Through a twisted path i came across this quote today, attributed to the prophet of Islam, Muhammad:
‘If learning were suspended at the highest parts of heaven the Iranians would attain it.’ (reference)
In fact i came across it in an excerpt of an essay by famous Iranologist Richard Frye, wherein he quotes Ibn Khaldun. Now i did not know who he was, this Ibn Khaldun, and was much more surprised that i did not know him, after finding out who he actually is!
According to Wikipedia he
was a North African polymath — an astronomer, economist, historian, Islamic scholar, Islamic theologian, hafiz, jurist, lawyer, mathematician, military strategist, nutritionist, philosopher, social scientist and statesman—born in North Africa in present-day Tunisia. He is considered a forerunner of several social scientific disciplines: demography, cultural history, historiography, the philosophy of history, and sociology. He is also considered one of the forerunners of modern economics … Ibn Khaldun is considered by many to be the father of a number of these disciplines, and of social sciences in general, for anticipating many elements of these disciplines centuries before they were founded in the West. He is best known for his Muqaddimah (known asProlegomenon in the West), the first volume of his book on universal history, Kitab al-Ibar.
– wikipedia
Seems like quite a character! Its a shame that we are so well indoctrinated on western (i.e. european) thinkers, and miss out on all the incredible other characters from the world.
Anyways, Ibn Khaldun has a passage in his Muqaddimah, wherein he makes a reference to aforementioned hadith by Muhammad regarding Iranians:
”It is a remarkable fact that, with few exceptions, most Muslim scholars both in the religious and intellectual sciences have been non-Arabs… Thus the founders of grammar were Sibawaih, and after him al-Farisi and al- Zajjaj. All of them were of Iranian descent. They were brought up in the Arabic language and acquired knowledge of it throught their upbringing and through contact with the Arabs. They invented the rules (of grammar) and made it into a discipline for later generations. Most of the hadith scholars, who preserved the traditions of the Prophet for the Muslims, were also Iranians, or Persian in language and breeding, because the discipline was widely cultivated in Iraq and regions beyond. Furthermore, all the great jurists were Iranians, as is well known. The same applies to speculative theologians, and to most of the Qur’an commentators.
Only the Iranians engaged in the task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly works. Thus the truth of the statement of the Prophet becomes apparent, ‘If learning were suspended at the highest parts of heaven the Iranians would attain it.’ The intellectual sciences were also the preserve of the Iranians, left alone by the Arabs, who did not cultivate them. They were cultivated by Arabicized Iranians, as was the case with all the crafts, as we stated at the beginning. This situation continued in the cities as long as the Iranian, and the Iranian lands, Iraq, Khurasan and ma wara-l-nahr, retained their sedentary culture. But when those cities fell into ruins, sedentary culture, which God has devised for the attainment of the sciences and the crafts, disappeared from them. “
Wow, i did not know that! That arabic grammar was basically systematized and formed by Persian scholars after the arabic conquest.
Professor Edward G. Browne summarizes the extent of Iranian’s contribution to Arabian science as follows:
Take from what is generally called Arabian science from exegesis, tradition, theology, philosophy, medicine, lexicography, history, biography, even Arabic grammar the work contributed by Persians and the best part is gone. (Ed Browne, Vol. I, p. 204)
Wow, i did not know that! That arabic grammar, in its modern form, was basically systematized and formed by Persian scholars after the arabic conquest, namely one named Sibawayh. Once again according to Wikipedia:
Abu Beshr ʻAmr ibn ʻUthman ibn Qanbar Al-Beşrey (aka:Sibawayh) was a linguist of Persian origin born ca. 760 in the town of Bayza (ancient Nesayak) in the Fars province of Iran, died in Shiraz, also in the Fars, around 180 AH.
He was one of the earliest and greatest grammarians of the Arabic language, and his phonetic description of Arabic is one of the most precise ever made, leading some to compare him with Panini. He greatly helped to spread the Arabic language in the Middle East.
Of interest also is the motivation for such work:
Much of the impetus for this work came from the desire for non-Arab Muslims to understand the Qur’an properly and thoroughly; the Qur’an, which is composed in a poetic language that even native Arabic speakers must study with great care in order to comprehend thoroughly, is even more difficult for those who, like Sibawayh, did not grow up speaking Arabic
The other named by Ibn Khaldun is:
Kamal al-Din Abu’l-Hasan Muhammad Al-Farisi (1267-ca.1319/1320) was a prominent Persian muslim physicist, mathematician, and scientist born in Tabriz, Iran. He made two major contributions to science, one on optics, the other on number theory. Al-Farisi was a pupil of the great astronomer and mathematician Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, who in turn was a pupil of Nasir al-Din Tusi.
Now, we all know (or perhaps dont know), that a great number of the “islamic scientists/philosophers” were in fact Persians, but who – forcibly – spoke, wrote and published in arabic (much like most european scientists published in latin during many centuries, as the scientific language of their times). These include – but are not limited to – the likes of :
- Avicenna: “father of modern medicine”, “father of geology”, (first to introduce the notion of momentum in physics, 500 years before galileo), among a ton of other things
- Zakaria Razi: considered by many to be the greatest of the “islamic” scientists, “father of pediatrics”, discoverer of ethanol and its refining, author of first treatise on infectious disease, pioneer in neurosurgery and ophtamology
- Khayyam: one greatest mathematician of his age, one of the greatest poets of all time, possibly the first person to have proposed a heliocentric astronomic model (500 years before copernicus), and philosopher
- Biruni : one of first exponents of experimental scientific method (the first to introduce experimentation to the study of mechanics, mineralogy, sociology, pscyhology), ‘first’ anthropologist, critic of astrology and alchemy, (not to mention having the great fortune as sharing the same birthday as me!!!)
- Kharazmi: the founder of modern algebra
- Farabi: (philosopher, physicists, logician, … )
just to name a few ( here is a more exhaustive list).
Professor Edward G. Browne summarizes the extent of Iranian’s contribution to Arabian science as follows:
Take from what is generally called Arabian science from exegesis, tradition, theology, philosophy, medicine, lexicography, history, biography, even Arabic grammar the work contributed by Persians and the best part is gone.
(Ed Browne, Vol. I, p. 204)
Now i admit, a good part of my motivation for this ‘rant’ of sorts is that damn Iran Nationalism which I can’t seem to rid myself of, peppered with a small but omnipresent dose of begrudgement against all that is ‘arabic’ conditioned into me from my youth (i truly am tryign to get rid of that, and have done a fairly good job in the past years),
But here is my point: anytime you look up any of these names, in almost any encyclopedia ESPECIALLY in the west, they are identified as “islamic” scientists, or philsophers, or poets, or…whatever!
That is the the equivalent of calling Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Christian Huygens, and James Clerk Maxwell, simply as “christian scientists”.
It makes no sense! What does religion have anythign to do with it. Look, i’m not saying that religion as a cultural force has no influence on a people’s relations to learn, to culture, etc; but to simply identify a whole swath of intellectuals and thinkers with a one-word categorization is simply intellectually lazy.
Either you dispense with the qualifying adjectives before the name, be it religious, or nationalistic, or you stick to the ethnicity/nationality of the thinker. What does religion have anythign to do with it.
On a final note, Richard Frye, comes across as a very interesting character himself. As a world renowned scholar (prof emeritus still at Harvard), he has been one of the true champions of Persian/Iranian culture through his lifetime. Here is an interview he had with CNN regarding his wish to be buried in Isfahan upon his death (like two other noted Iranologists Arthur Pope and Phyllis Ackerman). I just love his comment at the end regarding the Islamic republic and how the Iranian people will get through this as they have for thousands of years:
