Jonathan Lyons - The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization

THE HOUSE OF WISDOM

How the Arabs Transformed
Western Civilization

JONATHAN LYONS

Copyright 2009 by Jonathan Lyons

All rights reserved.

For information address
Bloomsbury Press,
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury Press, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Lyons, Jonathan.
The house of wisdom: how Arab learning transformed Western civilization / by Jonathan Lyons.1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Other title: Insurance company insider speaks out on how corporate PR is killing health care and deceiving Americans
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59691-459-5 (hardcover)
1. Civilization, WesternArab influences. 2. Learning and scholarshipArab countriesHistoryMedieval, 5001500. 3. East and West. I. Title.
CB251.L96 2009
909.09821dc22
2008026238

First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Press in 2009
This eBook edition published in 2011

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60819-058-4

www.bloomsburypress.com

To the memory of my father, Will Lyons,
who introduced me to the power of ideas.

CONTENTS

FEW HAD ANY doubts that God had sent the earthquake to punish Antioch for its wanton and profligate ways. The residents of this Christian outpost not far from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean were notoriously corrupt and flouted their solemn obligations to God. Certain men who hated fasting and loved lavish banquets, slaves to gluttony for enticing foods, were eager to copy the life and life-style not of those who lived well but those who ate well, scoffs Walter the Chancellor, a cleric and longtime Antioch functionary whose firsthand account of life in Antioch is dotted with references to Christian scripture and well-worn quotations from Ovid and Virgil. Others prostituted themselves for sport, soliciting friends and neighbors alike from the town streets.

If a plague of locusts two years earlier had failed to stem this tide of dissolution among these Western newcomers to the Near East, then perhaps the very tremor of the earth would command the attention of the wayward populace. On November 13, 1114, an earthquake struck the outlying town of Mamistra, inflicting great damage and foreshadowing the destruction to come. Sixteen days later, in the silence at the dead of night, when human frailty was accustomed more suitably and sweetly to sleep, Antioch itself felt the wrath of the Lord. The city was a scene of destruction, Walter tells us, with many killed in their homes. Others, indeed, were terrified; they abandoned their homes, scorned their wealth, left everything, and behaved as if demented in the streets and squares of the town. They stretched their hands towards the heavens because of their manifold fear and powerlessness, and cried tearfully without ceasing in different languages: Spare us, Lord, spare your people. The next morning, chastened survivors filed into the central St. Peters Church, miraculously untouched by the violent swaying of the ground, and forswore the pursuit of earthly pleasure.

The Antiochenes were not the only ones to have their world turned upside down. Huddling for shelter on a stone bridge in Mamistra was a young country gentleman far from home. Adelard of Bath had not made the arduous journey from Englands West Country for the celebrated wedding of King Baldwin of Jerusalem to Adelaide of Sicily. He was not interested in the debaucheries of his fellow Europeans. Nor had he followed in the footsteps of the conquering crusaders sixteen years before him to Outremer, literally the lands beyond the sea. Unlike those fearsome holy warriorsthat race of Franks unleashed by Pope Urban IIwho had raped and pillaged their way across Central Europe even before they had gotten to the Holy Land, Adelard was determined to learn from the Muslims rather than kill them under the sign of the cross. Where the crusaders had seen only evil in the Muslim infidel, Adelard sought the light of Arab wisdom.

Antiochtoday the provincial Turkish town of Antakyamust have been irresistible for the restless Adelard, who as a young scholar had already decreed the value of traveling far and wide in the pursuit of learning: It will be worthwhile to approach teachers of different people, to commit to memory what you may find is most finely expressed among each of them. For what the French studies are ignorant of, those across the Alps will unlock; what you will not learn amongst the Latins, eloquent Greece will teach you. It had once flourished under Muslim rule but was now controlled by crusading Normans. This new principality of Antioch comprised the fortified central town, the surrounding plain, and the seaports of Alexandretta and St. Simeon. The land was very rich, its fortunes resting on the manufacture of fine silks, carpets, pottery, and glass.

Like Adelard himself, the city that awaited him stood on the cusp between East and West. Antioch had long been an important stopover on the lucrative caravan trade route from Mesopotamia, traditional commerce that scrupulously ignored the inconvenient religious warfare of the Crusades and carried on much as before. Most of the citys inhabitants were ChristiansEastern Orthodox, Jacobites, Nestorians, and Armenians. The predominant language was Arabic, but religious and cultural affinities also ensured a place for Greek and Latin, creating a living Rosetta stone that eased the exchange of books and ideas across sectarian, cultural, and ethnic lines. Now, the principality found itself a vital link between opposing worlds, thrust together by the religious and political struggle for control of the holy city of Jerusalem, almost three hundred miles to the south.

A few years before Adelards arrival, combined Norman and Genoese forces had captured the nearby city of Tripoli from the Banu Ammar, its refined Muslim princes. The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, a contemporary Arab account, recorded that among the booty carted off from Tripoli by the victorious Christians were the books of its college and libraries of private collectors. Thousands of these works ended up in the hands of Antiochs merchants, now within easy reach of the man from Bath.

Still, nothing had prepared Adelard for what he found in his dogged pursuit of what he called the studia Arabum, the learning of the Arabs. Here at last were the secrets of the ages, buried for six centuries beneath the chaos of western Christendom. This peripatetic Englishman immediately grasped the power of Arab knowledge to remake the world as he knew it. Adelard left his native England a young scholar thirsting for wisdom only the Arabs could supply. He would return as the first Western man of science and help change his world forever.

If, as Adelard now learned from his Arab teachers, the heavens moved to regular and immutable rhythms, then what role remained for God Almighty? Could he suspend these laws of nature? Did the universe have a beginning and an end, as written in the Bible and the Koran? Or was it eternal, neither created in time nor subject to change, as the Muslim philosophers said? If this new logic was correct, then what was one to make of the sacred teaching of creation? To Adelard, the world suddenly seemed a new and unfamiliar place. Such questions had engaged Arab thinkers for centuries, as they struggled to fit their own monotheistic faith into a growing understanding of the universe around them. This great struggle between faith and reason was about to come crashing down on an unsuspecting Europe.