Q J Med 2004; 97: 111-112
© Association of Physicians 2004; all rights reserved.
Coda |
Cultural nepotism
Do you know who first discovered the systemic circulation of the blood? Of course you do. He was an Englishman called William Harvey. But can you name the person who, three centuries earlier, first described the pulmonary circulation? Almost certainly not. He was a Syrian Arab physician by the name of Ibn al-Nafis. The writings of al-Nafis were probably known to Michael Servetus, whose own understanding of the pulmonary vessels paved the way for Harvey's theory.If this example of Eurocentrism in our knowledge of history was a fairly isolated one, it would be no great matter. The problem, however, is that our general ignorance in Western countries of Islamic history is so comprehensive and so massive that it has led us into a world view that it may be no exaggeration to describe as delusional.
For a thousand years, from the victories of the caliph Omar in the seventh century to the retreat of the Ottomans from Vienna in the seventeenth, civilization from the Atlantic to beyond the Indian Ocean was predominantly Islamic. Our Dark Ages and Middle Ages were the obverse of what was a glorious millennium in the Muslim world. We often regard the Roman world as the yardstick for the size and duration of cultures, but it was a relatively modest presentiment of what the conquering Muslims later achieved, and it came and went in little more than four centuries. (Even this degree of longevity has yet to be achieved by the succession of brief European empires that have prevailed since the Ottomans retreated: those of Spain, Portugal, England, Holland, Sweden, France, Austria, Germany, Russia and the USA.)
In all the arts and sciences, and in mathematics and philosophy, the achievements of Islamic culture during its ten centuries of primacy surpassed anything that had been known previously in history. Islamic thinkers believed themselves—with justification—to be the successors of all the earlier civilisations that had arisen in the Middle East, going back to the dawn of recorded history. For them, Baghdad was in a direct line of succession from nearby Babylon and ancient Ur. Yet they were also the inheritors of Greek knowledge, and in time they became the chief source of such knowledge for the Western Renaissance.
It is hard to get a sense from the written word or the historical atlas of the richness of Islamic civilisation, but anyone who has visited one of its great centres will have come away with an impression of a certain grace and serenity that, for all their greatness, cannot be found even in Paris or in Venice. If you want to risk a seismic shock to your cultural prejudices, I would recommend the walk from the ethereal courtyards of the Alhambra in Granada, built by the Moorish kings of Spain, down the hill to the gloomy cathedral that Ferdinand and Isabella built to celebrate the ‘reconquest’, ghoulishly furnished with images of torture and death.
An experience like this makes it possible to comprehend classical Islam's estimation of itself, and of the West. By and large, Islam saw itself, until modern times, as the definitive climax of all previous civilisations. Europe, by contrast, was seen to be sunk in superstitious barbarism—an impression that was confirmed periodically by the murderous but generally incompetent incursions of crusader warlords. The same contrast seemed evident in the levels of religious tolerance displayed in the Islamic and Western worlds. Moorish Spain, for example, was a golden age of cross-cultural synergy. It produced the great Hebrew poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol and the even greater philosopher Maimonides—both of whom wrote with equal fluency in Arabic. Later, while Europe was locked into the vicious wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Mughal emperor Akbar was sponsoring interfaith dialogues involving Jesuits and Hindus in his court at Fatehpur Sikri. The Ottoman empire was for many centuries a place of refuge for the victims of religious persecution in Europe.
In the words of the historian Bernard Lewis, non-Muslims within the Islamic world generally experienced ‘the normal constraints and occasional hazards of minority status’. However, as Lewis also points out, there is nothing in Islamic history to compare with the Spanish Inquisition, the auto da fe, the wars of religion, ‘not to speak of more recent crimes of commission and acquiescence’. Against such a historical background, he argues, it becomes possible to empathize with the perplexity and pain of many contemporary Muslims. There is perplexity at the speed and completeness with which Western military power, technology and secular governance eventually swept aside a millennium of Islamic primacy on the world stage. But more than this, there is pain at the Western capacity to denigrate the Islamic past or to deny it altogether, and at our capacity to see Western acts of violence as aberrant or merely reactive, while we regard that of the Muslim world as pathognomonic or definitional.1
There may be no time better than the present for Western medical historians to honour Ibn al-Nafis, who died around the age of eighty and bequeathed his house, his estate and his library to a hospital in Cairo. We should also mourn Michael Servetus, who was arrested in 1553 in Geneva for his theories of physiology, and charged with heresy and blasphemy. He refused to retract, and was burned alive the next day. I suspect that many Muslims, both now and then, would not learn of this violent, irrational and misplaced reaction with any great surprise.
References
1. Lewis B. What went wrong? Western impact and middle-eastern response. London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2002.
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