Blog 8

“Read in the name of your Lord who created, He created man from a clot of congealed blood. Read and your Lord is most bountiful – who taught with the use of the pen (to write), Taught man what he knew not.”

The Quran, surah 96 (The Clot): 1-5

Many of the world’s major religions encourage learning from sacred books – to name just a few, the Rg Vedas, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, the Tao te Ching, the Torah, and the Bible. In many of these religions, the books themselves were in the hands of the few – priests or scholars. This was not unreasonable, given the very laborious processes that were needed in the production of written materials. By the time Islam was founded, the production of books was becoming easier than it had been previously. The importation of paper-making technology from China and the invention of compact, flat book forms greatly facilitated copying and dissemination. When Caliph Uthman, the third Caliph to rule after the death of Muhammad the Prophet, feared that variant versions of the Quran might compete with the version he had compiled, he had several thousand copies made of his predecessor Abu Bakr’s orthodox version (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran) and distributed them widely. This multiplication made the Quran irrepressible as a popular book. Contrast the Talmud, a massive compilation of Jewish religious thought, which was reduced by Christian bans and burnings in the 15th century to few and scattered copies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud), and even today is poorly accessible to most non-Hebrew-speaking potential readers who lack access to an academic library or a Jewish religious institution.

The book-oriented nature of Islam encouraged the construction of libraries and aided the preservation of much of the ancient literature that is fundamental to the world’s intellectual heritage. The Islamic empires, though at war with Christian Europe on both the east and the west sides, made an essential contribution to the intellectual revival referred to as the Enlightenment. Though broadly focused libraries had existed in ancient times and were diligently maintained in a few parts of early Christian Europe, Islamic libraries have always been integral to the maintenance of the world’s intellectual patrimony.

Knowledge relies on its repositories. Libraries are very vulnerable to conflict and to religious or political upheaval, but, collectively, they persist. They are symbols of the old to newly minted fanatics, and they are symbols of new growth and eternal vitality to all young people everywhere discovering the joy of learning. The Islamic contribution to the longevity and ongoing freshness of human thought deserves proper appreciation. 

Quran, Wikipedia, viewed 4 november 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran

Talmud, Wikipedia, viewed 4 november 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud

Contributions

Despite some strands in Islam that touted dropping all written knowledge other than the Quran and a few other religious works, Islamic academia is widely credited for keeping the knowledge of Greek and Roman philosophy alive during a period of history when European culture had mostly lost touch with these ideas. Given access to fundamental thinkers like Aristotle, Islamic thinkers as well as Jewish thinkers in Islamic communities were able to make major contributions to logic, mathematics, medicine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_sina) and philosophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_science). Many English technical words, such as algebra, algorithm and alcohol, are derived from Arabic terms coined by medieval Islamic thinkers (www.etymonline.com) The influence on European thought was profound. It could even be argued that Protestantism is Christianity informed by the Sunni ideal of each person standing alone before God, without intermediaries such as priests and saints. The breakaway of Protestantism from Catholicism, then, may indirectly be an outgrowth of the Islamic library movement. 

Avicenna, Wikipedia, viewed 4 november 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_sina

Islam and science, Wikipedia, viewed 4 november 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_science

Harper, D 2011, Online Etymology Dictionary, viewed 4 november 2011 www.etymonline.com

Controversies

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). 

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. 

Al-Ghazali, Wikipedia, viewed 4 november 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ghazali

The arrangement of Islamic libraries.

In mosque libraries, the most prevalent type of Islamic library, the top shelf of any shelving for books is devoted to copies of the Quran.  This superior placement helps diplomatically with ongoing controversies about whether books other than the Quran are of value.  I’ll say more about this topic in the next blog post.  

According to Adams (2003), a typical arrangement of books in an early Islamic library was the one laid out by Al-Nadim in 987 A.D. in a library catalogue known as the al-Fihrist.   This catalogue listed Quran copies as the top-ranking volumes.  In descending order of importance, and also in descending elevation in bookshelves (though, closely ranked items other than Qurans might be placed on the same shelf together), were five more topics related to Islamic literature, followed by four general topics.  The five Islamic topics were; grammar, history, poetry, dogmatics and jurisprudence.  The four general topics were philosophy, light literature, miscellaneous religion and alchemy. 

Grammar is an Islamic topic because the Quran is written in a classical form of Arabic that has an elaborate, Latin-like grammatical structure than popularly spoken Arabic dialects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_grammar).  The Quran rhymes and scans as poetry in its original form and therefore can’t be translated into contemporary language without suffering severe literary damage.  Also, it is believed to be the word of God (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran),

and, in some schools of thought, even to have pre-existed throughout eternity.  Technically, all Quran versions not in the original Arabic are considered to be interpretations, not translations.  The Quran is held to be untranslatable, and to imply that a linguistically altered edition is a reliably faithful translation may be considered legally punishable blasphemy in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_blasphemy).  The Quranic grammar shelf in the library is thus literally a resource for understanding the verbal logic of God. 

Jurisprudence (fiqh) is a major topic: it forms the basis of the currently much debated Sharia laws.  There are several differing schools of Islamic jurisprudence greatly differing in their legal interpretations.  The effect of this can be highly consequential.  For example, the Hanafi fiqh, prevalent in countries such as Turkey, Bosnia and Egypt, is opposed to the death penalty for women convicted of apostasy (rejection of Islam), whereas in the Shiite and Hanbali fiqhs, in Iran and Saudi Arabia, respectively, a woman may be put to death if convicted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam).  Thus the library shelf related to the fiqhs is the law library of the Islamic world.  

Arabic grammer, Wikipedia, viewed 4 november 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_grammar

Quran, Wikipedia, viewed 4 november 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran

Islam and Blasphemy, Wikipedia, viewed 4 november 2011http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_blasphemy

Apostasy in Islam, Wikipedia, viewed 4 november 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam