On his book Success and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance
Cover Interview of April 05, 2017
The wide angle
There are many forgotten heritages in Western
history, but the issue of Arabic influence is particularly contested because the
heritage has its roots in a culture that suffers from Western prejudices today.
A sensitive topic such as this calls for a sober historical approach. Yet, in
recent years, the Arabic influence in Europe has been the subject of a number
of biased studies, which minimize or maximize the influence in a way that distorts
history.
There is the temptation to cherish a narrow
and comfortably simple ideal of European high culture as formed by Greek, Roman,
and Christian traditions, and at the same time to marginalize the contributions
of other traditions to that culture — for example, pagan, oriental, Jewish, or
Islamic — which make the history of the West much more complicated. In the eyes
of those who cultivate this narrow ideal, scholarship today exaggerates the
intellectual achievements of medieval Islam and the Arabic influence in Europe
for reasons of political correctness. On the other hand there is the more
forgivable temptation to overemphasize the blending of cultures and to
celebrate Arabic influences, which upon closer inspection, turn out to be very
thin.
My work is sustained by the conviction that
the reaction to ideological accounts of the past can come only from the careful
historical and philological scrutiny of sources, and from scholarship that does
not shy away from judgments based upon such scrutiny.
At the traditional German Gymnasium in Kiel,
where I was educated, Anton Raphael Mengs’ eighteenth-century copy of Raphael’s
School of Athens adorned a wall of the auditorium, reminding everybody
of the true torchbearers of culture. Later, as a student of Arabic, I realized
that my Renaissance heroes of Greek and Latin culture were, on many occasions,
bitterly opposed to my new heroes, the great Arabic philosophers and
scientists. Was it possible that humanism had deteriorated into ideology and
blinded humanists to the intellectual quality of Arabic science? Or was it
that, by 1500, the tradition of Arabic science had outlived its historical role
and that its supporters were men of the past whose obsolete theories deserved
to be set aside? Without a satisfying answer, with sympathies for both sides,
and with increasing awareness of the political implications, I studied the
phenomenon with the aim of arriving at impartial and historically grounded
answers. Nevertheless, the issue never lost its provocative sting for me.
It is a consoling thought – and perhaps a
historical lesson – that ideology, the enemy of true knowledge, grows out of a
very humane and productive property: partiality, the incessant motor of
cultural change. In this respect, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg is right: “All
impartiality is artificial. Man is always partial and is quite right to be.” It
seems to me that the Renaissance epoch offers a rich array of the various gradations
of partiality, and of the many gains and losses that such partiality entails.
[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012
The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010
The wide angle
There are many forgotten heritages in Western history, but the issue of Arabic influence is particularly contested because the heritage has its roots in a culture that suffers from Western prejudices today. A sensitive topic such as this calls for a sober historical approach. Yet, in recent years, the Arabic influence in Europe has been the subject of a number of biased studies, which minimize or maximize the influence in a way that distorts history.
There is the temptation to cherish a narrow and comfortably simple ideal of European high culture as formed by Greek, Roman, and Christian traditions, and at the same time to marginalize the contributions of other traditions to that culture — for example, pagan, oriental, Jewish, or Islamic — which make the history of the West much more complicated. In the eyes of those who cultivate this narrow ideal, scholarship today exaggerates the intellectual achievements of medieval Islam and the Arabic influence in Europe for reasons of political correctness. On the other hand there is the more forgivable temptation to overemphasize the blending of cultures and to celebrate Arabic influences, which upon closer inspection, turn out to be very thin.
My work is sustained by the conviction that the reaction to ideological accounts of the past can come only from the careful historical and philological scrutiny of sources, and from scholarship that does not shy away from judgments based upon such scrutiny.
At the traditional German Gymnasium in Kiel, where I was educated, Anton Raphael Mengs’ eighteenth-century copy of Raphael’s School of Athens adorned a wall of the auditorium, reminding everybody of the true torchbearers of culture. Later, as a student of Arabic, I realized that my Renaissance heroes of Greek and Latin culture were, on many occasions, bitterly opposed to my new heroes, the great Arabic philosophers and scientists. Was it possible that humanism had deteriorated into ideology and blinded humanists to the intellectual quality of Arabic science? Or was it that, by 1500, the tradition of Arabic science had outlived its historical role and that its supporters were men of the past whose obsolete theories deserved to be set aside? Without a satisfying answer, with sympathies for both sides, and with increasing awareness of the political implications, I studied the phenomenon with the aim of arriving at impartial and historically grounded answers. Nevertheless, the issue never lost its provocative sting for me.
It is a consoling thought – and perhaps a historical lesson – that ideology, the enemy of true knowledge, grows out of a very humane and productive property: partiality, the incessant motor of cultural change. In this respect, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg is right: “All impartiality is artificial. Man is always partial and is quite right to be.” It seems to me that the Renaissance epoch offers a rich array of the various gradations of partiality, and of the many gains and losses that such partiality entails.