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Why Christians Accepted Greek Natural Philosophy, But
Muslims Did Not By Fjordman My main thesis in this essay is that Christianity was a
Greco-Roman religion in a way which Islam never was or could be. Islam was
founded outside of the Greco-Roman world. Christianity was founded within this
world, and gradually grew accustomed to Greco-Roman culture. This had a major
long-term impact on how the adherents of these two religions treated the
Greco-Roman legacy. Before I explain this, let me first say something about
Roman civilization and why it was possible for Christianity to take over the Roman architectural achievements were impressive but purely
functional, famously displayed in their bridges, aqueducts and above all their
excellent roads, some of which remained in use for a thousand years or more. In
their technical skill Roman architects far surpassed those of classical “ There was a notable decline in the confidence of traditional
agrarian religions in the urban
As Bamford Parkes states, “A civilization is not to be condemned solely because it fails to produce any important art, but a lack of artistic creativity is likely to indicate some more general failure of vitality. It is the function of art to sharpen human perceptions and sensibilities, to communicate an awareness of the values and significances inherent in human experience, and thereby to enrich man's understanding and enhance his capacity for enjoyment. That a society has become incapable of original self-expression means that it is deficient both in the apprehension of reality and in the power of appreciation. A society without good art is likely to succumb to a pervasive ennui and sense of futility and oppression, and to turn for stimulation to violent and morally shocking forms of entertainment. Only a people devoid of aesthetic sensitivity could have developed such a passion for watching gladiators. The strongest impression conveyed by the art of the early empire is that it was the product of an immense boredom. This is the simplest explanation for the decline of Roman civilization and may also be the truest.”
The great city of
Roman politics, too, were frequently brutal. Caesar died at
a meeting of the Senate, killed by senators. Pompey and Cicero died violent
deaths at the hands of their political rivals. After the Republic, the
cruelties of the emperors Nero and Caligula became legend. There is undeniably
something dark about a culture where families go to watch people get killed for
enjoyment. In this case, as with the widespread Roman slavery, Christianity was
definitely a force for good, although there are those who have blamed it for
contributing to the downfall of the Empire. The English historian Edward Gibbon
(1737-1794) frequented the circles of people such as Voltaire and in all
likelihood did not believe in organized religion. His critical remarks about
Christianity in his monumental The History of the Decline and Fall of the
According to Charles Murray, “The Roman republic was also a slave state on such a scale that Gibbon estimated that the number of slaves may have outnumbered the free inhabitants of the Roman world. A proposal that slaves should wear a distinctive garment was rejected, Gibbon notes dryly, because ‘it was justly apprehended that there might be some danger in acquainting [the slaves] with their own numbers.’ Nor was Roman slavery kindly. Roman masters might dispose of the lives of their slaves at will, and were not reluctant to use that power. We know, for example, that the size of the slave force in the palace of a Roman noble family could number about four hundred souls. The reason we know that number is that the Roman archives record an instance in which the master in such a palace was murdered, and the household slaves were executed for failing to prevent his murder – all four hundred of them.”
There were increasingly strong ties between the Roman state
and the Christian religion during the fourth century until finally in 391 and
392 Theodosios, the last emperor of the unified Roman Empire before its
division, forbade all pagan cults, in public and private. The law probably
could not be strictly enforced and there was no such thing as a single “edict
of Theodosios” that closed the pagan temples, but there can be no doubt that
the rise of Christianity led to the abolishment of alternative religions. As a
non-Christian I would like to compliment Christianity for having made numerous
positive contributions to my civilization, from abolishing slavery to
contributing greatly to
Nevertheless, while Greco-Roman religions were suppressed, Christians were quite willing to use many Greek philosophical concepts and ideas. As Henry Bamford Parkes puts it: “…although Christianity may have borrowed from the pagan heritage, it borrowed only what it could integrate with its own basic doctrines and could profitably absorb and make use of….Much more important in the early evolution of Christianity was the influence of the classical intellectual heritage. As men trained in Hellenic and Roman modes of thought became converted, they began to reinterpret the new doctrines in the terms to which they were accustomed. Thus, Christian theology was presented in the language of Greek philosophy and of Roman law. Much of the classical tradition was worthy of preservation and could be harmonized with the new religion. Especially significant was the assimilation by Christianity of the whole Greek concept of natural law, especially in its Stoic form. On the other hand, Christianity also became linked with the Platonic heritage, in spite of the sharp contrasts between the teaching of Jesus and that of Plato; and from this and other sources it gradually acquired a bias toward an ascetic denial of the world and the flesh which was not a part of the original gospel and which tended to obscure much of its original meaning.” The fourth century also witnessed the development and
institutionalization of Christian monasticism. The desire for the ascetic life
is common to many religious traditions; Christian monasticism arguably had its
roots in Jewish asceticism. There is evidence of Christian ascetics from an
early age, individuals who sought to follow the example of John the Baptist or
Jesus Christ himself, who had spent time in the solitude and wildness of desert
places. By the third century there were significant numbers of such ascetics,
especially in the deserts of “The best-known of the early ascetics is St. Antony (or St.
Anthony, ca. 251-356), an Egyptian born to a prosperous family who gave away
all his wealth to follow the monastic life. St. Athanasios' biography of St.
Antony (written ca. 356-7) provides characteristic details about the ascetic
life: Anthony's struggles with demons and miracles became the standard fare of
all subsequent ascetic lives. Although The first Christian monasteries were created in “As Cantor explains, ‘half-consciously the pope worked to make the Roman episcopate the successor to the Roman state in the West.’ Leo’s [Leo I, Pope AD 440-461] prominent ideological work was complemented by the growth of a literate monastic network that gradually spread through western Europe. Throughout the period of Imperial disintegration, many aristocrats converted to Christianity, carrying over to the Church their literary education and respect for the preservation of the written word characteristic of late antiquity….But the veneration and preservation of the word that was carried over by former Roman aristocrats gradually became fused with the practices of monasticism, making the Church an island of literacy in an otherwise oral culture. In Cantor's words: ‘The Latin church was preserved from extinction, and European civilization with it, by the two ecclesiastical institutions that alone had the strength and efficiency to withstand the impress of surrounding barbarism: the regular clergy (that is, the monks) and the papacy.’” The fact that Christian monasticism was born in
Many Jews resisted Hellenization. According to Nicholas
Ostler, “Aramaic remained the dominant language in
Philo Judaeus or Philo of Alexandria (ca. 15 BC-ca. 50 AD) was a Hellenized Jew who wrote in Greek but knew little Hebrew, and arguably had a greater influence on Christians than on Jews. He is often considered the initiator of the handmaiden tradition, the idea that secular disciplines such as Greek natural philosophy could be utilized to understand and explicate Biblical theology. This attitude was adopted by Augustine and by many church fathers who made it respectable, even essential, for Christian authors to study Greek philosophy and science where these were thought to contribute to the advancement of Christianity. While they admittedly sometimes discouraged the study of Greek pagan thought for its own sake, they didn’t condemn all secular literature. This was to prove of great importance for the future.
The birth of Jesus of Nazareth was by his followers considered to constitute nothing less than the major turning point in human history, which is why the Christian calendar is based on his (alleged) year of birth. Anno Domini (Latin: In the year of (Our) Lord) is abbreviated as AD or A.D., whereas BC or B.C. means Before Christ in the Julian or Egyptian-inspired Roman calendar and later in the modified Gregorian version of this calendar. The Gregorian calendar has, after the European colonial expansion, been adopted on a global basis. Because it is deeply tied to a Christian world view, some scholars now prefer to use the supposedly more neutral terms Common Era or “CE” instead of “AD” and “BCE” or Before the Common Era instead of “BC,” but I have primarily used the traditional abbreviations when writing this.
The theologian and
mathematician Dionysius Exiguus created the Christian chronology currently in
use around 525 AD at the request of the pope, and its use spread through his
Easter tables. Since the concept of zero was not known at this time (it was
imported from
We now believe that Jesus of Nazareth was born just before
our current era, perhaps in the years 4 or 6 BC. Most critical scholars accept
that Jesus was crucified in
Although apparently born in
Jesus is often portrayed as the founder of Christianity the way Muhammad was the founder of Islam. Both men came from humble origins and had a huge impact on world history, but this is also where the parallels end. Jesus is not the equivalent of Muhammad, who claimed to be a Messenger who brought the Koran, the word of his God Allah, to mankind. In Christianity, Jesus himself is the message, the Word become flesh, and the Gospels are inspired texts about Him. The concept of the Trinity, with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three manifestations of the same God, is unthinkable in Islam, as is the idea that God had a Son, born of a human mother to die for the sins and salvation of mankind. While these theological differences are large, the different practical impact of the two religions primarily stems from the fact that the personalities and teachings of the founders were radically different, as were the political circumstances in which the faiths were historically formed.
According to Islamic sources, Muhammad and his followers
pillaged their neighbors and killed some of their critics. Jesus and his
apostles never did anything like this. While Islam became a major world
religion because Muhammad and his successors conquered a vast empire by force,
Christianity became a world religion by slowly conquering an already
established empire, the
That Christianity gradually formed within a Greco-Roman political and cultural context had a huge impact on its development. In some cases it was clearly an extension of Judaism; for instance the Christians adopted the entire Hebrew Bible as their own, including the Ten Commandments. While many Jewish ethical ideas with no Greco-Roman precedent were continued and spread though the vehicle of Christianity, either directly or in an altered form, Christians added some new ideas of their own and adopted others from their Greco-Roman environment. The Christian emphasis on pictorial arts and sculpture as a means of worship, for instance, clearly owed vastly more to the Greco-Roman than to the Jewish tradition.
The primary language of Palestinian Jews since the age of
the Assyrian and Persian Empires was Aramaic; already in Jesus’ time Hebrew was
restricted to religious uses. However, Jewish traders could probably speak some
Greek, and since the conquests of Alexander the Great Koine Greek, too, had
been widely used in the region. Greek remained an unofficial first or second
language in the
As a young Jew, Jesus’ main language was probably Aramaic, but he may well have been familiar with Hebrew, the language of the Hebrew Bible and a Semitic tongue closely related to Aramaic. It is also possible that he was competent in Koine Greek, although the details of his linguistic skills are disputed among critical scholars. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that the founder of Christianity spoke Greek. We can be virtually certain that Muhammad, if he did indeed exist, did not speak Greek, nor did any of his prominent followers, immediate successors or those who first formulated Islamic legal doctrines. In contrast, we know with absolute certainty that Paul, who shaped Christianity more than any other person other than Jesus himself, was proficient in Greek, as were many of the early Christian leaders.
Paul’s Gentile converts did not have to undergo circumcision and did not become Jews, but something new. Paul spoke in positive terms of celibacy and insisted on the duty of obedience to secular rulers. In his letter to the Romans 13:2-7 he asserted that “whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.” In later times this passage was used to support the doctrine of the divine right of kings, until this doctrine was finally questioned by Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke. According to Christian tradition, Paul and Peter were executed in Rome, perhaps as part of the executions of Christians ordered by the Roman Emperor Nero following the great fire in that city.
The relationship between the Roman state and the new
religion was admittedly quite complex. A number of early Christians, starting
with Jesus himself and possibly Paul and Peter, were executed by Roman
authorities. Yet in the end, it could be claimed with some justification that
Christianity was a Roman religion. Christianity may have been a Jewish child,
but it was born into the
I do not agree with everything scholar L. Carl. Brown writes in his book Religion and State as I believe that Islam with its doctrine of Jihad differs from Judaism and Christianity and indeed any other major religion. However, it is true that there are a few commonalities. Paul adopted secular Roman law instead of Jewish religious law that governs all aspects of life: “Islam and Judaism both place great emphasis on the law.
Both religious systems conceive of a comprehensive religio-legal system
covering all aspects of the individual’s relations to others and of the
individual’s relation to God. Everything is taken into account and set out in
detail – times of prayer, foods that may be eaten and manner of ritual slaughter
of animals, almsgiving, inheritance, and even such minor details as the use of
a toothpick. The emphasis on the religious law in both Islam and Judaism is to
be contrasted with the Christian concept of liberation from the curse of the
law (Galatians 3:13) and of justification through faith alone, all this being
especially the theological contribution of In his book The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, the English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton explains how Christianity from its beginning in the Roman Empire “internalized some of the ideas of imperial government,” above all a concept of law that was more Roman than Jewish. Roman law was secular, unconcerned with the individual's religious status and could change in response to changing circumstances; its validity derived purely from the fact that it was commanded by the sovereign power and enforced against every subject. “That conception of law is perhaps the most important force in the emergence of European forms of sovereignty.” Roman law was conceived as a universal jurisdiction, and Christianity was conceived as a universal church: “ Moreover, according to Roger Scruton, “Western civilization is composed of communities held together by a political process, and by the rights and duties of the citizen as defined by that process. Paradoxically, it is the existence of this political process that enables us to live without politics. Having consigned the business of government to defined offices, occupied successively by people who are the servants and not the masters of those who elected them, we can devote ourselves to what really matters – to the private interests, personal loves, and social customs in which we find our satisfaction. Politics, in other words, makes it possible to separate society from the state, so removing politics from our private lives. Where there is no political process, this separation does not occur. In the totalitarian state or the military dictatorship everything is political precisely because nothing is…. The political process is an achievement – one that might not have occurred and has not occurred in those parts of the world where Roman law and Christian doctrine have left no mark. Even today most communities are held together in other ways – by tribal sentiment, by religion, or by force.”
The notion of a “common Abrahamic monotheism” is misleading. A comparative reading of the Gospels and the Koran makes it evident that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God, despite what Muslims and some non-Muslim apologists might claim. Jesus refused to punish an adulterous woman by stoning by stating that he who is without sin should throw the first stone (John 8:7). In contrast, Muhammad endorsed stoning. Jews once practiced lapidation (stoning) but have long since been able to move beyond such cruel practices, whereas stoning is still practiced by some Muslim groups in the twenty-first century.
In the Islamic world, Greek natural philosophy was never fully accepted, and what initial acceptance there had been was largely nullified by the highly influential theologian al-Ghazali (1058-1111). He regarded natural philosophy as dangerous to Islam and was even skeptical of the concept of mathematical proof, one of the most important and unique contributions of ancient Greek scholarship to the modern world. Edward Grant explains in his very well-researched book Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus: “[Al-Ghazali] included the mathematical sciences within the class of philosophical sciences (i.e., mathematics, logic, natural science, theology or metaphysics, politics, and ethics) and concluded that a student who studied these sciences would be 'infected with the evil and corruption of the philosophers. Few there are who devote themselves to this study without being stripped of religion and having the bridle of godly fear removed from their heads' (Watt 1953, 34). In his great philosophical work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali attacks ancient philosophy, especially the views of Aristotle. He does so by describing and criticizing the ideas of al-Farabi and Avicenna, two of the most important Islamic philosophical commentators on Aristotle. After criticizing their opinions on twenty philosophical problems, including the eternality of the world, that God knows only universals and not particulars, and that bodies will not be resurrected after death, al-Ghazali declares: 'All these three theories are in violent opposition to Islam. To believe in them is to accuse the prophets of falsehood, and to consider their teachings as a hypocritical misrepresentation designed to appeal to the masses. And this is blatant blasphemy to which no Muslim sect would subscribe' (al-Ghazali 1963, 249).” As Ibn Warraq sums up in his modern classic Why I Am Not a Muslim, “orthodox Islam emerged victorious from the encounter with Greek philosophy. Islam rejected the idea that one could attain truth with unaided human reason and settled for the unreflective comforts of the putatively superior truth of divine revelation. Wherever one decides to place the date of this victory of orthodox Islam (perhaps in the ninth century with the conversion of al-Ashari, or in the eleventh century with the works of al-Ghazali), it has been, I believe, an unmitigated disaster for all Muslims, indeed all mankind.”
It is true that a number of Greek works were translated to Arabic, especially in the ninth century when a group called Mu’tazilites attempted, without lasting success, to reconcile Islamic with logic. They have gained a modern reputation as freethinkers, but as Ibn Warraq writes: “However, it is clear now that the Mu’tazilites were first and foremost Muslims, living in the circle of Islamic ideas, and were motivated by religious concerns. There was no sign of absolute liberated thinking, or a desire, as [Hungarian orientalist] Goldziher put it, ‘to throw off chafing shackles, to the detriment of the rigorously orthodox view of life.’ Furthermore, far from being ‘liberal,’ they turned out to be exceedingly intolerant, and were involved in the Mihna, the Muslim Inquisition under the Abbasids. However, the Mu’tazilites are important for having introduced Greek philosophical ideas into the discussion of Islamic dogmas.” Ibn Rushd (Averroes) was born in
Nevertheless, Ibn Rushd is chiefly remembered for his attempts at combining Aristotelian philosophy and Islam. According to Ibn Warraq, he had a major influence on the Latin scientists of the thirteenth century, yet “had no influence at all on the development of Islamic philosophy. After his death, he was practically forgotten in the Islamic world.” Philosophy in general went into permanent decline. One of the reasons for this was the writings of al-Ghazali, who argued that much of Greek philosophy was logically incoherent and an affront to Islam. Averroes’ attempts at refuting al-Ghazali were ignored and forgotten.
Al-Ghazali, whose influence cannot be overstated, was a highly orthodox Muslim on matters regarding the use of violence against non-Muslims. Here he is on the importance of Jihad: “[O]ne must go on jihad [i.e., warlike razzias or raids] at least once a year...One may use a catapult against them [non-Muslims] when they are in a fortress, even if among them are women and children. One may set fire to them and/or drown them...If a person of the ahl al-kitab [People of the Book] is enslaved, his marriage is [automatically] revoked...One may cut down their trees...One must destroy their useless books. Jihadists may take as booty whatever they decide...They may steal as much food as they need.” Another Muslim scholar, the prominent North African historian Ibn Khaldun, had a similar, traditional view of Jihad and shared the deep suspicion of philosophy. Edward Grant: “Even so enlightened an author as Ibn Khaldun (A.D. 1332-1406) was hostile to philosophy and philosophers. On the basis of his great Introduction to History (Muqaddimah), Ibn Khaldun is regarded as the first historian to write a world history. According to Franz Rosenthal: 'The Muqaddimah was indeed the first large-scale attempt to analyze the group relationships that govern human political and social organization on the basis of environmental and psychological factors' (Rosenthal 1973, 321). Despite his brilliance as an historian, Ibn Khaldun included a chapter in the Muqaddimah titled 'A refutation of philosophy. The corruption of the students of philosophy' (Ibn Khaldun 1958, 3:246-258). In this chapter, Ibn Khaldun condemns the opinions of philosophers as wrong and proclaims to his fellow Muslims that 'the problems of physics are of no importance for us in our religious affairs or our livelihoods. Therefore, we must leave them alone' (Ibn Khaldun 1958, 3:251-252). He regarded the study of logic as dangerous to the faithful unless they were deeply immersed in the Qur'an and the Muslim religious sciences to fortify themselves against its methods.” In my online essay The West, “(The Muslims) desired to learn the sciences of the (foreign) nations. They made them their own through translations. They pressed them into the mold of their own views. They peeled off these strange tongues [and made them pass] into their [own] idiom, and surpassed the achievements of (the non-Arabs) in them. The manuscripts in the non-Arabic languages were forgotten, abandoned, and scattered. All the sciences came to exist in Arabic. The systematic works on them were written in (Arabic) writing. Thus, students of the sciences needed a knowledge of the meaning of (Arabic) words and (Arabic) writing. They could dispense with all other languages, because they had been wiped out and there was no longer any interest in them.” Logic continued to be used as an ancillary subject in scholastic theology (kalam) and in many religious schools, but there was enough hostility toward philosophy to prompt Muslim philosophers to keep a low profile. Those who taught it often did so privately, not within the established institutions. Here is Edward Grant in Science and Religion: “Following the translations in the early centuries of Islam, Greek philosophy, primarily Aristotle's, received its strongest support from a number of individuals scattered about the Islamic world. As we have already mentioned, al-Kindi, al-Razi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd were among the greatest Islamic philosophers. All were persecuted to some extent. Al-Kindi's case reveals important aspects of intellectual life in Islam. The first of the Islamic commentators on Aristotle, al-Kindi was at first favorably received by two caliphs (al-Mamun and al-Mutassim), but his luck ran out with al-Mutawwakil, the Sunni caliph mentioned earlier. According to Pervez Hoodbhoy, 'It was not hard for the ulema [religious scholars] to convince the ruler that the philosopher had very dangerous beliefs. Mutawwakil soon ordered the confiscation of the scholar's personal library….But that was not enough. The sixty-year-old Muslim philosopher also received fifty lashes before a large crowd which had assembled. Observers who recorded the event say the crowd roared approval with each stroke' (Hoodbhoy 1991, 111). The other four scholars were also subjected to some degree of persecution, and a number of them had to flee for their safety.” This situation was radically different in the Latin West.
There was sporadic opposition to the use of reason and one serious attempt to
ban the works of Aristotle at the
In contrast, Islam is in principle a theocracy in which religion and state form a single entity. Islamic schools, or madrasas, generally taught "Islamic science," that is theology, Arabic grammar, the Koran and the hadith etc. Greek and other non-Muslim philosophy was called "foreign sciences" and was never integrated into the core curriculum. Grant again: “[The madrasas] had as their primary mission the teaching of the Islamic religion, and paid little attention to the foreign sciences, which, as we saw, were comprised of the science and natural philosophy derived ultimately from the Greeks. The analytical subjects derived from the Greeks certainly did not have equal status with religious and theological subjects. Indeed, the foreign sciences played a rather marginal role in the madrasas, which formed the core of Islamic higher education. Only those subjects that illuminated the Qur'an or the religious law were taught. One such subject was logic, which was found useful not only in semantics but was also regarded as helpful in avoiding simple errors of inference. The primary function of the madrasas, however, was 'to preserve learning and defend orthodoxy' (Mottahedeh 1985, 91). In Islam, most theologians did not regard natural philosophy as a subject helpful to a better understanding of religion. On the contrary, it was usually viewed as a subject capable of subverting the Islamic religion and, therefore, as potentially dangerous to the faith. Natural philosophy always remained a peripheral discipline in the lands of Islam and was never institutionalized within the educational system, as it was in Latin Christendom.” Greek natural philosophy became fully integrated into the
university curriculum in “It is important to point out that not only did university-trained theologians fully accept and embrace the discipline of natural philosophy, but many, if not most, of them were eager and active contributors to the literature of natural philosophy. It is for that reason that it is wholly appropriate to call them 'theologian-natural philosophers.' They were equally at home in both disciplines and were keen to import as much natural philosophy as they could into the resolution of theological problems, while avoiding any temptations to theologize natural philosophy. This explains why some medieval theologians can be equated with the best of the secular natural philosophers, such as John Buridan and Albert of Saxony. Some theologians, such as Albertus Magnus and Nicole Oresme, were clearly superior to them. By their actions, theologians in the West were full participants in the development and dissemination of natural philosophy. They made it possible for the institutionalization of natural philosophy in the universities of the late Middle Ages, and therefore its extensive dissemination.” One of the most important advantages Catholic Europe enjoyed during this period was the separation between church and state. While the West developed a lively natural philosophy, “in Islam natural philosophy became a peripheral and suspect discipline, whose study could even prove dangerous.”
Edward Grant has done a great job at bringing to light this role played by the European university system in preparing the ground for the later Scientific Revolution. As he concludes: “Without the separation of church and state, and the developments that proceeded as a consequence, the West would not have produced a deeply rooted natural philosophy that was disseminated through Europe by virtue of an extensive network of universities, which laid the foundation for the great scientific advances made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, advances that have continued to the present day.”
The French professor of medieval history Sylvain Gouguenheim
has published a book entitled Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les Racines
Grecques de l’Europe (Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel: The Greek Roots of
Europe), triggered by a recommendation from the European Union that schoolbooks
give a more positive rendering of Islam’s part in European heritage. Europeans,
he says, “became aware of the Greek texts because it went hunting for them, not
because they were brought to them.” He attacks the thesis advanced by
historians such as Edward Said, which sets off an “enlightened, refined and
spiritual Islam” against a brutal, racist and ethnocentric West. Aristotle’s
works on ethics, metaphysics and politics were disregarded by the Muslim world
because they were viewed as incompatible with Islamic ideas. Outside of a few
thinkers, among them Avicenna, Averroes and the astrologer Albumasar (Abu
Ma'shar), the scholars of the
It is true that there were some decent scholars in the medieval Islamic world, for instance Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Razi (Rhazes), al-Kindi and Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), but they made their contributions more in spite of Islam than because of Islam.
The Saudi reformist thinker Ibrahim al-Buleihi expressed his admiration for Western civilization in an interview 2009, stating that “Western civilization is the only civilization that liberated man from his illusions and shackles; it recognized his individuality and provided him with capabilities and opportunities to cultivate himself and realize his aspirations.” Self-criticism is a precondition to any change for the better, and Mr. Buleihi thinks Muslim culture lacks this. Here he is, as quoted by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI): “When we review the names of Muslim philosophers and
scholars whose contribution to the West is pointed out by Western writers, such
as Ibn Rushd, Ibn Al-Haitham, Ibn Sina, Al-Farbi, Al-Razi, Al-Khwarizmi, and
their likes, we find that all of them were disciples of the Greek culture and
they were individuals who were outside the [Islamic] mainstream. They were and
continue to be unrecognized in our culture. We even burned their books,
harassed them, [and] warned against them, and we continue to look at them with
suspicion and aversion. How can we then take pride in people from whom we kept
our distance and whose thought we rejected?....these [achievements] are not of
our own making, and those exceptional individuals were not the product of Arab
culture, but rather Greek culture. They are outside our cultural mainstream and
we treated them as though they were foreign elements. Therefore we don't
deserve to take pride in them, since we rejected them and fought their ideas.
Conversely, when In medicine, there is the phenomenon of “transplant
rejection,” which happens when an organ is transplanted into another body and
that body's immune system rejects it as an alien intrusion. This is a useful
analogy to keep in mind when assessing how Muslims and Christians treated Greek
natural philosophy during the Middle Ages. Muslims did engage the Greek
heritage, but only parts of it, and eventually even this limited acceptance was
rejected by conservative theologians such as al-Ghazali. The immune system of
Islamic culture considered Greek philosophical ideas to constitute an alien
intrusion into its body, fought them and ultimately rejected them. In contrast,
for Christian culture, the Greek philosophical heritage did not constitute
something alien. Christians did not accept all parts of the Greek heritage as
valid for them, but most of them didn’t consider Greek logic, modes of thinking
and philosophical vocabulary per se to be something alien and hostile. We could
say that Christianity was a Jewish child, baptized in water steeped in Greek
philosophical vocabulary and raised in a Greco-Roman environment. This new
synthesis was personified by
Posted May 26th, 2009 by hd http://europenews.dk/en/node/23379 |
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