Many of the things people heard Muhammad, the prophet, say after the Islamic religion was established were recorded and written up into collections called the Hadith, or sayings, of the prophet. Here is one of the hadith records:
“Ibn Umar tells us the Prophet said, ‘It is better for a man to fill the inside of his body with pus than to fill it with poetry.’” (Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 8, Book 73, Number 175).
“Ibn Umar tells us the Prophet said, ‘It is better for a man to fill the inside of his body with pus than to fill it with poetry.’” (Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 8, Book 73, Number 175).
The effect of this hadith is felt whenever fundamentalist forms of Islam become popular. The Taliban in Afghanistan banned all popular music, considering it to be equivalent to poetry. The same is being done today by the Al-Shabab movement in Somalia. Imagine, then, the effect on libraries, where poetry is a major topic, as mentioned in the previous blog. The topic of whether or not any books other than the Quran and hadiths should be sanctioned has been a lively one at various points in Islamic history.
Philosophy is also a controversial topic. The so-called “Thomas Aquinas of Islam,” Abu Hamed Mohammad ibn Mohammad al-Ghazali, published a book in the 11th century called “The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” which was a denunciation of the Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies that had become popular in the educated Islamic world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ghazali).
Al-Ghazali was by no means a fundamentalist, and is credited with reconciling mystical Sufi ideas and practices with mainstream Sunni Islam. The ‘falsafa’ (“philosophy”) movement he opposed included thinkers who had become famous not only in the Islamic world, but also in the Christian world, such as Ibn Sina (known in Christendom as Avicenna) and Al-Farabi. The philosophy movement rebutted Al-Ghazali in the next century with a book published by Ibn Rushd (known in Christendom as Averroes), ‘The Incoherence of ‘The Incoherence,’” but the retention of philosophical works in libraries remained controversial, and was a sign of liberalism. The maintenance of a balanced and diverse library collection required moral and political tenacity then, just as it does today.
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