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Posted on 06/12/2002 4:00:42 PM PDT by knighthawk
A thousand years ago Islam ruled the world. Now the West leads in wealth, technology and personal freedom. Our correspondent explains how it happened
In the 10th century, the famous Arab geographer, al-Masudi, had this to say about the peoples of “Urufa”, as Muslims then called Europe: “The warm humour is lacking among them; their bodies are large, their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understanding dull, and their tongues heavy . . . the farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish they are.” His slightly later colleague, Said ibn Ahmad, Qadi of the Muslim city of Toledo in Spain, wasn’t much more impressed. According to Bernard Lewis, the great Islamic scholar, in 1068, two years after the battle of Hastings, ibn Ahmad wrote a book in Arabic on the categories of nations. He found that there had been eight nations that had contributed most to knowledge — including the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Egyptians and, of course, Arabs. On the other hand he found that the north Europeans “have not cultivated the sciences (and) are more like beasts than like men . . . they lack keenness of understanding and clarity of intelligence . . .”
Even in the 13th century, the Oxford scholar Roger Bacon had his eyes fixed firmly on the east. He petitioned Pope Clement IV to mount a grand project — an encyclopaedia of new knowledge in the natural sciences. He had in mind the great number of translations then being made from the Arabic, and he recommended the study of oriental languages and of Islam.
By the time of his near-namesake Francis Bacon, however, the world was very different. A massive change had come over Europe, some time between AD1000 and AD1500, and the continent had drawn decisively ahead. Francis Bacon believed that there was little to be learnt from outside Europe.
What had happened? Why had “the West” drawn ahead? What features of this “frigid”, “gross” and “apathetic” people, as ibn Ahmad also described Europeans, were turned round, to create the world we see about us today, where the West indisputably leads in terms of wealth, technological advance and religious and political freedoms?
It is surprising that more inquiry has not been devoted to this all-important subject, but from such scholarship as exists, the answers divide into five. They all agree that there was a fundamental change in Europe between 1000 and 1500, and that that is when the “West” began. But that is as far as the agreement goes.
First there are the theories that Europe didn’t so much forge ahead as that the East dropped behind. This idea starts from the fact that in about 1250 there were three broadly equivalent trading systems in the Old World (ie, excluding the Americas). These three were the European system, the Middle Eastern and the Asian. According to scholars such as Janet Abu-Lughod, of the New School for Social Research in New York, each system had cosmopolitan cities at the same stage of complexity and development. There was nothing intrinsic to any of these systems that made one better than the other, or worse: “The organisation of textile production in Kanchipuram was not unlike that in Flanders, and the state built boats for trade in both Venice and China.”
However, after 1250, there was progressive fragmentation of the overland Asian trade routes that had been unified by Genghis Khan. These depredations were begun by Tamerlane, and had a much worse effect on trade in Asia than the Crusades did. Then the Black Death, which spread from China across to Europe, did much greater damage to the cities of central Asia than those of Europe. The coup de grâce was delivered by the Portuguese discovery of new sea routes to the East.
The theory of Joseph Needham, the Cambridge-based historian of early Chinese science, is quite different. Needham thought that, in the earlier centuries, Europe had been a much less stable continent than China. Its layout — a series of archipelagos (Iberia, Italy, Greece) — made it more nationalistic, because there were many natural boundaries. The alphabet system of writing, precisely because it was so flexible, exacerbated the problem by making it easy for different tribes and groups to evolve mutually incomprehensible languages (unlike China, which had a unifying script). This kept Europe embroiled in repeated conflict, and therefore backward.
But then came two inventions, both out of China. First was the stirrup, which, by adding immeasurably to the power of the knightly class, helped to create feudalism. And second, gunpowder, which helped to destroy feudalism, at least in Europe, because it reduced the power of the knightly class.
As feudalism decayed in the West it gave rise to a mercantile class, closely associated with the rise of science. In China, this didn’t happen. With a more stable and unified imperial history, feudalism was replaced by “bureaucratic feudalism”, or a “mandarinate”, a scholar-gentry class highly suitable to a large country, heavily centralised under an emperor, where mandarin bureaucrats could administer steady progress.
As well as stifling creativity, this arrangement meant that the city-state never developed in China: cities were dominated instead by the representative of the emperor, which meant that there were no mayors, guilds or councillors. Instead of being places of upward mobility, Chinese cities were ruled from the top down. As a result, China never developed modern business methods or modern science.
As opposed to the stagnation and fragmentation of the East, the economic theory for the rise of the West stems from the fairly basic fact that, between 1000 and 1300, the European landmass became the first region in the world to be “full” with people. This produced a particular kind of technical, social and psychological change.
In particular, there was a new system of agriculture, a change from the two-field system to the three-field system. This produced a massive increase in yield, and the greater variety of crops helped the market system to develop. At the same time, horses replaced oxen and watermills were introduced. Together, this amounted to a technological revolution.
The theory with the most scholarship attached to it relates to the Christian Church and its role in the unification of Europe. At the time, the name Europe was rarely used. It was a classical term, dating back to Herodotus, and though Charlemagne called himself pater europea, the father of the Europeans, by the 11th century the more normal term was Christianitas, or Christendom.
Around AD1000-1100 Christendom entered a new phase, partly out of the failure of the millennium to provide anything spectacular in a religious, apocalyptic sense, and partly as a result of the crusades, which, in identifying a common enemy in Islam, also acted as a unifying force among Christians.
The early aim of Christianity had been territorial expansion, the second phase had been monastic reform, with the monasteries — dispersed throughout Christendom — leading the battle for the minds of converts. Out of this arose a third chapter in church history, to replace dispersed localism with central — papal — control. This climaxed in the 13th century as popes vied for power with kings and emperors, and even monarchs were excommunicated.
Around and underneath this, there developed a certain cast of mind. The problems of the vast, dispersed organisation of the continent-wide church, the relations between church and state — all these raised many doctrinal and legal matters. Because these matters were discussed and debated in the monasteries and the schools that were set up at this time, they became known as scholastic. The British historian R. W. S. Southern, who died last year, was most intimately involved in showing how scholars, as a “supranational entity”, aided the unification of Europe.
This was most obvious in the use of Latin. All over Europe, in monasteries and schools, in the developing universities and in bishops’ palaces, the same language was used. Because of this, papal careers were notoriously international. Frenchmen might be seconded to Spain, Germans to Venice, Italians to Greece and then to England, Croatia and Hungary, as Giles of Verracclo was between 1218 and 1230.
In this way there was in Europe between AD 1000 and 1300 a unification of thought, and an agreement on what was important, that did not occur anywhere else. It was not only in strictly theological matters, but was felt in architecture, in law and in the liberal arts.
Three scholars in particular may be singled out for their contributions to the idea of the West. The first is the Bolognese monk Gratian, who rethought and rationalised ecclesiastical law. The second was Robert Grosseteste (1186-1253), inventor of the experimental method, who proved the importance of exact measurement. The third scholar who helped to lay the fundamentals of the West was Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who made possible objective study of the natural order, and therefore the idea of the secular state.
The scientific method, exact measurement, an efficient secular world: any definition of Western modernity would include these as fundamental elements. Less tangible than all that, but more intriguing, is the notion that a certain form of individuality was born in Europe between 1050 and 1200, and that this accounts most of all for the Western mentality and its surge ahead. An increase in individuality is found everywhere between 1050 and 1200, inside and outside the Church.
So, some time between 1000 and 1400, two sets of changes were occurring simultaneously in Christianity. Through the scholars, it was unifying Europe intellectually in a way that hadn’t happened before. In more general terms, it was becoming a more inward and individualistic faith, the beginnings of modern psychology. Simultaneous economic and sociological changes paralleled and boosted this growing individualism, while the developments of science, increasingly exact, brought increasing control and predictive powers.
This would lead first to the commercial triumph of the Italian city-states. The fortunes amassed there by merchants sparked the flowering of the arts known as the Renaissance and then to the generation of merchant-adventurers who, using the new exact sciences, explored the globe and vastly increased the success — and the size — of the West.
We in the West are constantly being admonished not to be triumphalist about its success, and are warned that we may be entering a post-scientific and even a post-western age. So it may be worth pointing out that there are troubling parallels between the “mandarinate” and its role in keeping China backward in the Middle Ages, by crushing the mercantile class, and the Arab countries of today.
Every Arab country is to a degree an autocracy which is helped to keep power by what the Arabs call the Mukhabarat, or intelligence services. Though not precisely equivalent to the mandarinate, the prime aim of the Mukhabarat is to preserve the current ruler, as the mandarinate helped the emperor, and to censor rigorously mercantile and intellectual innovation.
The autocracies of the Arab world use the Mukhabarat to control big chunks of the economy — licensing the weapons business, running concessions in the motor trade, controlling furniture imports. As a measure of how successful — and retrograde — this arrangement is, the number of books published in Egypt fell from 3,000 titles a year in the 1960s to just over 300 a year in the 1990s.
The Arabs can’t do much about their geography, and in religious terms they are as unified as any. That leaves what we might call an axis of progress — science, mercantilism, individualism — as the defining difference between the successful West and the disappointing (Middle) East. Unfortunately, at the moment (and as those Egyptian publishing figures show), the Islamic world, far from catching up with the West, is going backwards.
Peter Watson’s intellectual history of the 20th century, A Terrible Beauty, is published by Phoenix. He is currently working on a history of ideas.
Christianity combines philosophic "realism" with confidence that the world is a rational place, created by the Logos or Word, as John refers to the Second Person of the Trinity.
Western science and technology are still living off the intellectual capital that Christian Europe provided. Islam, on the other hand, has never been what might be called a rational religion. I suspect that most of its philosophical achievements reflect the work of more civilized peoples who were subjugated and incorporated into their empire, but eventually those civilizations disappeared into the fatalism of of Islam. "Inshallah"--everything will be as Allah wills, and there's no use trying to do anything about it.
During the 1200s the Mongols wrought havoc on the civilized world. They smashed China, Persia, Russia, and Hungary. If not for the death of the Khan Ogodai in 1241. They would have overtook Europe within 20 years and then North Africa. The blow they dealt Islam was one from which the Arab world never recovered. China was stagnated. Europe was spurred into action which led to the Reformation and the Renaissance. Effectively, the Mongols destroyed the only rivals to European power.
The Arabs before the Mongols
The world of the Mongols
Bingo!! You are correct. You gain 500 points. (Don't spend them all in one place). I'm reading "Why I Am Not A Muslim" by Ibn Warriq. He notes that most of the translators of the Greek scientific works were Jewish or Christian.
Part of Islam's problem is that they believe that the Koran was dictated to Mohammed and is the literal, perfect word of Allah. The Koran lays out an all-encompassing rule for living. You don't need to know anything else outside of the Koran. If you are a believer, anything outside of the Koran is blasphemy. There are repeated stories of mob violence against authors, scientists, philosophers and creators, because they're going against the Koran and are anti-Islamic.
Now, when the entire world is at the technical level of the Amish, it doesn't matter much, but today, you're in deep doo-doo. Islam is behind the entire world, with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa.
It's stunning that Egypt, which is considered the intellectual capital of Islam is down 90% in the number of books published. You know, that's compared to the time under the nutcasser Nasser. Believe it or not, but more books are published every year in America than ever before.
Cool, let's get in some Christian bashing, eh.
Until then your analogy is--specious is the polite word.
The South, and Texas in particular, was largely a very hot backwater until the air conditioner was invented, and summering there became tolerable, and even enjoyable. Now I can't remember the exact details, but, that said, there was a significant change in climates in the 1200s to 1400s. At one time, in roughly 1000 AD, much of Europe was wooded. By 1400 large swathes had been cleared. Greenland also was a lot warmer, with farmers living there. This climate change, I believe, also helped tip the balance, making the Middle East the backwater it is, bringing preeminence to Europe.
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