THE HELLENISTIC SCIENCES

THE HELLENISTIC SCIENCES

1987 11 November 15-16 THE HELLENISTIC SCIENCES (650) The Macedonian king, Alexander· the Great, (352-323 BC) conquered a host of countries stretching from Iran to Turkestan, thus laying the foundations of the Greek Empire. Later, the Romans came into eminence. Among the many countries which they conquered was Greece which became part of the Roman Empire. The Greek and Roman Empires, now one, formed the mightiest of all the pre-Islamic empires. The increased affluence engendered by political successes afforded additional opportunities for academic work, and. it was under such circumstances that Greek philosophy and other sciences gained popularity. However, this philosophy was a patchwork of metaphysical discussion and far-fetched hypotheses.’ When the Romans converted to Christianity, following the lead of Constantine; books on these subjects were banned as being harmful to religion.

It was at this time that the Abbasid Caliph, Mamun Rashid, wrote to the Caesar asking him to send him books on philosophy by Greek and Roman authors. The Caesar of the day, uninformed on this subject himself, made enquiries and was told by an elderly monk that all such books had been confiscated and kept under lock and key after the spread of Christianity. The Caesar then asked the monk what he thought of sending these books to the country of the Muslims. The monk was very much in favour of doing so. “Certainly, they should be sent,” he said, “for a nation which reads these books becomes entangled in futile arguments, their faith is undermined and, in this way, they are weakened.” So the Caesar had these books taken out of the sealed house in which they had been stored, then he had them loaded on to five camels and sent off to Baghdad. Jamal-uddin Qafti writes in Akbarat-Hukama: “They found a vast number of books in that library and, without scrutinizing them, took five loads of books from one end of the collection and sent them to Mamun.”

The monk’s prediction was borne out by subsequent events. In the second century of the Islamic era, these books so influenced Muslims that, in their preoccupation with classical philosophy, they began to base their arguments on hypothetical syllogisms, thus deviating from the Quran, which is based on the true facts of nature. This mode of discussion and reasoning actually became incorporated in the educational syllabi of the Muslims”—notwithstanding the fact that it was a deviation from the Quran—and thus became sacrosanct in educational status. Over one thousand years have elapsed since then. but, even so. Muslims are unwilling to extricate themselves from the labyrinth of logic and philosophy into which misguided reading had plunged their forebears.

Muslims’ never-ending subjection to this unislamic system of learning is due to the compilation of Islamic sciences in this philosophical style subsequent to the first centuries of the Islamic era. So great is the philosophical bent in these books, that unless one has a thorough grounding in ancient Greek logic, their content remains incomprehensible, one obvious example, being the Sharh Mulla Jami, a book on Arabic grammar which is still included in our school syllabi. Given the part played by logic in the compilation of formal Islamic learning, it was inevitable that books of logic should themselves find a permanent place on the Islamic bookshelf.

The issue which now confronts us is that if books on logic are to be dispensed with, other books related to allied branches of Islamic learning shall have to meet the same fate. Had these books never been compiled along these lines in the first place, this issue would never have arisen. As it is, logic has assumed a place of inordinate importance in our theology syllabus (based on the Nizamia syllabus) * in this way, thrusting truly Islamic sciences into the background.

* The Nizamiyah founded in 1065-7 in Baghdad by the enlightened Nizam al Murk, the Persian vizir of the Saljuq Sultans, the Nizamiyah was consecrated as a theological seminary