RESOURCE: ISLAM AWARENESS
Teaching children how Muslim sages saved European
philosophy could bridge a modern culture gap.
Martin Wainwright
Friday July 26, 2002
The Guardian
Halfway down the old Band of Gold prostitutes' beat in
Lumb Lane, Bradford, there is an Asian-owned chemist's
shop advertising yunani tibb. Few people give the two
words a second glance, but they are a key to a
marvellous but scandalously little-known embrace
between those uneasy and quarrelsome neighbours, Islam
and the west.
Tibb means "medicine" in Urdu, yunani means "Greek"
and the phrase comes straight from the centuries when
the Muslim world saved the bedrock of western European
culture, the learning of Athens.
Without the work of a
500-year succession of Islamic sages, we would have
lost the essence of Aristotle, much of Plato and
scores of other ancients.
It happened simply enough. While the barbarians
smashed and burned in western Europe, the Arabs and
Persians used the libraries of Alexandria and Asia
Minor, translated the scrolls and took them to Baghdad
and far beyond.
In distant Bukhara on the Silk Road to
China, a teenager called Abu Ali Ibn Sina was
engrossed in Aristotle's Metaphysics at the age of 17.
The year was AD997 and the text - central to the
subsequent development of philosophy - had long been
lost and unknown in western Europe.
The story of this priceless heritage's return home,
slung in the saddlebags of camels on the long caravans
to Cairo, Fez and the cities of Moorish Spain, is well
known to scholars. Hundreds of learned books are
available and if you key in Ibn Sina or his
westernised name Avicenna on an internet search engine
you will come up with about 28,800 references.
But the
story, so relevant to the world today, has never been
admitted to everyday British culture.
There are simple reasons for this too - medieval
Christian bigotry, the post-Renaissance belief in the
glory of Europe - but a lack of excitement in the
story is not one of them. Umberto Eco proved that in
the global bestseller, The Name of the Rose. His
demented monk Jorge smears poison on a lost work of
Aristotle and contemptuously spits out the name of
"the Arab, Averroes" - the scholar Ibn Rushd of
Cordoba, the last link in the journey of Greek
learning back to the west.
The national curriculum reformers, to their credit,
have seen the gap and tried to fill it, but their good
intentions easily get lost.
How many pupils in Britain
take key stage 3's option on Islamic civilisation
AD600-1600 or the shorter, 15-hour "scheme of work"
project on the cultural achievements of Islamic
civilisation?
The Department for Education does not know; neither,
more disturbingly, do the education authorities in a
place like Bradford where Muslims and others
desperately need common ground.
In his report on the
Yorkshire city's divided communities last year, Lord
Ouseley inveighed against the national curriculum's
shortcomings and demanded "effective learning
environments in which racial differences are seen
positively by pupils, underpinned by knowledge and
understanding".
He had good ideas, including a local Bradford
citizenship section to be added to the national
curriculum's citizenship module, which becomes
compulsory from September. But the simpler option of
highlighting those KS3 options, which offer just that
"knowledge and understanding", didn't figure. Did
Ouseley and his researchers know they were there?
The need for them, and for simple, readable textbooks
on both courses, is not just a matter for the white
community; the story has been marginalised in Islamic
culture as well. A straw poll of British Asian
students in Bradford produces the occasional cautious
nod at the name Ibn Sina but none for Ibn Maimoun
(Maimonides, Saladin's doctor and the greatest Jewish
scholar of the Arabic world); and none for Ibn Rushd.
Like Jorge, traditionalist Muslims have long found the
sage of Cordoba disturbing and hard to explain to
students in the madrassa. What can they make of a man
who complained that curbs on women wasted the
potential of half the population of the Islamic world
- and this way back in the 12th century?
A man whose
books, for a time, were proscribed by Christian and
Muslim authorities alike?
And so we fumble on, with both communities stuck in
the world memorably summarised by Dr Johnson's
explanation of why Richard Knolles' book, A Generall
Historie of the Turkes (1603), sank without trace.
The
author, said Johnson, "employed his genius upon a
foreign and uninteresting subject and recounted
enterprises and revolutions of which none desire to be
informed".
Next to Lumb Lane's yunani tibb shop is the Asian
Sweet Centre, which, significantly, has opened a
subsidiary Sweet Centre fish and chip shop. Commerce
and the laws of the market can force such bridges
between communities; maybe the KS3 history options, in
places like Bradford, need a bit of compulsion too.
· Martin Wainwright is the Guardian's northern editor.
He presents an account of Averroes' life and work on
Radio 4 at 11am today
martin.wainwright@ guardian.co.uk
Copy and paste: 31 July 2022 : 3 Muharam 1444H: 950 pm
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