The Andalusian interlude

Lewis traces the rise and fall of the Arab empire in Spain.

ISLAM contributed handsomely to the Renaissance in Europe to its learning, arts and culture. While Europe forged ahead, the Muslim world sank into obscurantism and revivalism. This book traces the first process with erudition and empathy; it alludes briefly to the beginnings of the second process.

The author is one of Americas most distinguished historians, winning the Pulitzer Prize twice and many other awards besides. He demonstrates that a historian can be eminently readable as he imparts his knowledge.

At the beginning of the eighth century the Arabs brought one of historys greatest revolutions in power, religion, culture and wealth to Dark Ages Europe. The Arabs were to stay there until the end of the fifteenth century and for much of that time until roughly the beginning of the twelfth century Islam in al-Andalus [Muslim Spain] was generally religiously tolerant and, above all, economically robust.

At the Battle of Poitiers in 732, Charles Martel beat back the Muslim forces. Gibbons well-known pronouncement influenced the value judgments rendered by historians as to the desirable outcome from the competition between these two world orders. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

Islam rose when the Roman Empire fell. Irans new Sassanian rulers shook it to its foundations. The background to the birth of Islam is described vividly.

The Arabs watched the contest, little imagining that they themselves would, one day, be a power to reckon with. Prophet Muhammad was born in 570 when the Ethiopian army reached the gates of Mecca. It was routed by the Iranian army, to Gibbons bitter lament that a Christian power had lost Arabia. Abyssinia would have prevented a revolution which has changed the civil and religious state of the world.

The story of the spread of Islam is well told, the author debunking myths fostered by Gibbons heirs, for instance, that the Caliph Umar destroyed the Library of Alexandria. That terrible result had been all but accomplished in the last decade of the fourth century by fanatical Alexandrian Christians who travestied Emperor Theodosiuss decree against paganism.

Professor Lewis traces the rise, decline and fall of the Arab empire in Spain. Two European civilisations occupied the Continent, one Muslim, one Christian. The Muslim invasion of Europe had begun with a night-time deployment on empty Calpe Mountain. Tariq built the brick fortress that still stands there, on what is now Gibraltar Jebel Tariq (Tariqs Mountain).

The fall of Toledo on May 25, 1085, was the beginning of the end of Arab rule in Spain. That was marked by the evacuation from Granada of the last Amir on Spanish soil on January 2, 1492. Arab rule in Spain lasted for nearly eight centuries. As it happened, in 1453 Constantinople fell to the forces of Sultan Mehmed II.

The Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1919, but not before Turkish forces knocked twice at the gates of Vienna, in 1529 and 1683. The empire governed a large part of eastern Europe. In European eyes, the Turks had taken over from the Arabs as the Islamic threat to Christian Europe.

This book provides a corrective to both sides. The West refuses to acknowledge its debt to Islam. Muslims refuse to reflect earnestly on their decline. Andalusians assimilated the new learning in the sciences and humanities with an almost-untroubled alacrity, thereby creating a basis of knowledge that would provide the foundation for the Renaissance in Christendom certain to come. In the polarised twelfth century, the flow of knowledge gave way to a virtual flood. Muslim learning, having seeped into the Christian West for decades from Andalusia, commenced a torrential outflow. It was a process mimicking osmosis at first and later, a conveyor belt by the first quarter of the twelfth century, philosophy and science fairly tumbled out of occupied Toledo into Christian Europe.

The seepage of early times had yielded the writings of Ibn Hazm, historian, jurist and Platonist of al-Zarqiyal (Zarquallu). Toledan astronomer (whose Toledan Tables shaped the development of Latin Astronomy) Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Sephardic philosopher and poet of Zaragoza, influential in the Latin West as Avicebron A man of science and philosophy who became well known to literate Christians was a Persian who never travelled to al-Andalus. His Latinised name was Avicenna. A child prodigy born in a remote corner of the Muslim empire at the end of the tenth century, Abu Ali ibn Sina had assimilated the entire contents of a sultans library by the age of eighteen. Ibn Sina the philosopher caused the doctors of the Church much worry about his synthesis of Platonic pantheism and Aristotelian rationalism. Ibn Sina the physician was eventually received almost with veneration.

In contrast to Ibn Sina and his philosophical companions, no Platonic pantheism or Sufi mysticism infected Ibn Rushds writings. His intensely rationalist philosophy reiterated Aristotles insistence that existence preceded essence, that science trumped theology that essences were mental abstractions.

He refuted Islams premier theologian of the late 11th century, al-Ghazali (died 1111), whose arbitral book, The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-Falasifa), purported to prove that rational philosophy was futile. Ibn Rushd rejoined that God had created a logical universe of cause and effect. He who repudiates causality, he wrote in his audacious book, The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahafut-al-Tahafut), actually repudiates reason.

There were three paths to knowledge, he contended a threefold system of truth, rhetorical (religious), dialectical and philosophical (empirical). The former served the needs of the unsophisticated, the latter was the tool of the educated.

It was a magnificent achievement. The author comments movingly on the Arabic legend on the wall of Abel al-Rahman Is Great Mosque in Cordoba, la Mezquita:

The brief inscription on this most perfect structure whispered an oracular subtlety that lingers in the mind. Before the House of Islam became possible, two world empires the Roman and the Iranian had struggled seven hundred years for primacy. After the construction of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, Islam would wax and wane in Europe seven hundred years until its definitive suppression. La Mezquitas Arabic spoke of itself thus: It embodied what came before, illuminated what came after . More than ever before, light needs to be shone on the long Andalusian aftermath that is pressingly with us now.