Muslim Heritage: A Forgotten Contribution to Human Civilization (Part 1)

By Youssef El Kaidi

Morocco World News

Fez, January 12, 2013

Many people rush into a simplistic definition of civilization understanding it as the overall way of life! Civilization, however, is a complex concept that incorporates history, culture and the processes of human development. It’s, as Braudel defines it “a cultural area; a collection of cultural characteristics and phenomena.”[1]

Wallerstein holds that civilization is “a particular concentration of worldview, customs, structures, and culture (both material culture and high culture) which forms some kind of historical whole and which coexists (if not always simultaneously) with other varieties of this phenomenon.”[2]

Another interesting definition provided by Dawson states that civilization is “a particular original process of cultural creativity which is the work of a particular people.”[3] The erudite 14^th century Arab historiographer and historian Abderrahman Ibn Khaldoun (1332- 1406) defines civilization in the following passage by saying that:

Human social organization is something necessary. The philosophers expressed this fact by saying “Man is political by nature.” That is, he cannot do without the social organization for which the philosophers use the technical term “town” (polis). This is what civilization means.[4]

In fact, Ibn Khaldoun in a seminal book entitled The Mugaddimah split so much ink on various complex human phenomena and on civilization in particular. He believed that any civilization cannot escape undergoing three different stages in its life; the stage of origination, the stage of power and prosperity and the stage of degradation and demise.

Human civilization and history is, thus, but the rise and fall of civilizations and empires in a cyclical way. Each new civilization comes to feed on the achievements of the one it replaces. Each emerging civilization builds on, absorbs and integrates the accomplishments of the preceding one to refine its values and institutions. Human civilization, so, is the outcome of an ongoing collaborative construction. Western civilization which is in its heyday nowadays after a monumental economic growth and scientific development should not be amnesiac towards the contribution of other civilizations such as the Muslim civilization.

This may seem weird and unbelievable to many but the truth is that at a time when some Catholic people in Europe used to regard bathing as a blasphemy and, thus, keep their dirt on as part of their religious devotion to the Catholic Faith, in Cordoba alone there were about five hundred public baths! At a time when Europe of the Middle Ages was wallowing in superstitions and various backward beliefs, Andalusia was teeming with Madrasas and scholars –males and females- who imprinted the history with their inventions and findings.

In this series of essays, I intend to shed light on Muslim cultural and scientific heritage and render tribute to many Muslim scholars who considerably contributed to human development through various subject areas such as mathematics, astronomy, medicine, physics, alchemy and chemistry, cosmology, ophthalmology, geography and cartography, sociology and psychology.

I do not mean to denigrate any culture or civilization because that would be a big mistake. Colonialism has always assumed that Western culture is superior to other cultures and justified conquest and hegemony on this basis. However, can we talk of cultural superiority with the principle of cultural relativism? Certainly not. There is no superior culture or inferior culture.

All I mean is to revive a forgotten rich history that hasn’t been noticed by most people in the West due to many reasons. Media discourse and other representational forms, for example, have been consistently representing Arabs and Muslims in very negative terms, nurturing, thus, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and other stereotypes. Hopefully, these articles will contribute to cross-cultural understanding and mutual respect, for any cultural conflict or clash, I believe, is first and foremost the result of ignorance!

[1] Quoted in: Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996 ), p. 41.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Abderrahman Ibn Khaldoun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Vol.1 (New York: Princeton University press, 1967), p.89.

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morph2020

I would like to dissent from the author’s statement that we cannot describe one culture as superior to another. Some cultures value highly the human qualities that will advance human beings to a better condition. Those cultures are, in my view, superior to those that admire human qualities that harm the possibility of human advancement. Let me illustrate with an obsolete example, so the cultural practices I will cite as bad ones do not offend any existing cultures.

The American Aztec culture apparently practiced human sacrifice by ripping out the beating hearts of healthy people as a sacrifice to their gods. There is NO WAY to make this sort of thing acceptable. It illustrates the extreme bad behaviors induced by some fierce ancient religions. The religions that have survived into modern times are at least somewhat more moderate. Such practices are the behaviors of an inferior culture that must not be allowed in modern times. We need to re-examine all cultural practices to determine objectively whether they help advance humanity or simply cause more human suffering than necessary.

There is a good illustration of this from the time of the colonial occupation of India by the British. A British officer came upon a crowd of people who were assembling wood to make a big fire. He asked what it was for. His Hindu counterpart explained that a man has died and that the people were preparing to burn his body and to burn his wife with him. The wife was perfectly healthy! The Indian explained that “this is our custom.”

The British officer said, “Well then, you must understand that it is our custom that, when we find an innocent woman has been murdered for no better reason than that, we will hang the ones who killed her.”

After that remark, the party was over and the woman was released unharmed. This custom of burning living wives with their dead husbands has been discontinued. Some cultural practices are not defensible.
elkaidi

@morph2020
Thanks for your comment.
my statement is based on this principle of cultural relativislm originated in the work of the anthropologist Franz Baos. Cultural relativism is the view that all beliefs, customs, and ethics are relative to the individual within his own social context.In other words, “right” and “wrong” are culture-specific; what is considered moral in one society may be considered immoral in another, and, since no universal standard of morality exists, no one has the right to judge another society’s customs.. Cultural relativism has been considered an attempt to avoid ethnocentrism and the judgement of other culture by the standards of one’s own culture (as the English officer did with the Indian custom!!)
morph2020

Franz Boas was the beginning of the destruction of the good. OF COURSE we should make judgments, even moral judgments, of other cultures. There are two strange ways of thinking that have corrupted our world. One of them is an inordinate fondness for what is most alien to us. Normal people are more fond of their own kind and favor their immediate loved ones more than their neighbors, favor their neighbors more than the people in the next village, and favor the people in their nation more than those in a neighboring nation. Modern corruption of this pattern now has us favoring the most alien and most different people, even animals, that we can find. This is typical of the modern “liberal,” and leads eventually to favoring one’s enemies over one’s friends — in a single word, treason.

The second corruption influence has been the idea of “cultural relativism,” that there is no ultimate truth, no universal good. There are some universal goods: life, comfort, beauty, truth, happiness, etc. It corrupts all of human experience to claim that we should endure misery in this life in exchange for the mere promise of happiness in an afterlife of which there is no evidence. Read my favorite poem, the ancient Persian one known as the “Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam.” There, you will find the truth.
elkaidi

What makes people strong is belief..People who believe strongly in religion whether it is Islam, Christianity or Judaism lead happier lives than those who lead a pure material life seeking pleasure and avoiding pain like any other animal on the palnet! I have read roubaiyat Omar EL-khiyalm long time ago and I appreciate its aesthetic and poetic value but for me it’s very superficial even if it may seem philosophical and thout provoking!! in two words, it encourages atheism and moral decadence!! As to cultural relativism, whether it’s true or not, you have no right of judging my belifs, how come you do!!! Are you sure yours are true? What makes you sure?? Isn’t it ethnocentrism?? These questions are meant just to push us think!
morph2020

I don’t believe I have judged your beliefs, since I do not know of them. Nevertheless, we all make judgments of other people’s beliefs in everyday life. You did exercise some judgment in your written reply. I do not criticize you for that, as it is your right as a fellow human being to do so. Judgment is part of living. We just have to be respectful of each other. Anything else is folly.
morph2020

I think it will interest you to google the words “franz boas fraud” to see more modern thinking about his scientific fraud and that of Margaret Mead as well.