Early Middle Ages

Islamic Civilization and Learning

The flowering of Islamic civilization: the translation movement, the House of Wisdom, philosophy, science, medicine, and art in the Abbasid age.

In-depth article

The civilization that grew up in the lands of the caliphate between the eighth and the eleventh centuries was, in its time, the most sophisticated in the world. In philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, optics, and chemistry, the scholars of the Islamic world built upon and went beyond the Greek, Persian, Indian, and Syriac traditions they inherited. The legal, theological, and mystical traditions of Islam took their mature form in the same period, producing syntheses that have shaped the religious life of Muslims to the present day. The Arabic language, in which most of this work was done, became a major literary and scientific language and the principal medium by which the heritage of Greek thought was transmitted to the Latin West.

The Islamic civilization of the Early Middle Ages is sometimes described as a transmission belt, useful principally for having preserved the Greek tradition during the centuries in which Latin Europe was too poor and too disorganized to do so. This is unfair. The scholars of the caliphate were not, in the main, mere copyists: they were original thinkers who built upon, criticized, and went far beyond the inheritance they had received. Al-Khwarizmi did not merely translate Greek mathematics; he created a new discipline, algebra, and gave it the name it still bears. Al-Kindi did not merely expound the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato; he synthesized them with Islamic theology in a way that opened new questions. Al-Razi did not merely transmit Galenic medicine; he made original clinical observations and wrote the first systematic pediatric treatise. The civilization of the caliphate was, in short, a civilization in its own right.

The Religious Sciences

The religious sciences of Islam developed in the first centuries of the caliphate in response to a fundamental problem: how to interpret the Qur’an and the practice of the Prophet into a coherent framework for the life of the community. The result was a remarkable tradition of scholarship, characterized by a rigor of method, a depth of textual criticism, and a comprehensiveness of scope that has few parallels in the religious history of the world.

The principal disciplines of the religious sciences were Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir), the study of the reports about the Prophet’s sayings and actions (hadith), the elaboration of the law (fiqh), and the development of speculative theology (kalam). The major schools of Islamic law took shape in the eighth and ninth centuries, and by the early tenth century, four great schools had become the dominant Sunni traditions: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali schools. Each was associated with a major early jurist: Abu Hanifa (d. 767), Malik ibn Anas (d. 795), al-Shafi’i (d. 820), and Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855). The Shiite tradition produced, in the same period, the Ja’fari school, named after the sixth imam, Ja’far al-Sadiq.

The hadith tradition was the foundation of the legal and theological sciences. The hadith scholars developed an elaborate method for the authentication of reports, examining the chains of transmission (isnad) and the content (matn) of each report. The result was the compilation, by the ninth and tenth centuries, of the six canonical collections of Sunni hadith, including the Sahih of al-Bukhari and the Sahih of Muslim, which remain the most authoritative collections in the Sunni tradition.

The Sufi tradition, the mystical dimension of Islam, developed alongside the legal and theological traditions, and at times in tension with them. The early Sufis, including figures such as al-Hallaj (d. 922), Bayazid al-Bistami (d. c. 874), and Rabi’a al-Adawiyya (d. 801), emphasized the personal, loving encounter with God, the annihilation of the self in divine love, and the practice of dhikr (remembrance) and sama (listening) as aids to spiritual realization. The Sufi orders, which began to take shape in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, would become one of the principal vehicles of popular Islamic piety.

The Translation Movement

The translation movement, in which the great works of Greek, Persian, Indian, and Syriac scholarship were translated into Arabic, was one of the most important intellectual events of the Early Middle Ages. The movement began in the late eighth century under the Umayyad caliphs and reached its apogee in the ninth and tenth centuries under the Abbasids, particularly in the House of Wisdom at Baghdad. The principal figures of the movement included Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. 873), a Nestorian Christian who translated Galen, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and many others, often from Greek to Syriac and then to Arabic; Thabit ibn Qurra (d. 901), who translated Archimedes, Apollonius, and other Greek mathematicians; and al-Kindi (d. c. 866), the first major philosopher of the Islamic world, who synthesized Greek philosophy with Islamic theology.

The Greek works translated included the philosophical corpus of Aristotle and Plato, the medical works of Galen and Hippocrates, the mathematical works of Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, and Ptolemy, and the astronomical works of Ptolemy. Persian works of statecraft and ethics, including the Kalila wa Dimna (a translation of the Indian Panchatantra via Pahlavi) and the Siyasatnama tradition, were also translated. Indian works, particularly in mathematics and astronomy, were transmitted through the embassy to the court of Harun al-Rashid in the early ninth century and the work of scholars such as al-Khwarizmi.

The translation movement was not, in itself, a passive reception. The Arabic translators were critical readers, and their translations often included commentary, criticism, and improvement on the original. Al-Khwarizmi’s Algebra, for example, was a synthesis of Greek, Indian, and original work; al-Razi’s medical works were based on Galen and Hippocrates but included much original clinical observation; and the great syntheses of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) went far beyond the Greek philosophical tradition in the construction of original philosophical systems.

Philosophy, Science, and Medicine

The Arabic philosophical tradition developed in close interaction with the Greek. Al-Kindi (d. c. 866), the first major Islamic philosopher, attempted to synthesize the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato with Islamic theology, holding that philosophy and religion were two ways of arriving at the same truth. Al-Farabi (d. 950), a Turk who worked in Baghdad and Damascus, developed a more systematic political philosophy based on Plato’s Republic and a more elaborate metaphysics based on Aristotle and the Neoplatonists. The most influential of the Islamic philosophers was Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037), whose Canon of Medicine was the standard medical textbook in the Islamic world and Latin Europe for centuries, and whose Book of Healing was a major synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy with Neoplatonic and Islamic elements.

The mathematical and astronomical tradition of the Islamic world built upon and went far beyond the Greek and Indian inheritance. Al-Khwarizmi (d. c. 850) wrote on algebra, giving the discipline its name, and on the Hindu numerals that would later be transmitted to the Latin West as the “Arabic” numerals. Al-Khwarazmi’s work on algebra was developed by later mathematicians, including Omar Khayyam (d. 1131), who solved the general cubic equation by means of conic sections. The astronomers of the caliphate refined the Ptolemaic system, developed the discipline of trigonometry, and built some of the most sophisticated observatories of the medieval world. The tradition of astronomical observation culminated in the great observatory of Ulugh Beg at Samarkand in the fifteenth century.

The medical tradition of the caliphate was one of its most distinctive contributions. The great hospitals (bimaristans) of Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba were centers of medical education, with organized programs of study, libraries, and visiting physicians. Al-Razi (Rhazes, d. 925) wrote a comprehensive medical encyclopedia, the Kitab al-Hawi, which was translated into Latin and used in the European universities for centuries; he is also credited with the first clinical description of smallpox and measles. The great hospitals of Cairo, founded under the Fatimid and Ayyubid dynasties, became the model for the hospital systems of the later medieval world.

Art, Architecture, and Material Culture

The art and architecture of the early Islamic world drew on the late antique inheritance and the artistic traditions of the conquered lands. The great monuments of the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods - the Dome of the Rock, the Great Mosque of Damascus, the Great Mosque of Cordoba - are based on late antique architectural forms but adapted to the new functions of Islamic worship. The Abbasid caliphs built palace cities such as Samarra, with its great mosque and spiral minaret, and patronized the great Abbasid factories producing textiles, metalwork, glass, and ceramics.

The calligraphic tradition of Islam, with its elaborate scripts of kufic and naskh and the later cursive scripts developed for use in the chancery, was a major art form in its own right. The art of the book, including the decoration of Qur’ans with abstract ornament and illumination, reached a high level of sophistication in the Abbasid period. The figurative tradition, while restricted in religious contexts, was preserved in secular art, particularly in the wall paintings of the Umayyad desert palaces and the illustrated manuscripts produced for the Abbasid court. The story of how this civilization was transmitted to the Latin West, particularly through the translations made in Toledo and Sicily, is an important chapter in the intellectual history of the medieval world.

The Transmission to the Latin West

The civilization of the caliphate was not only a self-contained achievement: it was also the principal bridge by which the heritage of Greek thought, Indian mathematics, and Persian statecraft was transmitted to the Latin West. The translation movement from Arabic to Latin, which began in the late tenth century and continued through the thirteenth, was one of the most important events in the intellectual history of the medieval West. The principal centers of the movement were Toledo, in Spain, where the archbishop Raymond of Toledo (d. 1152) established a translation school, and Sicily, where the Norman kings patronized Arabic-Latin translations. The translations of al-Khwarizmi, al-Razi, Ibn Sina, and the philosophical and scientific works of the Islamic world provided the foundation of the medieval Latin philosophical and scientific tradition, and the recovery of Aristotle through Arabic was one of the central events of the twelfth-century Renaissance.

The Islamic civilization of the Early Middle Ages was, in sum, a civilization of extraordinary richness and depth. It built upon the late antique and Persian inheritances, contributed original work in virtually every field of human knowledge, and transmitted its achievement to the Latin West at a moment when the European world was ready to receive it. The legacy of this civilization is fundamental to the intellectual and cultural life of the modern world.

Further reading

  • George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (MIT Press, 2007).
  • Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbāsid Society (Routledge, 1998).
  • Peter Burke, What Is the History of Knowledge? (Polity, 2016) for the comparative historiography.