Golden Age of Islam
The Islamic Golden
Age is the era in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from
the 8th century to the 13th century, during which much of the
historically Islamic world was ruled by
various caliphates, and science, economic development and
cultural works flourished. This period is traditionally understood to have
begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the
inauguration of the House of Wisdomin Baghdad, where scholars from
various parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds were mandated to
gather and translate all of the world's classical knowledge into the Arabic language. This period is
traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due
to Mongol
invasions and the Siege of Baghdadin 1258 AD. A few
contemporary scholars place the end of the Islamic Golden Age as late as
the end of 15th to 16th centuries.
History of the concept
The
metaphor of a golden
age began
to be applied in 19th-century literature about Islamic history, in the context
of the western aesthetic fashion known as Orientalism. The author of a Handbook for Travelers in Syria and
Palestine in 1868 observed that the most beautiful mosques of
Damascus were "like Mohammedanism itself, now rapidly decaying" and
relics of "the golden age of Islam".
During
the early 20th century, the term was used only occasionally, and often referred
to the early military successes of the Rashidun caliphs. It was only in the
second half of the 20th century that the term came to be used with any
frequency, now mostly referring to the cultural flourishing of science and
mathematics under the caliphate during the 9th to 11th centuries (between the
establishment of organised scholarship in the House of Wisdom and
the beginning of the crusades), but
often extended to include part of the late 8th or the 12th to early 13th centuries. Definitions
may still vary considerably. Equating the end of the golden age with the end of
the caliphate is a convenient cut-off point based on a historical landmark, but
it can be argued that Islamic culture had entered a gradual decline much
earlier; thus, Khan (2003) identifies the proper golden age as being the two
centuries between 750–950, arguing that the beginning loss of territories under
Harun al-Rashid worsened after the death of al-Ma'mun in
833, and that the crusades in
the 12th century resulted in a further weakening of the Abbasid
empire from which it never recovered.
Education
The
centrality of scripture and its study in the Islamic tradition helped to make
education a central pillar of the religion in virtually all times and places in
the history of Islam. The
importance of learning in the Islamic tradition is reflected in a number of
hadiths attributed to Muhammad, including one that instructs the faithful to
"seek knowledge, even in China". This
injunction was seen apply particularly to scholars, but also to some extent to
the wider Muslim public, as exemplified by the dictum of Al-Zarnuji,
"learning is prescribed for us all". While
it is impossible to calculate literacy rates in pre-modern Islamic societies,
it is almost certain that they were relatively high, at least in comparison to
their European counterparts.
Education
would begin at a young age with study of Arabic and the Quran, either at home
or in a primary school, which was often attached to a mosque. Some
students would then proceed to training in tafsir (Quranic exegesis) and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), which was seen as
particularly important. Education
focused on memorization, but also trained the more advanced students to
participate as readers and writers in the tradition of commentary on the
studied texts. It
also involved a process of socialization of
aspiring scholars, who came from virtually all social backgrounds, into the
ranks of the ulema.
For
the first few centuries of Islam, educational settings were entirely informal,
but beginning in the 11th and 12th centuries, the ruling elites began to
establish institutions of higher religious learning known as madrasas in an effort to secure
support and cooperation of the ulema. Madrasas
soon multiplied throughout the Islamic world, which helped to spread Islamic
learning beyond urban centers and to unite diverse Islamic communities in a
shared cultural project. Nonetheless,
instruction remained focused on individual relationships between students and
their teacher. The
formal attestation of educational attainment, ijaza, was granted by a particular
scholar rather than the institution, and it placed its holder within a
genealogy of scholars, which was the only recognized hierarchy in the
educational system. While
formal studies in madrasas were open only to men, women of prominent urban
families were commonly educated in private settings and many of them received
and later issued ijazas in
hadith studies, calligraphy and poetry recitation. Working women learned
religious texts and practical skills primarily from each other, though they
also received some instruction together with men in mosques and private homes.
Muslims
distinguished disciplines inherited from pre-Islamic civilizations, such as
philosophy and medicine, which they called "sciences of the ancients"
or "rational sciences", from Islamic religious sciences. Sciences
of the former type flourished for several centuries, and their transmission
formed part of the educational framework in classical and medieval Islam. In
some cases, they were supported by institutions such as the House
of Wisdom in Baghdad, but more often they were transmitted
informally from teacher to student.
The University
of Al Karaouine, founded in 859 AD, is arguably the world's
oldest degree-granting university. The Al-Azhar
University was another early university. Islamic
"universities" of the Middle Ages were in fact madrasas, centers for the study
of religious texts and law. Only after the Arabs came in contact with the
institutions of higher learning of the Christian Greek Roman Empire during
their conquests did the madrasas begin to teach other subjects as well - but
the only degree granted remained that of expert in religious law: "There
was no other 'doctorate' in any other field, no license to teach a field except
that of the religious law". The madrasa is one of the relics of the Fatimid caliphate.
The Fatimids traced their descent to Muhammad's daughter Fatimah and
named the institution using a variant of her honorific title Al-Zahra (the brilliant). Organized
instruction in the Al-Azhar Mosque began
in 978.
Philosophy
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) played a major
role in saving the works of Aristotle,
whose ideas came to dominate the non-religious thought of the Christian and Muslim
worlds. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
translation of philosophical texts from Arabic to Latin in Western Europe
"led to the transformation of almost all philosophical disciplines in the
medieval Latin world". The
influence of Islamic philosophers in Europe was particularly strong in natural
philosophy, psychology and metaphysics, though it also had an impact on the
study of logic and ethics.
Mathematics
Algebra
Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī played
a significant role in the development of algebra, algorithms,
and Hindu-Arabic
numerals.
Geometry
Islamic
art makes use of geometric
patterns and symmetries in many of its art forms, notably
in girih tilings. These are formed using
a set of five tile shapes, namely a regular decagon,
an elongated hexagon, a
bow tie, a rhombus,
and a regular pentagon.
All the sides of these tiles have the same length; and all their angles are
multiples of 36° (π/5 radians),
offering fivefold and tenfold symmetries. The tiles are decorated with strapwork lines (girih), generally
more visible than the tile boundaries. In 2007, the physicists Peter Lu and Paul
Steinhardt argued that girih from the 15th century
resembled quasicrystalline Penrose
tilings. Elaborate geometric zelligetilework is a distinctive element
in Moroccan
architecture. Muqarnas vaults are three-dimensional
but were designed in two dimensions with drawings of geometrical cells.
Trigonometry
Ibn
Muʿādh al-Jayyānī is one of several Islamic
mathematicians to whom the law of sines is
attributed; he wrote his The Book
of Unknown Arcs of a Sphere in the 11th century. This formula
relates the lengths of the sides of any triangle, rather than only right
triangles, to the sines of its angles.
Natural sciences
Scientific
method
Ibn
al-Haytham (Alhazen) was a significant figure in
the history
of scientific method, particularly in his approach to
experimentation, and has been described as the "world's first true
scientist".
Avicenna
made rules for testing the effectiveness of drugs, including that the effect
produced by the experimental drug should be seen constantly or after many
repetitions, to be counted. The physician Rhazes was an early proponent of
experimental medicine and recommended using control for clinical research. He
said: "If you want to study the effect of bloodletting on a condition,
divide the patients into two groups, perform bloodletting only on one group,
watch both, and compare the results."
Astronomy
In
about 964 AD, the Persian astronomer Abd
al-Rahman al-Sufi, writing in his Book of Fixed Stars,
described a "nebulous spot" in the Andromeda
constellation, the first definitive reference to what we
now know is the Andromeda Galaxy,
the nearest
spiral galaxy to our galaxy. Nasir al-Din
al-Tusi invented a geometrical technique called a Tusi-couple, which generates linear motion
from the sum of two circular motions to replace Ptolemy's
problematic equant. The
Tusi couple was later employed in Ibn al-Shatir's geocentric
model and Nicolaus
Copernicus' heliocentric Copernican
model although
it is not known who the intermediary is or if Copernicus rediscovered the
technique independently.
Physics
Alhazen played
a role in the development of optics.
One of the prevailing theories of vision in his time and place was the emission
theory supported by Euclid and Ptolemy,
where sight worked by the eye emitting rays of light, and the other was the
Aristotelean theory that sight worked when the essence of objects flows into
the eyes. Alhazen correctly argued that vision occurred when light, traveling
in straight lines, reflects off an object into the eyes. Al-Biruni wrote
of his insights into light, stating that its velocity must be immense when
compared to the speed of sound.
Biology
In
the cardiovascular
system, Ibn al-Nafis in his Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's
Canon was the first known scholar to contradict the
contention of the Galen School
that blood could pass between the ventricles in the heart through the cardiac
inter-ventricular septum that separates them, saying that there is no passage
between the ventricles at this point. Instead,
he correctly argued that all the blood that reached the left ventricle did so
after passing through the lung. He
also stated that there must be small communications, or pores, between
the pulmonary artery and pulmonary
vein, a prediction that preceded the discovery of the
pulmonary capillaries of Marcello Malpighi by
400 years. The Commentary was
rediscovered in the twentieth century in the Prussian
State Library in Berlin; whether its view of
the pulmonary
circulation influenced scientists such as Michael
Servetus is unclear.
In
the nervous system,
Rhazes stated that nerves had motor or sensory functions,
describing 7 cranial and
31 spinal cord nerves.
He assigned a numerical order to the cranial nerves from the optic to
the hypoglossal nerves.
He classified the spinal nerves into 8 cervical,
12 thoracic,
5 lumbar,
3 sacral,
and 3 coccygeal nerves. He used this to link clinical signs of injury to the
corresponding location of lesions in the nervous system.
Modern
commentators have likened medieval accounts of the "struggle for
existence" in the animal kingdom to the framework of the theory
of evolution. Thus, in his survey of the history of the
ideas which led to the theory of natural selection, Conway
Zirkle noted that al-Jahiz was
one of those who discussed a "struggle for existence", in his Kitab al-Hayawan (Book of
Animals), written in the 9th century. In
the 13th century, Nasir al-Din
al-Tusi believed that humans were derived from advanced
animals, saying, "Such humans [probably anthropoid apes]live
in the Western Sudan and other distant corners of the world. They are close to
animals by their habits, deeds and behavior." In
1377, Ibn Khaldun in
his Muqaddimah stated, "“The animal
kingdom was developed, its species multiplied, and in the gradual process of
Creation, it ended in man & arising from the world of the monkeys.”
Healthcare
Hospitals
The
earliest known Islamic hospital was built in 805 in Baghdad by order of Harun
Al-Rashid, and the most important of Baghdad's hospitals was established in 982
by the Buyid ruler 'Adud
al-Dawla. The
best documented early Islamic hospitals are the great Syro-Egyptian
establishments of the 12th and 13th centuries. By
the tenth century, Baghdad had five more hospitals, while Damascus had
six hospitals by the 15th century and Córdoba alone
had 50 major hospitals, many exclusively for the military.
The
typical hospital was divided into departments such as systemic diseases,
surgery, and orthopedics, with larger hospitals having more diverse
specialties. "Systemic diseases" was the rough equivalent of
today's internal medicine and
was further divided into sections such as fever, infections and digestive
issues. Every department had an officer-in-charge, a presiding officer and a
supervising specialist. The hospitals also had lecture theaters and libraries.
Hospitals staff included sanitary inspectors, who regulated cleanliness, and
accountants and other administrative staff. The
hospitals were typically run by a three-man board comprising a non-medical
administrator, the chief pharmacist, called the shaykh saydalani, who was equal
in rank to the chief physician, who served as mutwalli (dean). Medical
facilities traditionally closed each night, but by the 10th century laws were
passed to keep hospitals open 24 hours a day.
For
less serious cases, physicians staffed outpatient clinics. Cities also had
first aid centers staffed by physicians for emergencies that were often located
in busy public places, such as big gatherings for Friday prayers. The region
also had mobile units staffed by doctors and pharmacists who were supposed to
meet the need of remote communities. Baghdad was also known to have a separate hospital
for convicts since the early 10th century after the vizier ‘Ali ibn Isa ibn
Jarah ibn Thabit wrote to Baghdad’s chief medical officer that “prisons must
have their own doctors who should examine them every day”. The first hospital
built in Egypt, in Cairo's Southwestern quarter, was the first documented
facility to care for mental illnesses. In Aleppo's
Arghun Hospital, care for mental illness included abundant light, fresh air,
running water and music.
Medical
students would accompany physicians and participate in patient care. Hospitals
in this era were the first to require medical diplomas to license doctors. The
licensing test was administered by the region's government appointed chief
medical officer. The test had two steps; the first was to write a treatise, on
the subject the candidate wished to obtain a certificate, of original research
or commentary of existing texts, which they were encouraged to scrutinize for
errors. The second step was to answer questions in an interview with the chief
medical officer. Physicians worked fixed hours and medical staff salaries were
fixed by law. The hospitals had male and female quarters while some hospitals
only saw men and other hospitals, staffed by women physicians, only saw women. While
women physicians practiced medicine, many largely focused on obstetrics.
"...The hospital shall keep all patients, men and
women, until they are completely recovered. All costs are to be borne by the
hospital whether the people come from afar or near, whether they are residents
or foreigners, strong or weak, low or high, rich or poor, employed or
unemployed, blind or sighted, physically or mentally ill, learned or
illiterate. There are no conditions of consideration and payment, none is
objected to or even indirectly hinted at for non-payment."
Medicine
The
misplaced theory of Humorism was
largely dominant during this time. Arab physician Ibn Zuhr provided proof that scabies is
caused by the itch mite and
that it can be cured by removing the parasite without the need for purging,
bleeding or other treatments called for by humorism, making a break with the
humorism of Galen and Ibn Sina. Rhazes differentiated
through careful observation the two diseases smallpox and measles,
which were previously lumped together as a single disease that caused rashes. This
was based on location and the time of the appearance of the symptoms and he
also scaled the degree of severity and prognosis of infections according to the
color and location of rashes. Al-Zahrawi
was the first physician to describe an ectopic pregnancy,
and the first physician to identify the hereditary nature of haemophilia.For Islamic
scholars, Indian and Greek physicians and medical
researchers Sushruta, Galen,
Mankah, Atreya, Hippocrates, Charaka, and Agnivesa were
pre-eminent authorities. In
order to make the Indian and Greek tradition more accessible, understandable,
and teachable, Islamic scholars ordered and made more systematic the vast
Indian and Greco-Roman medical knowledge by writing encyclopedias and
summaries. Sometimes, past scholars were criticized, like Rhazes who criticized
and refuted Galen's revered theories, most notably, the Theory of Humors and
was thus accused of ignorance. It
was through 12th-century Arabic translations that medieval Europe
rediscovered Hellenic
medicine, including the works of Galen and Hippocrates, and
discovered ancient Indian medicine,
including the works of Sushruta and Charaka. Works such as Avicenna's The Canon of Medicine were
translated into Latin and disseminated throughout Europe. During the 15th and
16th centuries alone, The Canon
of Medicine was published more than thirty-five times. It was used
as a standard medical textbook through the 18th century in Europe.
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