Eastern Thought The Middle East

EASTERN WISDOM (VI): ISLAM, ARABIC CIVILIZATION From the 8th to the 12th century the Islamic Empire, made up of many peoples, extending from the Pyrenees to the limits of China, preserved Hellenic science, enriched it with borrowings from Persia, India and even China, and finally transmitted it to the Latin West. Expelled from Europe by the Christians, driven from Asia by the Mongols, subjected to the Turks in Egypt, the Arabs lost contact with the Persians, the Syrians, the Christians and the Jews whose presence had played a vitalizing role in Arab culture. Thrown back upon themselves, they sank into a long torpor from which they were not aroused until the 19th century and the coming of the peoples of the West. How is this sleep of Islam to be explained? It was due to the fact that the Parsees, the Christians, the Jews and the Pagans who accepted the religion of Islam had done so more to be free from various onerous taxes than from any real conversion. The scholars who constituted the “Arab Miracle” were for the most part Syrians, Persians and Spaniards, peoples who were not Arab by blood, and had nothing of the Arab spirit. Once these alien elements were eliminated, the Islamic masses again fell under the yoke of their fanatical imams. From 1200 on, a theological reaction swept through Islam. There were no longer philosophers – the word itself became synonymous with ‘infidel’ – and only occasionally was there a scholar like the historian Ibn-Khaldun. The Turks, devoid of any critical and probing spirit, imposed their heavy yoke on Islam; and Islam, returning to its sources, paralyzed inquiry into a formula which brooked no answer: “Allah aalam” (God knows best what is). The traditionalism of Islam is incompatible with the spirit of inquiry and the idea of progress. For the Muslim, all truth worth knowing is contained in the Koran, at once a dogma and a code of faith, whose prescriptions regulate the smallest details of life. Whatever happens is the will of Allah. All is preordained; the only thing to do is to submit without complaint. This fatalism is destructive of effort, of any manifestation of personal will. It expresses the atavistic resignation of the nomad before the emptiness of the desert. Belief in another life, full of sensuous delights, of houris and fresh meadows, consoles the faithful for present tribulations. This mentality rules out restlessness, dissatisfaction with self, that constant drive to improve which is the ethical mainspring of the internal life of Western man.