Setting the Record Straight on the Islamic Golden Age
In an earlier article, I referred to Serge Trifkovic’s statement that, during the much-vaunted “golden age” of Islam, “[t]hree speculative thinkers — notably all three Persians, al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna — combined Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism with other ideas introduced through Islam.” As it turns out, this is not quite correct. Al-Kindi was an Arab. Conversely, al-Farabi was probably a Persian, and Avicenna was certainly one. Naturally, invalidating one out of three examples does not completely discredit Trifkovic’s argument, but misstating al-Kindi’s ethnicity is a rather glaring error to commit. The point Trifkovic tries to make by mentioning certain Muslim thinkers’ Persian backgrounds is that Islam’s supposed “golden age” was derived from the achievements of pre-Islamic times. “Whatever flourished,” he asserts, did so “in spite of Islam” and depended “on the readiness of the conquerors to borrow from earlier cultures.” Let us examine the validity of this thesis more closely.
It is certainly true that much of the “golden age’s” florescence was owed to the Persians and to various non-Muslim groups, and there is no need to rely on Trifkovic for this insight. Academics Ahmed Renima, Habib Tiliouine, and Richard J. Estes corroborate it in a chapter on the time period in question. The authors emphasize that the so-called “Islamic Golden Age” resulted from efforts by numerous different peoples. “Central among them were the Persians,” they write. “Persians were the main force behind the creation of the Abbasid Dynasty (750 CE-1258 CE), one of the most culturally sophisticated societies that gave birth to the Golden Age.” This statement yields some interesting implications when juxtaposed with Ibn Warraq’s assessment that, “[u]nder the Abbasid caliphs, certain Persian families sought the restoration of Zoroastrian customs — a clear indication that Islam meant very little to educated, upper-class Persian circles.”
Renima, Tiliouine, and Estes also explain that persons of various faiths contributed to the achievements of that period. Christians, Jews, and Hindus were represented alongside Muslims. Chinese made contributions, too.
In their concluding section, the scholars lament that, despite that period’s enduring legacy, “little credit is given to Islam” for it. Elsewhere, however, they explain that the standard description of the era as “Islam’s Golden Age” is a mischaracterization because it involved the efforts of a religiously diverse population and was based on the writings of pre-Islamic authors. So does popular discourse give Islam too much or too little credit for the “golden age”? The former seems more plausible, especially since it is this view which the chapter actually substantiates.
On the whole, the “Islamic Golden Age” has traditionally been oversold in the West. “The idea that Greek texts only survive thanks to the work of mediaeval Muslim scholars,” declares classicist Peter Gainsford, “is a myth.” In the vast majority of cases, the original Greek texts were preserved “in the Greek-speaking world.” And in instances when they were lost, Armenian and Slavonic translations have proved helpful, too. Elsewhere, Gainsford states that ancient Greek writings were often transmitted through worldly schools and libraries, occasionally with energetoc imperial support. “But in areas conquered by the Ottomans,” he adds, “books that survived often did so in monastic libraries. A much more robust avenue for survival lay in the books that were moved to Italy in the 1400s.” Obviously, that was after the Islamic Golden Age’s conventional end date, but it is nonetheless interesting to note. At least by the Late Middle Ages, ancient texts apparently stood a better chance of being preserved following transfer to western Europe than they did on Byzantine territory conquered by Muslims.
Sociologist Toby Huff, known for extensive work on the history of science, has incisively discussed the Islamic Golden Age in various places. One article is particularly helpful. Huff lists over a dozen influential Greek authors whose works, in Arabic translation, contributed to the Muslim world’s intellectual flourishing. Without the impact of ancient Greek texts, he avers, the Islamic Golden Age would arguably never have occurred.
“The cultural elite of the emerging Islamic civilization, mainly Christians and Jews,” writes Huff, “translated an extraordinary collection of scientific and philosophical texts into Arabic.” By dint of these borrowings as well as its own developments based on them, the Muslim world became a global leader in science, “surpassing both Europe and China in foundational ideas that were only to reach their zenith when transferred back to Europe.” That last phrase is important: even during the halcyon days of scientific development in the Muslim world, intellectual activity was stymied by Islamic doctrine. Those parts of Aristotle’s and Plato’s philosophy which portrayed the universe as “rationally coherent and understandable” were ignored. Science was not taught in madrassas and nothing like the European university system was established. On the whole, Huff reckons that the Islamic world experienced two centuries of considerable scientific progress fueled by the appropriation of Hellenic thought, after which said progress largely ground to a halt.
Thus, the “golden age” was driven by ancient Greek texts. In this regard, the Islamic world had a baked-in advantage over Europe. As Huff notes, “during the rise of Islamic civilization, Europe (especially Western Europe) was largely cut off from its earlier Greek inheritance.”
The above evidence supports the thesis that the so-called “Islamic Golden Age” occurred in spite of Islam, not because of it. Huff’s work, furthermore, suggests that Islam has historically been more of an impediment to intellectual advancement than has Christianity (another example he mentions is the dissection of human bodies, to which Muslims, but not Christians, were opposed).
Patricia Crone and Michael Cook similarly contend that Islamic society made use of Greek scientific and medical ideas without accepting the wider philosophy in which they were nested:
Just as Muslim rulers could not in practice dispense with the fiscal techniques of the pre-Islamic world in virtue of a doctrinaire legalism, so also they could not afford to do without the services of its doctors and astrologers in virtue of a doctrinaire occasionalism. […] So the continuing market for the expedient justice of the Persians was matched by a continuing market for the expedient science of the Greeks.
Consequently, and contrary to what the most superficial appraisal of the “Islamic Golden Age” suggests, it appears that Islamic tradition was an impediment to the growth of high culture all along. Trifkovic’s narrative is essentially correct, despite his bungled statement of it. The picture is completed by the fact that, far from inaugurating golden ages, Islamic conquests have devastated pre-existing culture. Of the Arab takeover of North Africa in the early eighth century, Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse write: “Unlike the Vandals who prized the classical cities of North Africa, the Arabs simply abandoned them. As a result North Africa experienced a Dark Age which lasted until the tenth century.”
A related point is that the Muslim world seems to have taken inordinately long to acquaint itself with philosophy. Paul Austin Murphy emphasizes, based on the dating of al-Kindi’s birth to the early ninth century, that “the first Muslim philosopher began to work around 200 years after the founding of Islam in Arabia. And even then […] Greek philosophy — of which al-Kindi had a special affection — was [considered] a foreign and a pagan/infidel import.” Conversely, it was part of the Christian tradition since its inception, Saint Paul having been familiar with “Plato and Aristotle as well as […] the Roman Stoics.”
I was immediately skeptical of what Murphy had to say about al-Kindi, but it does seem to be in line with accepted opinion. One could perhaps quibble over Murphy’s description of al-Kindi as “the first Muslim philosopher,” but Yunizar Ramadhani calls him “the first big-name philosopher who introduced philosophy to the Islamic world,” which is not much different. In addition, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that the Arab thinker’s oeuvre “might be thought of as a sustained public relations campaign intended to display and advertise the value of Greek thought for a contemporary ninth century Muslim audience.” Apparently, the Muslim world of the ninth century still had to be persuaded that classical Greek thought was valuable. It does appear that early Christians were more receptive to Hellenic philosophy, as exemplified not only by Paul, but also by people like Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Moreover, according to Ramadhani’s 2020 article, the majority of Muslims remain opposed to philosophy to this day, deeming it “strange, practically useless, not an Islamic science, ten[ding] to mislead, [alongside] many other negative sentiments.”
(Ramadhani also seems to treat al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna as the three most significant Islamic philosophers (pp.20–21), which can be taken to support Trifkovic’s spotlighting of this trio.)
Contrariwise, the point that it took 200 years for the first Muslim philosopher to enter the scene is, stated in that way, not very strong. It is debatable who was the first Christian philosopher, but it is at least not obvious that Christianity’s record is that much better in this regard. Though if Justin is considered the first, perhaps the argument could be made.
That notorious progressive, H. G. Wells, did not have the benefit of access to Huff’s work or that of other authors cited here. In his famous The Outline of History, Wells offers an account of the Islamic Golden Age which depicts it as more of an internal development than one derived from outside influences and multinational cross-pollination. “[T]he mind of the Arabs,” writes Wells, “blazed out like a star for half a dozen generations after the appearance of Islam, having never achieved anything of importance before or since.” That may be a tad too harsh (though the “before” part is quite accurate), but it is true that Islamic civilization has had little to brag about since the “golden age.” However, Wells portrays the subsequent decline as normal and paralleled in other cultures. “The English mind,” he remarks in the same passage, “had a phase of brightness in the seventh and eighth centuries, and it did not shine again until the fifteenth.” Well, the Magna Carta is generally considered a major milestone in the evolution of government, and it was issued as early as 1215. But if we accept Wells’s choice of the fifteenth century as the start of the English renaissance, that means there have been six centuries during which I would say the English mind has not stopped “shining.” This period of greatness in the history of just one Christian country has therefore lasted longer than the whole “Islamic Golden Age,” and arguably yielded more impressive and beneficial results.
Why discuss the “Islamic Golden Age”? One good reason is that Western left-wingers are in the habit of radically overstating the history of enlightenment in the Islamic world, as President Obama did in his infamous 2009 speech in Cairo. This is a dangerous practice which risks retarding social progress among the populations it is designed to propitiate. In his classic Why I Am Not a Muslim, Ibn Warraq opines that establishing democracy and regard for human rights in the lands of Islam will require “rigorous self-criticism that eschews comforting delusions of a glorious past, of a Golden Age of total Muslim victory.” And does flattery even succeed in winning Muslims over? Concerning Obama’s Cairo address, Egyptian-born author Hamed Abdel-Samad comments that Muslim society tends to rejoice when Western celebrities “enumerate Islam’s achievements.” “Yet these individuals,” he adds, “are seen by Muslims more as exceptions and therefore as an argument against the West.”