Religion Triumphant, Science in Retreat
In the world of science and philosophy, the great days were over. Religion had won the struggle against them, just as in young Europe at the same time religion was giving ground. Honor now went to theologians, mystics, the poor and the saints, while scholars mostly sought to understand and explain the findings and sayings of their predecessors rather than study nature personally with open eyes.
In Samarkand, the Muslim astronomers at Ulugh Beg's observatory gave their last display by compiling astronomical tables (1437) that Europeans accepted until the eighteenth century. With the help of these tables and an Arabic chart, an Arab pilot, the book says, was able to guide Vasco da Gama around southern Africa to India, the momentous voyage that ended Islam's economic dominance of the world.
Ibn Battuta, the Great Traveler
In geography a great figure emerged. Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Battuta was born at Tangier in 1304. During his life he crossed the length of the abode of Islam, the realm of Muhammad, and after twenty-four years of travel returned to Morocco and died in Fez. His route shows the enormous spread of the Islamic faith at the time. Ibn Battuta wrote that he traveled 125,000 kilometers in Muslim lands, more than any other traveler before the age of steam, according to the book. He visited Granada, North Africa, Timbuktu, Egypt, the Near and Middle East, Russia, India, Ceylon and China, and met each Muslim ruler.
In each city he first went to pay respects to scholars and theologians, and then presented himself to the rulers. He says that of the seven mighty kings of the world, all but one, who is Chinese, are Muslims. He describes not only notable people and places but also animals, plants, minerals, foods, drinks, prices of goods, climate and physical geography, customs, morals, religious practices and beliefs. He speaks respectfully of Jesus and Mary, but adds, to satisfy his own feelings, that every pilgrim entering the Church of the Resurrection pays Muslims a small fee.
When he returned to Fez and told what he had seen, most listeners accused him of fantasy and exaggeration. The vizier of the time had a secretary write down his memoirs as he told them. For a long time the work was lost and almost forgotten, until in modern times, when the French occupied Algeria, it was found.
Natural History and Medicine
Between 1250 and 1350 the most prolific writers on natural history were Muslims. Muhammad al-Damiri of Cairo wrote a 1,500-page book on zoology, Hayat al-Hayawan. Medicine was still largely a Semitic art, and hospitals were abundant in the lands of Islam.
Ala al-Din ibn al-Nafis, a physician of Damascus, discovered and explained the pulmonary circulation of the blood about 1260, some 270 years before Servetus. Ibn al-Khatib, a physician of Granada, attributed the spread of the Black Death to contagion and proposed quarantining the sick, against the view of theologians who held it to be a sign of God's wrath and vengeance on sinners. His treatise on the plague (about 1360) contains a remarkable statement that rings of heresy: when a proof drawn from traditions clearly contradicts the evidence of our senses, the proof must be replaced or modified.
Historians and Geographers
Scholars and historians of the time were as numerous as poets. They always wrote in Arabic, the Esperanto of Islam, and in many cases combined research and writing with political and civil service. Abu al-Fida of Damascus took part in crusader wars, became vizier to al-Malik al-Nasir in Cairo, and returned to Syria as governor of Hama. There he collected a large library and wrote works that were the best of their kind. His Taqwim al-Buldan in geography was better and fuller than anything Europeans had written on the subject by then.
He calculated that three quarters of the globe was covered by water. He also discussed the point that a traveler going around the world westward would gain a day, and going eastward would lose one. His well-known Mukhtasar Tarikh al-Bashar was known to Europeans as the most reliable Islamic history.
Ibn Khaldun: A Life in Politics
The great name in fourteenth-century history is undoubtedly Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun. Even for Westerners he was an important and substantial figure who, while traveling, serving in government and gathering the experience of life, was thoroughly familiar with the art, literature, science and philosophy of his time. With this breadth he discussed the different aspects of general history in his famous Kitab al-Ibar. The fact that he was born (1332) and educated in Tunis shows that North African culture was not merely a reflection or shadow of Asian Islam but had its own nature and life.
In his autobiography Ibn Khaldun wrote that from childhood he was eager for knowledge and devoted himself to schooling with energy. The Black Death took his parents and several of his teachers, but he continued his studies until he finally realized that he knew little, a mistake typical of youth. At twenty he became private secretary to the sultan of Tunis, at twenty-four he held the same post under the sultan of Fez, and at twenty-five he was in prison. He moved to Granada and was sent from there as ambassador to the court of the tyrant of Seville. Back in Africa he became chief minister of the emir Abu Abd Allah at Bougie, but when his patron was deposed and killed by his enemies, Ibn Khaldun fled for his life.
In 1370 he was sent as ambassador of Tlemcen to Granada. On the way a Moorish emir captured him, and he served that emir for four years, then withdrew to a castle near Oran (1377). There Ibn Khaldun began writing the Muqaddimah, but needing many books and references not found at Oran, he soon returned to Tunis. In that city he made powerful enemies and had to go to Cairo (1384). His fame as a scholar was now worldwide. When he preached at al-Azhar students gathered around him from all sides, and Sultan Barquq set him a salary, as was his custom with scholars. He rose to be chief judge, applied legal rules with surprising strictness, shut down taverns, was dismissed and again retired.
In the reign of Sultan al-Nasir Faraj, Ibn Khaldun returned to the bench and went with him to fight Timur. The Egyptian army was routed and he took refuge in Damascus. Timur besieged Damascus, and the great historian, by then an old man, led a delegation to the unconquerable Tatar to ask for lenient terms of surrender. Like any author, Ibn Khaldun carried a copy of his history. He read Timur the chapter about him and asked for corrections. Perhaps he had chosen certain pages to fit the occasion. His plan worked, and Timur released him. Soon he was again chief judge of Cairo and held the post until his death at seventy-four (1406).
In this stormy life Ibn Khaldun still managed to write a summary of the philosophy of Averroes and treatises on logic and mathematics, as well as the three volumes of the Muqaddimah, the history of the Berbers and the history of the peoples of the East. Of these works only the last three, which make up the Kitab al-Ibar, survive.
The Muqaddimah: A Philosophy of History
The Muqaddimah counts among the outstanding works of Islamic literature, and its material on the philosophy of history is, though the product of a medieval mind, astonishingly "modern". Ibn Khaldun called history an important branch of philosophy and considered the writing of history a difficult and wide-ranging task. In his view, the real purpose of history is to show us man's social condition, his civilization. It should reveal the natural phenomena of every primitive society, then the cultivation of individuals and the refinement of its customs, the different forms of superiority that peoples win and that lead to the rise of empires and dynasties, the appearance of professions, intellectual occupations, sciences and arts, and all the changes that the natural course of affairs works on the nature of a society.
Ibn Khaldun regarded himself as the first to write history this way and begged pardon for his unavoidable errors. He admitted that he was weaker than anyone in crossing so vast a field, and hoped that capable, learned and good-willed men would examine his work and correct his mistakes with indulgence. What he offered to the general public, he said, had no value in scholars' eyes, yet he could not give up hope of colleagues' kindness. He hoped his work would be useful in the dark times to come, when the world suffers total destruction and seems to change its very nature to prepare for a new creation and a new organization. We need a history, he said, that can describe the state of the world and all its countries and peoples and determine how customs and beliefs change in each society.
He devoted glorious pages of his book to pointing out the errors of earlier historians. In his view they merely recorded events in order and rarely explained the relations between causes and effects. They often accepted legend for truth, invented exaggerated statistics and explained many events by bringing in supernatural forces. Ibn Khaldun himself announced that he would explain and interpret historical events only on the basis of natural factors, would test historians' statements against the present experience of mankind and would reject any report of events that seems impossible today. Present experience should judge the tradition of the past.
His own method in the Muqaddimah was to begin with the philosophy of history, then describe intellectual occupations, general trades and crafts, and then the history of the development of science and art. In later volumes he deals with the political history of each nation, deliberately sacrificing unity of time for unity of place. As he puts it, the real subject of history is the account of the civilization of human societies, how they arise and survive, how writing, science and art arise and develop in each, and finally how they decline and are destroyed. Empires, like individuals, have a life and course of their own. They grow, mature and then decay. We must understand the causes of this sequence of stages, and the most basic condition is the geography of each land. Climate has a general and basic effect.
Geography, Food and Economy
Ibn Khaldun held that the cold of the north gives a serious temperament and the heat of the tropics produces carelessness and a love of pleasure, and the book also reports him attributing physical features to climate. These passages carry stereotypes and are omitted here. Food too affects human character. A heavy diet of meat, spices and grains makes body and mind sluggish and lowers resistance to infection and famine, while a light diet, like that of desert people, gives a healthy, agile body and a clear mind and raises resistance to disease.
Among the peoples of the earth there are no innate differences in ability. Progress or backwardness depends on the geographical conditions of each people's environment. That is why when those conditions change, or when a people migrates to a new climate, its social conditions and traits change too.
Economic conditions, to a lesser degree than geography, also shape a people's growth. Ibn Khaldun divides human societies, by their way of gathering food, into nomads and settled peoples, and sees most wars as the result of greed for more provisions. Nomadic tribes sooner or later defeat settled societies, because their hard and changing life gives them fighting virtues of courage, cooperation and patience. Nomads may destroy civilizations but never create one, and are generally absorbed into the blood and culture of the people they conquered, as even the nomad Arabs were. Since no people stays content with its food supply for long, war becomes natural. War creates or renews political powers. Hence monarchy is the normal form of government and has been common through nearly all of history.
A government's fiscal policy can establish a society or ruin it. Excessive taxation and state participation in production and distribution smother individual incentive, enthusiasm for work and the spirit of competition, and kill the state's golden goose. On the other hand, excessive concentration of wealth may cause revolution and the breakup of society.
Religion and the Five Stages of an Empire
Moral forces also operate in history. Empires stand on the cooperation and shared outlook of their people, and the best way to secure this is for one religion to take hold of minds. Ibn Khaldun, in fact, agrees with the popes, the Inquisition and the Protestant reformers on the value and need of religious unity in any society. For victory and progress one must rely on the support of a people with common faith and a single aim. This unity of hearts and wills can be had only with the help of divine power and religious support. When people attach their hearts to worldly ambitions they become envious and hostile. But if they wash their hands of the world and its vanities for the love of God, jealousies disappear, strife subsides, people help one another wholeheartedly, their unity makes them stronger and good aims advance quickly, until a great and powerful empire arises.
Religion is not only a great help in war; its survival is a source of good for society and peace for the individual soul, and these benefits come only when a single faith, unquestioned, rules society. Philosophers have devised thousands of rational theories but none has found a substitute for religion able to guide and inspire mankind. Since man cannot discover the truth of the world by himself, it is better to accept the faith taught by an inspired lawgiver, who knows our good better and gives clear orders on what to believe and do. After this preface in line with religious principles, our historian and philosopher turns to a naturalistic interpretation of history.
Every empire passes through successive stages. First, a nomad tribe that has won victories settles in the land or country it has conquered to enjoy its benefits. "The least civilized peoples conquer the widest regions." Second, the growing complexity of social relations demands a more centralized power to keep order, and the tribal chief becomes a king. Third, under this stable order wealth increases, cities multiply, culture and literature advance, the arts find patrons, and science and philosophy lift their heads. But the progress of urban life and the comfort that comes from wealth is itself the beginning of corruption. Fourth, the prosperous society reaches a stage where pleasure, luxury and ease are preferred to daring, adventure or war. Religion's hold on faith and imagination weakens and moral standards decline. The warrior's virtues and ambitions vanish, so mercenaries are hired to defend such a society, but they lack patriotic zeal and religious faith. The defenseless treasure invites hungry frontier people to raid and plunder. Fifth, invasion from outside, or conspiracy within, or both together, overthrow the state. This was the course of the Roman empire, of the Almoravid and Almohad states in Spain and of the other Islamic kingdoms in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran, and it "will always be so". This is only a glimpse of the thousands of points that made the Muqaddimah the most credible philosophical product of its century.
The Limits of a Great Mind
Ibn Khaldun put forward new ideas in almost every field of thought, except in theology, where he thought innovation foreign to reason. While writing an important book of philosophy, he called philosophy dangerous and advised his readers to give it up. Probably he meant metaphysics and theology rather than philosophy in its broad sense, the effort to understand human affairs in wide perspective. At times Ibn Khaldun talks like the simplest old woman in a vegetable market, accepting miracles, magic, the "evil eye", the strange properties of the letters of the alphabet and divination by dreams, animal entrails and the flight of birds. Yet he admires science, admits the superiority of the Greeks over Muslims in it and regrets the decline of scientific research in the Islamic world. He rejects alchemy but to some degree believes in astrology.
Here we should lessen his credit with a few negatives. Although the greatness of his thought matches that of Islam, it shares some of Islam's limitations. In his three volumes of history he finds only seven pages to discuss Christianity. He seldom mentions Greece, Rome or medieval Europe. When writing the history of North Africa, Muslim Egypt and the Near and Middle East, he thinks he has told "the history of all peoples". Sometimes he commits careless slips: he thinks Aristotle taught in a portico and Socrates from inside a wooden tub. In fact his method of writing history departs sharply from the principles he sets out in the Muqaddimah. The volumes on the Berbers and the peoples of the East are little more than tedious genealogies of dynasties, court intrigues and minor wars. Evidently he meant them only to record political events, and wrote the Muqaddimah as a history of culture, though only in outline.
To see him again with respect and recall his importance, it is enough to ask which philosophical work of fourteenth-century Christians could stand beside the Muqaddimah. Some earlier writers may have covered part of the wide field he mapped, and among his own people al-Masudi (died 956), in a book now lost, studied the effect of religion, economics, moral aims and environment on the behavior and laws of each society and explained the causes of political decline. Ibn Khaldun considered himself the creator of the science of sociology, and in some respects was right. In writings before the eighteenth century we find no discussion of the philosophy of history or of sociological method comparable to his in breadth, strength of thought and fine analysis.
A leading philosopher of history of our own age judges the Muqaddimah as without doubt the greatest work of its kind ever created by any mind, at any time or place. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology may be compared with it, but Spencer had several collaborators. In any case we can accept the verdict of an eminent scholar of the history of science, who said the Muqaddimah was the most important historical work of the Middle Ages.