When Iran and Afghanistan Were the World's Centers of Learning
Iran and Afghanistan used to produce the world's great scientists and philosophers. Then the patrons of the arts were captured by the madrasas.
There was a time when modern-day Iran and Afghanistan’s thinkers were the envy of the world. Thinkers from Baghdad to Balkh engaged with classical thinkers, using philosophy, history, and scientists to build on ancient discoveries.
Central Asia’s Enlightenment lasted from around 800 to 1200. While Europe was in its Dark Ages, the area between Persia and China was producing work that Europeans would rely on throughout the Renaissance and their own Enlightenment.
Frederick Starr’s book, Lost Enlightenment, is the story of the Central Asian thinkers who supported scientific and philosophical discovery.
It’s also the story of how that Golden Age ended.
Baghdad’s Translation Movement
In 833, Caliph Harun al-Rashid was focused on waging jihad against Byzantium, what was left of the eastern portion of the Roman Empire. One of the most influential families in Central Asia at the time, the Barmaks, took advantage of Harun’s distraction.
The Barmak family found the arts deeply valuable — so much so that three generations of them would lead translations of Greek, Sanskrit, and other texts into Arabic:
“Yahya Barmak, his son Jafar, and his second son, Fadl, the most serious of the lot, became Baghdad’s most active patrons of new thinking in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine,” Starr wrote.
Shortly after this translation project began, the Barmaks were imprisoned and killed by Harun, who was furious at being considered the Barmaks’ “puppet.”
The next Caliph who took power happened to be a great patron of the arts. Caliph Mamun founded and became the patron of the “House of Wisdom.” Starr writes:
“What emerges instead is an informal and constantly shifting coterie of scholars supported by the caliph or his viziers and grouped around a major library. This was almost certainly the Barmaks’ collection of books, transformed after their fall into the caliph’s library.”
Over the next two centuries, many Ancient Greek thinkers, including Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Euclid among many others, had their works translated into Arabic. Copies would later make their way back to Europe, where they were translated into the kingdoms’ languages and lay the intellectual groundwork for the Renaissance.
Religious Criticism in Muslim Central Asia
There were many great thinkers who arose out of Central Asia during this time. Polymaths like al-Kindi and al-Balkhi made great progress in scientific experimentation and philosophical inquiry.
One early polymath stands out: Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi.
Razi produced an eight-volume medical encyclopedia that was referenced centuries after his death. Starr explains why:
“Razi was the father of immunology, the first to distinguish smallpox from measles, the first to write on allergies and, through his Diseases of Children, on pediatrics as well…Even today there is a university named for him in Iran, and Iran’s pharmacists annually celebrate “Razi Day.”
Medicine wasn’t Razi’s only subject. Starr named three of Razi’s religious tracts: The Prophets’ Fraudulent Tricks, The Stratagems of Those Who Claim to Be Prophets, On the Refutation of Revealed Religions.
Starr quotes a passage from one of Razi’s works challenging the Quran’s unique sanctity:
“You claim that the evidentiary miracle is present and available, namely, the Quran. You say: ‘Whoever denies it, let him produce a similar one.’ Indeed, we shall produce a thousand similar, from the works of rhetoricians, eloquent speakers and valiant poets, which are more appropriately phrased and state the issues more succinctly…’”
It’s a damning criticism of the Quran that’s unimaginable in Islamic theocracies today. Razi was heavily criticized for these passages, but he wasn’t killed for them. He remained a much-admired physician.
This was the level of frank discussion of rationality that was allowed in Central Asia during its Enlightenment.
It was also the kind that would soon end.
The Theocrats Take Over
As Central Asia had its own Enlightenment, it also had its own Machiavelli. Nizam al-Mulk wrote his Book of Government advising rulers how to maintain order. As the Seljuk empire’s vizier, he was well-positioned to produce such a work.
He felt threatened by heterodox thinkers like Razi, but Shiite views and dueling schools of Islamic jurisprudence also concerned him. They included traditions that rejected reason as a source of ultimate truth in favor of the Prophet’s teachings. Other traditions “fully accepted the authority of the Hadiths but were open to somewhat broader interpretations of them.”
Nizam al-Mulk sided with Shafi’i jurists, one of the conservative traditions that rejected a role for reason in truth-seeking.
To ensure his favored tradition could take hold and keep the empire together, Nizam al-Mulk created a network of religious schools comprised of “Shafi’i legal experts” and “Asharites in theology.” The Asharites denied cause and effect and believed that all things happened because God made them.
There were many religious schools — madrasas — already. But no one else had the power to create a network of schools with identical missions and ideologies across the empire he managed. Nizam al-Mulk even recruited Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, the era’s most effective religious apologist, to launch the first Nizamiyya madrasas.
With one orthodoxy spread across a network of schools, Nizam al-Mulk ensured his chosen religious tradition would shape the boundaries of thought in Central Asia for centuries to come.
The Beginning of the End
Central Asia’s Enlightenment didn’t end overnight. A century after Ghazali’s writings, Ibn Rushd — who Salman Rushdie’s last name came from — wrote a scathing rebuke of Ghazali’s criticism of logic, reason, and the philosophers.
But it was too late. The Mongols invaded from the West and annihilated Central Asia because of the local governor who killed a Mongol trade convoy on the way back to Mongolia. While the Mongols settled down to rule Europe and China, the Mongol ruler in charge of Central Asia remained nomadic and didn’t reestablish city life. The region’s greatest minds fled, and few returned.
Tamerlane’s grandson and later a sultan, Ulughbeg, shows how much the intellectual climate had changed.
Ulughbeg was a patron of the arts and sciences. He was an intellectual in the mold of the polymaths before him. One of his signature achievements was in astronomy. Rather than relying on previous works, he set out to make new observations and gather new data.
He built a new observatory for that purpose, a marvel of the age. His work included a catalog of stars and their locations and was “considered the most authoritative guide to the heavens between Ptolemy’s in the second century and Tycho Brahe’s at the end of the sixteenth century.”
After Ulughbeg died in 1449, members of the ulema purged his school of Enlightenment-style thinkers and tore down his observatory. Starr notes that “when the site was excavated…archaeologists found clear evidence that it had been torn down to its very foundations and most of the building material hauled away.”
Central Asia’s environment was no longer hospitable to heterodox thought. Around the time of Ulughbeg’s death, Europe would regain access to classics like Lucretius’ poem, On the Nature of Things, which reintroduced ideas like matter being made of small building blocks. The printing press and the collaboration it made possible launched the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the modern era.
In contrast, one orthodoxy became the rule in Central Asia. The Ottoman Empire, which would reach part of Central Asia, suppressed the printing press, and networks of religious schools modeled on Nizam al-Mulk’s network narrowed the mainstream’s range of acceptable ideas. Starr closes one of the sections in his final chapter by reflecting on the impact it had on individual thinkers:
“At first the thinkers responded with various forms of self-censorship, but over time they simply abandoned those fields in which tey were most likely to come athwart the guardians of correct thinking. This is not to deny that the traditionalist mainstream produced thoughtful and highly moral thinkers of thier own, or that the writings of these people wre anything but sincere. But because they were no longer subjected to rigorous and open criticism, even the writings of members of the tradition-bound mainstream tended over time to become lax and ritualistic.”