The Moslems

The Near-Eastern and North African remnants of the Roman Empire fell as far as any other parts. Mohammed (570-632) brought Islam -- "Surrender" -- into the world, and it spread like wildfire, both by sword and by persuasion. So, with Islam and reunification under a series of Arab caliphates, the dark of the dark ages lifted a bit earlier there. In Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, even Seville in newly-conquered Spain, scholars turned to the ancient Greeks and began again to reason and observe. The security, stability, wealth, and relative tolerance of their society inspired them to produce literature, including philosophy, that by the millennium, nearly equalled that of ancient Greece.

Avicenna of Baghdad (Ibn Sina, 980-1037) was one of these great thinkers. Thoroughly familiar with Aristotle, he was nonetheless a neo-Platonist and a gnostic, as it seems all Moslem philosophers must be in order to remain Moslem. Generally, he felt that reason and faith could not conflict, as the Christian thinkers had concluded as well. But he hints at heresy by suggesting that such items of faith as the physical paradise after death that Mohammed promised his followers, were necessary in order to win over the masses, but are just stories to the mature believer.

Averroes of Cordova (Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198) is the greatest of the Islamic philosophers. He began as a lawyer, and was chief justice of Seville and later of Cordova. He was also a physician, and served as the court physician in Marrakesh. He was the first to recognize that if a person survived smallpox, they would be immune thereafter. He described for the first time the purpose of the retina. He wrote an encyclopedia of medicine used in both Moslem and Christian universities.

Averroes begins, of course, with God. God is what sustains reality. God is the order of the universe. But, he says, creation is just a myth. The universe has always existed, and will always exist.

The human mind has two aspects. There is a passive intellect, which is composed of the potential for thought and carries the details that make one personality different from another, both physically and psychologically. It is a part of the body and dies with it. And there is an active intellect, which energizes the passive intellect. It is actually the same in each person, is the only part of us that survives death, and is, in fact, God.

But Islam’s openness to philosophy was not to last. The Emir of Baghdad ordered Averroes’ books burned, and his example was followed by other leaders all the way back to Averroes’ homeland of Spain. The world of Islam had achieved what the Christian world failed to achieve: complete domination by religion.

By means of Moslem Spain and Sicily, Avicenna and Averroes and others would come to inspire, in turn, the Christian scholars of the new universities of Europe. These scholars would consume the writings of Greek, Jewish, and Arabic scholars.