By PLS
(In this post I’m going to talk about three recently published books: Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists by Michael Hamilton Morgan, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk and Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.)
People forget (or decide to ignore) all kinds of history. Bad things, of course. But sometimes it’s convenient to repress the memory of the good things, too.
Muslim Genius
Michael Hamilton Morgan’s Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists reminds us of the greatness of Muslim civilization. All humanity stands on the shoulders of the luminous human beings who lived in Bagdad, Damascus, Al Andalus, Tabriz, Nishapur, Isfahan, Basra, etc., just as those immortals stood on the shoulders of the ancient Greeks, who for their part learned much from ancient Egypt. For all the anxiety about economic globalization today, it’s well to remember that trade and cultural exchange are normal for human beings. The world of knowledge has always been globalized, as scholars, mathematicians, astronomers, poets and others move from court to court, country to country, university to university. In any era the center that attracts the most brilliant scholars of the day gains prestige and profits in innumerable ways.
When Europe went through the dismal period known as the Dark Ages, a term which some are now attaching to the current relatively retro phase of Muslim history, the Islam-enhanced, largely forgotten learning of the Western past was preserved in Muslim libraries and archives. Those intellectual achievements, further developed by Western thinkers over the past few centuries, are now waiting to be reclaimed when—No! I’m not forgetting the brilliant individual Muslims scattered in universities around the world—the Muslim world at large is ready to support the enthusiastic creation of new knowledge again.
Michael Morgan is providing a terrific springboard for making the most of recovered memories. It’s hard to see how a Muslim student at Al Azhar or any other university could fail to be inspired by this fast-paced and very readable introduction to these intellectual live wires who illuminated Islamic civilization from the eighth century to the sixteenth when Akbar, the Mogul Emperor of India, illiterate himself, sponsored lively debates on the great issues of the day among the great scholars of his time, including Hindus and Jesuits as well as representatives of his natal religion Islam. Such debates seldom take place even in our so called advanced time.
Morgan has a wonderful talent for bringing his heroes to life and allowing us an almost visceral participation in each moment of insight. We meet great physicians like Ibn Sina whose science-based Canon of Medicine became the guide for European practice for over 700 years. We meet the less well known, but equally influential Ibn Al-Haytham, who studied light, astronomy and optics in the eleventh century, and we share with him the excitement of watching what sun beams do. Empiricism was alive and well way back then!
Ibn Sina went way beyond Galen, whom he acknowledged as a master; Al-Haytham built on Ptolemy, who was no slouch. And Westerners could never have become masters of the sea, if they had not been able to count on the navigational aid of the astrolabe as refined by Muslim scholars like Al Majriti, who also used his more sophisticated device for land surveys in Muslim Spain that were more accurate than the Roman-based surveying still in use until then. To build on the past is no indication of inferiority. It’s the way knowledge advances. And Muslims helped mightily, in the past.
If you don’t know much about Muslim intellectual history, this engaging book will bowl you over. It’s the perfect corrective for insufficiently informed Muslims depressed by the pre-eminance of Westerners in the intellectual world—and for Westerners who equate Islam with nothing but violence and backwardness. The message to young Muslims is this: if Islamic civilization could inspire such accomplishment in the past, it can happen again—and you—Yes, you!—might make it happen. The related message to non-Muslims is that terrorism is a malignancy on the body of Islam, not its essence.
Western Hubris
But why terrorism in our time? Why do young Muslims (even those who study science) turn themselves into suicide bombers, with or without the assistance of jet liners? Some people in the West, especially in the U.S., believe the violence arises because young Muslims are jealous of the Western life style They hate “us” for our freedoms. They hate “us” for democracy. They hate “us” for having the high standard of living that only the wealthy among them can enjoy. Maybe they also hate the over-sexualizing of our culture, and lots of us would agree that we could do with a bit less of that!
Veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk has a more convincing answer in The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. It’s this: They hate us for what we’ve done to them, to their countries, to their autonomy, to their self-respect, “them” being the Muslim world and “we” being the West—first Great Britain and France during the Colonial Era and now the United States, which exercises imperial power mostly without occupying the territory it dominates.
As Fisk sees it, from the time of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire through Israel’s brutal “colonization” of Palestine to the current U.S. occupation of Iraq, the story of Western contact with the Muslim world has been one of domination, deception and death. Chapter after chapter he lays it out, the sordid details of the “forgotten history” that leads up to the misguided, duplicitous invasion of Iraq after 9/11. He’s got the details: the facts, the dates. It’s all here, in a text that runs to 1041 utterly compelling pages, and it’s a painful read because the hard stuff can’t easily be refuted.
When I first set out to write this book, I intended it to be a reporter’s chronicle of the Middle East over almost three decades....But as I prowled through the shelves of papers in my library, more than 350,000 documents and notebooks and files, some written under fire in my own hand, some punched onto telegram paper by tired Arab telecommunications operators, many pounded out on the clacking telex machines we used before the Internet was invented, I realised that this was going to be more than a chronology of eyewitness reports.If I feel this personally, it is because I have witnessed events that, over the years, can only be defined as an arrogance of power....After the Allied victory of 1918...the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spend my entire career—in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad—watching the peoples within these borders burn. American invaded Iraq not for Saddam Hussein’s mythical “weapons of mass destruction”—which had long ago been destroyed—but to change the map of the Middle East.
“In the end,” writes Fisk,
we journalists try—or should try—to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: “We didn’t know—no one told us.”
But, he says, there’s another, even more important task for journalists:
to challenge authority—all authority—especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.
The tendency in America these days is to denigrate or look down on most all variants of Muslim society while imagining that U.S. contributions to world history are largely admirable. When ignorance meets amnesia, as now in Iraq, the consequences for national policy are likely to be disastrous. To those who suspect they too may be suffering from a seriously misbalanced view of recent and more distant events, I recommend that you read Forgotten History back to back with The Great War for Civilization. You’ll be in a much better position to think intelligently about current affairs.
Service or Martyrdom?
But here’s a more up beat book to read: Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time. This story will make you feel good about one remarkable American and equally good about some wise and humane Muslim villagers who live in the remote valleys shadowed by the Karakoram range in northwestern Pakistan. It’s about a mountain climber who got lost on the way down from a failed assault on K2 in 1993. After the dirt poor Balti villagers nursed him back to strength and health, Greg Mortenson vowed to come back and build them a school—and he did. The deal was: he’d provide the money for building; the villagers would provide land and labor. Some girls from that village have already graduated from that school. The girls are now training to become doctors and nurses and plan to return to serve their home villages.
Today there are twenty more schools in those valleys, built on the same self-help principles, and they all offer a good education to children who would otherwise be as illiterate as their parents.
By contrast, today’s NYT offered an article about some other Pakistani girls, girls who actually regret they lost out on martyrdom when the Pakistani army stormed the Red Mosque in Islamabad last week. Seems they’re back in their home villages dying of boredom, but determined to establish clones of the women’s madrassa associated with the Red Mosque. Their families aren’t so convinced that radical Islam is the way to go. In fact, they never expected their daughters to become jihadis. They’d just wanted their bright young girls to have an education. Since the Pakistani government and the elites to control it have utterly neglected public education, these village parents thought a madrassa would be better than nothing. Ha!
For Pakistan as a whole it’s blowback time. Pakistanis of all backgrounds respect education. They want their children to be educated, girls as well as boys. The government has never invested seriously in schools and teachers for all children, especially in poor rural areas, but the oil-rich Saudis will. They pour in money to establish madrassas that mainly propagate salafist Islam—and tens of thousands of Pakistani children with no other educational alternatives attend them. The parents do not realize that when their children emerge they will not be equipped to cope with the modern world. The process continues apace. Even in the Balti valleys where Mortenson’s schools actually had a head start madrassas are sprouting up, and villagers who prefer a secular education are coming under pressure from traditionalists. But Mortenson, now director of the Central Asian Institute, persists—and he continues to have amazing local support. History is being made in those remote valleys. But the outcome it up in the air.
Three Cups of Tea is a wonderful book. I am not doing it justice, frankly, for lack of time. I have to pack in order to catch a plan early tomorrow morning. Just get it and read it. You’ll feel a lot better about the human race.
Photo from cover of Three Cups of Tea.