THE ISLAMIC MIDDLE AGES

Abstract

Ten years after Muḥammad’s death in 632, Arabic warriors kept together by the new creed he had established had conquered Egypt, Syria (both from the Byzantine Empire), as well as the Sasanid Empire (Iraq and Iran), and before 714 the whole of North Africa and most of the Iberian Peninsula. In 661, power had gone to a family dynasty, the Umayyad, at the cost of a split which left the partisans of Muḥammad’s son-in-law (the Ši‘ah) as an internal opposition. Umayyad power was ended by the Abbāsid revolution in 750, in which the Šīʿites participated without profiting.

Under the Umayyads, conversion to Islām was allowed, but converts became subordinate “clients” to an Arabic tribe. Elite Persian clients had been another driving force in the Abbāsid revolution, and they became the real beneficiaries of the revolution.

The earliest sciences in the Islamic world can be characterized as “Muslim” sciences; they deal with problems of religious importance: first sciences of language, needed for the production of the Qurʾān (Muḥammad’s revelations were at first handed down orally); criticism of the also orally transmitted traditions about Muḥammad’s sayings and decisions; theoretical theology born from the political conflicts. After the Abbāsid revolution, first Sasanid astronomy-cum-astrology (with appurtenant mathematical techniques) and medicine were taken over, but soon the whole range of Greek learning was translated into Arabic, becoming the foundation for further unfolding. These “original” sciences were certainly “Islamic”, woven into the fabric of Islamic society and culture though cultivated also by Jewish and Christian scholars; but they were not “Muslim”.

In particular the “original” sciences created a counterpart of the so-called “Greek miracle”, the discovery of the possibility of theory not meant to serve any practical purpose. This “Islamic miracle” was the stance that no theory is too majestic to be used, and no practice too lowly to be dealt with by theory.

After the Mongol invasions and the dissolution of much of the Islamic world into impoverished statelets, the economic basis for active scientific life and creativity dwindled.

The text selections represent Muslim as well as well as “original” sciences. To the former group belong theoretical theology, historiography and lexicography; to the latter philosophy, medicine, astrology, alchemy, algebra (a newly created mathematical discipline), sociological meta-historiography and commercial science.