Islamic Civilization Short History Part 3

The Islamic World as Global Trading Hub

Bismillah, let's continue. So now that we've done this very broad overview of the faith-based foundations for the civilization, as far as what that brought up culturally, now we want to talk about the connections that were created through this. If you look at the ancient overland traffic, the grand central station of the world was the nexus of roads and routes connecting the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, Iranian highlands, Mesopotamia, and Egypt.

So the map that you see in front of you is actually a map of Islamic trade routes. Notice the concentration throughout Central Asia. Some modern professors of Islamic studies and Islamic history, such as Tanim Ansari, they frame the entire history of the Islamic world around its unique geography, which he terms the middle world.

So this functioned as the grand central station for a land-based network of trade routes that connected the great civilizational zones of the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, Far East Asia, and everything in between. So unlike the sea-based Mediterranean world, this territory was an intercommunicating zone where ideas and goods could flow in all directions. They were not constrained by simple ports.

And this central position was not just the geographic fact, but it was the engine, the very engine of Islamic civilization that made it a natural hub for global exchange and cultural synthesis. So the flow of global commerce was open to travel essentially in any direction, and you could bring coveted goods from one place to another. So what that allowed was it allowed things like silk to come from the East, pepper and nutmeg and other spices to come from South Asia and Southeast Asia.

Global Marketplace and Commerce

The transformative technologies like print and paper to come from China. From India, they came cotton, textiles, clay pottery from Central Asia. You had metals and handcrafted products that were coming from Africa and Europe.

And essentially the Muslim world, the Islamic world, functioned as the world's marketplace. And what that allowed people to do, and this is going to be very important for our next session, is that it allowed people to be producers and consumers at the same time. So they were producing goods that were resource intense in their area, selling those goods, profiting from them, and then able to buy the coveted goods and imports that they wanted from the rest of the world.

So sometimes, you know, when we travel to the more affluent areas of the Muslim majority world now, like the Gulf, and we see kind of things from all over the world, you know, we say to ourselves, you know, why can't we have Huawei phones in America? This is better than, you know, the iPhone, better than the Android. You know, all these people are just worldly people. They're just, you know, there's so much into the dunya.

They just want the material life. It was a norm for most of Muslim history for people to enjoy things from far off disparate cultures to the point that you'll find Chinese china porcelain in Timbuktu. Timbuktu is where? West Africa, and you're bringing porcelain from China. So people's personal eating utensils coming from halfway across the world.

So it was not strange. The problem that we'll talk about next session is when you become a consumer with no productivity. So essentially, the Islamic civilization, Islamic world functioned as a world marketplace.

Merchants and Cultural Exchange

Its merchants controlled the distribution of these luxury items, and especially they controlled the flow of these items, particularly to the resource-poor areas, but the more increasingly eager Europeans. Caravans and ships that carried the goods, they served also as conduits for the ideas that were prominent in those areas. So you would have gossip and stories and religious mythologies and products and other detritus of culture that would flow along with the traders.

Now I want to tell you of a very interesting narration that I found in a book of narration transmitted book of narration. So it's, you know, stories, some hadith stories and things like that by a very early scholar by the name of Al-Shaabi. He was in the fourth or fifth, fourth, fourth, maybe beginning land in the fourth, beginning of the fifth century.

So in this book, he says, I have been told by traders who have come that there is a land beyond Al-Andalus where the people wear giant leaves as clothes and the fruits are so large they can feed a family on one of them. Now, I've never found that size fruit in Florida where I grew up, but it's obvious that this person is speaking of some form of transatlantic travel that had happened before them. But because it was not state-sponsored, it was not normalized, it was not, you know, widely held, it was kind of looked at as a myth.

But there's only one way for this information to come. Either this person was making an extremely lucky guess about there being a land beyond the Atlantic Ocean, you know, Uqba ibn Nafi', the companion of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, who essentially took Islam all the way to modern-day Morocco and to the Atlantic Ocean. You know, it said when he got there, you know, they said, this is it, this is the end of the landmass.

You're not going to go any further. You're not going to go any further west. So he rode his horse into the water and then he got off his horse and he walked off into the water until he was, you know, at his chest and he raised his hands and he said, oh Allah, if I knew that there were people beyond this ocean, I would travel to them to take this message to them. So there was obviously some form of transatlantic and Atlantic you know, trips or trade or communication that had happened for this kind of myth or this folklore to have developed and reached a scholar who lived in Transoxiana, who lived, you know, not in Baghdad but in Central Asia.

Stories of Islamic Trade Expansion

But these commercial routes, not only did they encourage this cultural exchange and the academic and scientific exchange like, you know, place value and zero and we talked about that papermaking from China, but it became a cross-pollination around the world and the Islamic world became a clearinghouse where the world's knowledge could be compared, synthesized and improved upon. And so the reach of the Muslim merchant was far and wide. Actually, just last night I was in Dallas for a program and I met a gentleman, I'm not going to attempt to pronounce his name as to not make a huge mistake. But I said to him, that is a very unique name.

And he said, yes, it's because it is a native Keralan name. I'm from Kerala, which is an area in India. So I said, oh, I know that to be the most literate part of India for centuries.

He said, in fact, we're the very first area of India to accept Islam. We became Muslim shortly after the advent of the Prophet Muhammad through traders that were traveling east to China. And he said, this is the reason why, as far as Islamic law, we're all Shafis, whereas most of India are Hanafis, and we all are very literate in several languages, including the Arabic language until today.

So the merchants that traveled, you know, I have a friend from the Maldives that I was a student with in Medina, Muhammad Shamim. You know, he told me, I said, how did the Maldives become Muslim? He said, quite simple. A Yemeni trader came by sea.

He landed in the Maldives. He approached the king for permission to do business in the country. The king said, who are you? What are you here for? What are you about? He said, this is who I am.

He said, you have permission to do trade. And they were just so impressed by the honesty of this merchant that the king became a Muslim. And then he told everybody else, hey, if you like this guy's honesty, you should be Muslim too.

And until today, it's a 100% Muslim populated country. There was no conquered army. There was no conflict that brought it there.

It was simply people who had met people that were on their trade routes. So you had trade routes that stretched from east Africa, west into Spain, across the Mediterranean, across Central Asia, down into South Asia, Southeast Asia, as far as Mindanao in the Philippines. A lot of people don't know that the Philippines was a Muslim sultanate at one time. The national fish of the Philippines is what? Sultan Lapu-Lapu, who was the actual Muslim leader of the Philippines at one time? And who is said to have discovered the Philippines? Magellan.

Do you know, did Magellan make it out of the Philippines? No, he didn't. He came to the Philippines and he said to Sultan Lapu-Lapu, I am claiming the Philippines for the crown of Spain. So Sultan Lapu-Lapu said, they said, what do we do? These people are going to attack us.

He said, well, I'll take care of it. So he stripped to his, just as waste cloth, put a knife in his mouth and swam out to Magellan's ship and killed him. And then the ship set sail.

So Magellan's ships sailed around the world, but he didn't make it past the Philippines. Just to say, that was a stronghold of Islam at one time. So you have these huge trade routes. Why was there so much European discovery by ship? It was to circumvent those trade routes. To be able to get spices and textiles and other things cheaper than they were able to get it at that time. So Malaysian, Indonesia, Southeast Asia as a whole, Islam entered through trade, not through any form of military force.

The Paper Revolution

Another connection that was made was that in 751 CE, there was a battle of Talas and there were Chinese papermakers who were captured.

And they essentially were brought back to Muslim majority centers. And papermaking became a norm. In fact, what you see in front of you is a diagram written in Persian on the papermaking process.

It was transmitted from East Asian sources and moving towards the West. So the intellectual life of both Europe and the early Muslim world, or the early Islamic world, was constrained by the limited availability of paper and the high cost of writing materials. So books were considered rare treasures.

They were written on expensive parchment. And the scarcity essentially kept literacy confined to clerical elite, so people who are in religious functions or rulers. But this material became a bottleneck.

Parchment or use of non-paper sources became a bottleneck. So when the Abbasids in the 8th century acquired paper technology, papermaking technology from China, it quickly transformed society. So it was dramatically cheaper, easier to produce, made books affordable, and as we talked about Baghdad earlier, allowed it to explode with information transfer and create a new class of scholars and readers, both public libraries and private libraries and the source.

So this is one of the early fuels and connective tissue. This is the sinew that was connecting everybody at that time. So they created a literary scene, poetry, the folktales, things like the Arabian Nights, which weren't really Arab.

They were like Persian stories that were taken by the Persians from East Asia and improved upon. So if you read, you'll actually notice how there's a bit of cultural exchange between the stories. And then when they made it to the West, they were then interpolated and added to, so you have some things that weren't even from them.

But there was this, you know, ألف ليلة وليلة in Arabic, they're called, you know, a thousand and one nights in the Arabic language. And then before that, it had another name in Persian and before that, another name. So the point being is that this, you know, the informational revolution, the sinew or the connective tissue underneath was paper.

Al-Andalus: The Jewel of Islamic Spain

Another important area that I mentioned earlier for cultural exchange and the exchange of information up into Europe was Andalus. Now, Andalus is an actual region in Southern Spain until today. It's called Andalus. But it's taken from the Visigothic tribe, the Vandals. Vandalusia. So it's an interpolation of their name.

Now, the Abbasid Caliphate in the East was weakening and an independent Umayyad Caliph, who they were formerly the rulers in the Middle East and Syria, they had left and gone all the way to Spain. So they set up camp there.

They created Córdoba as this magnificent capital. And at its height, it was considered the greatest city in Europe with about half a million inhabitants. The large towns of Europe at that time only had about 25,000 people.

Imagine you have a city of half a million people versus most of the cities that you're from are 25,000 people. It's like, uh, it's like growing up in Seguin and then moving to Houston. It's like, I don't know if you know those cities, but any small city on I-90 from between here and Austin. You're in a small town and then you move to a big city. It's pretty shocking.

So it had hundreds of bath houses, hospitals, schools, mosques, and other public buildings. It had unparalleled intellectual life with numerous libraries. And it was said to contain an astonishing 500,000 volumes of works.

In fact, one of my teachers in Medina, who was from the Ansar, he's from the companions of the Prophet that were native to Medina. They traced their lineage back to them. Interestingly enough, they left Medina and went to West Africa, and then they moved to Mali, and then they intermarried in Mali, and then they migrated back to Medina.

And so, they, you know, his father had actually gone to Spain. You know, anytime he had a vacation, he would take all his money and go around the world and look for manuscripts and try and find it, you know.

And he puts an ad in the newspaper that, you know, I'm a man from Arabia that's here to buy any Arabic manuscripts that you have, and come see me in, you know, this XYZ hotel. So he says two young men show up, and they say, here are these documents that our families gave to us. We've, they've been passed down generation and generation, generation upon generation.

We have no idea what they are. We have no idea what they are, but they, they were told their family heirlooms. So he looks at them.

He says, you are from the family of the Prophet Muhammad. You're a descendant of Alawites. This is your family tree.

And you are a descendant of Abd al-Rahman al-Khamis from the Umayyads that used to rule this land. And they were like, they had no idea, you know, they were dumbfounded. And I have another friend who's an academic, Professor Mohammed Ballan, who's a specialist in Islamic Spain, Morocco, and West Africa.

And he actually took a trip for his PhD research from starting, I believe, in Senegambia and going all the way up to northern Spain and southern France, including Portugal. And he said, until today, people still have private libraries that they have inherited generation upon generation of Arabic manuscripts. So it was a very, very literate society, and it was a very widespread phenomenon.

Convivencia: Multi-Religious Coexistence

So one of the reasons why we're mentioning this is, and I need to get this word right, convivencia. I think my wife will be proud of me. I can't manage to marry a Spanish speaker and screw up a word like that, you know.

So essentially, this concept was prominent in Spain. Spain was a multi-religious society where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony. There was a fairly amicable harmony amongst them.

They followed established policies of Muslim rules, but Christian-Jewish communities maintained their own religious authority, leadership, and judicial systems even. And although they were not taking higher political positions, all other occupations and offices were open to them. And so this idea of convivencia was an idea of coexistence.

So with the story of King Sancho, the fat of León, who was a Christian king who traveled to the Muslim court of Córdoba to be treated for obesity by the famous Jewish physician of the caliph's court, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, under the protection of the Muslim ruler. So if you want to look up an interesting story about that, that's a very interesting story. As I mentioned earlier, there was this cultural exchange between the ruling elite of Europe and Spain.

I mentioned Martin Luther and others. And then there was also this impending threat. Sometimes it would be like, if you don't send us protection here in the British Isles, then we're going to join the caliph in Spain and become part of the Muslim world.

There are these interesting types of historical anomalies that were happening. But it was very interesting in Spain as a center of learning. Notice that Morgan here, he says, though through the relatively inclusive vision of the Umayyads and their successors, both Muslim and Christian, these forces will combine to create a tri-religious society marked by convivencia, a unique form of social coexistence and cooperation between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

Not only was this happening, but something else was happening. And that was that Al-Andalus was a land like really people had never seen before. They had never lived in lush gardens and the types of natural.

So even when you read Arabic poetry, the poetry of Arab poets is completely different. Andalusian poetry is completely different than all of the other poetry before, because the poetry was reflected before of desert environments and mountainous environments and barren lands. And so you would look for the beauty in the eye of a cow that you saw in the distance, because everything else was stark.

Whereas now they're talking about lush gardens and flowers and things like that. So fascinating history that's there as well. And essentially, Muslims had made it up into southern France. And that's kind of where they were stopped after a few battles.

Centers of Learning and Knowledge Transfer

But what cropped up around the world, and if you see the map that's behind here, they're essentially, this created centers of learning across Muslim civilization. And so every red dot, besides the two green dots of Mecca and Medina, every red dot that you see on this map was a center of Muslim learning at some time.

Where you had religious scholarship, natural sciences, trade, all of these things that we talked about. And so traveling for seeking knowledge is something which is praiseworthy in Islam. Traveling for seeking knowledge is considered praiseworthy.

And it became a recognized institution. And because you had people traveling, and you had places to go to, what also was created in addition to that were caravans. And the caravanserai, the types of hostels that would house people, as it is an Islamic dictate that if you have a guest that comes to your home, that you have to give them three days of hospitality.

So instead of people bringing the hospitality to their individual homes, many times on the caravan paths, there would be these huge caravan stops called caravanserai that would, essentially people would bring the goods to show hospitality to people that were coming to the city through that. And this led to large scale technology transfer through Arabic authors to European bookshelves.

The Second Translation Movement

And there were, we mentioned these two major translation movements. The first one we've talked about, which was Greek and Sanskrit and Persian into Arabic. But then in Spain, we saw translation from Arabic in Spain and Italy into Latin. And then those works permeated through the rest of Europe.

And this happened from the late 10th to the early 14th century. And these are two books that if you'd like to read more about that topic specifically, are pretty detailed on this topic. Now, we mentioned the learning centers.

And what this gave rise to as well, was these great centers of learning and translation that were found in Spain, in southern Italy, and in Sicily. Because remember, Sicily was under Muslim rule for 500 years. Southern Spain was under Muslim rule for about 300 to 400 years.

Corsica was as well. What this did is they saw these examples of religious institutions, and learning institutions, and this third economy that we talked about, and this gave rise to European universities. So this new body of knowledge that was being transferred through this second translation movement, spurred the creation of Europe's first universities.

So books from the Islamic world made their way to monastery libraries in Europe. European scholars started to gravitate towards them because the books were there, and they were eager to learn and read for themselves. And in turn, students began gathering where the scholars were, forming learning communities, and then availing themselves of these new academic resources.

And so two or three of the early learning centers, which then developed into universities, were Notre Dame, Oxford, and Cambridge. Three of the oldest universities in the world, which were preceded by the universities that they had taken the books from in Toledo, and Córdoba, and other places. So these places ripened into Europe's first universities, and they were born out of a hunger for knowledge that was transmitted from the Muslim world.

Institutional Models and Legal Systems

So foundational concepts and institutional models were essentially copied. So for example, the corporation was copied from early trust formation in Muslim-majority areas. The court system in common law countries, where we have a jury of our peers and 12 people.

This is a concept that was taken from Maliki Islamic law in West Africa and Spain, and adopted by the Normans in Normandy, who essentially moved to England, France and England, and implemented it there. And then it became the legal norm. If you want to read a fascinating work about these kind of legal cross-pollination, George Makdisi of Penn State, who is a Christian Arab specialist in Islamic studies and Islamic history and Arab history.

He wrote a detail about this. Fascinating papers you can find on JSTOR and other open source. They're open source now.

They were behind academic paywalls, but you can find them online. Look for John Makdisi and George Makdisi. They were brothers.

But they've written extensively about this type of technology transfer, and technology more than just physical material technology, technology of ideas, technology of concepts, technology of improving societies. Essentially, seeing that the hospitals of Baghdad and the hospitals and the universities of Córdoba and other places were the best the world had ever seen, they wanted to do the same. And so they essentially brought the same forms of institutions to Europe and then implemented them.

The Waqf System

One of the ways that that was supported was the idea of waqf, the idea of a charitable endowment that functioned for public benefit and essentially was independent of state control.

It was owned in and of itself as a sovereign entity and had independent status. It could not be shut down by its founder. It couldn't be taxed by the government.

And that model is what eventually became, especially Oxford, was certainly modeled off of that. So it was an idea of taking private philanthropy and turning it into essentially a public good. The waqf system that was prevalent throughout the Muslim world, and we said kind of bled into Europe because of the educational exchange or the intellectual exchange, became a powerful mechanism for cultural preservation.

And it would protect key institutions from political instability. It was self-owning, perpetual, was not tied to any ruler, any dynasty, or any government. It allowed for people's lives to continue. So the hospitals stayed open, the markets stayed open, merchants, you know, their supply chains stayed open.

Why? Because there was this independent form of economy that was able to support it. There was also, at this time, direct scientific transformation or transmission, I should say. So if you look up here, this is actually a side-by-side calculation of astronomy.

Scientific and Astronomical Contributions

The famous Damascus astronomer, Ibn Shatir, in 1375. If you look at his diagrams on the right, and you look at Copernicus on the left, they're nearly identical. And if you look through the book, you'll find even more similarities.

So essentially, these texts were discovered, and it was found that much of the knowledge that we think was discovered and presented to us as a discovery, many times is discovered by someone else or improved upon from previous discoveries. For example, recently, there were Mesopotamian cuneiform works that were translated, because now with LiDAR and AI, you can pull information out of areas where generally they were inaccessible because of damage or something like that. And they found that, you know, the ancient Mesopotamians were using Pythagorean theorem way before Pythagoras.

Pythagoras was the one who stated it in one place, but it was a norm. So long before Copernicus, astronomers in the Islamic world were actively working to correct the mathematical and philosophical flaws of the Ptolemaic system that was common amongst the Greeks. And Ibn Shatir of Damascus, he was one of the few who had done this.

He lived about 150 years before Copernicus, as we said. And, you know, we can find the connection between these two most evident in the mathematical models themselves. So the geometric constructions that are used and the writings on them are no coincidence that they are very, very alike. This information was making its way up into Europe and continued to do so because of the changing tide of economics as well.

So as Europe started to become more seafaring and started to bring trade to other parts of the world and bring goods to Europe, cutting out the Silk Road and cutting out the Muslim majority areas in between, they were able to gain more economic dominance in the world, which means now they had more money and they had more expendable money.

So what did they do with that money? They copied or, let's say, iterated on the styles that were in vogue at that time. So if you look at a lot of European architecture, you will find that European architecture and art mimicked to some degree the architecture of the Muslim world because the artisans who were skilled in doing that were traveling the Mediterranean and going over to Europe. So you have a Syrian who's skilled in interior design being asked to design the inside of a building or being asked to paint a picture of the Virgin Mary. And then the halo around her head has praises in Arabic because that's the style that they wanted to see.

So you have this direct scientific revolution and these works were being transmitted throughout time.

Very, very different than what we were taught in grade school, like the Dark Ages. Nobody really knew anything. Europeans magically discovered the classics from the Roman and Greek times and then they brought the light to the rest of the world.

The reality is much different. As we said, every people builds on what came before and so this huge blank space in history has always been left out about Islamic civilization. Now, another manifestation of this was the fact that Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine, after the discovery or after the proliferation of the printing press, became one of the most printed books in Europe at that time.

Influence of Islamic Scholars on Europe

So you had two people. You had Averroes, who is Ibn Rushd. He was a Spanish theologian, philosopher, jurist, and doctor. And he was known in European languages as Averroes.

And then you had Ibn Sina, known as Avicenna. And their books were widely disseminated in Europe. The 15th, the 16th, the 17th centuries, European presses in cities like Venice and others produced hundreds of editions of these texts as a testament, not just to their status as a foreign curiosity, but as essential foundational components for learning in Europe. So they were further preserved, synthesized, advanced, just as they had been in the Islamic world.

So, you know, this connection to Aristotle as the first teacher in ancient Greek only came through the Muslim jurist Ibn Rushd, because of his, who was simply known as the commentator in Ash-Sharh. And then his works were taught extensively in European universities. Another thing that was widespread and connected, you know, the world was the idea of architecture and material culture.

Architectural and Cultural Influences

So on the left here, you have the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. On the right, you have the Great Mosque of Damascus. The Dome of the Rock is the first and longest lasting architectural vision of the Umayyads, who was the dynasty right after the time of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

They ordered to be built by the Caliph Abdul Malik in 691, nearly 60 years after the Prophet Muhammad's death, peace be upon him. So why architecture? It's not simply style and aesthetic, but the pointed arches, the ribbed domes that are central to the construction of masjids and palaces, they were not just decorative, but they were also structural. So they allowed for taller, grander, and more light-filled spaces.

So you had more air, more space, more light being let into buildings instead of small, cramped, linear constructions that were there before. So this started in Spain and Sicily and moved up through Europe and became the foundations of the mimicry found in Gothic architecture in Europe. The idea of having a garden in your home or in a public space was a mimicry of the great gardens in Iran and other such places, where not only were they filled with beneficial plants, but also with pools and fountains and courtyards where people could enjoy themselves.

So this became a standard in homes from Spain to India, and then it saw its way into other parts of the world. And then also calligraphy, as should be said. We just had the calligraphy exhibit with famous Chinese calligrapher Haji Nooruddin back in September.

I hope you all were able to make it for that. The reverence for the written Qur'an, the Qur'an as a written text, produced an interest in calligraphy that went beyond just writing the word, but making it itself an exacting work of art and a primary subject of visual art. So because of the prohibition on creating pictures of graven images in Islam, you would many times find extensive art in the geometric space and the calligraphic space.

So master calligraphers were always celebrated artists. Their flowing scripts adorned everything from mosques to manuscripts to everyday objects like books and bowls and other things. And so there's a unique and sophisticated aesthetic that goes along with that, and that found its way into the illumination tradition of manuscripts in Europe as well.

Conclusion and Looking Forward

So to summarize this idea of global civilization, Islamic civilization was not isolated. Instead, it was a central hub connecting the world to technology, knowledge, and culture flowed in all directions. It had a direct influence on the European Renaissance and scientific revolution.

And there is a material legacy that's visible today in architecture, language, science, and art. And I recall actually, I mentioned earlier Dr. Zulfiqar Shah, who wrote the book on the Enlightenment. He actually has another book on this aesthetic transfer between Europe and the Muslim-majority world.

So given these achievements, why did the Islamic world lose its scientific, religious, political, mercantile leadership? Well, first we have to challenge some of those assumptions and then contextualize them as well for the reasons of civilizational decline as a whole. So we're going to take a break. It is 12.45. We're going to break now.

Lunch will be here soon, so don't go anywhere. And we're going to pray at 1.45. Correct? 1.45 is generally the prayer? Yeah, that's the time that I was given. So we're going to eat lunch, pray, and then we'll come back for the last session, which we will talk about transformation and modern questions, the decline narrative.

Was there really a decline? If there was, what was it? And then how do we contextualize that? So we'll go over kind of the tail end of Islamic civilization history and then some of the reasons for that. But see you back here at two o'clock.