Part Seven
(This is a translation from the original Arabic, offered so that my grandchildren, and others of their generation, may understand something of their history— a history they were denied when they were uprooted without choice.)
The Second Inferiority Complex of the European
A number of Europeans—including university professors—have attempted to falsify history in order to deny our people the credit due to them for enriching human thought during the Abbasid era and the age of al-Andalus. They have claimed that our forebears produced nothing original, and that their role was limited to translating Greek thought. This is simply untrue. Our scholars—and those who came from the far reaches of the East to study and live among them—authored vast works in science, philosophy, and intellectual inquiry, far too extensive to be surveyed here. What distinguished the history of Arab thought during the period stretching from the emergence of philosophy under al-Kindi to its flowering in al-Andalus with Ibn Rushd’s philosophical commentaries on Aristotle was the pursuit of true happiness through reasoned inquiry, and the rigorous engagement with the legacy of the ancients as a guide toward understanding reality as it truly is. It was a period rich in intellectual production.
Some Europeans have openly revealed the depth of the hostility they harbour toward us—a hostility rooted in inferiority complexes that have plagued them since their conversion to Christianity. A revealing example is Cristina D’Ancona, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pisa, who contributed an article to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entitled “Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy.” She is notably eager to emphasize the religion of every Arab who participated in translating Greek works into Arabic or Aramaic. For instance, she writes: “Abū ʿAlī ibn al-Samḥ, a Christian and a student of Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī, edited the old translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric…”—carefully stressing Ibn al-Samḥ’s Christianity, lest anyone mistakenly assume he was Muslim because his name is “Abū ʿAlī.” In this display of European blindness, she overlooks two truths that ultimately work in our favour. First, our people were not particularly concerned with the translator’s religion; their preoccupation was with knowledge and thought. Second, the Arab caliph who appointed Christians as his advisers and granted them free rein in the House of Wisdom was a ruler of remarkable tolerance and justice toward his subjects. Despite being the caliph of the Muslims, he felt no embarrassment in drawing close to those who did not even acknowledge his caliphate. This level of civilizational maturity has yet to be attained by Europe to this day—how many American presidents, for example, have appointed even a single American Muslim as a close adviser?
I have already shown that Arabs at that time stood at the pinnacle of intellectual creativity across all fields of knowledge, while Europe languished in a figurative Stone Age, materially and intellectually. Then Baghdad fell to the Mongols, and the Arab world fragmented into petty states—precisely the condition Europe seeks to impose today after its failure to establish compliant nation-states in the wake of the Sykes–Picot Agreement that divided the Arab East. The European Crusader withdrew into his backward lair, but this did not mean he ceased to seek conflict, for warfare is no measure of civilization or refinement.
The Church, through its domination of both religion and politics, obstructed any genuine intellectual development in Europe that might call its dogmas into question. This reality undoubtedly prolonged Europe’s age of backwardness. Yet several factors began to influence European society—chief among them the intellectual imprint left by our region upon the Crusaders, who lived under its influence and were shaped by it, as well as the interaction with the Arabs of al-Andalus, which transmitted advanced Arab thought into southern Europe. The invention of the printing press also played a decisive role in disseminating written knowledge on a wide scale within a society burdened by widespread illiteracy.
Two events in the fifteenth century were particularly significant in accelerating the European Renaissance: the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the fall of Granada in 1492. The former led to the migration of large numbers of educated individuals into central Europe, carrying with them books of knowledge and science. The latter—along with the complete eradication of Islam in Granada and the expulsion of every Arab who refused conversion to Christianity—granted Europeans access to the entire corpus of knowledge and thought that had existed in al-Andalus, whether written in Arabic or translated by Arabs into Latin.
Despite all that Europeans have attempted over the centuries, the inescapable truth remains that during the Dark Ages Europe lost Greek thought in its entirety, particularly in philosophy. Had the Arabs not translated Greek works into Arabic, Greek thought would have vanished from Europe altogether. Europe as we know it today would not exist—and we would not witness Englishmen filling thousands of pages expounding Aristotle’s philosophy.
There may be nothing novel in the facts presented above; they are easily verifiable. What is new, however, is my understanding of the implications of the transmission of Greek thought to Europe. I had previously alluded to this, only to be told by a friend that I was advancing a dubious and strange claim. For that reason, I have found it useful to elaborate here.
Thought grows and evolves through accumulation and through learning from others. Recorded history—and we have no other history, for what is unrecorded is not history—tells us that in our region, stretching from Mesopotamia to the eastern Mediterranean coast, there existed a continuous and cumulative movement of intellectual production in which knowledge flourished and expanded. Europe, by contrast, consisted of nomadic tribes of hunters roaming forests, living in caves or atop trees to avoid wild animals. A scientific study at the University of Leicester has shown that the population of Britain carries a significant proportion of genes originating from our region, as migrants from our lands fifteen thousand years ago transformed British society from hunter-gatherers into settled agricultural communities that built villages and cultivated the land.
So where, then, did Greek thought originate? Consider prominent Greek philosophers and scientists whose fame later spread widely: Pythagoras (570–496 BCE), Socrates (470–399 BCE), Hippocrates (460–370 BCE), Plato (424–348 BCE), Aristotle (384–322 BCE), Euclid (350–270 BCE), and Archimedes (287–212 BCE). All lived within three centuries between Moses and Jesus, during a time when our region possessed developed religions and advanced intellectual traditions. Europe, meanwhile, had neither thought, culture, nor science. Is it plausible that Greek philosophy and science suddenly emerged from a backward Europe in such abundance without any precedent or accumulated heritage? Rational reflection rejects such a possibility. Moreover, the similarities between Greek deities and those of the Semitic and Egyptian traditions suggest a deep interconnectedness. Add to this the extensive travel and exchange between Greece and the Fertile Crescent—Pythagoras, for example, is known to have travelled to Mesopotamia and learned of its scientific advancements. It is now established that his famous theorem was known in Babylon, where it appears on a clay tablet dating a thousand years before his time. He must therefore have encountered it, employed it, and later generations attributed it to him. Numerous other examples exist, though they need not be catalogued here. The logical conclusion is that Greek philosophy and thought were merely a natural extension of the advanced intellectual traditions of our region. Europe had no comparable legacy, while the Greeks lived not only along the Mediterranean coast bordering our lands, but also maintained continuous contact with Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt.
Thus, when Europeans of the Renaissance sought intellectual liberation from the Church, they turned to Greek thought, for they had no alternative. They claimed it as their own, arguing that Europe was the heir to Greece—an awkward attempt to fabricate an indigenous European intellectual tradition. Yet Greek thought had already been absorbed, translated, preserved, commented upon, and expanded by the Arabs.
When Europeans realized the frailty of this claim, a new inferiority complex emerged. Having attempted to overcome the first inferiority complex—stemming from the fact that they had received their religion from us—by seeking a philosophy to compensate for it, they found themselves confronted by a second: they had also received their philosophy and intellectual heritage from us.
Thus, the European came to realize, deep within himself, that he had originated nothing of his own. His civilization was built upon a religion and a philosophy both drawn from the heritage of our region. How could he not reject such a truth? Yet he has no alternative: he can neither claim a religion nor a philosophy rooted in his own soil, nor can he acknowledge the debt he owes us for guidance and thought.
These two inferiority complexes have defined the nature of Europe’s relationship with our region for centuries, and they remain the principal driving force behind its policies toward us to this day.
How did matters unfold after that? What became of us? And how should we deal with this reality?
That is what I shall attempt to examine next…
To be continued…