, philosophy, and other aspects of Islamic culture in medieval West. However, such researches have not been incorporated in the Western education system and culture, in the manner and to the extent necessary for fostering the proper appreciation of the ideal and historical patterns of Islamic culture. Therefore, the West portends and strives for Westernization of the Muslim world because of what is considered to be the backwardness of contemporary Muslim behavioral culture pattern and the denial of the existence and validity of ideal Islamic culture pattern. Therefore, we can see the reactionary Muslim responses through polemics, xenophobia, historical romanticism, zealotism, fanaticism, extremism, even terrorism. This is in fact very different from the creative adaptation indispensable for contemporary rejuvenation. The consequences of the denial, falsification and neglect of this historical fact have been extremely serious: the denigration of Islam in the eyes of Muslims and non-Muslims; the identification of Islam and its culture with ignorance and backwardness and of â€Å"modernity† and progress with Western civilization; the creation of xenophobia and arrogance in Western mind, and the perpetration of ideological and politico- economic. Western imperialism against Muslim people; the imposition of an inferiority complex among Western educated â€Å"modern† Muslims, and the bitter social and political cleavages between the â€Å"modern† and the â€Å"traditional† Muslim elites. 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