A Civilizing Influence

Books from the Islam Quintet by
Tariq Ali discussed in this essay:
A Sultan in Palermo
Verso, 2005, 246 pp., $36

The Stone Woman
Verso, 2000, 274 pp., $18

The Book of Saladin
Verso, 1998, 367 pp., $22

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree
Verso, 1993, 242 pp., $22

A shame, really, that no one thought to publish How The Muslims Saved Civilization back in the 1990s. Such a book might have outlined the debt owed by the great minds of the sixteenth- century Renaissance to Islamic scholarship, especially in astronomy, medicine, and math. Or the earlier bequeathment to medieval Europe of versions of Aristotle, Plato, and Euclid, courtesy of Muslim translators working in Moorish Spain. Or any of the other influences and encounters in what historian Steven Runciman has called “the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident.” How The Muslims Saved Civilization would surely have been welcomed by readers a decade ago, just as they welcomed Thomas Cahill’s 1995 account of heroic Irish monks who performed similar good deeds.

Unless, that is, something about linking Muslims with civilization in the title would cause confusion. Admirers of Cahill’s How The Irish Saved Civilization knew that by the term “civilization” the American scholar meant the recorded greatness of Greece and Rome, which was preserved by Irish scribes until Europe could climb out of its dark age and become civilized again. No offence was intended against the cultures of India or China or any other corner of the globe where, in effect, little of this history applied. This was the rise and fall and rise again of white Europe.

Would a book title in which Muslims, whose skin is generally less white and who are associated today with North Africa and the Middle and Far East, were proclaimed to have also played a role in the resurgence of Western civilization have been readily understood? Explaining that large numbers of followers of Islam once lived and flourished in places such as Spain and Sicily might have helped. The city of Granada featured Muslim public baths in most neighbourhoods? Residents of twelfth-century Salerno could have counted a hundred mosques inside their city walls? Who knew.