The House of Wisdom (25 page)

Yet this transposition, the source of the amir’s melancholy, was by no means an aberration. The genius of the medieval Arabs lay in their extraordinary receptivity to new ideas, their ability to identify and adopt what they needed from foreign cultures—first Persian and Hindu, then Greek—and to modify and enhance these notions to fit the practical, intellectual, and, especially, religious demands of their own times. Ibn Khaldun, a masterful observer of the human condition whose family had been driven from al-Andalus by the Christian conquest, once noted that his fellow Arabs could simply not sit still: “All the customary activities of the Arabs lead to travel and movement.”
⁴
The result was an almost dizzying transit of people, arts, technologies, even plants, across the enormous expanse of the known world that comprised the lands of Islam.

Even deep political divisions within this community of believers, whether the rise of al-Andalus in the eighth century, the later fragmentation of the Abbasid Empire, or the eventual dissolution of Muslim Spain in the eleventh century into rival petty kingdoms, could not break the fundamental bonds provided by a common faith, language, and legal code and other shared cultural values. At the same time, Islam’s presence on three continents gave it an extraordinary reach, capable of uncovering and then assimilating an array of traditions and cultures that might otherwise have remained isolated and apart. Arab scholars effectively enjoyed a global monopoly on knowledge of the far reaches of the world that remained unrivaled until Europe’s Age of Discovery. In such an environment, it is no surprise that the celebrated physician and scientist al-Razi, known in the West as Rhazes, in the early tenth century could discuss intelligently the relative medicinal merits of different strains of saltwort grown as far apart as Spain and India.
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Over the course of four centuries, innovations of all kinds from India, Persia, and Iraq flowed steadily westward, through Egypt to the Muslims of the Maghrib—essentially modern-day Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia; West Africa; and al-Andalus, the latter bordering directly on Christian Europe. For example, Arabs from Yemen who settled in North Africa and Spain brought along their established irrigation regulations and administrative procedures, as well as new crops, new technologies, and new systems to enhance land use and increase yields.
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In time, this traffic would constitute somewhat less of a one-way street, but for now al-Andalus and the rest of the western Muslim world were the primary beneficiaries of this expanding store of innovation, science, and know-how emerging in the East.

Consider the common eggplant. Originating in India, the vegetable was apparently well established in Persia at the time of the Muslim conquest, and soon it was discussed in great detail in Arabic cookbooks and agricultural manuals. It was even celebrated in verse. The plant was then taken to Egypt, across the Maghrib, and into al-Andalus. One medieval account describes four different varieties known at the time in Spain: a “local” type, the Cordoban, the Syrian, and the Egyptian.
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Watermelon, spinach, the hard wheat essential to the high art of Italian pasta, and many other foodstuffs now common on Western dinner tables followed similar patterns. Along the way, these imports had to be adapted to new climates and conditions and supported with often complex systems of cultivation and irrigation. Many important Andalusi crops—rice, sugarcane, and oranges and other citrus, to name just a few—had their origins in climates that did not suffer the summer droughts typical of the Mediterranean world. Irrigation schemes, based on advanced engineering techniques and backed by intricate legal and administrative procedures for implementing, sharing, and maintaining them, were vital to long-term success.

The farmers of Muslim Spain became expert in the diversion, collection, and distribution of water for farming, as witnessed by the rich Arabic linguistic trail they left behind in contemporary Spanish: The words for floodgate (
azuda
), irrigation ditch (
acequia
), waterwheel (
noria
), water mill (
aceña
), and related terms are all derivations from Arabic.
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This same process of East-to-West progression and selective adaptation was repeated time after time, involving everything from the latest fashions in music, dress, and taste to sophisticated studies in astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy.

From its founding, the Arab court at Cordoba had set out to import books and attract scholars from the East in a deliberate bid to compete with the Abbasids. Among these works was the
zij al-Sindhind
of al-Khwarizmi, which arrived not long after it was completed in Baghdad. The prolonged struggle between al-Mamun and his brother for the Abbasid throne in the early ninth century left a number of court scholars, physicians, and poets temporarily without patronage or prospects; some were more than happy to try their luck in al-Andalus. Still, Spain battled a lingering reputation in the intellectual circles of Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus as an uncultured, provincial outpost. It often took the threat of political or social unrest in the East, or promises of substantial financial reward, to convince hesitant scholars to make the trip.

One who did was the celebrated musician Ziryab, who arrived from Baghdad under mysterious circumstances; contemporary accounts hint darkly at royal intrigue and the poisonous jealousy of a less talented rival. Ziryab brought with him a repertoire of thousands of songs, and his talent and fame soon established him as Cordoba’s leading arbiter of manners, taste, and popular culture. He is widely credited with introducing the locals to such niceties as toothpaste, underarm deodorant, eating meals in distinct courses, and fine cuisine in general. Among the other figures to appear on the scene was the eccentric inventor Abbas ibn Firnas, whose ill-fated attempt to fashion wings and then fly from the heights of the amir’s palace ended in some serious injuries but not a broken spirit; he went on to perfect a technique for cutting crystal, build an in-home planetarium, and design a complex clepsydra, or water clock, that could approximate the changing times of the five daily prayers.
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The Muslim conquest had already brought the Arabic language to the western edge of Europe, and it quickly became the accepted medium of high culture and often of everyday life within and among the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities of al-Andalus. As early as the ninth century, the bishop of Cordoba bemoaned the fact that the Arabic tongue was endangering the survival of Latin, the language of the Catholic Church. He was aghast at the alarming rate at which his fellow Christians were devouring Arabic books and “building up great libraries of them at enormous cost … Hardly one can write a passable Latin letter to a friend, but innumerable are those who can express themselves in Arabic and can compose poetry in that language with greater art than the Arabs themselves.”
¹⁰

A handful of anti-Arab conservatives launched a campaign to incite Christians to slander the Prophet Muhammad in public, in the hopes that severe treatment of the militants would provoke a rebellion. A small number of these so-called Cordoba Martyrs were in fact executed, but only after Muslim and Christian leaders tried without success to defuse the crisis peacefully. The movement never caught fire, and good relations among the faiths were restored. Yet the bishop’s deepest fears were not without foundation: The widespread use of Arabic did help break Latin’s stranglehold on Europe’s literary and learned speech, paving the way for the rise of the vernacular languages and the great works of “national” writers.
¹¹
These include Cervantes, who uses the device of a lost Arab “original” author, Sidi ben Hamed, to frame his story of Don Quixote; Dante, whose description of Paradise and the Inferno almost certainly spring from Islamic models then in European circulation; and Shakespeare.

Andalusi innovations in Arabic love poetry spread into Christian Spain and southern France through diplomacy, intermarriage, war, and other contacts across the sectarian divide. The institution of the
qiyan
, a singing girl not unlike the Japanese geisha, carried on the tradition of Arabic lyrical poetry and song in the courts of al-Andalus. These slave girls presented their masters and patrons with an image of the beloved as capricious and often unattainable, in keeping with the erotic sensibility of the day: “For both by training and by innate instinct, her nature is to set up snares and traps for her victims,” sighs one ninth-century Arab writer on the subject of the
qiyan
.
¹²

These singers at times were given to Christian princes as diplomatic gifts or comprised part of a marriage dowry. They were also taken in battle. The seizure of the Muslim city of Barbastro by a force of Normans and knights from southern France in 1064 saw the capture of hundreds of these highly trained slave girls, many of whom ended up as entertainers and concubines in the royal households of southern France. One beneficiary was the young William IX of Aquitaine—often called the first troubadour, or lyric poet in a “modern” European tongue—who grew up surrounded by the songs and verses of the Arabs.
¹³
Readers of troubadour poetry will have no difficulty recognizing the recurrent themes—the lover’s total submission to his beloved, the use of secret signs and intermediaries, the rapture induced by silent suffering and self-restraint—that run through the older repertoire of the
qiyan
.
¹⁴

The geographer Ibn Hawqal, who visited Cordoba in 948, declared that the imperial capital “has no equal in the Maghrib, and hardly any in Egypt, Syria or Mesopotamia, for the size of its population, its extent, the space occupied by its markets, the cleanliness of its streets, the architecture of its mosques, the number of its baths and caravanserais [merchants’ inns].”
¹⁵
Although figures vary wildly, the city’s population has been estimated at more than one hundred thousand, roughly on par with the Byzantine capital Constantinople but towering over anything at the time in Christian Europe.

Other contemporary accounts say the caliphs maintained a library whose catalog alone filled forty-four large volumes. The collection was so big—commonly put at four hundred thousand volumes—that it took five days just to transport the works of poetry during one of the royal library’s periodic moves to bigger quarters. Street lamps, paved city roadways, and other civic amenities were plentiful, seven hundred years before London could boast of any form of public illumination. Successful cataract operations, using instruments fashioned from sharpened fish bones, were carried out in the mosque by the city’s surgeons.
¹⁶

There were at least two fields where Andalusi men of science at times outdid their learned counterparts in the East. The first was the down-to-earth subject of agronomy, along with the related disciplines of botany, pharmacology, astrology, and meteorology. The second was the more rarefied matter of Aristotle’s philosophy, encompassing cosmology, metaphysics, and elements of theology.

A number of factors drove what might be termed a Green Revolution carried out by the Muslims of the Iberian Peninsula—some seemingly accidents of history, others intimately bound up with the nature and experience of the Arabs themselves. First, the science of agriculture received a big boost from the timely appearance in Spain of several key scientific works. The sudden arrival in the tenth century of a Greek medical masterpiece by Dioscorides, a diplomatic gift of the Byzantine emperor, sparked intensive interest in the pursuit of botany and pharmacology. Also influential was the
Calendar of Cordoba
, a uniquely Andalusi work that combined a wealth of Arab astronomical tradition and intricate calculations with agricultural information, weather predictions, and even key elements of the religious calendar of Spain’s large Arabic-speaking Christian community, the Mozarabs, from the Arabic for “those who follow the ways of the Arabs.” Emblematic of the multi-confessional nature of al-Andalus, where Muslim rulers were generally tolerant of their Jewish and Christian subjects, one surviving example of the
Calendar of Cordoba
is written in standard Arabic but with Hebrew letters.
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Entries for March in one text include the vernal equinox, the coming of Easter, astronomical events predicted in the
zij al-Sindhind
, and a storm warning for late in the month: “The winds which blow now damage, by their violence, the early figs and the formation of fruits.”
¹⁸

Second, there was a pervasive desire on the part of the Andalusis to match the glories of the Muslim heartland and even to surpass them. In the fine art of cuisine, for example, this meant at the very least replicating the large variety of fruits, vegetables, and herbs featured in the classical Arab repertoire developed in the East. And that required significant advances in collecting, introducing, acclimatizing, and successfully raising crops historically unknown in Spain. Much of the basic research was assisted by the vogue among the rich and powerful for experimental and ornamental gardens, patterned after Munya al-Rusafa, the country estate of the first amir. In such surroundings, specialists could adapt imported plants to the local conditions and improve existing varieties, by means of grafting or other techniques.
¹⁹

The number of such “royal” gardens rose substantially in the early eleventh century, when the centralized caliphate collapsed and made way for dozens of petty kingdoms scattered across al-Andalus. The imperial capital never recovered from what the Arabs call the
fitna
, a state of social chaos. “Weep for the splendor of Cordoba,” laments the historian Ibn Idhari. “Fortune made her a creditor and demanded payment for the debt.”
²⁰
But this dispersal of power into small, atomized states created opportunities for scholars of all sorts, as the new generation of individual rulers and petty dynasts sought to imitate the caliphs of old and to outdo one another at the same time.
²¹
With their political and military room to maneuver often circumscribed by internal weakness, as well as by treaty obligations with one another and with the Christians to the north, these so-called party kingdoms were left to fight it out in the cultural arena. Agronomists, poets, philosophers, and other court intellectuals were perhaps the only ones in al-Andalus to benefit directly from the
fitna
.