"The learned ones are the heirs of the prophets. They leave knowledge as their inheritance; he who inherits it inherits a great fortune... Knowledge is maintained only through teaching."

-Hadith (traditional sayings of Muhammed), from the Jami of Muhammed Ismael Bukhari.

As a teacher, Sima Daad is a member of a profession revered in the Islamic world, one that the religion's founder singled out for special praise. But like Deborah Whitley, Mrs. Daad teaches English language and literature - "Western" subjects that might seem incompatible with contemporary efforts to preserve the integrity of Islam.

Mrs. Daad, however, asserts that Iranians "know that learning another language, especially English, is to know more about a wider world, and we are not blocking ourselves at all." She tells Mrs. Whitley that her belief does not forbid the study of the traditions and languages of other societies. Islamic intellectuals through the ages have concurred with her on this point, and the resulting scholarship has been of great benefit not only to the Islamic world, but the whole of humanity.

Ever since Muhammed exhorted his first followers to study the heavens in order to better discern the will of the Creator, scholarship in the sciences and humanities has been an integral component of Islam. Indeed, the quick expansion of Islamic civilization in its early years owed much to the excellence of its physicians, architects, and practitioners of the "exact sciences"- mathematics, astronomy, and physics.

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Islam's Evolution - Situated Upon a Great Cultural and Intellectual Crossroads

At the time of its birth, Islam was situated at the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, the meeting-point for some of the ancient world's greatest civilizations: Greece, Persia, and India. Much of the genius of the early Muslim intellectuals was grounded in their eagerness to understand and integrate the research already carried out in these disparate societies. Islamic leaders sponsored a vast project of translation, whereby key works by Greek philosophers were rendered in Arabic and so made available to Islamic scientists, thinkers, and engineers in the Arab world and Persia (present-day Iran). Thus supplied with certain philosophical foundations, these individuals were able to improve upon the earlier work and to develop original lines of inquiry, many of which we continue to study today.

Physician Abu al-Razi

One of these early, influential scholars was the physician Abu Bakar al-Razi (known to his Latin-speaking contemporaries as Rhazes). A Persian scholar (born, in 864 A.D., near Teheran), Al-Razi, studied the works of Greek physicians like Hippocrates and Galen before entering into practice. After gaining fame as a doctor and chemist, Al-Razi published his own works, including the Al-Hawi, which for many centuries stood as the most complete world's encyclopedia of anatomy, disease, and medicine. Al-Razi, like many Islamic scholars, was also interested in many other fields of study, and wrote theoretical works on astronomy, mechanics, and music.

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Mathematicians

The study of mathematics took great leaps forward in the Islamic world. Early Islamic mathematicians wedded Greek geometry with the greatly superior Hindu numeric system (which we use today), and with these powerful tools developed a new type of math: algebra. One of the most celebrated algebraists in the ancient Islamic world was the Persian intellectual Umar al-Khayyam (1048-1122 A.D.), best known to us as the author of a book of verse (the Rubiyat). Al-Khayyam developed ingenious solutions, based on the Greek geometry of conic sections, to problems that had vexed mathematicians for hundreds of years. Advances in mathematics, including the contributions of al-Khayyam, allowed Islamic astronomers to make exceptionally accurate estimates of the solar year, the diameter of the Earth, and the distances from Earth to the sun and the moon.

Islamic Scholarship Enlivens the Europe of the "Dark Ages"

While al-Razi, al-Khayyam and their many colleagues in the Islamic world were undertaking original research, Europe lingered in the Dark Ages. When contact between the two worlds expanded (in Spain and southern Italy), Europeans began to enjoy the fruits of Islamic scholarship. Islamic professors at European universities introduced their students to the astrolabe and the quadrant, instruments which Islamic astronomers had used to make their remarkable measurements. Perhaps more importantly, they made available to their students the works of renowned Greeks - Euclid, Hippocrates, Ptolemy, and Aristotle - which had been lost to European civilization with the fall of Rome. All of these texts, of course, had been annotated and improved by succeeding generations of Islamic scholars. Pupils (such as Abelard of Bath) began furiously translating the lost works into Latin, sparking the European Renaissance.

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It might surprise us that the heritage of ancient Greece - which we think of as the "birthplace of Western civilization"- belonged for many centuries to what we today consider "the East." The more closely we look at history, though, the less ideas such as "Eastern civilization" and "Western civilization" come to mean. While Mrs. Daad discusses Shakespeare and Dickinson with her students, Mrs. Whitley's colleagues across the hall instruct their pupils in subjects that could properly be called Islamic.

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Hank Sims is a graduate student of political science at Humboldt State University.

Sources

Ahmed, Akhbar S. Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Ali, Maulana Muhammed. A Manual of Hadith. Lahore: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaat Islam.

Berggren, J.L. Episodes in the Mathematics of Medieval Islam. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986..

Rosenthal, Franz, ed. The Classical Heritage in Islam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965.

Serres, Michael, ed. A History of Scientific Thought. Oxford, Blackwell, 1995.

Talon, Rene, ed. History of Science: Volume 1. New York: Basic Books, 1963.

Thomas, Carol G., ed. Paths from Ancient Greece. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988.

Turner, Howard R. Science in Medieval Islam. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997.

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