Al-Ghazali, Monguls, and the Death of the Golden Age

The collective Muslim psyche has yet to properly come to terms with the trauma of the destruction of Baghdad in 1258, the loss of Al-Andalus in 1492, or the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924. Part of our inability to engage in a healthy critical self-reflection to understand how and why we are in the position we are today is the general lack of historical literacy.

There is a great proverb worth reflecting on: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” What we read in history books today, at least those popularized through official mainstream education systems and popular culture “intellectuals” is one that tells a story of the great triumph and progress of reason in Europe over the superstition of religion. It makes the Western European into the peak of human development that everyone else must measure up to and aspire to be like. In this narrative, the simplistic causes given for the ascent of Western Europe over the rest of the world are used in reverse to explain the decline of everyone else. For Muslims, the decline of Islamic civilization is simply the result of religious belief overcoming “reason”, where Imam Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī and his work against philosophers is blamed, or the result of the sacking of Baghdad and destruction of its manuscript collections by the Mongols. In both accounts, one must wonder what kind of a civilization that runs across a vast distance from east to west, with multiple centers for learning and thousands of scholars dispersed across the land can be destroyed by the work of a single man or the intellectual productions in a single city being cast into the river.

The following excerpts come from the final chapter in George Saliba’s Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. This is an immensely important work and a must read for Muslims given the untold history it contains. Saliba goes through the daunting task of reviewing manuscripts, some of which are incredibly difficult to read given their quality, that included commentaries on Greek texts as well as original works by Muslim scientists working in the period between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. He presents very compelling evidence that what many consider to be a period of decline was actually a period of great fecundity for Muslims, having scientific rigor and quality in the period post Imam al-Ghazālī than it did before him. This book was included in the 2021 booklist for Al-Andalus Book Club as part of the year’s theme on science, reason, and Islam.

[Although] the critiques of Greek thought began early on, the more mature criticism and the confidence with which the Greek scientific edifice began to be dismantled and replaced by more consistent alternatives, and far more sophisticated deployment of mathematics, did not really take place until the later centuries of the Islamic civilization, and mostly after the thirteenth century. Thus, based on what we have seen so far, one is justified in saying that those later centuries of Islamic civilization seem to have been centuries of great creativity, at least as far as the discipline of astronomy was concerned. In addition, one could also say that, that creativity was not apparently restricted to revamping all of the Greek astronomical theory but it seems to have had a seminal impact on Renaissance science as well.

But these are precisely the centuries that the classical narrative had earmarked as representing the total death of science, not to say the total death of rationality in Islam, which is more often used in connection with this period…the classical narrative formulated its theory of decline by basing itself on two main assumptions. Those assumptions were held by two different groups of people. And although each group had its own analysis of the intellectual history of Islam, they converged, almost independently, on considering the age of decline to have begun in the thirteenth century.

For those who looked, from the very beginning, at Islamic civilization as a continuous unfolding of religious thought only, and at the same time held the European paradigm of the conflict between religion and science, they attributed this death of rationality in the Islamic civilization, and in this later period, to an upsurge in religious thought, which they claim came about at the expense of scientific and philosophical thought. For those people, “progress” was defined by the very victory of science over the church, just as European progress was defined. Thus every civilization had to demonstrate that it had participated in this struggle before it could participate in this “universal” linear and constant search for “progress.” Those civilizations had to have their science overcome their church, even if one had to redefine “church” in the particular terms of the said civilization. In the case of Islamic civilization, the struggle of the Mu’tazilites against the people of tradition (hadith) exemplified, to a great extent, the conflict paradigm between “science” and “religion,” without ever bothering to define the “science” of the Mu’tazilites, or the “church” of the people of hadith. In that regard Ghazālī’s (d. 111) book The Incoherence of the Philosophers (tahāfut al-falāsifah) constituted a real milestone. Not only because this group of people saw in it the direct connection between philosophy and science in that period, and hence an attack on one is an attack on the other, but because they also rightly considered Ghazālī as the initiator of an Islamic Orthodoxy of sorts, and thus his book symbolized the triumph of religious thought. The conclusion that is usually drawn from the success of Ghazālī’s religious thought is that this triumph must have caused the death of its counterpart, the rational scientific thought. Thus in a simple fashion, Ghazālī was single-handedly held responsible for the decline of rational, read scientific, thought in Islamic civilization in these later centuries.

Focusing on the conflict between science and religion before the Ghazālī period may have contributed to the lack of awareness that there were scientists working during that period and whose main concern was to combat the imported Greek scientific tradition, because of the errors and blemishes it harbored, and not because of the religious thought of their time. Muḥammad b. Mūsā’s critique of Ptolemy, or Rāzī’s Shukūkagainst Galen, or even Ibn al-Haitham’s Doubts against Ptolemy, among many others discussed above, have gained some importance only recently as texts rebelling against the Greek scientific tradition, rather than texts rebelling against the religious authorities of their time. None of those texts made any significant impact on the group of people who saw Islamic history as an unfolding of religious thought, and in that sense those texts were badly read if they were read at all.

The second group which saw Islamic history more in political terms, and thus portrayed it as a succession of dynasties and battles, with little attention paid to intellectual history, the bête noire that was made responsible for the decline of science in the Islamic civilization was after all Hulagu Khan. Hulagu’s devastating blow came at a time when he actually managed to destroy the city of Baghdad, in 1258, in his westward bid from Central Asia to conquer the rest of the world. Those who blamed Hulagu for the death of Islamic science took literally the anecdotes preserved in the historical sources, which were incidentally mainly written further west, in Mamluk areas that were not conquered by the invading Mongols. Those historical sources spoke of the water of the Tigris turning black from the dissolving ink of the manuscripts that were tossed into the river by the barbarian invader. They presented a scene of destruction that continues to stand in the collective memory of most Arabs, and Muslims in general, as the ultimate of disaster and the epitome of barbarity.

In a sense, the dates of the death of Ghazālī (1111) and the devastation of Baghdad (1258) seem to allow for the conversion of the two historiographic traditions just mentioned, one of which saw Islamic intellectual history as an unfolding of religious thought and one of which saw it simply as a sequence of political events.

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If one takes either explanation of the age of decline, as offered by either group of the proponents of the classical narrative, one is then faced with problems that will not easily disappear. In the first case, and for those who hold Ghazālī responsible for the age of decline, they will have to explain the production of tens of scientists, almost in every discipline, who continued to produced scientific texts that were in many ways superior to the texts that were produced before the time of Ghazālī. In the case of astronomy, one cannot even compare the sophistication of the post-Ghazālī texts with the pre-Ghazālī ones, for the former were in fact far superior both in theoretical mathematical sophistication, as was demonstrated by Khafrī, as well as in blending observational astronomy with theoretical astronomy, as was exhibited by Ibn al-Shāṭir. Similar original production can be easily documented as well in mechanical engineering, in medicine, and in optics, to say nothing of the whole class of astronomers who were all working after the thirteenth century, and whose purpose was to push the frontiers of planetary theories into the realm of alternative astronomy or “New Astronomy” as was proposed by Ibn al-Shāṭir.

Anyone who takes the time to read the scientific production in the post-Ghazālī period would have to characterize this period as the most fecund, and in the field of astronomy in particular completely unparalleled. As for those who still harbour the notion of the deadly struggle between science and religion, I only need to mention that with the exception of ‘Urḍī, whose religious credentials are yet to be determined, every one of the other astronomers mentioned, as well as Ibn al-Nafīs himself, were all religious men in the first place. Not in the sense that they were religiously practicing men only, but that they also held official religious positions such as judges, time keepers, and free jurists who delivered their own juridical opinions. Some of them wrote extensively on religious subjects as well, and were more famous for their religious writings than their scientific ones. This evidence leads me to conclude that the model of conflict between science and religion, which may have worked in Europe somehow, and I am not sure it did for it sounds too simplistic to contain the truth, this model does not seem to apply at least as far as the Islamic civilization is concerned. Nor does it particularly seem to apply in the post-Ghazālī period, when we witness more of the men of science being men of religion. Nor did it ever seem to be analytically useful as far as the discipline of astronomy is concerned for most astronomical works seem to have been produced by men of religion, and most of them were in fact employed in religious institutions.

As for those who think of history as a series of political events only, and a sequence of dynasties and wars, without paying much attention to intellectual history, they too can take little solace by relying too heavily on the Mongol invasion in order to justify their theory of decline. For although it was true that Baghdad was indeed destroyed at the hands of Hulagu Khan, it so happened that his vizier at the time was Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭúsī, the astronomer he had captured in the conquest of the Ismā’īlī fortress of Alamūt. It was this same Ṭūsī who had enough wisdom to save about 400,000 manuscripts before the sack of Baghdad. In addition, he even saved a young man by the name of Ibn al-Fuwatī, and took him along to what later became the Ilkhānid stronghold near Tabrīz. There, on a hill at the edge of the nearby city of Marāgha, Ṭūsī convinced the son of the same destroyer of Baghdad to grant enough support in order to establish one of the most elaborate observatories the Islamic world had ever known.