Book review 2

LOST HISTORY; The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists by Michael Hamilton Morgan                 Published by National Geographic, 2007

History is not written by the vanquished, and so most people in the Western world have no idea of the debt owed to the great Muslim thinkers of Islam’s Golden Age for much of the knowledge that fuels the modern world. Names that were known in Europe, or sometimes not, before the Renaissance; al Biruni, al-Kindi, al-Khwarezmi, al-Jazari, al-Uqlidisi, Omar Khayyam, al-Tusi, Ibn Sina, al-Razmi, Ibn al-Haytham, al-Zahrawi, Ibn Rushd – between them they mapped the stars and planets, calculated with astonishing accuracy the circumference and diameter of the earth, understood the rotation of the earth on its axis, measured the angle of the tilt of its axis, explained eclipses, equinoxes, comets, introduced the decimal point and zero, invented the discrete disciplines of algebra, trigonometry, and chemistry (then known as alchemy), set empirical rules for the testing of drugs, noted the link between health and diet, and invented tens of surgical instruments including the scalpel and forceps. 

In many cases these Muslims were credited with their discoveries even if they were later forgotten, but in many more cases hundreds of years later Europeans were given credit for Muslim inventions and discoveries in what has become the ‘lost history’. The Muslims gained much of their learning from the Greeks and Indians whose works had been translated by scribes at the Abbasid court in Baghdad into Arabic. The initial knowledge of zero came from the brilliant Hindu mathematician Brahmagupta, whose work they refined. In those days scholars wandered from court to court and through them was this learning transmitted to Europe and the Ummayad court in Cordoba, where the Arabic texts were translated into Latin. The Europeans took this learning and half a millennia later developed it, as the Arabs had done with earlier science. Sometimes these Islamic thinkers sailed perilously close to the wind - charges of heresy were leveled much as Galileo faced from the Catholic church several hundred years later with his acceptance of heliocentrism.

The difficult question is why did it all come to an end? There is no single answer but by the 14th century, the religion that had given the freedom to think eventually became the organ of institutionalized thought that trapped, just as the medieval church had done in Europe until the 15th century Renaissance and the 18th century Age of Enlightenment. Muslims sank into intellectual apathy, falling prey to superstition, sorcery and self-serving charlatans - a decline 'foretold' by the great social historian Ibn Khaldun who wrote in the 14th century of the cyclical rise and fall of empires. With women now forming the majority of students and graduates in universities across the Islamic world, we may yet witness a new cycle in the ascendant.

NO GOD BUT GOD - THE ORIGINS, EVOLUTION AND FUTURE OF ISLAM

by Reza Aslan

Published by Arrow Books 2006 

Highly readable and exceptionally informative minus the arcane academe that often accompanies such subjects, this book should be required reading for anyone interested in more than the inane platitudes parroted by politicians and so-called experts about the Muslim world today. Reza Aslan lays out defining moments in the development of Islam, from the succession struggles immediately after the death of the Prophet to the killing of Hussein at Kerbala in 680 by the Ummayad army, which solidified ineluctably the schi’sm between the Sunni and Shi’a. He gives examples of how the Prophet gave rights to women regarding inheritance, marriage and divorce, moves that were highly unpopular among the men, and how after the death of the Prophet, such men ‘took back’ their ‘rights’ by ‘re-interpreting’ the Quran and the Prophet’s words. He describes the efforts by scholars to lay down a body of law necessary to accommodate the requirements of the growing Islamic empire, and explains the ‘Traditionalist’ and ‘Rationalist’ thinking that for a time uneasily co-existed, to the ultimate triumph of the ulema who in the 11th century succeeded in carving out for themselves the role of sole authority to interpret the Qoran and the Sunna. In a fateful move, they decided that the Quran could in no way be considered a historical document and therefore the answers to all questions that arose from now until eternity were contained within the Qoran. This decision seriously impaired critical thinking and intellectual innovation, and Islamic intellectuals from across the broad spectrum of Islamic thought have periodically questioned it, sometimes fatally. He outlines the effect colonization had on the Islamic world, from the savage retribution meted out by the British overlords after the Indian Mutiny of 1857 to the plundering of colonized countries’ natural resources to enrich the Europeans at the expense of the indigenous people, and the hypocrisy of the colonial powers for whom the ideals of enlightened governance in the form of political pluralism and democracy were in no way to be applied to their colonial subjects. He ends in the present, arguing persuasively against the simplistic notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’ in favor of a current Islamic reformation in which the West though implicated and often complicit, is a spectator.

Book Reviews

PALESTINIAN WALKS by Raja Shehadeh Published by Profile Books, 2007   Winner of the Orwell Prize of 2008 this beautifully written book by Ramallah-based writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh is by turn heartbreaking and enraging. As the title suggests, Shehadeh describes walks he took in Palestine as a child and as a young man, walks that are no longer possible due to cement walls and the expropriation of land by Israel that has left Palestine fragmented into discrete and isolated stumps. Shehadeh writes of his despair; as a lawyer who has fought the land grab in Israeli courts, the results of which as he readily admits, were virtually always a foregone conclusion, and as a Palestinian man who stayed because he believed things would get better but whose belief has now become a distant dream. But he also writes of his disillusionment with the PLO, and the Oslo Accords which not only did nothing for Palestinian statehood, but as the PLO were seemingly interested in little more than gaining recognition for themselves, the disastrous outcome gave Israel more legal ammunition to expropriate even more land.

He asks himself why he does not leave and start a new life like others who have given up and left. But if he leaves he will not be allowed to come back, and under Israeli law his land and property will be forfeited by the Israeli state. When he is walking for solace in what is left of the hills – and it is so painfully clear that he loves this land - he cannot but note the hilltops dotted with neat Israeli settlements - the original inhabitants built in valleys with closer access to water and their villages have become invisible. His is not a story of self pity - these days he writes to assuage his feelings of anger, loss and frustration - but rather a treasured remembrance of what was, a record of what is, a memento mori of what might have been, and a bleak foretelling of what may yet come. His last walk of the book describes his uncomfortable encounter with two young masked Palestinian men, youngsters who had grown up only in the years of the intifada knowing nothing but violence, fear and death, yet who despite their shared ethnicity and history were as alien to their older compatriot as the young Israeli soldiers from Ethiopia or Russia who now owned his land. Such is the tragedy of Palestine. 

THE ARABIAN NIGHTS Translation by Hussain Haddaway Published by W.W Norton & Co. 2007 The fabled tales of The Thousand and One Nights took place at the Baghdad court of Caliph Harun al-Rashid in the 8th century, although many are based on even older Arab, Persian and Indian folktales. In the days before their written language, Arabs revered the spoken word, and until television came along and put paid to such entertainment, storytelling was an art.

The misogynist King Shahrayr sleeps with a different girl every night and kills her the following morning. Sheherezade marries him and must spin her stories to save her life; in conjuring up demons and kings, princesses and hunchbacks, dervishes, eunuchs, viziers and maidens in an alluring combination of fairy tales, fables and comedy amid a scattering of historic fact, replete with romantic encounters, drunken nights, and lots of sex, Shahrayr is spellbound and must hear the end of the story before he kills Sheherezade the next morning. But she always falls asleep leaving him hanging on yet another skillfully concocted plot with heroes and heroines who have faces like the moon, teeth like pearls, lips like garnets, cheeks of anemones and skin like silk, and the King must wait to learn the plight of the prince with ‘the slender figure like a bough’ who has been transformed into a netherworld figure half-man, half-stone, or the concubines and queens with ‘swelling breasts like pomegranates, and swaying hips’ who have bedazzled their suitors, poisoned their enemies or bewitched a sultan’s heir.

This translation based on a 14th century Syrian manuscript, one of the oldest still available, faithfully follows the original tales as opposed to later manuscripts which were adulterated by translators who deliberately or unwittingly rendered them more ‘fitting’ for their audience. The work of a translator as Haddawi writes is “the transfer of a text from one cultural context to another by converting its language into the language of the host culture”. In Arabic language and Islamic culture, everyday speech is peppered with references to God; “Thank God, by God, God Willing….Haddawy has kept these expressions in the translation which those familiar with the language or the culture will recognize as an authentic pattern of speech. Being a native Arabic speaker familiar with the syntax and nuance of the language, not to mention the culture of the time, Haddawy has given us a fluid re-telling that reads as if we too were listening to Sheherezade weave her tales.