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Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

This article considers the ways in which Chinese Muslims depicted themselves as central both to Chinese society and to the Muslim world in Chinese Muslim texts of the early modern period. Through the creation of origin myths attributing the Muslim presence in China to the direct interventions of the Prophet Muḥammad and the Chinese imperium, Chinese Muslims used their condition of displacement—that is, their separation from the heart-Lands of Islam—as the pivot for an identity linking them simultaneously to China and to the Muslim world. The article suggests that this use of displacement is a direct inversion of the position of early Arab travellers in China. In the writings of al-Sīrāfī and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, for example, China is depicted as exotic and wholly foreign, a place where Muslims necessarily long for their distant home. In later Chinese Muslim writings, however, the Muslims of China emerge as vital both to the origins of Islam and to the integrity of the Chinese state. Displacement, a lamentable condition for al- Sīrāfī and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, becomes the basis for a unique identity in Chinese Mushm myths of origin.

FIRST §: AN AUTHOR, SUCH AS MYSELF, can only be grateful when a leading historian of Arabic science takes one of his books so seriously as to write a long review article on it. Professor George Saliba calls The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West “a refreshing and welcome contribution” to the field “documenting . . . a whole array of the achievements” of Arabic/Islamic (and Chinese) science in the ongoing project of modern science (143, 144). At the same time, Professor Saliba raises a host of issues, not all of equal importance, nor even connected to the main thesis of my book. In this reply, I shall present my comments under four headings with the intention of making the themes and thesis of my book evident to the reader. These headings address the main issues raised in Saliba’s essay, namely, the nature of ‘modern’ science, the possibility that economic factors have played a significant role in its rise, innovation in Arabic/Islamic astronomy after Ibn al-Shatir and the fourteenth century, and the nature and role of free inquiry.

FIRST §: THIS EXCHANGE WITH PROFESSOR HUFF brings to mind the time-honoured Arabic adage about the goat that remains a “goat, even if it flies,” which is often used to refer to people who retain their opinions despite being shown evidence to the contrary. In my review article on his book, The Rise of Early Modern Science,1 I tried to take each of the constituting hypotheses that Professor Huff proposes for the rise of modern science and find either a counter-example or a corrective fact that might sharpen the arguments in a book that I essentially liked. But Professor Huff has apparently taken offence at my well-intentioned critique, going so far as to accuse me of “defensiveness” and of “oppos[ing] the idea that past and present human communities, institutions, governments and so on ought to grant greater freedom of expression, inquiry and action to their participants” (emphasis mine). It seems that I touched a raw nerve, one that may best be characterized as Western chauvinism, since I prefer not to use his own term, “triumph”-alism. And I feel the urgent necessity of clearing my name before he goes on to accuse me of a lack of patriotism, as is quickly becoming the fashion these days.

The Phoenicians have long been recognized as one of the major cultures of the Mediterranean’s Iron Age period, noted for their maritime activities and over- seas settlements. This contribution explores the origins of Phoenician movement overseas, and assesses the nature of this expansion. It discusses ancient literary perceptions of the Phoenicians and examines how study of the Phoenician over- seas settlements has been considered by the disciplines of Near Eastern and Classical archaeology. When compared to discourse on contemporary Greek colonial activities, a sense of competition between the two disciplines is revealed. At the same time, however, the recognition of common sets of practices and shared bodies of knowledge suggest complex connectivities during the Iron Age, reminding us that cultures should never be considered in isolation.

First paragraph
The Growth of Foreign Trade and its Connection to the Global Market
WHEN THE GEOGRAPHICAL AREA we know today as Iraq came under Ottoman rule in 1534, Iraq became an Ottoman border state. The search into the history of this state in the late Ottoman era, therefore, is in fact a search into part of the history of the Ottoman state itself. That historical period was not, under any circumstances, void of economic and social deterioration. There was little or no movement, especially social life in the cities of the three Iraqi provinces, Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. The various Ottoman concepts, ideas, traditions and customs were not entrenched, not just in individuals’ minds, but also among the civilian social groups and units.1 In addition, historical events, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, confirm the receding role of the Iraqi city, as it isolated itself and Bedouin values and customs became prevalent among its residents.

This paper advocates the view that there is a permanent interpenetration between the cultural constituents of human mental activity; and that, despite the unity of the mind, these constituents are not necessarily coherent for they are in permanent transformation. Indeed, mental activity gives birth to multiple competing and conflicting interpretations of events and attitudes; and, in every part of this activity, there is the intervention of belief. Science does not possess firm grounds to control faith, for its constructs change with time. Moreover, faith also manifests itself in different beliefs and no belief may be proven to be more fully and absolutely reliable than any other. Hence, all of the different beliefs can offer only partial images of divinity, owing to the diversity of cultures and historical conditions, but not a complete representation. It follows from this that the reasonable attitude consists in letting everyone experience faith in the way that he or she conceives it and in encouraging reflection and communication among the holders of competing world-views.

The early Islamic period witnessed the appearance of a new astronomical disci-pline, ʿilm al-hayʾa (science of the configuration’ of the universe), which had no Greek equivalent per se. In an effort to determine the conditions underlying this development, the paper argues that its main impetus was a rejection of the discipline of astrology, which was conceived to be an integral part of the imported Greek astronomical tradition and which was opposed by social forces sufficiently influential to compel the principal intellectuals of the day to dissociate themselves from it. Astrology’s opponents were not only religious figures, but included, among others, physicians and even astronomers who, in the end, created a new discipline that was free of the stigma attached to Greek astronomy. The evidence for these developments comes from the work of a contemporary author named Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī (AD 787-886), whose famous astrological work, Al-Madkhal ilā ʿilm aḥkām al-nujūm (Introduction to the science of the judgements of the stars), devotes a full chapter to the opponents of astrology, which included most sectors of society, even those considered the discipline’s natural allies. In order to corroborate Abū Maʿshar’s assessment, recourse is made to the well-known, but relatively later Muʿtazilite author, ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. AD 1025/26), whose famous work, Tathbīt dalāʾil al-nubuwwa (Confirmation of the signs of prophecy), contains a full attack upon astrology and all those associated with the foreign sciences in Islam. The paper concludes by asserting that the identification of astrology with Greek astronomy and its consequent denigration in the newly-emerging Islamic environment left practicing Islamic astronomers with no option but to dissociate themselves from both disciplines and to create a new astronomy that may be called Islamic. In order to distinguish this new astronomy from its Greek antecedents, it was given a new name: ʿilm al-hayʾa.‬

“This paper begins with a brief outline of two major positions on the question of whether the ancient (or ‘rational’) sciences were excluded from Muslim madrasas and cognate teaching institutes. In the section that follows, I take up positions formulated by Jonathan Berkey and Michael Chamberlain, who both stress the importance of networks, rather than schools, for Muslim education in the post-classical period, to show that these networks integrated the teaching and studying of mathematics, astronomy, astrology, philosophy, logic and/or the occult sciences into the Muslim educational landscapes. In the third and fourth sections of the paper, I talk about the differences between the ancient and the ‘rational’ sciences and about partnerships between the religious and philological sciences, on the one hand, and the ‘rational’ sciences, on the other. In section five, I discuss the inimical attitudes of religious scholars toward the ancient and ‘rational’ sciences and illustrate some of their strategies to deal with them. Finally, in the conclusion, I claim that the much-debated decline of the ancient sciences did not result from their exclusion from the religiously-dominated Muslim educational landscapes, but rather from their integration into them.

Historians of science in Islamic civilization usually study science as it was practiced in the context of falsafa: the mathematical sciences, the physical sciences, the life sciences, and medicine and its allied disciplines. But within the milieu of Islamic civilization, the physical sciences, particularly theories of matter, space, time and motion, were also discussed by scholars immersed in the discipline of kalām. Preserved in eleventh-century kalām texts, these discussions highlight problems of physical theory that arise as a result of kalām’s minimal parts atomism, which is similar, in many ways, to Epicurean atomism. These problems include the nature of space and of motion, the possibility of relative motion within an absolute space and the questions of place, the earth’s motion and falling bodies. Kalām ‘s engagement with these problems provides a vivid illustration of the anti-Aristotelian spirit of its physics, which is generally evident in its embrace of discontinuity, atomism, vacuum and impetus. kalām perspectives on these problems of physics are echoed in earlier as well as later historical developments, although there do not seem to be any clear lines of influence or transmission. Kalām discussions are therefore a rich source for the study of the history of these problems, some of which are central to the evolution of physics.‬

This essay examines the relationship between scientific and religious knowledge as reflected in theological works written in the fourteenth century. It argues that later works differ from earlier, classic works of theology partly as a result of developments in the field of astronomy. I contend that the theology that previously informed astronomy itself underwent theoretical adjustment and transformation under the influence of new conceptual trends in the science of astronomy. I also maintain that the new theology was conceptualized as a limited, rather than a comprehensive, field of knowledge.