Dr. Hussein Qasim al-Aziz

Introduction

As a modest contribution toward showing the social and cultural value of the role played by the Syriacs in helping the Arabs and Muslims engage culturally with world civilization in the medieval period, I offer this brief study of some aspects of the influence of the cultural centers in the East. Their scholarly schools, which preserved the Greek and Latin works along with some of their Syriac translations, together with Sanskrit, Persian, and other writings, supplied their brilliant, exceptional scholars, physicians, and translators, who paved the way and helped Arab-Islamic thought, at the moment of its first flowering, to draw upon the wellsprings of knowledge and the horizons of thought — in addition to enriching the classical studies with their analyses, commentaries, and additions.

The Condition of the Arabs Before Islam

A sound scholarly view regards the human heritage as the product of the varied contributions of many peoples, in differing degrees and in different forms, according to their material capacities — which are determined by their mode of production — and the circumstances of each within the social system in which it exists, and the effects of the interactions of economic life upon the various forms of superstructural relations: moral, religious, philosophical, legal, political, and artistic. For peoples, in practicing the process of production according to differing, specific, and distinct modes, have contributed to the building of the edifice of world civilization in varying forms of interaction — between giving and taking, rejection and resistance — through a chain of relations of contact, cooperation, intermingling, and domination. In light of this scholarly view we are required to take into account the objective and subjective conditions of the Arabs before and after Islam. For the interaction of nations and peoples with civilization, whether negative or positive, depends upon complex objective and subjective factors — social and economic — that are affected (especially among peoples that were backward in antiquity) by geographic conditions: topographical, geological, climatic, and locational (strategic) — and by economic activity and human contact through migrations, wars, and trade. And although geographic conditions, as is known, do not play a decisive role in social changes, they are not without influence, for they affect human beings, and their influence upon backward peoples is all the stronger.

For this reason, the conditions of the desert of the Arabian Peninsula — with its harshness and the scantiness of its resources in antiquity, and with its almost total isolation of its inhabitants from the neighboring peoples — left tangible traces, without doubt, upon the life of the ancients, among whom the communal system prevailed for a longer period (except in Yemen). The tribal clan system, which is one of the requisites of the communal system, persisted for a long time. The tribal clan system presupposes a very primitive production, and consequently a very small population scattered over a vast expanse of land, which leads to a low level of production and to a nomadic, roaming life; and from these two there arises the intensification of tribal loyalty (asabiyya), which continued until the coming of Islam — whereas the neighboring peoples of the Near and Middle East had, to varying degrees, passed beyond communalism to slavery and then to feudalism. And since the life of the pre-Islamic Arabs was simple and naive, their knowledge, ideas, and opinions — which are a reflection of social conditions and their material circumstances, of economic states — were simple and naive; for just as people's mode of life is, so too is the mode of their thought.

Intellectual and Cultural Conditions

Through a process of contradictory development, the Sasanians — who, after conquering Iraq, the cradle of the ancient civilizations, took it as their seat — inherited a civilizational heritage; likewise the Byzantines, who occupied Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, inherited it, and the lands of these regions were advanced on the ladder of civilizational development for their time. The features of civilization among the settled societies of these countries — engaged in agriculture and its related crafts and in trade — were clear in the flourishing of cities teeming with palaces, buildings, and enormous temples, in the commercial centers spread throughout their regions, and in the arrangement of extensive irrigation networks, where the growing feudal system pervaded those societies. There were contracts for irrigation and regulation of matters of agriculture, planting, and land exploitation; there were extensive systems of oppressive, manifold taxes; and there were cultural institutions and scholarly centers such as Alexandria, Antioch, Harran, Edessa, Bosra, al-Hira, and Gundeshapur. There were philosophers, physicians, scholars, legislators, historians, and astronomers, and both empires had systems of governance and laws by which they controlled them in imposing their sovereignty over the peoples they exploited. But the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, before Islam, had no acquaintance with the sciences and knowledge that the Sasanians and Byzantines possessed.

In the southwest, in Yemen — where a civilization of the slave system had arisen — there came the foreign occupation, first Abyssinian and then Iranian, which devastated the land, ruined the economic infrastructure, and diverted the trade routes away from it. For this reason, long was the age in which the people of the south were separated from the arts and knowledge of old that they had once practiced in the art of engineering the building of irrigation works, temples, fortresses, and palaces, and in the sciences available in their time. As for the rest of the Peninsula, it was backward by virtue of the backwardness of the development of its economy — which did not have a commodity production — and by virtue of the isolation imposed by the desert. Yet this broad isolation of the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, before Islam, from the neighboring, developed countries of the Near East was not complete, for on a narrow scale there took place contacts — of the tribes roaming after pasture and water, of the merchants who traveled with their trade, of the delegations of chiefs and powerful figures of the tribes, and of the poets who came to the courts of the Lakhmid and Ghassanid princes, and sometimes to Ctesiphon (al-Mada'in), the capital of the Chosroes — with the members of those developed peoples. These narrow contacts had limited effects upon the civilization of the pre-Islamic Arabs, in that some knowledge was borrowed in a simplified form, and civilizational terms and vocabulary of financial, literary, cultural, and religious systems entered (kharaj, jizya, qafiz, sirat, asatir, mihrab, haykal, bi'a, etc.). The trace of this may be observed in the styles and vocabulary of the poets who came to the Lakhmid and Ghassanid princes in particular.

As for the most important knowledge of the pre-Islamic Arabs — which for the most part arose from the requirements of their societies — it was: the (science of) genealogy, the (science of) history, the interpretation of dreams, and the (science of) astrology and astronomy. This simple, rudimentary knowledge was called "science" only loosely. But in truth it was nothing more than a little rudimentary knowledge, and scattered fragments of orally transmitted lore in which truth is mingled with myth. That is because the communal mode of production prevailing in the Arabian Peninsula (despite its disintegration and the appearance of manifestations of slavery and the like) did not allow the dominant system there to attain even the lowest intellectual and civilizational level reached by the neighboring civilized peoples, whose societies were developed by the advancement of their production, as we mentioned earlier.

Cultural Interaction

The widest contact of the Arabs with others, and the most important circumstance and stimulus for their civilizational interaction, came about, without doubt, after their conquest of various countries and their contact with numerous nationalities and religions possessing developed civilizations and social systems, where Islam accompanied the final transition of the enslaving relations of production in the region into feudalism.

As a result of this, Arab-Islamic society developed, owing to its liberation from its former isolation and its inheritance of the systems of the conquered countries — their economic, social, and administrative systems, their social relations of production, and their developed traditions of governance. The Arab Muslims were affected by the influences of those developed societies, which had passed beyond the systems of communalism to slavery and then to feudalism a long time before; and the new circumstances compelled Islamic society — despite the resistance of the Arab aristocracy and its attempt to preserve the old mode — to adopt the advanced civilizational styles and modes in those conquered countries, and to become acquainted with their knowledge, sciences, inherited systems, laws, and philosophies. Thus, upon the transition from the communal society to the feudal society, there arose the need to acquaint oneself with the systems, sciences, and arts of the ancients, to learn them, and then to adopt them. And the inhabitants of the conquered land had the great merit of facilitating these tasks. For it was the non-Arabs and non-Muslims among the inhabitants of the conquered countries who transmitted the heritage of human thought and translated it from Greek (the Greek sciences had already been translated into Syriac), Sanskrit, and Pahlavi (Old Persian) into Arabic. Translation and transmission began, in the Umayyad period, to proceed slowly; but the development of society in the Abbasid period advanced at a swifter pace [?], which encouraged the expansion of the translation movement and pushed it forward, such that Muslim scholars in the Abbasid period, and after the caliphate of al-Ma'mun, became acquainted with most of the output of the ancient philosophers and scholars, among the Greeks and others. There is no doubt that the development of society in the Abbasid period helped to provide the material basis for creating better conditions for the emergence of the requisites for the development of Arab-Islamic thought, which contributed to the rise of civilizational interaction and to the acceleration of the movement of the broad contribution made by the Arabs and Muslims to the whole of the human heritage. Translation was its principal tributary, which supplied the Muslims with an inexhaustible source from the ancient civilizations, their arts, and their ideas; it benefited them, without doubt, in following their styles, methods, and philosophy, as reflected in the rationalism of the Mu'tazila, the ideas of the encyclopedic Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa) (philosophers and scholars), and some of the later philosophers who developed Aristotle's philosophy in a materialist direction, and became, thanks to that, the necessary link between Greece and the Renaissance. The abundant Arab and Muslim sources that have reached us have provided us with rich and ample information about the culture that all of humanity's development created — of medical, mathematical, geometrical, and astronomical sciences and knowledge, literature, linguistics, jurisprudence, philosophy, and arts — which pointed to the mutual understanding among peoples and the mutual influence of each people's culture upon the other. Those sciences and forms of knowledge were translated, digested, and assimilated, and so bequeathed to the Arabs and Muslims an immense inheritance whose enlightened ideas exerted their influence upon the free thought of the Latin peoples in the Renaissance. Nevertheless, we ought to take into account the strong reservation expressed by "Claude Cahen" concerning the impossibility of the Muslims becoming acquainted with the whole of the ancient heritage, on account of what had befallen the ancient heritage, shortly before Islam, in the way of a purge in the later schools — in addition to the fact that the Eastern peoples, who had not been stamped with the imprint of Greek civilization, had begun — as he notes — to transmit the ancient works with which they were concerned into their own languages, and especially into Syriac, and sometimes into Pahlavi as well. The Soviet orientalist "Barthold" holds that the lands that fell into the possession of the Muslims were better off than others, and that the "Christians were better off under the rule of the Muslims in the early times, on account of the conquerors' need for this Christian element, which surpassed the Arabs in civilization. In Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia there arose men of learning and letters of the first rank in Syriac and Greek literature during the first Islamic century. And Jacob of Edessa (640–708 CE), of celebrated renown, held among those scholars a special, distinguished place in the Syriac Orthodox denomination, and the banks of the Euphrates, after recovering their ancient standing, became one of the centers of the civilization of the world."

There is no doubt that "Blachère" observed the superiority of the members of the vanquished peoples in material and cultural wealth, which enabled them to retain the capacity for civilizational interaction — to say nothing of their retention of their religious beliefs, their social frameworks, and their positions in administration, trade, and the crafts. Given the need of the Arabs and Muslims for the expertise and knowledge that these superior elements possessed, they sought their help and provided them with opportunities that were limited at first and then began to expand with the development of the material and intellectual needs of the Arabs and Muslims. "O'Leary" points to the translation movement, saying: "The first and most important indication of the new adaptation in Islamic thought was the abundant production of Arabic translations of works dealing with scientific philosophy. As a result of this, the Arabic-speaking world, eighty years after the fall of the Umayyads, came into possession of translations of most of the works of Aristotle and the Neoplatonist commentators, some of the works of Plato, most of the works of Galen and parts of other works on medicine and their commentaries, and then of Greek scientific works and various Indian and Persian works. This age of activity in translation consists of two stages: the first begins from the Abbasids' seizure of the caliphate to the caliphate of al-Ma'mun (132–198 AH), during which independent translators carried out a great deal of translation, most of them Christians and Jews and converts who had entered Islam from other religions. The second stage was during the reign of al-Ma'mun and his immediate successors, when the work of translation was concentrated in a school (he means the House of Wisdom) newly founded in Baghdad, and a persistent effort was made to make the material necessary for philosophical and scientific research available to the Arabic-speaking student." But the translation movement, though it continued to be active and successful after the age of al-Ma'mun, did not remain paid work — as al-Yaziji notes — but rather became free and rested upon personal desire and individual pleasure. That is because the continued occupation with these sciences had generated in their devotees an exquisite intellectual pleasure. No sooner had the fourth century dawned than the scholarly movement began to mature, and the translations came to be accompanied by annotations and commentaries. Al-Yaziji adds that works on these subjects began to appear, first in the form of short studies on limited topics, then in the form of comprehensive works containing quotation, independent reasoning, analysis, criticism, ordering, classification, deduction, and original composition. But despite the superiority of the Christians over the Muslims and their earlier acquaintance with the Greek sciences, they did not surpass the Muslim scholars — as Barthold holds — and did not produce a scholar who could rightly be compared to al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Biruni, and Ibn Rushd. Moreover, the Muslims' superiority over them caused them to lose their connection with Greek, in which their Syriac language would have aided them, because the Arabic language became the language of science after the transfer of that immense heritage of foreign sciences and knowledge into Arabic.

To be continued in the next issue