How Muslims Saved the World

And Then Shot Themselves in the Foot

Background

Prophet Muhammad passed away in AD 632, after which there were four Caliphs, known as the Rightfully Guided Caliphs, who succeeded him as leaders of the Muslim community. In 661, with the accession of Muawiya, when the capital of the Islamic world was shifted from Medina to Damascus, the Caliphate became more or less hereditary.

Since Muawiya belonged to the Umayyad clan of the Quraish tribe (the tribe to which the Prophet belonged), the line of succeeding Caliphs is collectively referred to as the Umayyad Dynasty.

In 750, a new dynasty, known as the Abbasid, gained control of the Caliphate. The Abbasids moved the capital of the Caliphate to Kufa in modern day Iraq, and thereafter to the newly founded city of Baghdad in 762. The Abbasids claimed to be descended from an uncle of the Prophet, whose name was Abbas, hence their title.

The Abbasid dynasty that ruled from Baghdad lasted from 750 to 1258, and was finally extinguished with the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols under Hulegu Khan. However, in practical terms, of the thirty-seven Caliphs who ruled as Abbasid Caliphs from Iraq, only the first ten, from 750 to 861, had any real power; with a few exceptions, most of the Abbasid Caliphs who came after Mutawakkil (the last of these ten Caliphs) were just puppets and figureheads.

The real power behind the throne was taken over by the Turkish slave army that was initially brought in as a praetorian guard, and ultimately became so powerful that it could make and unmake rulers almost at whim; a favored tactic was to blind the discarded Caliph, and this was done so frequently that at one time there were three blinded Caliphs begging for food in the streets of Baghdad.

Baghdad

It was during the early period of the Abbasids that the Islamic world reached its zenith, in terms of both its opulence as well as its learning. The Baghdad of Harun Al Rashid, the fifth Abbasid Caliph, who ruled from 786 to 809, was a great and wealthy city of over 300,000 people, renowned for its sheer wealth, full of lavishly decorated palaces, rich bazaars, museums, libraries, schools, and public baths.

Goods from the farthest reaches of the Islamic world flowed into Baghdad, as the Abbasids, sitting on wealth that was extracted through taxation from the farthest reaches of their empire, spent it on both luxury as well as intellectual pursuits, living an extravagant lifestyle that still inspires awe.

This was not only a time of material prosperity, it was also a period of great intellectual ferment. The founders of all the four main Sunni Muslim schools of jurisprudence — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi, and Hambali — lived and worked during the hundred-year period ending in 855, creating a coherent set of laws for the laity to follow.

A Fateful Decision by Mamun

Harun Al Rashid’s son Mamun, who ruled as the seventh Abbasid Caliph from 813 to 833, established the Bayt al-Hikmah (House of Wisdom), which historian Philip Hitti, in his book “The Arabs: A Short History” describes as “the most important educational institution since the foundation of the Alexandrian Museum in the first half of the third century B.C.”

The House of Wisdom functioned as a centralized point for translating books that were being collected from all parts of the world, including Indian treatises on astronomy and mathematics. It was Abbasid scholars who were responsible for spreading the Indian decimal numbering system to the world, without which the modern world as we know it could not have come into existence.

Scholars who produced original works, or could bring forward books for translation, were paid with the weight of their manuscripts in gold; the emphasis was on collection of knowledge for its own sake, without any a priori consideration of religious suitability. As a result, many ancient Greek texts, which would have otherwise been lost forever, were retained for posterity.

But what motivated Mamun into taking such an unprecedented and liberal approach to the acquisition of knowledge? It was a certain view of the world, one may even say the universe, and how its functioning could be interpreted and understood. This was a rationalist view of the world, embedded within an Islamic/religious superstructure, known as the Mutazili doctrine.

The Rationalist Doctrine

Although the Mutazili school of thought had been founded in the city of Basra during Umayyad times, it was during Mamun’s reign that it was elevated to a state doctrine, with momentous implications for Islamic history; moreover, given that the intellectual activities of Muslim scientists affected the later history of other nations, Mamun also (inadvertently) affected the trajectory of world history with his decision.

There were many aspects to this doctrine, but the most important, from the point of view of our discussion, is that the Mutazilis regarded reason as a valid means of arriving at religious truth, and also believed in secondary causation — the idea that God had created the universe with secondary laws that underlay its functioning.

From this idea, it followed naturally that humans could have free will, and therefore the power of their own accord to do right or wrong, since human beings, as created beings, could act on correspondingly created secondary laws. In other words, it allowed human beings to have free agency while still allowing, in principle, for God to remain omnipotent, i.e. remain as the Primary Cause.

It also meant that the natural world was quite amenable to analysis and discovery, since, almost by definition, the secondary causes created by God could be studied in their own right as natural laws, an understanding of which could be used to change the world through purely human efforts, i.e. through a combination of human free will acting on secondary laws.

The Opposition

The Mutazili viewpoint was regarded as heretical by the mainstream religious establishment, and this opposition crystallized around Abu al-Hassan al-Ashari, who died in 935; he was a former Mutazili who renounced this doctrine, and thereafter became its most vocal opponent.

Some of the arguments between the two schools revolved around issues that seem arcane and theological in nature, such as whether the Quran was created (the Mutazili position) or uncreated (the Ashari belief). However, the most critical Ashari counter-argument, again from our viewpoint, was the belief that God was the only cause in the universe, a doctrine also known as occasionalism.

The Ashari position was that to conceive of secondary causes in the universe, which in turn allowed human beings to predict what would happen in a given situation, was considered to create a boundary on the will of God. Since God was all-powerful, setting any constraints on His will amounted to a heresy.

In time, with further elaboration by the philosopher al-Ghazzali (who died in 1111), the Ashari position became official Sunni Muslim doctrine, and the Mutazili position is now considered heretical, and a deviance from the correct path.

In practical terms, the Mutazili school of thought effectively ceased to exist by the year 1000, as the orthodox position, at least in the core of the Islamic world, became Ashari.

Practical Effects

The fact that the Mutazili doctrine “officially” combined revelation with reason, where God as the ultimate cause of everything (revelation or Primary Cause) could be combined with an acceptance of secondary causes (reason), meant that every study of the material world, no matter where it led, could be reconciled with religion in a non-contradictory manner.

To give a modern example, the theory of evolution would be quite acceptable to a Mutazili, because it provides a secondary explanation for the creation of new species, with God, as always, being the Primary Cause.

In fact, if everything happens through secondary causes, then a theory such as evolution, to explain the emergence of new species through a natural process, would be a necessity in the Mutazali view of the world.

Thus, this initial dominance of the Mutazili doctrine brought two centuries of unprecedented progress in scientific and intellectual achievements within the Islamic world.

Counter-Effects

Once the orthodox Ashari counter-reaction set in and solidified to become the new mainstream, the intellectual climate ossified along with it, for if God was the only cause for everything that was happening in the material world, there was not much point in studying or understanding it.

The Mutazili vision of a coherent and logical universe that ran on predictable and rational secondary laws was now replaced by a universe that was the way it was just because that was how God had willed it; in fact, as noted above, to believe that the past “behavior” of the universe set a precedent for the future was heresy, because it set a constraint on God’s actions.

The prevalent Muslim belief is that it was the Mongol conquest of 1258 that put an end to the golden age of Islam, but the reality is that this golden age, at least in the core of the Islamic world, had ended well before that, and it was not the Mongols who put an end to it, but the misguided belief that rationalism would lead to the end of faith.

However, all was not lost, because there were still areas of the Islamic world which were far enough from the core to escape the stifling bounds of orthodoxy, at least for a while longer. These were Fatimid Egypt, and Islamic Spain. You can read about these in Part 2 and Part 3.