Since writing this article I found the following of interest, details in the footnotes.
Footnote 1 Book Holy Lands: Reviving Pluralism in the Middle East
Footnote 2 Two 2016 exhibitions about Sicily, British Museum and Ashmolean, Oxford
Footnote 3 A book on Pythagoras and how knowledge of his (and other) mathematics was transmitted via Arabic.
==================================================================
MOSLEM AND JEW ANOTHER VIEW
For many the word Islam now triggers images
of violence, extremism, misogyny and
religious fundamentalism. This set me wondering when the term first came
into my consciousness. As a schoolboy I read about other societies and their
religions and customs. Brought up in a devout catholic family, I read about
missionaries who tried to convert people of other religions including Islam.
My school in the 1950s was near
Woking, Surrey. On the train from Woking
to Waterloo I remember seeing a mosque close to the tracks and being told that
this was the only mosque in the country.
To me it was just a curiosity and I don’t remember wondering why
Woking? Today I would wonder why.
Later that decade I spent some years
in Spain and visited some of the wonderful Islamic architecture of Andalusia,
the palace in Seville, the mosque converted into a cathedral in Cordoba and the
Alhambra in Granada. Again I just accepted the historic existence of Islam in
Spain without thinking too much about it.
At that time I had the feeling that ultra-Catholic Spain was uneasy
about its magnificent Muslim heritage.
Then
in 1967 I drove a second-hand London taxi to Athens, (like you do). This meant driving through what was
Jugoslavia. In the southern part of the
country, in what is now Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo I was astonished
to see mosques in towns and villages everywhere. The wars in the region in the 1990s then
highlighted the fact that the area has a substantial Muslim population. This in
itself was an interesting exercise in depersonalising groups, Serbs were Serbs
i.e. an ethnic group, likewise Croats.
However the third party to the conflict was called Muslim, the name of a
religion not a people. (The same was true in Vietnam, the US allies
were called South Vietnamese i.e. people, the enemy was called the Vietcong
i.e. communists, the name of an ideology. IS calls the Western enemy crusaders,
The West calls them Islamists. )
I now realise that all that part of Europe was
part of the Ottoman Empire. Greece for
example must have had hundreds of mosques although there are very few today. Besides much of ex-Jugoslavia, Bulgaria,
Albania and parts of Romania were all subject to Ottoman rule as well of course
as European Turkey.Istanbul with its magnificent mosques and oriental palaces
is in Europe.
Back to the Woking mosque. I had planned to see friends in that part of
the world and so on Saturday May 9th 2015 I visited the mosque. There was a sign to it down a narrow lane, which
then opened out into a spacious area with the mosque, car park and several
buildings. As I wandered around a
young man with typical moslem beard and dress asked me if I needed any
help. He asked me if I had had lunch or
would I like some food. I declined but
he offered to show me around the buildings which had been made an education and prayer centre. These buildings were, I imagine, converted
from some kind of workshop or factory and they were between the mosque and the
railway line so that you can no longer see the mosque from the train. I asked the young man if Shia moslems
worshipped there - I don’t think he wanted that question. He said that they did not, that they had
their own place somewhere else.
The Shah Jehan Mosque, Woking, Surrey.
So why a mosque in Woking?
The mosque was built in 1889 by an
orientalist called Dr. Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, an extraordinary linguist
and polymath by all accounts who had spent a lot of time in India. He was born in Pest, Hungary. I was delighted to discover that he was a Jew, or at least he was born to Jewish parents. I am not clear what religion he subscribed to.
Here in 1883 he established his
Oriental Institute and with a donation from the Begum Shah Jahan of the
princely state of Bhopal and built England's first mosque in 1889. He wanted to establish a Muslim Institute
and mosque, a place where visiting dignitaries from India could study, meditate
and pray. British India at that time
also included what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh with an enormous Muslim
population. Woking does not seem to have
been chosen for any particularly Islamic reason, just that suitable land and
premises were available. It slid into
disuse in the early part of the last century but in 1912 an Indian lawyer was
so moved by the neglect that he set up an Islamic mission here.
There were several notable converts to Islam
around this time. Among these was Sheik
Rahmatulla al Farouk a.k.a. Rowland
George Allanson Allanson-Winn, 5th Baron Headley of the Irish Peerage. In 1914 he published a book “A Western
Awakening to Islam.” Twice he performed
the Hadj pilgrimage. Whether they
converted or not there were people all those years ago with attitudes to Islam
that might teach us a lesson today.
For a long time this mosque was the
symbolic home of Islam in this country until the advent of large Muslim
communities from Pakistan and elsewhere.
Today there are more than 1,500 mosques in Britain. While doing some research on this
mosque I came across another claiming to be older than the Woking one. This was in my native Liverpool and pre-dated
the Woking mosque by a few months.
William Henry Quilliam, a Liverpool solicitor
embraced Islam in 1887 (aged 31), after returning from a visit to Morocco, and
took on the name Abdullah. He claimed that he was the first native Englishman
to embrace Islam. His conversion led to a remarkable story of the growth of
Islam in Victorian Britain. This history is now beginning to emerge and has
important lessons for Muslims in Britain and around the world. His mosque was a
converted house at 8 Brougham Terrace, Liverpool and so Woking can still claim
to have the first purpose built mosque in northern Europe. Quilliam was honoured throughout the Muslim
world and became Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam. He set up a school, orphanage and library The house at Brougham Terrace is once again
a Muslim Institute and I will try to visit when next in Liverpool.
Quilliam eventually had to leave
England after facing hostility and persecution, the first Muslim experience of
“Islamophobia” in the UK. He eventually returned to the UK and adopted the name
Haroun Mustapha Leon, and passed away in 1932 near Woking, and was buried in
Brookfield Cemetery where Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Marmaduke Pickthall and Lord
Headley are also buried. This cemetery is near Woking but is closed at weekends
so I was unable to visit it while I was in the area. Quilliam’s story is an extraordinary one and
worth looking up online.
Thinking about Islamophobia it is
worth noting that the Greek word ‘phobia’ means ‘fear of’ and not ‘hatred of’ even
if they are sometimes synonymous. I fear
tigers but I do not hate them.
An
interesting modern use of the name Quilliam occurs in the organisation called
The Quilliam Foundation. The following
is a quotation from its website –
Quilliam is the world’s first counter-extremism think tank
set up to address the unique challenges of citizenship, identity, and belonging
in a globalised world. Quilliam stands for religious freedom, equality, human
rights and democracy.
Challenging extremism is the duty of all responsible members
of society. Not least because cultural insularity and extremism are products of
the failures of wider society to foster a shared sense of belonging and to
advance liberal democratic values. With Islamist extremism in particular, we
believe a more self-critical approach must be adopted by Muslims. Westophobic
ideological influences and social insularity needs to be challenged within
Muslim communities by Muslims themselves whilst simultaneously, an active drive
towards creating an inclusive civic identity must be pursued by all members of
society.
Several times I have heard representatives of this
organisation interviewed on news channels.
Several recent popes such as John
Paul II have tried to claim that Europe is a Christian Continent. This is,
among other things, an insult to Jews who have played such an important role in
European culture and business. Islamic
Spain and Ottoman East Europe were not small, unimportant territories, they
played a major part in European history. The capital of the Ottoman Empire,
Istanbul, formerly Constantinople is in Europe. Let us look now at two achievements of Islam in those days.
AL ANDALUS
In
711Tariq ibn-Ziyad landed at Gibraltar, (Arabic ‘Jebel Tariq’ = Tariq’s
Mountain.) Islamic rule in the Iberian
peninsula lasted for varying periods ranging from only 28 years in the extreme
northwest (Galicia) to 781 years in the area surrounding the city of Granada in
the southeast. Writing in 2015 this
would equate to the Granada area having been under Islamic rule since
1234.
LA CONVIVENCIA
La Convivencia ("the
Coexistence") is the period of Spanish history from the Muslim Umayyad
conquest of Hispania in the early eighth century until the expulsion of the
Jews in 1492. In the different Moorish Iberian kingdoms, it is widely claimed
that the Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in relative peace
.
Christians and Jews were designated
dhimmi under Sharia (Islamic law). Dhimmi were allowed to live within Muslim society,
but were legally required to pay the jizyah, a personal tax, and abide by a
number of religious, social, and economic restrictions that came with their
status. Despite their restrictions, the dhimmi were fully protected by the
Muslim rulers and did not have to fight in case of war, because they paid the
jizyah.
It would be naïve to think that this
was some kind of utopia. There were
times when minorities were ill treated. Generally however minorities were allowed
to live their different lives provided they paid their tax. Christians and Jews continued to worship in
their churches and synagogues.
ISLAM and JUDAISM
It is particularly interesting to
study the situation of the Jews under Moslem rule. In the Jewish museum in Seville I noted a quotation suggesting that the Jews
welcomed the Islamic takeover because they had a much better life under Islamic
rule than they had under Christians. I have a book in the Penguin Classics
collection entitled “The Jewish Poets of Spain.” It is edited by a British rabbi David
Goldstein, and the following paragraph
says it all.
“The Spanish period not only saw the efflorescence for the first time
since the Song of Songs of secular Hebrew poetry – it also provided for the
first time the framework for the professional Jewish poet. Many of the poets represented in this volume
followed other callings in addition to writing poetry. They were physicians,
politicians, rabbis and merchants. But
others followed their Arab masters, and sought wealthy patrons. They were commissioned to write songs of
praise to celebrate births or marriages, elegies to commemorate the dead. They were able also, if they were offended,
to satirize their masters, as well as eulogise them. And many are the poetic laments to be found
describing the bad faith or the miserliness of the patron.”
P. 19
Some of these Jewish poets wrote in
Arabic and both Jews and Christians could, and sometimes did, rise to high
office in the Caliphate.
Jan Morris in her book “Spain”
writes "Life itself, which was seen elsewhere in Europe as a kind of
probationary preparation for death, was interpreted (by the Moors) as something
glorious in itself, to be ennobled by learning and enlivened by every kind of
pleasure."
Nothing could be further from the
Islam of Saudi Arabia or Islamic State which calls itself a Caliphate. (These two also despise each other, IS
claiming that Saudi Arabia has polluted the holy places by its attachment to
America and the West.) Even when US
troops were in Saudi Arabia before the first gulf war they were not allowed to
have Christian services. The Saudis
however want to build mosques in western countries. “Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are
convinced beyond doubt that they are right.” (
Laurens van der Post Lost World of the
Kalahari)
The contribution of Islamic Spain to
western culture has been written about in many places. Much Greek philosophy for example was lost to
the west, was translated into Arabic and from Spain entered Christian
Europe. Mediaeval scholars like Thomas
Aquinas acquired much of their knowledge of Aristotle from Spain. There have also been good TV documentaries,
such as those by Iraqi Jim Alkalili, Professor of Physics at Surrey University
about what western science and maths owes to Islam.
ISLAM AND THE WEST
Speech by HRH The Prince of Wales, at
the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford on the occasion of his visit to the Oxford
Centre for Islamic Studies 27th October 1993. I quote this extensively here because
someone had obviously done some research on behalf of the prince.
Ladies and gentlemen, if there is much misunderstanding in the West about
the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own
culture and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure which stems,
I think, from the straightjacket of history which we have inherited. The
mediaeval Islamic world, from Central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a
world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended
to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society and system
of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own
history. For example, we have underestimated the importance of 800 years of Islamic
society and culture in Spain between the 8th and 15th centuries. The
contribution of Muslim Spain to the preservation of classical learning during
the Dark Ages, and to the first flowerings of the Renaissance, has long been
recognised. But Islamic Spain was much more than a mere larder where
Hellenistic knowledge was kept for later consumption by the emerging modern
Western world. Not only did Muslim Spain gather and preserve the intellectual
content of ancient Greek and Roman civilisation, it also interpreted and
expanded upon that civilisation, and made a vital contribution of its own in so
many fields of human endeavour - in science, astronomy, mathematics, algebra
(itself an Arabic word), law, history, medicine, pharmacology, optics,
agriculture, architecture, theology, music. Averroes and Avenzoor, like their
counterparts Avicenna and Rhazes in the East, contributed to the study and
practice of medicine in ways from which Europe benefited for centuries
afterwards.
Islam nurtured and preserved the quest for learning. In the words of the
tradition, 'the ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the
martyr'. Cordoba in the 10th century was by far the most civilised city of
Europe. We know of lending libraries in Spain at the time King Alfred was
making terrible blunders with the culinary arts in this country. It is said
that the 400,000 volumes in its ruler's library amounted to more books than all
the libraries of the rest of Europe put together. That was made possible
because the Muslim world acquired from China the skill of making paper more
than four hundred years before the rest of non-Muslim Europe. Many of the
traits on which modern Europe prides itself came to it from Muslim Spain.
Diplomacy, free trade, open borders, the techniques of academic research, of
anthropology, etiquette, fashion, alternative medicine, hospitals, all came
from this great city of cities. Mediaeval Islam was a religion of remarkable
tolerance for its time, allowing Jews and Christians the right to practise their
inherited beliefs, and setting an example which was not, unfortunately, copied
for many centuries in the West. The surprise, ladies and gentlemen, is the
extent to which Islam has been a part of Europe for so long, first in Spain,
then in the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed so much towards
the civilisation which we all too often think of, wrongly, as entirely Western.
Islam is part of our past and
present, in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to create modern
Europe. It is part of our own
inheritance, not a thing apart.
There is a series of books published
by Atlantic Books and called “Books That Shook the World.” I have one of these entitled “The Qur’an A
Biography.” It is a curious and surprising
book, one whole chapter for example is devoted to Ossama Bin Laden. Another is devoted to Robert of Ketton who
lived around 1110 to 1160. Ketton is a
village in Rutland and not far from Stamford, Lincolnshire. Robert travelled widely, including Spain and
produced the first translation of the Koran into Latin, the academic lingua
franca of much of Western Europe. My
book notes the problems of translating this work from a language of a culture
based around city life to a culture based around desert life. “It is not just that Latin and Arabic have
different alphabets and grammars; they also reflect histories and societies
even more disparate than their speech and writing.”
Although Ketton referred to Mohamed
as “Pseuo-prophet” (which he would have to do anyway in the ‘crusader’ atmosphere
prevalent at the time) it is interesting that people wanted a translation. (A curious fact that I came across elsewhere
is that the Virgin Mary is mentioned more often in the Koran than in the Bible,
and I have verified this.)
WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG?
Returning to Islam and Judaism it is
clear that in the middle ages the relationship between Jews and Moslems was
generally much better than that between Jews and Christians. Today you might be forgiven for thinking
that the hostility between Jews and Moslems was almost something genetic.
I have two documents in front of me,
the first is an A4 36 page booklet entitled
“THE
ROUTES OF Sepharad - THE NETWORD OF SPANISH JEWISH SITES.”
This notes that there were Jews in
Spain before there were Christians. As
the Christian rulers gradually reconquered Spain their relationships with
Jewish communities varied from very tolerant to actively intolerant. As the reconquest neared its completion at
the end of the 15th century Christian persecution of Jews grew as
the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella sought to ‘purify’ the nation and
forcing Jews and Moslems to either convert or leave the country. Some of course did convert or pretended to
convert and thus both Jews and Moslems as well as Christians have contributed
to the genetic map of modern Spain. The ‘purification’ process led to the
Spanish Inquisition and all its attendant horrors.
So the Jews who had often flourished
and generally were tolerantly treated in Islamic Spain were forced to leave the
country. Some went to Portugal but were
soon expelled, others to Italy.
Southern Italy and Sicily were ruled by Spain at that time so many of
these too had to move on.
It is estimated that there were about
235,000 Jews in Spain in 1492. Around 50,000
converted (really or not) and most of the rest left the country. Of these around 20,000 died en route.
The estimated figures for the final
destinations are (Moslem countries highlighted)
Algeria
10,000
Americas 5,000
Egypt 2,000
France
3,000
Holland,
England,
Scandinavia and
Hamburg 25,000
Italy 9,000
Morocco 20,000
Turkey 90,000
Elsewhere 1,000
The vast majority, around 128,000
went to Moslem countries where they knew they would at least be tolerated and
the vast majority of these went to the Ottoman Turkish Empire. This Empire did not have the culture and
intellectual fizz of Islamic Spain but once again Jews and Christians who paid
the appropriate tax were allowed to worship in their churches and synagogues
and many flourished and some achieved high office under the Sultans.
This brings me to the second document
I have in front of me, entitled
“THE
JUDEO-SPANISH PEOPLE, Itineraries of a
community.” This I purchased in
the Jewish Museum in Thessalonika which was part of the Ottoman Empire until
1912 and had a very large and thriving Jewish community. There were about 32 synagogues and they were
each based on the places in Spain or Italy from which the community had come. The 80 page book is in two languages, English
and “Los Djudeo-Espanyoles – Los kaminos
de una komunidad.” This is the old Sephardic Spanish or Ladino
still in use. I speak Spanish and it is
quite easily readable with some spelling and grammatical differences and some
vocabulary from elsewhere. I have read that the relationship of Ladino to Spanish
is akin to that of Yiddish to German. Around 96% of the around 50,000 Jews of
Thessalonika were rounded up by the Nazis and died in Polish camps like
Auschwitz. Their names cover two large
walls in the Museum - a flourishing, vibrant culture destroyed.
THE EFFECT OF ZIONISM ON JUDEO-MUSLIM RELATIONS.
Back to the mosque at Woking. I was as I said before, pleased to discover that the man who
built it, Dr. Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner
was Jewish, or at least both his parents
were Hungarian Jews. I am not clear what faith he subscribed to later. At about
the time of the construction of the mosque the Zionist idea was taking shape in
Central Europe and elsewhere. The
Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 carved up a large part of the Ottoman Empire
between France and Britain who established protectorates, virtual colonies in
the area. This is responsible for many
of the problems since with the artificial partition of territories. However the
1917 Balfour Declaration which looked with favour on the establishment of a
national home for Jews in Palestine as long as this was not to the detriment of
the local people is undoubtably the principal cause of the troubles in the
Middle East. After WW2 many of the
remaining Jews in Europe went to Israel. The pogroms and massacres of Jews took place
overwhelmingly in Christian countries and especially in Eastern Europe. The solution though was found at the expense
of Arabs.
Zionist Israel is effectively a US
Satellite State in the Middle East. This
relatively prosperous country with a population of around 8 million receives
20% of the entire US aid budget, over 10
million dollars per day. It has turned
itself into a kind of Fascist state and
many Jews have drawn attention to this. When Israel last attacked Gaza with
totally disproportionate force, many Holocaust survivors and their relatives
signed a petition saying “Not in our name.”
Israel has dishonoured those who died in the Holocaust.
This map from the New Statesman shows
what has happened since 1947 and which the US has done nothing to prevent. Every time the UN Security Council condemns
Israel’s flouting of UN and International laws the US (and often UK) vetoes
action.
POSTSCRIPT 1
This essay has been concerned with
Moslem-Jewish relations. A similar story
could be told for Moslem-Christian relations.
For Islamic Spain and the Ottoman Empire the distinction that mattered
was between Moslems and Non-Moslems. In
both societies Christians could and did build churches and practice their
religion.
POSTSCRIPT 2
Among my books I came across two
Pelican Books –
Judaism
- A HISTORICAL PRESENTATION Isidore Epstein 1959
The Jews in our Time
Norman Bentwich 1960
Epstein says that “The first
encounter of the Jews with Islam was not an unhappy one. He says that at first
Mohammed set out to win the support of the Jews and adopted many of their
beliefs and customs. When they did not
accept him he turned against them and sought to expel them from Arabia.
This policy soon changed as Moslems
realised the importance of Jewish contacts all over the known world and their
usefulness in the world of commerce and trade.
Therefore, says Epstein, the lot of the Jews improved wherever the
Crescent ruled. He says that this was
particularly noticeable in Egypt and Palestine where Byzantine Christian rules
had interfered with the life, work and worship of the Jews. The Christian Visigothic kings in Spain were
harsh and cruel but their Moslem successors not only brought relief to the Jews
but also encouraged a culture which in
richness and depth is comparable to the best produced by any people at any
time.(Pp. 180/1) High praise indeed.
He says of Joseph Ibn Pakuda of
Zaragossa that he was the author of one of the most widely read and deeply
loved of Medieval Jewish books entitled “Duties of the Heart”, a book of Jewish
ethics. It was written in Arabic and
translated into Hebrew. (P. 214)
Bentwich says that the early Moslems
were generally free from religious intolerance toward Jews and Christians,
fellow Monotheists. The Abbassid Caliphs
in Iraq, the Fatimid Caliphs in Egypt and the Ommayad Caliphs in Spain all
showed favour to the Jews. Jews were
prominent in Government, science, medicine, philosophy and literature. He says that for around two centuries there
was a common Semitic culture in Arabic and in Hebrew and the Jews were
bilingual and most of their scientific work was written in Arabic.
Since Epstein and Bentwich were
writing nearly sixty years ago Zionists have sought to represent Moslems as
“the enemy”. Actually a substantial and
influential minority of Palestinians are Christian and as recent troubles have
highlighted there were Christians and as well as Jews living in relative
harmony with Moslems throughout the Middle East.
***************************************************************************************
As I write this, 18th
February 2016 an article in the Guardian quotes Barnaby Raine from Jewish Students for Justice
in Palestine. “We have to be so, so clear about Israel and Jews being
separate,”
***************************************************************************************
By coincidence The Guardian published a report on Mosques having open days and mentioned the two mosques I describe in this article. The paper published the following letter.
Your report “
Mosques open doors for tours, talks and tea” (6 February 2016) reminded me that when I was at school nearby decades ago I was told that the Shah Jahan mosque in Woking was our only mosque. Actually it was the only purpose-built one, built in 1889 by a Jew, Dr Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, for visiting Muslims from India. Your report might suggest that the doors are not open at other times but when I visited one afternoon last year not only was I able to enter the beautiful mosque but was asked if I’d like some lunch.
The Liverpool mosque was opened a few months earlier, but in a converted house, by William Quilliam, a
Liverpool solicitor from an Isle of Man family. He converted to Islam, took the name Abdullah and rose to some eminence as Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam Bey. He translated parts of the Qur’an into Manx Gaelic and while it is hard to imagine this flying off the shelves it is interesting to think of local interest in Islam so long ago. There were a number of prominent converts including the Right Hon Lt Col Lord Headley who became Shaikh Rahmatullah al-Farouq.
The name Quilliam lives on in the Quilliam Foundation, a thinktank dedicated to countering extremism.
Joseph Cocker
Leominster, Herefordshire
1. Holy Lands: Reviving Pluralism in the Middle East
Author Nicolas Pelham GUARDIAN REVIEW 6.8.16
I have only read the review but this confirms the ideas in blog that in the Ottoman Empire, while, no doubt, all was not sweetness and light, a high level of tolerance generally prevailed and both Christians and Jews, could, and some did attain high office.
2. Sicily culture and conquest
A superb special exhibition at the British Museum April 21st – August 14th 2016
SICILY and the Sea
Another excellent exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum Oxford
I visited these exhibitions and purchased the superb accompanying books.
In the context of this article I noted how the Normans who conquered Sicily continued to have very good relations with the resident Arab population and adopted Islamic styles of architecture seen particularly in Palermo. Norman King Roger of Sicily was a very enlightened monarch. They also adopted Arabic systems of organisation and much else. For a while Norman Sicily was a model of cultural diversity.
3. Pythagoras His Lives and the Legacy of a Rational Universe. Kitty Ferguson Icon Book
In the seventh century, followers of Mohammed poured out of
the east. In Syria and Egypt there was scarce resistance, and the great cities
surrendered quickly with little damage when the conquerors assured the Jewish
and Christian populations that they could continue as usual with their beliefs
and worship. This was fortunate for
still-existing ancient texts, which came into Islamic hands and were regarded
as a precious heritage. By 718, the
Arabs held all of Spain, where they would continue as a small but powerful
elite, ruling in a manner that was astoundingly tolerant in religious matters
and open to cultural influences from all over the Mediterranean and Islamic
world. ….it was under the rule of Islam
that the development of the newer mathematics and astronomy based on them moved
forward from the 8th to 11th century. Pythagoras 210
In the seventh century, followers of Mohammed poured out of
the east. In Syria and Egypt there was scarce resistance, and the great cities
surrendered quickly with little damage when the conquerors assured the Jewish
and Christian populations that they could continue as usual with their beliefs
and worship. This was fortunate for
still-existing ancient texts, which came into Islamic hands and were regarded
as a precious heritage. By 718, the
Arabs held all of Spain, where they would continue as a small but powerful
elite, ruling in a manner that was astoundingly tolerant in religious matters
and open to cultural influences from all over the Mediterranean and Islamic
world. ….it was under the rule of Islam
that the development of the newer mathematics and astronomy based on them moved
forward from the 8th to 11th century. Pythagoras 210
