[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.