Great East-to-West Diffusion

At the simplest level, I use this phrase to refer to the transmission from the East to the West over a period of several thousand years (roughly from the beginning of the Egyptians and Mesopotamian civilizations around 3500 BCE to the consummation of the Great European West-to-East Maritime Project with the inauguration of the European sea routes connecting all parts of the planet, which occurs by around 1700 CE) of ideas, products, and technologies through trade, war, conquest, etc. across both space and time. Although it may initially appear to be a term analogous to the Columbian Exchange there are two fundamental and important differences between the two processes of globalization to which these two terms ultimately refer: first, the Great East-to-West Diffusion was, for the most part, a unidirectional phenomenon as the term so evidently makes it clear, and, second, unlike in the case of the Columbian Exchange, it is a deliberately politically loaded term. That is, in coming up with this phrase (Great East-to-West Diffusion), my concern is to restore to universal memory the historical truth that many of the roots of the so-called “Western Civilization” are to be found in the East, broadly understood to include the entire Afro-Asian ecumene. Why is this so important? Well, for one it speaks to truth (as in do not tell lies by fabricating history) which is one of the foundational purposes of all true education. The second reason is that ever since the emergence of Western global hegemony in the aftermath of the Columbian Project, Western historians of world history have seen their role—for the most part—to advance, in various guises, sometimes overt and sometimes covert, the fallacious notion of “European exceptionalism” (meaning Europeans, compared to others on this planet, have been genetically endowed with superior intelligence) to explain this hegemony, which if not racist in intent at least borders on it. To know about the East-to-West Diffusion and to make it central to the study of world history is to help counter what I call civilizational hubris (and which in turn would help to foster humility and gratitude, two of the several human attributes that are foundational to harmony between peoples). So, from the perspective of true education, to establish, for example, who were the first this and first that (astronomers, inventors, scientists, mathematicians, etc.) would be simply a question of learning facts and no more. It would not be, as it has usually been in the study and teaching of world history by Western historians, an effort to deny the commonality of all humanity in which every ethnic variation of humankind has made some contribution at some point (even if only at the most rudimentary level of domestication of plant and/or animal life) to the totality of the modern human cultural development and experience. (See the fascinating study by Weatherford [1988], with respect to the last point.) As Joseph Needham (1954: 9) sagely observed in volume 1 of his work: “Certain it is that no people or group of peoples has had a monopoly in contributing to the development of science.” For all its proclamation of the virtues of “civilization” (to be understood here in its normative sense) the denial of this fact has been, sadly, as much a project of the West as its other, laudable, endeavors—for reasons that, of course, one does not have to be a rocket scientist to fathom: domination of the planet under the aegis of various forms of imperialism (an endeavor that, even now in the twenty-first century, most regrettably, has yet to see its demise).

Consequently, under these circumstances, true history is burdened by the need for constant vigilance against this Western intellectual tradition of erasure of universal historical memory for the purposes of rendering irrelevant the contributions of others.^[1] Moreover, one must be cognizant of the fact that it is a tradition that relies on a number of techniques: the most direct of which is “scholarly silence”—where there is a complete (or almost complete) absence of any recognition of a contribution. However, given the obvious transparency of this technique, it has increasingly been replaced by one that is more subtle (hence of greater intractability): achieving erasure not by a total lack of acknowledgement, but by the method of token (and sometimes even derisory) acknowledgement where the object of the erasure is mentioned in passing and then promptly dismissed from further consideration despite its continuing relevance to the subject at hand. As an extension of this last point, it is questionable to talk about a Western civilization at all; so much of its inheritance is from outside Europe—a more fitting term perhaps would be Afro-Eurasian civilization. To the ignorantsia, who are heirs to a Western ethnocentric mind-set honed over a period of some 600 years, of seeing humankind in no other terms than a color-coded hierarchical cultural fragmentation, this new appellation may, at first blush, appear hysterically preposterous; yet, in actuality, there is a growing body of literature that cogently demonstrates that the so-called Western civilization is simply a developmental extension of Afro-Asian civilizations.^[2] After all, if one were to take the entire 5,000-year period of recorded human history, commencing from say approximately thirtieth-century B.C.E. to the present twenty-first-century C.E., the European civilizational imprint, from a global perspective, becomes simply an atomized blip (the notion of an unbroken path going from the Greeks to the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, is just that, an illusory fabrication), and what is more, geographically, demographically, and culturally, a peripheral one at that when viewed against that of the neighboring Afro-Asian civilizations, taken together (ranging from the Sumerian to the Egyptian to the Chinese to the Islamic).^[3] It is only in the last 300 years or so that, civilizationally, Western Europe has taken center stage. The fact that many European and U.S. historians appear to be unaware of this simple fact is testimony to the enduring Western ethnocentric teleological tunnel vision that thoroughly imbues their work. Note that Western ethnocentrism is to be understood here as an ideology that is shared by all classes of Western Europeans and their diasporic descendants that is rooted in the assumption that, to quote Harding (1993: 2), “Europe functions autonomously from other parts of the world; that Europe is its own origin, final end, and agent; and that Europe and people of European descent in the Americas and elsewhere owe nothing to the rest of the world.” See also Amin (1989) and Blaut (1993, 2000), for a brilliant, but scathing critique of the Western ethnocentric paradigm that undergirds much of Western historiography.

Yet, consider that if one were to turn one’s historical gaze back to as recently as the beginning of the eighth-century when the Muslims (sometimes referred to as Moors by Western historians) arrived in Europe one has no difficulty whatsoever in categorically stating that there was nothing that one could read in the entrails of Europe then—comparatively backward as it was in almost all ways—that pointed to anything that could predict its eventual rise to global hegemony. What is more, even after fast forwarding 700 years, to arrive in the fifteenth-century, a different reading would still not have been forthcoming. In other words, folks, after you have ploughed through this definition there should be no difficulty in accepting the fact that at the point in time when Columbus left Europe in what would eventually prove to be a portentous journey for the entire planet, the cultures of many developing parts of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene outside the European peninsula were no less rational, achievement-oriented, materialistic, predatory, belligerent, ambitious, scientific, capitalistic, technologically innovative, urbanized, capable of ocean navigation, and so on, than were the cultures of developing parts of Europe of the period (nor should it be difficult to accept that the opposites of these qualities, for that matter, existed at comparable levels of magnitude in both areas of the world).^[4] In fact, on the contrary, in some respects they were more advanced than those of Europe.

Now, of course, it is true that when one considers where Europe was some 700 years earlier (at the time of the Islamic invasion), the rapidity of the European cultural advance is nothing short of miraculous! No, this is not in the least a hint, even remotely, of the much-vaunted but illusory “European miracle.” Because this progress was not achieved by the Europeans autarkicly; they did not do it alone (on the basis of their own intellectual uniqueness, inventiveness, rationality, etc.) that the Eurocentrists are so fond of arguing. Rather, it was an outcome of nothing less than a dialectical interplay between European cultures and the Islamic and other cultures of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene. Hodgson, for instance, is adamant that one must cast ones historiographical gaze across the history of the entire ecumene, for, as he explains, “most of the more immediately formative elements that led to the Transmutation, both material and moral, had come to the Occident, earlier or later, from other regions,” (p. 197). In other words, as he puts it: “[w]ithout the cumulative history of the whole of Afro-Eurasian ecumene, of which the Occident had been an integral part, the Western Transmutation would be almost unthinkable” (p. 198). Or in the words of Frank (1998: 4): “Europe did not pull itself up by its own economic bootstraps, and certainly not thanks to any kind of European exceptionalism of rationality, institutions, entrepreneurship, technology, geniality, in a word—of race.”

To really drive home this fundamental truth some examples may help, and here I will concentrate on the role of Islam (especially considering that it has become a favorite sport of politicians and pseudo-intellectuals alike in the West, since 9/11, to malign this religion at every opportunity in the name of the very legitimate need to severely castigate the terrorists and extremists who have hijacked this religion for their misguided and nefarious ends) in the development of Western modernity. Through the agency of Islam—involving a variety of mechanisms of diffusion, such as direct residential contacts with immigrant Muslims (e.g., in Muslim Sicily and Muslim Spain), the Arabic to Latin translation movement during the Reconquista, the Crusades, and long-distance trade—Europe was introduced to a range of technological artifacts and methods derived from within the Islamic empire, as well as from without (from such places as China and India).^[5] Note, however, that the concept of “technological diffusion” itself requires some analysis. As Glick’s study (1979) of Islamic Spain, for example, attests, one of the most important handmaidens of technological innovation is technological diffusion. However, one must be specific about what this concept means. It should be understood here to refer not only to the direct passage of artifacts and techniques from one culture to another (usually known as technology transfer), but also the indirect form of transmission that Pacey (1996) points to: the spread of information (actively or passively via travelers, traders, books, letters, etc.) about a given technology from one culture to another provoking an “independent” development of similar or even improved technology in the latter culture. Pacey refers to this technology as “responsive inventions.”

Further, in the category of responsive inventions one may also throw in inventions arising out of direct imitation of technological artifacts acquired through trade (for commercial purposes), or acquired through some other means (including illegal means) for the explicit purpose of local manufacture. It follows then that the concept of technological diffusion also embodies (seemingly paradoxically) the possibility of independent inventions. A good example of this that immediately comes to mind is the windmill. It has been suggested (Hill 1993: 116), that whereas in all probability the European windmill—considering its design—was independently invented sometime toward the end of the twelfth-century, the concept of using wind as an energy source may, however, have arrived in Europe through the agency of Islam (windmills—of a different design—had long been in use in the Islamic empire). Another example is the effort by Europeans to imitate the manufacture of a high-quality steel common in the Islamic empire called Damascus steel (primarily used in sword making). Even though, observes Hill (1993: 219), in the end Europeans never learned to reproduce Damascus steel, their 150-year-long effort in this direction was not entirely in vain: it provided them with a better insight into the nature of this steel, thereby allowing them to devise other methods to manufacture steel of a similar quality.

Anyhow, whatever the mode of diffusion, the truth, folks, is this: the arrival of Islamic technology and Islamic mediated technology of non-Islamic (e.g., Chinese, Indian) and pre-Islamic (e.g., Egyptian, Persian, etc.) provenance—examples would include: the abacus; the astrolabe; the compass; paper-making; the ogival arch; gun powder; specialized dam building (e.g., the use of desilting sluices, the use of hydropower, etc.); sericulture; weight-driven clocks; the traction trebuchet; specialized glass-making; sugarcane production and sugar-making; the triangular lateen sail (allowed a ship to sail into wind more efficiently than a regular square sail common on European ships); and cartographic maps (upon which the European nautical charts called portolans were based)—had profound catalytic consequences for Europe.^[6] It became the basis of European technological advancement in a number of key areas and which in turn would help to propel it on its journey toward the fateful year of 1492 and therefrom modernity.

Contemplate this: four of the most important technological advancements that would be foundationally critical to the development of a modern Europe (navigation, warfare, communication and plantation agriculture) had their roots outside Europe, that is, in the East! Reference here, is, of course, to the compass (plus other seafaring aids such as the lateen sail, etc.); gunpowder; paper-making and printing (that is, block printing and printing with movable type); and cane sugar production. All four technologies first originated in the East and then slowly found their way to the West through the mediation of the Muslims.^[7] Along the way, of course, the Muslims improved on them. Now, it is true that Europe’s ability to absorb these technologies was a function of internal developments, some unique to itself. As Pacey (1996: 44) observes: “if we see the use of nonhuman energy as crucial to technological development, Europe in 1150 was the equal of Islamic and Chinese civilizations.” But, as he continues, the key point here is this: “In terms of the sophistication of individual machines, however, notably for textile processing, and in terms of the broad scope of its knowledge, Europe was still a backward region, which stood to benefit much from its contacts with Islam.”

Islam introduced Europe to international commerce on a scale it had never experienced before. The characterization by Watt (1972: 15) that “Islam was first and foremost a religion of traders, not a religion of the desert and not a religion of peasants,” is very close to the truth. Not surprisingly, then, the twin factors of geographic breadth of the Islamic empire (which included regions with long traditions of commerce going back to antiquity, such as the Mediterranean Basin) and the acceptance of commerce as a legitimate occupational endeavor for Muslims—one that had been pursued by no less than Prophet Muhammed himself—had created a vast and truly global long-distance trade unmatched by any civilization hitherto. In fact, the reach of the Islamic dominated commercial network was such that it would embrace points as far apart as China and Italy on the east-west axis and Scandinavia and the deepest African hinterland on the north-south axis, with the result that the tonnage and variety of cargo carried by this network went far beyond that witnessed by even Greece and Rome in their heyday (Turner 1995: 117). Al-Hassan and Hill (1986: 18) remind us that the discovery of thousands upon thousands of Islamic coins dating from the seventh to thirteenth centuries in Scandinavia and the Volga basin region highlights the fact that for many centuries Europe relied on Islamic currency for its commercial activities, such was the domination of international trade by the Muslims (see also Watson 1995 for more on the East-West numismatic relations).

Recall also that the wealth of the Italian city-states like Venice and Genoa (the latter being the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, it may be noted) in medieval Europe rested to a considerable degree on trade in Eastern luxury and other commodities. Now, to be sure, it is mainly Italian and Jewish merchants, trading in places such as Alexandria, Aleppo, and Cairo, who were responsible for the final Mediterranean leg of the huge transoceanic trade that spanned the entire Indian Ocean (see the remarkable study by Goitein [1967] of the awesome treasure house of Jewish historical documents, known as the Cairo Geniza documents, that span a period of nearly three centuries, eleventh through thirteenth, and discovered in Old Cairo around 1890). However, as Chaudhuri (1985) shows us in his fascinating history of this trade, it is Muslim merchants who recreated and came to dominate this transoceanic trade—the same pattern held also for the transcontinental trade that was carried on in the hinterland of the Indian Ocean, behind the Himalayan range.

Consider the list of luxury and other commodities that Europe received from the East (including Africa) through the agency of the Muslim merchants: coffee; cotton textiles (a luxury commodity in Europe prior to the industrial revolution); fruits and vegetables of the type that medieval Europe had never known (e.g., almonds, apricots, bananas, eggplants, figs, lemons, mangoes, oranges, peaches); gold; ivory, paper; tulips; porcelain; rice; silks; spices (these were especially important in long-distance trade and they included cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, ginger, nutmeg, pepper, saffron, and turmeric); alum; dyes and dye-making products; medicinal drugs; aromatics (e.g., frankincense, myrrh, musk); cane sugar and sugarcane; and so on. (The last is of special historical significance, sadly, considering the ignominious role it would play in the genesis of the Atlantic slave trade.) What is more, with the exception of a few items such as gold, silk, some aromatics, and a few spices like cinnamon and saffron, medieval Europe had not even known of the existence of most of these products prior to the arrival of Islam.^[8]

In other words, the Islamic civilization, through its commercial network, introduced Europe, often for the first time, to a wide range of Eastern consumer products (the variety and quantity of which was further magnified via the agency of the Crusades) that whet the appetite of the Europeans for more—not surprisingly, they felt compelled to undertake their voyages of exploitation, a la Bartolomeu Diaz, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Fernao de Magalhaes (Ferdinand Magellan), and so on.^[9] This quest for an alternative trade route to the East—one that would have to be seaborne—was also, of course, a function of the desire to bypass the very people who had introduced them to the Eastern luxury commodities they so eagerly sought: their hated enemies, the Muslim intermediaries, who straddled the land-bridge between the East and the West and who at the same time held a monopoly over this ever-increasingly important and obscenely profitable East/West trade. (Only a few decades earlier [on May 29, 1453], prior to the departure of Columbus [on August 3, 1492] on his historic sea quest, Constantinople had fallen before the victorious forces of the Muslim Turks under the leadership of Sultan Mehmed II, thus effectively and permanently placing the land bridge in the hands of the Muslims.)^[10]

Yet, the European commercial debt to Islam goes even deeper. For, as Fernand Braudel (1982) reminds one in volume 2 of his three-volume magnum opus (grandly titled Civilization and Capitalism), a number of critical elements of European long-distance trade were of Islamic origin; such as the “bill of exchange,” the commenda (a partnership of merchants), and even the art of executing complex calculations—without which no advanced commerce is possible.^[11] In fact, as Braudel further points out (p. 559), the very practice of long-distance trade itself in medieval Europe was an Islamic borrowing. Now, without long-distance trade, it is quite unlikely that Europe would have experienced the rise of merchant capitalism (and therefrom industrial capitalism following the colonization of the Americas); for, while such trade may not be a sufficient condition for its development, it is a necessary condition.

Of course, it is not, it must be stressed here, that Europe had never engaged in long-distance trade before—consider the long-distance trade of the Greeks and the Romans with the East (e.g. via the famed Silk Road)—but, like so many other things, it was reintroduced to them by the Islamic civilization, since the Europeans had, for all intents and purposes, “lost” it over the centuries with their retrogressive descent into the post–Alaric world of the Germanic dominated European Early Middle Ages.^[12] On the basis of these observations, Braudel, is compelled to remark: “To admit the existence of these borrowings means turning one’s back on traditional accounts of the history of the West as pioneering genius, spontaneous inventor, journeying alone along the road toward scientific and technical rationality. It means denying the claim of the medieval Italian city-states to have invented the instruments of modern commercial life. And it logically culminates in denying the Roman empire its role as the cradle of progress” (p. 556).

However, it wasn’t only in the area of technology alone that Islam came to play such an important role in the genesis of Western modernity as we know it today. Consider the foundational role of the modern university in Europe in the journey toward the European Renaissance, but from the perspective of its origins. From a broader historical perspective, the modern university is as much Western in origin as it is Islamic (that is Afro-Asiatic) in origin. How? Nakosteen (1964: vii) explains it this way: “At a time when European monarchs were hiring tutors to teach them how to sign their names, Muslim educational institutions were preserving, modifying and improving upon the classical cultures in their progressive colleges and research centers under enlightened rulers. Then as the results of their cumulative and creative genius reached the Latin West through translations... they brought about that Western revival of learning which is our modern heritage.” Making the same observation, James Burke (1995: 36) reminds us that at the point in time when the first European universities at Bologna and Charters were being created, their future as academic centers of learning was far from certain. The reason? He explains: “The medieval mind was still weighed down by centuries of superstition, still fearful of new thought, still totally obedient to the Church and its Augustinian rejection of the investigation of nature. They lacked a system for investigation, a tool with which to ask questions and, above all, they lacked the knowledge once possessed by the Greeks, of which medieval Europe had heard, but which had been lost.” But then, he further explains: “In one electrifying moment it was rediscovered. In 1085 the [Muslim] citadel of Toledo in Spain fell, and the victorious Christian troops found a literary treasure beyond anything they could have dreamed of.” Through the mediation of Spanish Jews, European Christians, and others, much of that learning would now be translated from Arabic, which for centuries had been the language of science, into Latin, Spanish, Hebrew, and other languages, to be disseminated all across Europe. (This translation activity, one would be remiss not to point out here parenthetically, was a replication of an earlier translation activity undertaken by the Muslims themselves over a 300-year period, eighth to tenth centuries, when they systematically organized the translation of Greek scientific works into Arabic—see Gutas 1998, and O’Leary 1949, for a detailed and fascinating account.)^[13] During the long periods of peaceful co-existence among Christians, Jews, Muslims and others in Spain, even after the surrender of Toledo, was also highly instrumental in facilitating the work of translation and knowledge export into Western Europe. To a lesser extent, but important still, the fall of Muslim Sicily, beginning with the capture of Messina in 1061 by Count Roger (brother of Robert Guiscard), and ending with his complete takeover of the island from the Muslims in 1091, was yet another avenue by which Muslim learning entered, via translations, Western Europe (see Ahmed 1975, for more).^[14] This export of Islamic and Islamic-mediated Greek science to the Latin West would continue well into the thirteenth-century (after all, Islam was not completely vanquished from the Iberian peninsula until the capture of the Muslim province of Granada, more than 400 years after the fall of Toledo, in 1492).

Among the more prominent of the translators who worked in either Spain or Sicily (or even both) included: Abraham of Toledo; Adelard of Barth; Alfonso X the El Sabio; Constantine the African (Constantinus Africanus); the Archdeacon of Segovia (Dominicus Gundissalinus); Eugenius of Palermo; Gerard of Cremona; Isaac ibn Sid; John of Seville; Leonardo Pisano; Michael Scott; Moses ibn Tibbon; Qalonymos ben Qalonymos; Robert of Chester; Stephanus Arnoldi, and so on. (See Nakosteen 1964 for more names—including variants of these names—and details on when and what they translated.) Of course, it must be conceded, that the contributions by the Muslims to the intellectual and scientific development of Europe was made unwittingly; even so, it must be emphatically stressed, it was of no less significance. Moreover, that is how history, after all, really unfolds in practice; it is not made in the way it is usually presented in history textbooks: as a continuous chain of teleological developments.

So, guys, the truth of the matter really, then, is this: during the medieval era, the Europeans acquired from the savants of the Islamic empire a number of essential elements that would be absolutely central to the foundation of the modern Western university: First, they acquired a huge corpus of knowledge that the Muslims had gathered together over the centuries in their various centers of learning (e.g., Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba) through a dialectical combination of their own investigations, as well as by gathering knowledge from across geographic space (from Afghanistan, China, India, the Levant, Persia, etc.) and from across time: through systematic translations of classical works of Greek, Alexandrian, and other scholars.^[15] Lest there is a misunderstanding here, it must be stressed that it is not that the Muslims were mere transmitters of Hellenic knowledge (or any other people’s knowledge); far from it: they, as the French philosopher Alain de Libera (1997) points out, also greatly elaborated on it by the addition of their own scholarly findings. “Yet it would be wrong to think that the Arabs [sic] confined themselves to a slavish appropriation of Greek results. In practical and in theoretical matters Islam faced problems that gave rise to the development of an independent philosophy and science,” states Pedersen (1997: 118) as he makes a similar observation—and as do Benoit and Micheau (1995), Huff (1993); King (2000); and Stanton (1990), among others).

What kinds of problems is Pedersen referring to here? Examples include: the problems of reconciling faith and scientific philosophy; the problems of ocean navigation (e.g., in the Indian Ocean); the problem of determining the direction to Mecca (qibla) from the different parts of the Islamic empire for purposes of daily prayers; the problem of resolving the complex calculations mandated by Islamic inheritance laws; the problems of constructing large congregational mosques (jami al masjid); the problems of determining the accuracy of the lunar calendar for purposes of fulfilling religious mandates, such as fasting (ramadhan); the problems of planning new cities; and so on. Commenting on the significance of this fact, Stanton (1990) reminds us that even if the West would have eventually had access to the Greek classical texts maintained by the Byzantines after the fall of Constantinople, it would have missed out on this very important Islamic contribution of commentaries, additions, revisions, interpretations, and so on, of the Greek classical texts.^[16] A good example of the Muslim contribution to learning derived from Greek sources is Ibn Sina’s Canon Medicinae, and from the perspective of medieval medical teaching, its importance, according to Pedersen (1997: 125) “can hardly be overrated, and to this day it is read with respect as the most superior work in this area that the past has ever produced.” Now, as Burke explains, this knowledge alone would have wrought an intellectual revolution by itself. However, the fact that it was accompanied by the Aristotelian concept of argument by syllogism that Muslim philosophers like Ibn Sina had incorporated into their scholarly work, which was now available to the Europeans for the first time, so to speak, that would prove to be an explosive “intellectual bombshell.” In other words, they learned from the Muslims (and this is the second critical element) rationalism, combined with, in Burke’s words “the secular, investigative approach typical of Arab natural science,” that is, the scientific experimental method (1995: 42). Pedersen (1997: 116) makes the same point in his analysis of the factors that led to the development of the studium generale and from it the modern university: “To recreate Greek mathematics and science from the basic works was obviously out of the question, since even the knowledge of how to do research had passed into oblivion....That the study of the exact sciences did not end in a blind alley, was due to a completely different stream of culture now spilling out of [Islamic] civilization into the Latin world.”[17]

The third critical element was an elaborate and intellectually sophisticated map of scientific knowledge. The Muslims provided the Europeans a body of knowledge that was already divided into a host of academic subjects in a way that was very unfamiliar to the medieval Europeans: “medicine, astrology, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, physiology, zoology, biology, botany, mineralogy, optics, chemistry, physics, mathematics, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, music, meteorology, geography, mechanics, hydrostatics, navigation, and history” (Burke 1995: 42).^[18] The significance of this map of knowledge is that the European university, as de Libera (1997) observes, became its institutional embodiment. As he states: “The Muslim learning that was translated and passed on to the West formed the basis and the scientific foundation of the university in its living reality—the reality of its syllabus, the content of its teaching.” In other words, the highly restrictive and shallow curriculum of Martianus Capella’s Seven Liberal Arts (divided into the trivium and the quadrivium), which the Carthaginian had promulgated sometime in the middle of the fifth-century C.E. to become, in time, the foundation of Latin education in the cathedral schools—the forerunners of the studium generale—would now be replaced by the much broader curriculum of “Islamic” derived education. It ought to be noted here that the curriculum of the medieval universities was primarily based on the teaching of science; and it was even more so, paradoxically, than it is in the modern universities of today. The fact that this was the case, however, it would be no exaggeration to state, was entirely due to Islam! As Grant (1994), for example, shows, the growth of the medieval European universities was, in part, a direct response to the Greco-Islamic science that arrived in Europe after the fall of Toledo (see also Beaujouan [1982], Grant [1996], Nakosteen [1964], and Stanton [1990]).

The fourth was the extrication of the individual from the grip of what de Libera describes as the “medieval world of social hierarchies, obligations, and highly codified social roles,” so as to permit the possibility of a civil society, without which no university was possible. A university could only come into being on the basis of a community of scholars who were individuals in their own right, intellectually unbeholden to no one but reason, but yet gathered together in pursuit of one ideal: “the scientific ideal, the ideal of shared knowledge, of a community of lives based on the communication of knowledge and on the joint discovery of the reality of things.” In other words, universities “were laboratories in which the notion of the European individual was invented. The latter is always defined as someone who strikes a balance between culture, freedom, and enterprise, someone who has the capacity to show initiative and innovate. As it happens, and contrary to a widely held view, this new type of person came into being at the heart of the medieval university world, prompted by the notion—which is not Greek but [Muslim]—that [scientific] work liberates” (de Libera 1997).

A fifth was the arrival of Islamic inspired scholarship, such as that of Averroes (Ibn Rushd), that helped to extricate the curriculum from the theological oversight of the church. In the struggle over the teaching of “Averroeism” in the academy, for example, the academy triumphed and the church retreated behind the compromise that there would be two forms of knowledge: divine or revealed knowledge that could not be challenged, and temporal knowledge that could go its separate way. (See Iqbal [2002] and Lindberg [1992], for an accessible summary of this struggle.) Henceforth, academic freedom in terms of what was taught and learned became an ever-increasing reality, jealously guarded by the academy. The implications of this development cannot be overstated: it would unfetter the pursuit of scientific inquiry from the shackles of religious dogma and thereby permit the emergence of those intellectual forces that in time would bring about the scientific revolution in the seventeenth-century (see also Benoit [1995]).

The sixth critical element was the standardization of the university curricula across Europe that the arrival of Greco-Islamic learning made possible. Independent of where a university was located, Paris, Bologna, Oxford, and so on, the general pattern was that the curriculum rested on the same or similar texts addressing the same or similar problems in philosophy, science, theology, and so on, regardless of the curricular emphasis or specialty of the institution. What benefit did this standardization of the curricula confer on the development of universities in Europe? “For the first time in history,” as Lindberg (1992: 212) explains, “there was an educational effort of international scope, undertaken by scholars conscious of their intellectual and professional unity.” On the basis of the foregoing, then, what has been established? That the modern university is an Islamic invention? Not at all. Rather, that it is an institutional expression of a confluence of originality and influences. Makdisi (1981: 293) sums it up best: “The great contribution of Islam is to be found in the college system it originated, in the level of higher learning it developed and transmitted to the West, in the fact that the West borrowed from Islam basic elements that went into its own system of education, elements that had to do with both substance and method.” At the same time, “[t]he great contribution of the Latin West,” Makdisi continues, “comes from its organization of knowledge and its further development—knowledge in which the Islamic-Arabic component is undeniably considerable—as well as the further development of the college system itself into a corporate system.” (See also Textual Erasure.)

[1]. Consider, for example, the long line of Western science historians who have grappled with the issue of the origins of Europe’s scientific revolution and who feature in Cohen’s overview of their work (1994) but yet almost none of them deigned to even nod at the precursory presence of Islamic science.

[2]. Of course, the adoption of “civilization” as a unit of analysis presents its own set of problems given that it is more a historian’s imaginary construct than a construct of reality. Guys, this entire definition in this glossary, in a sense, stands in complete opposition to a historiography that relies on encapsulating human experiences into normatively hierarchical, discrete, time, and spatially bounded categories labeled “civilizations.” Hodgson (1974: 31) alludes to the difficulties when he questions the delimitations of boundaries in the “Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene.” As he observes, “it has been effectively argued on the basis of cultural techniques and resources to be found there, that all the lands from Gaul to Iran, from at least ancient classical times onward, have formed a single cultural world.” “But,” he argues, “the same sort of arguments would lead us on to perceive a still wider Indo-Mediterranean unity, or even (in lesser degree) the unity of the whole Afro-Eurasian citied zone.” To decisively drive home the point: the myth of “civilization” becomes readily apparent when one turns one’s gaze to the present and pose the question—regardless of one’s geographic place of abode in this age of “globalization”—What civilization are we living in today? A world civilization, perhaps? (See also Wigen and Martin 1997.)

[3]. Consider what Hodgson says in Volume 1 of his work on the matter of the geographic peripherality of Western Europe: “[T]he artificial elevation of the European peninsula to the status of a continent, equal in dignity to the rest of Eurasia combined, serves to reinforce the natural notion shared by Europeans and their overseas descendents, that they have formed at least half of the main theater (Eurasia) of world history, and, of course, the more significant half. Only on the basis of such categorization has it been possible to maintain for so long among Westerners the illusion that the ‘mainstream’ of world history ran through Europe” (p. 49).

[4]. This issue, to drill home the point, can be presented in another way: all human progress, in the “civilizational” sense, ultimately rests either on structural factors (both contingent and conjunctural) or ideational factors. If one accepts the former then it becomes easy to explain, for example, the rise and fall of civilizations and empires throughout history (including the collapse of the British and the Russian empires not too long ago). Moreover, one can enlist the support of science here in that it is now an incontrovertibly established scientific fact that there is no fraction of humanity (whatever the social structural criteria for the division: ethnicity, sex, age, class, etc.) that holds a monopoly over intelligence and talent. If, on the other hand, one privileges the latter, then one must be content with ethnocentrically driven historiography unsupported by evidence, other than fantastical conjectures. Yes, yes… people! Of course, ideas do matter; but only when placed within the context of structures. (This applies even to religious ideas—at the end of the day the metaphysical and the transcendental are still rooted in the material; for, how else it can it be as long as human beings remain human, that is biological entities.)

[5]. Regarding the Crusades, even though intuition alone would suggest otherwise (the Crusaders had colonized parts of the Islamic lands for considerable periods of time spanning almost two centuries), some Western scholars have tended to downplay the role of the Crusades in accelerating Eastern influences on the development of the West. However, there are at least three areas of Crusader activity that bore considerable fruit in this regard: namely, emulation of sumptuous lifestyles of the Muslims by wealthy resident Crusaders (yielding influences in art and architecture, for example); agricultural production (especially sugarcane); and trade and commerce. About the last: Hillenbrand’s fascinating study clearly points to remarkable interchange between the Franks (Europeans) and the Muslims, even—unbelievable this may appear—during times of ongoing conflict. Consider this: while the robust siege of Karak by the forces under the command of Salah Ad-din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (Saladin) was underway in 1184, trading caravans from Egypt on their way to Damascus were allowed to pass through Crusader-held territories unhindered. This phenomenon would lead one Muslim chronicler of the period to remark: “One of the strangest things in the world is that Muslim caravans go forth to Frankish lands, while Frankish captives enter Muslims lands” (Hillenbrand 1999: 399). That the Muslims and the Franks refused to put aside the peaceful activity of trade and commerce between them on many an occasion (which it should be noted often required the conclusion of treaties and agreements), even as they fought each other, is indicative of how important such activity was for both sides. What is more, the Crusaders undertook these economic relations often in the face of strong strictures on the part of various Popes condemning such activity. Note also that the importance of trade is also attested to, of course, by the currency in Crusader-held territories: it was an imitation of Islamic currency—in terms of design. (See also Bates and Metcalf [1989]; Ballard [2003]; and Verlinden [1995]). In other words, then, through trade and commerce, regardless of whether it was local trade or international trade, Europe opened yet another door to Eastern influences. (For more on this topic, see Abulafia [1994], and Ashtor [1976], and the Dictionary of the Middle Ages. About the last item, as already pointed out, you will do well to mine it for a number of other issues too, covered in this definition.)

[6]. A note on the portolans, given their critical importance to the European sea navigators, that should further give pose to those who continue to insist on European exceptionalism: while the immediate provenance of many of them was Islamic, the Muslims themselves were also indebted for some of their maps to the Chinese. Of singular importance are those that were of relevance to the European Atlantic voyages given that the Chinese had, probably, already preceded Columbus to the Americas—vide for example the voyage of Zhou Wen described by Menzies (2003). (Note: Menzies also discusses the Chinese contribution to the development of the portalans.)

[7]. There is some doubt as to exactly how the compass arrived in the West from the East in that, according to Watt (1972), it was probably invented jointly by the Muslims and Westerners (one reciprocally improving on the creation of the other) on the basis of the original Chinese discovery of the magnetic properties of the lodestone. Be that as it may, it is yet another instance pointing to the fact that the story of the diffusion to the West (via the Islamic intermediary) of the products of the Eastern technological genius is one that has yet to be told in its entirety.

[8]. One can hardly imagine what would have been the fate of Europe if it had never found out about some of these commodities. Take, for instance, that absolutely wondrous plant fiber called cotton. Ahhhh … cotton!… cotton! … Guys, what would our lives be like without cotton? Cotton was first domesticated, records so far indicate, in the Indus Valley civilization of India thousands of years ago. The cultivation of cotton and the technology of manufacturing cotton textiles (which in time would become the engine of the European industrial revolution) eventually spread from India to the rest of the world, and Islam was highly instrumental in this diffusion. What did Europe export to the Islamic empire (specifically the Mediterranean region) in return for its imports, one may ask out of curiosity? According to Watt (1972), the principal exports comprised raw materials, such as timber and iron, and up to the eleventh-century, European slaves from the Slavic region. (About the latter export: following the conversion of the Slav peoples to Christianity in the eleventh-century, observes Watt, the enslavement of the Slavs soon petered out. Incidentally, this aspect of European history points to the etymology of the word “slave.”)

[9]. The use of the phrase “voyages of exploitation” instead of the more common “voyages of exploration,” here should not be considered as an expression of gratuitous churlishness; rather it speaks to that popular misconception well described by Hallet (1995: 56): “It is commonly assumed that it was a passionate desire to expand the boundaries of knowledge or, more sharply defined, the rational curiosity of scientific research that formed the mainspring of the European movement of exploration. Undoubtedly such motives have inspired many individual explorers; but a review of the whole history of exploration reveals a process more complicated than is generally realized…. Three motives had led Europeans to venture into the unknown parts of the world: the search for wealth, the search for political advantage, the search for souls to save.” An excellent example of how these factors were played out in practice is provided by Newitt’s (1995) fascinating exegesis on the origins of the Portuguese voyages of exploitation down the coast of West Africa and finally on to the other side of the continent and therefrom into the Indian Ocean basin. Even the long cherished myth of Henry the Navigator as the heroic architect of the mission to the East and as “scientist and scholar of the Renaissance, the founder of the School of Navigation at Sagres,” is laid to rest and in its place we are presented with the real “Henry the consummate politician” as a shrewd, powerful and wealthy man in fifteenth-century Portugal whose preoccupations were primarily with matters much more closer to home; such as the colonization of Morocco, piracy, and rent (levying taxes and dues on others involved in maritime profiteering activities in places like the Canaries and off the coast of West Africa). See also the riveting account by Bergeen (2003) of the three-year harrowing odyssey (1519–22) of Magellan’s fleet, Armada de Molucca (named, tellingly, after the Indonesian Spice Islands), as it circumnavigated the globe and the motivating forces behind it, including the powerful lure for the West of Eastern spices which, as in this case, literally propelled it to the “ends of the earth” despite unimaginable hardships. Moreover, the veracity of his conclusion that “[I]n their lust for power, their fascination with sexuality, their religious fervor, and their often tragic ignorance and vulnerability, Magellan and his men,” as with the other similar voyages, “epitomized a turning point in history,” for, “[t]heir deeds and character, for better or worse, still resonate powerfully,” is absolutely incontrovertible (p. 414). (Incidentally, Magellan was not the first to circumnavigate the planet—though perhaps he was the first European—the Chinese, probably, had already preceded him in that effort. See Menzies 2003.)

[10]. Taking Columbus’s project specifically: that Islam is written all over it, directly and indirectly, is attested to, for instance, by the fact that only a few months prior to the departure of Columbus under the sponsorship of Spain, the Spanish crown, in what may be considered Europe’s final crusade against the Muslims, had just taken over (on January 2) the last Muslim Spanish stronghold (the province of Granada). In bringing to an end the 700-year Muslim presence in Spain, the Spanish crown, after it had initially rejected Columbus’s project on two different occasions as a hair brained scheme, now saw it in an entirely new light. The victory over the Muslims allowed the Spanish crown (specifically Queen Isabella) to dream of even grander possibilities of sidelining the Muslims (as well as Spain’s other arch enemy, the Portuguese) in its quest for “Christian” glory, gold, spices, and perhaps even an empire that Columbus’s project so coincidentally now promised. In fact, Columbus himself was present at the siege of Granada, and he was quick to bring to the queen’s attention the larger import of the fall of Granada in the context of his project. As he would write in his log of the first voyage while addressing the Spanish monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella): “Because, O most Christian, most elevated, most excellent, and most powerful princes, king and queen of the Spains and of the islands of the sea, our lords in this present year of 1492, after your highnesses had put an end to the war with the Muslims, who had been reigning in Europe, and finished the war in the great city of Granada, where on January 2 in this same year I saw the royal standards of your highnesses raised by force of arms atop the towers of the Alhambra, which is the fortress of that city, and I saw the Muslim king come out to the gates of the city.... your highnesses, as Catholic Christians and princes who love the holy Christian faith, exalters of it and enemies of the sect of Muhammad and of all idolatries and heresies, thought to send me, Christopher Columbus, to those aforementioned regions of India to see the princes, peoples, and lands, and their disposition and all the rest, and determine what method should be taken for their conversion to our holy faith.... So it was that, after having expelled all the Jews from your kingdoms and domains, in that same month of January, your highnesses commanded that I should go to the said regions of India with a suitable fleet” (from his journal—part of the Repertorium Columbianum edition, vol. 6 [ed. by Lardicci 1999], p. 37). Then there is the matter of Columbus’s monumental navigational blunder: Alioto (1987: 163) reminds one that even the chance “discovery” of the Americas by Columbus has its root in the mathematics of an Islamic scholar, Al-Farghani—albeit involving erroneous mathematical calculations on the part of this ninth-century astronomer. (In the Latin West, where his work, titled The Elements, on Ptolemaic astronomy had achieved considerable popularity, he was known by the name of Alfraganus.) On the basis of these calculations, Columbus came to conclude that Cathay (China) lay only 2,500 miles due west of the Canary Islands! For good or ill, depending on whose interests one has in mind, how wrong he would turn out to be.

[11]. In a riveting exegesis, Benoit (1995) not only demonstrates the Islamic roots of Western mathematics, but also alerts one to a less well-known fact: it is primarily through the agency of commerce that Islamic mathematics in general was diffused to the West and it is in the environment of commerce that it first began to undergo innovation—greatly helped of course with the introduction of those seemingly mundane (as seen from the vantage point of today) artifacts of Eastern origin: Indo-Arabic numerals, and paper! This process especially got underway in Europe in the fourteenth-century as parts of it, notably the Italian city states like Florence, evolved on to the path of merchant capitalism.

[12]. The importance of the development of European long-distance trade (and Islam’s role in it) cannot be overemphasized. For, long-distance trade had the indirect outcome of accelerating a number of internally rooted, but incipient transformations in Europe, that in time would be of great import, including: its urbanization, the emergence of merchant capitalism, and the disintegration of European feudalism (the last precipitating, in turn, the massive European diasporic movement to the Americas, and elsewhere, with all the other attendant consequences, including the monumental Columbian Exchange).

[13]. There is a clarifying point of context that must be dispensed with concerning the presence of Arabic names in the historical literature dealing with the Islamic empire. An Arabic name does not in of itself guarantee that the person in question is an Arab Muslim; it is quite possible that the person is a Muslim of some other ethnicity. The reason is that for a considerable period of time not only was Arabic the lingua franca of such activities as learning and commerce in the Islamic empire, but then as today, for all Muslims throughout the world, Arabic is their liturgical language and this also often implies taking on Muslim (and hence Arabic) names. Therefore, the Islamic empire and civilization was not exclusively an Arabic empire and civilization, it was an Islamic empire and civilization in which all manner of nationalities and cultures had a hand, at indeterminable and varying degrees, in its evolution. Consider, for example, this fact: over the centuries—from antiquity through the Islamic period—millions of Africans would go to Asia (as slaves, as soldiers, etc.) and yet the absence, for the most part, of a distinct group of people today in Asia who can be categorized as part of the African diaspora—akin to African Americans in the Americas—is testament to the fact that in time they were genetically and culturally absorbed by the Asian societies. To be sure, in the early phases of the evolution of the Islamic empire, Arab Muslims were dominant; but note that domination does not translate into exclusivity. Ultimately, then, one can assert that the Islamic civilization was and is primarily an Afro-Asian civilization—which boasted a web-like network of centers of learning as geographically dispersed as Al-Qarawiyyin (Tunisia), Baghdad (Iraq), Cairo (Egypt), Cordoba (Muslim Spain), Damascus (Syria), Jundishapur (Iran), Palermo (Muslim Sicily), Timbuktu (Mali), and Toledo (Muslim Spain)—and in which, furthermore, the Asian component ranges from Arabic to Persian to Indian to Chinese contributions and influences. As Pedersen (1997: 117) points out: “Many scholars of widely differing race and religion worked together…to create an Arab culture, which would have made the modest learning of the Romans seem pale and impoverished if a direct comparison had been possible.” In other words, the presence of Arabic names in relation to the Islamic civilization can also indicate simply the Arabization of the person’s name even though the person may not have been a Muslim at all! (Take the example of that brilliant Jewish savant of the medieval era, Moses Maimonides; he was also known by the Arabic name of Abu Imran Musa ibn Maymun ibn Ubayd Allah.) This fact is of great relevance whenever the issue of Islamic secular scholarship is considered. Secular knowledge and learning in the Islamic civilization (referred to by the Muslims as the “foreign sciences” to distinguish it from the Islamic religious sciences) had many diverse contemporary contributors; including savants who were from other faiths: Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and so on. Consequently, when one talks about the Islamic contribution to knowledge and learning, one does not necessarily mean it is the contribution of Muslim scholars alone, but rather that it is the output of scholars who included non-Muslims (albeit a numerical minority in relative terms), but who all worked under the aegis of the Islamic civilization in its centers of learning and whose lingua franca was primarily Arabic. My use of the phrase Islamic scholars or Arabic scholars in this definition, therefore, should not imply that the scholars were necessarily Muslim scholars (or even Arab scholars for that matter), though most were—that is, most were Muslim scholars, but here again they were not all necessarily Arabs; they could have been of any ethnicity or nationality. (See Iqbal 2002; Nakosteen 1964; and Lindberg 1992, for more on this point.)

[14]. While it is true that evidence so far indicates that the bulk of Greco-Islamic learning arrived in Europe through the translation activity in Spain and Italy, Burnett (2003) shows that some of this learning also seeped into Europe by means of translations of works that were imported directly from the Islamic East, but executed by Latin scholars in other places (like Antioch and Pisa).

[15]. See, for example: Grant (1996); Gutas (1998); Huff (1993); Nakosteen (1964); O’Leary (1949); Schacht and Bosworth (1974); Stanton (1990); and Watt (1972).

[16]. It should be remembered that the Byzantines did almost nothing, in comparative terms, with the Greek intellectual heritage they had come to possess; though they had the good sense to at least preserve it (see Gutas 1998, for an account of the Byzantine role in the Muslim acquisition of Greek scientific knowledge).

[17]. Until recently, the traditional Western view had been that the father of the scientific experimental method was the Englishman, Roger Bacon (born c. 1220 and died in 1292). However, as Qurashi and Rizvi (1996) demonstrate, even a cursory examination of the works of such Islamic savants as Abu Musa Jabir ibn-Hayyan, Abu Alimacr al-Hassan ibn al-Haitham, Abu Raihan al-Biruni, and Abu al-Walid Muhammed ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammed Ibn Rushd proves this view to be patently false. What Bacon ought to be credited with is the fact that he was a fervent proselytizer of the experimental method, the knowledge of which he had acquired from the Muslims through their translated works while studying at Oxford University. Bacon, it should be remembered, was well acquainted with the work of the university’s first chancellor, Robert Grosseteste, who was an indefatigable apostle of Greco-Islamic learning in the Latin West (see also Crombie [1990]).

[18]. The European scientific debt to Islam is also attested to by etymology: Consider the following examples of words in the English language (culled from Watt 1972: 85–92) that have their origins in the Arabic language (either directly, or indirectly—that is, having originally come into Arabic from elsewhere): alchemy, alcohol, alembic, algebra, algorithm, alkali, amalgam, arsenal, average, azimuth, camphor, chemistry, cupola, drug, elixir, gypsum, natron, rocket, saccharin, sugar, zenith, zero.