Durants' S o C
Vol. Vi THE REFORMATION
Pgs. 663 - 666
THE GENIUS OF ISLAM.
The Moslem world had sustained, from 1095 to 1291, a series of assaults as violent and religious as those by which it later subdued the Balkans and changed a thousand churches into mosques. Eight Crusades, inspired by a dozen popes, had hurled the royalty, chivalry, and rabble of Europe against Mohammedan citizens in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Tunisia; and though these attacks had finally failed, they had greatly weakened the order and resources of the Moslem states. In Spain the Crusades had succeeded; there Islam had been beaten back while its survivors were crowded into a Granada whose doom was leisurely delayed. Sicily had been taken by the virile Normans. But what were these wounds and amputations compared to the wild and ruinous descent of the Mongols ( 1219-1258) into Transoxiana, Persia, and Iraq? City after city that had been a haven of Moslem civilisation was subjected to pillage, massacre, and fire -- Bokhara, Samarkand, Balkh, Merv, Nishapur, Rayy, Herat, Baghdad, . . . provincial and municipal governments were shattered; canals, neglected, succumbed to the swirling sand; commerce was put to flight; schools and libraries were destroyed; scholars and scientists were scattered, slaughted, or enslaved. The spirit of Islam was broken for almost a century. It slowly revived; and when Timur’s Tatars swept across western Asia in a fresh desolation, and the Ottoman Turks cut their way through Asia Minor to the Bosporus, no other civilisation in history had known disasters so numerous, so widespread, and so complete.
And yet the Mongols, Tatars, and Turks brought their new blood to replace the human rivers they had shed. Islam had grown luxurious and supine; Baghdad, like Constantinople, had lost the will to live by its own arms; men were so in love with easeful life that they half invited death; that picturesque civilization too, as well as the Byzantine, was ripe to die. But so rich had it been, that -- like ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy -- it was able, by its salvaged fragments and memories, to civilize its conquerors. Persia under the Mongol Il-Khans developed an enlightened government, produced good literature and majestic art, and graced history with a noble scholar, Rashidu’d-Din. In Anatolia the Turks were already civilized, and poets among them were as plentiful as concubines. In Egypt the Mamluks continued to build like giants; and meanwhile Islam was spreading through India to the farthest reaches of the east.
When Marco Polo set out across Persia (1271) to see the China of Kublai Khan, he found himself within the Mongol Empire almost all the way. History had never recorded so vast a realm. On the west it touched the Dnieper in Russia; in the south it included the Crimea, Iraq, Persia, Tibet, and India to the Ganges; in the east it embraced Indochina, China, and Korea; in the north lay its original home, Mongolia. Throughout these states the Mongol rulers maintained roads, promoted commerce, protected travellers, and permitted freedom of worship to diverse faiths.
Hulagu, grandson of Ghenghis Khan, after destroying Baghdad ( 1258) established a new capital at Maragha in northwest Persia. When he died (1265), his son Abaqa became Khan or prince of Persia, loosely subject to the distant Kublia Khan; so began the Il-Khan dynasty that ruled Persia and Iraq til 1337. Greatest of the line was Ghazan Khan. He broke off allegiance to the Great Khan in Mongolia and made his state an independent kingdom, with its capital at Tabriz. He reformed administration, stabilized the currency, protected the peasants from landlords and robbers, and promoted such prosperity as recalled Baghdad in its proudest days. He built a mosque, two colleges, a philosophical academy, an observatory, a library, a hospital. He set aside revenues from certain lands in perpetuity to support these institutions, and secured for them the leading scholars, physicians, and scientists of the age. He himself was a man of wide culture and many languages, including Latin.
Marco Polo described Tabriz as a “great and glorious city.” Fra Oderic (1320) pronounced it “ the finest city in world trade. Every article is found here in abundance..... The Christians say that the revenue the city pays to its ruler is greater than that which all France pays to its king.” Clavijo (1404) called it a “Mighty city abounding in riches and goods,” with “many fine buildings,” magnificent mosques, and “the most splendid bathhouses in the world.” Uljaitu continued the enlightened policies of his brother Ghazan. The carer of his chancellor, Rashidu’d-Din Fadlu’llah, illustrates the prosperity of education, scholarship, and literature at this time. Rashidu’d-Din Fadlu’llah was born in 1247 at Hamadan, perhaps of Jewish parentage; so his enemies held, citing his remarkable knowledge of Mosaic Law. He served Ababa as physician, Ghazan as premier, Uljaitu as treasurer. In an eastern suburb of Tabriz he established the Rab’-i-Rashidi, or Rashidi foundation, a spacious university centre. One of his letters, preserved in the Library of Cambridge University, describes it:
In it we have built twenty-four Caravanserais ( Inns) touching the sky, 1500 shops and 30,000 fascinating houses. Salubrious baths, pleasant gardens, stores, mills, factories for cloth weaving and paper making.... have been constructed .... people from every city and border have been removed to the said Rab’, among them 200 reciters of the Koran. . . . we have given dwellings to 400 other scholars, theologians, jurists, and traditionalists in the street which is named “The street of the scholars.” Daily payments, pensions, yearly clothing allowances, soap money and sweets money have been granted for them all. We have established 1,000 other students . . . and have given orders for their pensions and daily pay.. . . . in order that they may be comfortably and peacefully occupied in acquiring knowledge and profiting people by it. We have prescribed, too, which and how many students should study with which professor and teacher; and after ascertaining each knowledge-seekers aptness of mind and capability of learning a particular branch of the sciences . . . we have ordered him to learn that science. . . .
Fifty skilled physicians who have come from the cities of Hindustan, China, Misr {Egypt}, and Sha’m {Syria} have all been granted our particular attention and favour in a thousand ways; we have ordered that they should frequent our ‘House of Healing’ ( hospital) every day, and that every one should take ten students capable of learning medicine under his care, and train them in the practice of this noble art. For all these men. . . we have founded a quarter behind our hospital . . . their street is called the ‘Street of the Healers”. Other craftsmen and industrialists too, whom we have transferred from various countries, have been established, each group in a particular street.
We must marvel at the industry of a man who, while actively sharing in the administration of a kingdom, found time and knowledge to write five books on theology, four on medicine and government, and a voluminous history of the world. He laboured seven years on his ‘Compendium of Histories’; Here were substantial accounts of Mongols from Genghis Khan to Ghazan; of the various Mohammedan states and dynasties in Eastern and Western Islam; of Persia and Judea before and after Mohammed; of China and India, with a full study of Buddha and Buddhism; and a chasteningly brief report on the doings and ideas of European kings, popes, and philosophers. He appears to have read Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Turkish, and Mongolian authorities -- in their original languages.
Much of his work has been lost, perhaps as a result of his political disaster. In 1312 Uljaitu associated with him Ali-Shah as co-chancellor of the exchequer. Under Uljaitu’s successor, Abu Sa’id, Ali-Shah spread divers charges against his colleague, and persuaded the Khan that Rashid’d-Din and his son Ibrahim had poisoned Uljaitu. The historian was dismissed and soon after put to death (1318), at the age of seventy, along with one of his sons. His properties were confiscated, his foundations were deprived of their endowments, and the suburb of Rab’-i-Rashidi was plundered and destroyed. After Abu Sa’id’s death a period of anarchy brought the dynasty of Il-Khans to an end, and their realm was divided into petty states ravaged by war and redeemed by poetry.
