Letters to the Editors

Hassan Hassan, 10 January 2013

on: The Decline of Islamic Scientific Thought: Don't Blame It on al-Ghazali, by Hassan Hassan

I appreciate your comment on the essay, although I have reservations about the use of language. The text didn't say anything about Batiniyya being an "offspring of the Shia".

In my understanding, you seem to ascribe to the traditional reading of the schools' system of education, which is familiar and widespread. "The diversity of scholars, the vibrant debates and the reliance on persuasion in dealing with religious differences". But the point of my essay is to dispute all that.

Certainly, throughout Islamic history up until now, there have always been bright scholars who existed within the most regressive systems (such as in Taliban Afghanistan or Wahhabi Saudi Arabia). Naming Khayyam as an example of a bright scientist does not challenge the argument.

It is worth emphasising that the nizamiyyat lasted for centuries and took decades to take effect, in that people shifted towards religion at the expense of independent inquiry and from their schools to the Shafi school. Modern Muslim scholars praise that system for the spread of Sunni Islam and the retreat of Batini thought.

Notice that the names you mentioned, especially the scientists ones, are the first generation scholars in the Nizamiyat; they had been brilliant scholars just like al-Ghazali but then that is exactly my point – a seismic shift towards religion was caused by the Nizami government at the time. As you said, the Nizamiyyat were a "cultural revolution" but you seem to miss their impact.

The idea that Shafi school as the school of choice for the Nizamiyyat is well-established. I quote, as an example, one scholar who lived then saying scholars from different schools were 'converting' to Shafi school for the career.


Sonja Brentjes, 9 January 2013

on: The Decline of Islamic Scientific Thought: Don't Blame It on al-Ghazali, by Hassan Hassan

Mr. Hassan is not well informed about the academic debate. Otherwise he could not write such a misleading and utterly simplifying text. He also seems to have problems with understanding the complexities of political, religious and intellectual history of the Abbasid caliphate and the Seljuq dynasty. It is simply not true that the madrasa stopped scientific activities in various Islamicate societies after 1100. The Batiniyya was not merely an esoteric offspring of the Shi'a. Seljuq sultans like Malik Shah and his son Sanjar sponsored scholars at their courts who became famous for their contributions to philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and mechanics – Umar Khayyam, Muzaffar al-Din al-Isfizari, Abd al-Rahman al-Khazini, to name but three of them.

Scholars of high reputation who were themselves madrasa teachers in various fields, including hadith, fiqh, mathematics, philosophy and astronomy, were the Shi'ite Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1202-1274), the Sufi Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (died ca. 1320) or the Shafi'i Taqi al-Din al-Ma'ruf (died 1588).

Again, I have chosen only three scholars among many others of different degrees of importance and reputation. Neither is it correct that madrasas only taught Shafi'i law. If they were Sunni schools, they taught, depending on the stipulations of the donor, either one of the four major law schools (Shafi'i, Hanafi, Maliki, Hanbali) or more than one of them plus Arabic and possibly other languages, mathematics, astronomy, hadiths and in some cases also medicine. To claim that before Nizam al-Mulk, sciences and Islamic law were intertwined is utter nonsense. To speak of these two fields of knowledge being intertwined begs the question which sciences did the author mean: natural philosophy, medicine, astronomy, astrology, arithmetic, mechanics, optics, geometry, algebra, alchemy? The madrasa was a cultural revolution which gave new spaces for the mathematical sciences and parts of philosophy.


next »