Islamic Influences on Western Culture
With Muhammad and the emergence of Islam the tide again turned suddenly, although the historian can trace the undercurrents as they built up for this dramatic reversal in the cultural flow. Out of Arabia came a resurgence of the Semitic peoples who carried their religion and language east to the borders of China and west across the Pyrenees. In the Golden Age of Islam under the ‘Abbasids the Muslims laid under tribute their heritage of Greek, Persian, and Hindu civilizations and themselves created a dynamic culture that dominated the Middle Ages positively and influenced more backward Europe, which was engaged in the slow process of civilizing the barbarian hordes that had brought the downfall of classical Rome. Up to the climax of medieval civilization in the thirteenth century the tide of cultural influence was largely set from East to West; indeed the West did not feel itself wholly free from the pressure of Eastern Islam until the Ottomans were turned back from the gates of Vienna in 1683.
Yet the intervening centuries had been that period of transition when the Renaissance and Reformation had effected the rebirth of Western civilization and unleashed dynamic forces that have not yet spent themselves as they have since circled the globe. From roughly 1500 onwards the tide of cultural influence has moved steadily and continuously from West to East. Varied may be opinions as to just where we stand in relation to the surge of this cultural tide. Certainly the mid-twentieth century marks a critical juncture in the determination of future East-West relationships. This symposium aims to be a modest contribution to the delineation and understanding of this critical juncture in history.
By the very nature of the case, the discovery of the East by Western scholarship and research calls for more historical treatment and criticism, howbeit the contributors to this half of the symposium have tried to focus their material on the present and its demands for accelerated improvement of the means whereby Western thought can truly penetrate, and thereby understand and appreciate, Near Eastern culture. The volume tries to accomplish this by exploring four major highways over which the material and spiritual goods of acculturation travel: art and archeology, literature, science, and religion.
Only when individual phenomena are related to their total cultural matrix and context can the interpreter be reasonably sure that he has understood them and that they, in turn, are able to articulate freely and accurately the spirit of the age and culture to which they witness. The essay concludes with some indications as to how the interpreters of Islamic art and archeology can better approximate this ideal.
Literature, another form of cultural expression, in the Near East stands in a class by itself. The genius of the Semite, who has dominated the Near East during most of its history, finds its peculiar and significant articulation in the art and in the science of the Word. To attain determinative and lasting influence in the Near East men have always had to have something substantial to say, but equally if not more important has been the demand that they be masters of the wizardry of words and able to clothe their thought in garments of beauty and light.
In any meeting of the Near East by the West it is therefore of paramount importance to explore the literature of Islamic peoples. The fascinating story of the West’s discovery of the two major literary traditions of the Islamic Near East Arabic and Persian is here traced by Professors von Grunebaum of Chicago and Arberry of Cambridge. Starting from meager beginnings, proceeding gradually but with increasing acceleration, this story of literary appreciation and criticism gains breadth and depth and the authors conclude with valuable and stimulating indications of the next steps to be taken by Western scholars for more adequate understanding and appropriation of the rich values inherent in this great cultural tradition.
The illumination of Muslim science, its stewardship of the ancient and classical heritage and its contribution to the beginnings of Western science, owes more probably to Professor Sarton of Harvard than to any other single person. Most of this is enshrined in his monumental Introduction to the History of Science and the issues of the periodical I sis. In his contribution 1 to this volume he reviews the highlights of the passage of ancient Eastern science to the modern West by way of the Muslims of medieval times, with some estimate of the significance of this to human culture.
Civilization in the East
The urban civilization developed in the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates valleys spread eastward and westward until at its climax in the Late Bronze Age (1600-1200 B.C.) there was a remarkable degree of cultural interchange between this ancient Near Eastern civilization and the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization of Crete and the Aegean, with the western of these cultures largely in debt to the eastern. This dominant trend of influence moving westward was enhanced in the subsequent centuries when the Aegean was overrun by northern invaders in need of civilizing and when the Near East, though shaken and disrupted, was able to expand its ancient imperialism in new configurations. During most of this period, building on the Semitic-Hamitic and Sumerian foundations in the great river valleys and continually fructified by infusions from the mountain and steppe peoples to the north and east, the dominant people of the area were Semites. Originally differentiated as a distinctive cultural entity in prehistoric times somewhere in die Arabian peninsula, they moved from thence into the Fertile Crescent continuously and in waves from the fifth millennium onwards as Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Canaanites, Arameans, Hebrews, and Arabs, to mention but the major groups. For all the important contributions of diverse peoples and cultures during the Bronze Age, it was the Semites who stamped the Near East with its distinctive pattern of life aesthetic, reflective, and active. Moreover, during this Semitic ascendancy the flow of cultural influence was still for the most part steadily from East to West.
This ancient Near East of competing urbanized imperialisms reached a new climax in the vast Persian Empire stretching from the Aegean to the Indus, the Nile to the Ja,xartes. It was essentially a “Syriac” civilization to use Professor Toynbee’s expressive but not wholly accurate phrase but was ruled by an eastern IndoEuropean people. In. spite of its apparent climactic fulfilment of ancient Near Eastern civilization, its ecumenicity and genius for political and economic organization allowing for the toleration of diversity in unity, the Persian Empire was truly of a transitional character in the development of civilization in the Near East and therefore comparatively short-lived (550-530 B.C.).
It was transitional because around the Aegean Sea there had come to the threshold of maturity a superior culture which, heir to all the riches of the mythopoetic East, had wrought an intellectual revolution and laid new foundations for science and philosophy. Science and philosophy were not lacking in the Near East and in many instances were superior to some of the second-rate varieties in the West, but unquestionably the Greek genius freed man from many of the intellectual shackles of his own devising and set his mind to work in literally a new world of ideas. Stimulated into maturity by the pressures of the Persian Empire’s universality, Greek culture flowered and produced a dynamic that awaited only the appearance of an Alexander to go crusading to the ends of the East. Although its military conquest of the hinterland of the Near East was short-lived, the West’s Hellenistic cultural influence became profound and continued even after the resurgence of the East under the Parthians, although with diminishing effect under the Persian Sasanians. More lasting was the cultural influence of the West on the Near East’s perimeter of the Mediterranean when it developed the military, governmental, and social genius of the Latins to give structure and stability to Greek civilization. Here there was real and vital acculturation, yet for almost a thousand years after Alexander the flood of influence in the East-West cultural interchange moved steadily eastward.
