>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington DC. [silence] >> JOAN WEEKS: Good afternoon
ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of my colleagues, and
in particular Dr. Mary Jane Deeb, Chief of the African and
Middle East Division, I'd like to extend
a very warm welcome to everyone on this very rainy day. So thank you for coming. I'm Joan Weeks, head of
the Near East section that is sponsor of today's program. And we're very pleased
to present this program on Islam Facts and Fictions. But before we start today's
program and introduce our speaker, I'd like to just give you
brief overview of the division and its resources in
hopes that some of you who are newcomers will come back
and do research in our reading room. So this is a custodial collection,
a division which is comprised of three sections that build
and serve our collections to researchers from
around the world. We cover of 78 countries, and
more than two dozen languages. The Africa section
includes the countries of all of Sub Sahara Africa. The Hebraic section is responsible
for Judaica, and Hebraica worldwide. And the Near East section covers all of the Arab countries including
North Africa, and the Middle East, and covers Turkey, Turkic
Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, and the Muslims in Western China,
and the people of the Caucases. After the program we'd invite
you to fill in these surveys that we've left in your chairs. This helps us plan and evaluate
programs for the future. And I'd also like to invite you
to try out our Four Corners blog, and I've left this little paper that
tells you where you can find that, with special stories and very in
depth research by our specialists. And we're on Facebook, so if you
like us on Facebook you'll hear about all our latest programs,
and you'll receive alerts. So, we invite you to
take advantage of this. Also we invite you to
ask questions at the end, but just so that you know,
this is being videotaped, and if you ask questions you're
implicitly giving permission to be videotaped. Also we'd like to invite
you after the program to the book signing event. Our authors got a number of books
here for everyone that would like one to have it signed. And so without further
ado I'd like to call on my colleague Dr. Muhannad
Salhi, our Arab of world specialist to introduce our speaker. Thank you. >> MUHANNAD SALHI: Good
afternoon everybody, thank you all for joining us. It gives me great pleasure to
introduce our speaker today. We're very lucky to have him, Dr.
Chase Robinson, who is the president and distinguished professor of
history of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Since 2013, Chase F. Robinson
has served as president of the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York, the hub of research, doctoral
education, and advanced learning for the nation's largest
urban university. Between 2008 and 2013, Robinson was
provost and senior vice president. Before joining the Graduate Center,
he was professor of Islamic history and chairman of the faculty
board of Oriental studies at the University of Oxford. Educated in the United States,
France, and the Middle East, he holds a BA from Brown
University and a PHD from Harvard. A historian of the
premodern Middle East, Robinson holds the faculty rank
of distinguished professor, and teaches courses
on Islamic history. He has held the visiting
appointments at the University of California Los Angeles,
and the Institute for Advanced Studies Princeton. A member of the council on foreign
relations, he is the author, or editor of eight books,
and more than forty articles, most recently Islamic
Civilization In Thirty Lives. He serves on several editorial
boards, including past and present in the Cambridge Series in Islamic
Civilization which he chairs. He has written commentaries that
have appeared in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Times Higher Education
Supplement, The Times Literary
Supplement, and many others. As Joan mentioned, we are
going to have a book signing at the end, so please stay and ... The book that I mentioned
Islamic Civilization In Thirty Lives will be
available for purchase. So without further ado,
Dr. Chase Robinson. [applause] >> CHASE ROBINSON: Thank
you so much for coming, what a pleasure it is to be here. I'd like to thank Dr.
Salhi as well as Joan for her kind comments
in welcoming me. I'm especially grateful to
all of you for venturing out on such inopportune day. I do appreciate it. It's a great pleasure to talk about
my work, and rather than just talk about my work- I don't know my
dog, or my cats, or my wife, it's nice to talk about what I
feel strongly about with those who I think, at least to
judge by your presence, and overcoming the obstacles of the
day, obviously share an interest. I should also say before I get
going on the substance of my, for the most part informal comments,
that as an educator, as a scholar, a researcher, a university
president, it is a particular
pleasure to be here. Can you hear me? You can't hear me, I will bark. A particular pleasure
to be here in a library in which I did some research a
long time ago, during my PHD. Along the same lines, I think
it is a glory of our democracy that our civic institutions
are as strong as they are. It's to our collective credit,
and I think it's also a function of our democratic spirit
that we cultivate learning, we maintain learning, and
we respect the past the way that we do in libraries. So, what I'll do is I'll say a few
words of autobiographical nature. I will try not to slip into
solipsism, or self-indulgence. I think it'll become clear why
I'm speaking autobiographically, at least initially. Then I'll make some stray comments
about scholarly responsibility, and then I'll talk
about the book proper. I've decided just to let the
attractive slides scroll. I'll let you draw your
own connections between the comments I'll be making,
especially in the second half of my remarks, but
they are attractive. And I thought if nothing else they
are a good break from the monotony of my appearance at the stage. Do enjoy them, they should be for
the most part self-explanatory. So, a few years ago I gave a
paper at a community college within the CUNY system, which was
called, Not An Obvious Thing To Do. And the reason I've given this paper
this title, is that by that point of my career I'd been asked, I
don't know 500 times, Jane McAuliffe in the audience, she's
probably been asked 500 times, why do you do Islamic history? It's not an obvious thing to do. None of my forbearers
are Muslim, or Arab. I'd never been to the Middle East
before I'd taken interest in Arabic. It was not an obvious thing to do. My own background is I think utterly
ordinary in America, which is to say that I've got immigrants on
both sides of my parents. My mother, her parents
came from what is now, well the former Yugoslavia, and
they were ethnic Ukrainians. So I grew up in a house
in which my mother and my grandmother spoke Ukrainian,
obviously to keep secrets from me. But at the same time I grew up in
a house that was filled with kind of third rate Chin
Wazari, kind of beaten up late 19th century Chinese
furniture, because my grandfather on my dad's side had been a
missionary doctor in China. As it happens my mother was a French
teacher, so I think I grew up, and again I think utterly
ordinary, at least in the respect that my parents were
immigrants, or the sons and daughters of an immigrant. But fortunate, and I do want to
underline how fortunate I feel, to have grown up in a household
in which foreign cultures, foreign languages were taken for
granted, were understood to be part of one's education,
learning foreign languages, and appreciating foreign cultures. Now as it happened
when I was a teenager, the Middle East began
to, how shall I put it? Grow more salient, at least in
the American public imagination. I have dim memories of the long
lines when the price of gas spiked. I have clearer memories, by
this point I was a teenager, of course of the Iranian
revolution, of Camp David, the Iranian revolution, and
the controversy that attached to Salman Rushdie and
the affair of the fatwa. So, I think those were
the circumstances in which I either wisely, or
unwisely decided not to do what to my thinking would have
been the obvious thing to do, which is to study Chinese,
and instead study Arabic. As many of you will know Arabic is
a devilishly difficult language, but an extremely rewarding language, a language that reveals
culture in a very powerful way. I began the study of Arabic and
spent some time in the Middle East, after having spent a year
in France in high school. I spent two years living in Cairo,
and at that point I threw myself into early Islamic history. Now what is early? Historians like to periodize, it's
not always clear what we mean. Early Islamic history is typically
thought to be the seventh, eighth, or ninth century, then
sometimes historians talk about classical Islamic history. As many of you in this
room will know, that means the origins of Islam. Muhammed we think was born
around 570, maybe 580. We certainly know that the
Hijra, he grew up in Mecca in a small oasis town
in Western Arabia. We know that in 622, we
have good evidence for that, he made his emigration, his
Hijra from Mecca to Medina. And we know that, and this
date is slightly less secure, but we're pretty confident
in 632 he died. So, early Islamic history
covers the appearance of Islam, the career of Muhammed, and
then the successor caliphs, the Umayyad dynasty, and
the early Abbasid empire. What I like to say about this
period, and I say it shamelessly, when I'm teaching I brook
no dissent from my students. I say there is no period in recorded
human history more interesting than early Islamic history. The first century of Islam is
unprecedented as I like to put it, in its cultural productivity. In the first century of Islam, maybe
first century and half if you'd like to be more conservative,
a religion was created, Islam, a language was created, Arabic. There were varieties of
Arabic that predate Islam, but it had not been systematized,
hadn't become a written language. A religion was created, a language
was created, an empire was created, the Umayyad caliphate, the Abbasid
caliphate when at its largest, stretched from the Western
Mediterranean all the way to what is now Afghanistan
and beyond. And finally a people
were created, the Arabs. Because the Arabs as we now know
are very much a function of Islam, and early Islamic history. So, I threw myself into this, of
course at the time I wasn't able to theorize it in the
way that I do now. But I found it hugely fascinating,
and again to emphasize the fortune that I experienced, I was
very very fortunate not only to have received terrific training,
but then to be as was mentioned in the introduction, at
Oxford for many years in what was probably
the strongest department in the world in what I do. [pause] Having been educated, having been as it were invested
in, I think I was failing. I think I was being irresponsible. I didn't feel this at the time, but in retrospect I think
I was being irresponsible, I think I was failing because it's
not enough to publish articles in the Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society, or the Journal of the American Oriental Society, or
an Annual Journal of Syriac studies, or the Bulletin of the School
of Royal African studies. It's not enough, at
least it feels to me now, to write to pretty small
audiences of scholars about fairly arcane topics without
speaking to the larger public, especially in a moment in which
as I've already intimated, the Middle East was
becoming much more salient. So, about seven or eight years ago,
as it were I woke up and I began to consider ways in which I
could be more responsible, and address what I
think we all understand to be some deep entirely
understandable, but deep levels of both ignorance, and it
must regrettably be said, hostility towards Islam and Muslims. Let me just give you three or four
indexes of that ignorance and that, again I regret to say,
a measure of hostility. I found myself being asked the
kind of questions that were so fundamental that it made
me wonder how is it that we as scholars have been so
poor at informing the public. Fundamental questions,
why do they hate us? What is Jihad? Does Islam need a reformation? What's the difference
between Sunnis and Shiites? Was Islam spread by the sword? What is Sharia? Fundamental questions, which were
for the most part were being left to polemicists, or apologists, or
ill-informed commentators to answer. That's one index. Another index, and indulge me a
little bit of irreverence here, is what I call the tale of Agrabah. Some of you will know
the tale of Agrabah. In the heat of the primary season
last year, voters were asked whether or not they favored
the city of Agrabah. 30% of Republicans
favored bombing Agrabah, 19% of Democrats favored
bombing Agrabah, 13% of Republicans
thought it was a bad idea, 36% of Democrats thought
it was a bad idea. I'm not poking fun at
any political party, I have made an oath
to be nonpartisan. 44% of Democrats, when asked a
week later in a follow up poll that was commissioned, do they favor
welcoming refugees from Agrabah, 44% did favor welcoming
refugees from Agrabah. Of course you all know that
Agrabah is a confection of the Disney corporation. It was concocted in 1992. It's a setup of course. And I think a question like
that demands a response. Your average respondent
does not want to sound ignorant,
so he or she opines. I don't think you would
get that kind of question if there were a greater
cultural awareness, historical awareness,
geographic awareness. I think it says something
about attitudes that we so readily answer questions
about places that don't exist. Another index would be the
terrific work that the Pew does. They've done it in 2015,
they did it again in 2017. They asked Americans how they
felt about other religious groups. And they asked Americans to assign
a temperature as a measurement of their warmth, to assign a
temperature about their feelings about other religious groups on
as it were a feelings thermometer. The warmest Americans felt
was towards Jews, Catholics, and Evangelical Christians,
at 62, 62, 63, 61 degrees. The chilliest they felt,
this was the data from 2015, was about Muslims, 40 degrees. It says something in a culture
as religious as the United States that Muslims fared even
worse than atheists on that feelings thermometer. The same question was put
more recently and some of the chilliness has
subsided, we're now up to, I don't know what you'd call
48, it's obviously not warm. A fourth and final index, and
here much is said about this, so I'll say very little, and
this is highly politicized, but I think it is uncontroversial to
acknowledge that there is a measure of Islamophobia at the intellectual
political discursive level on both the right, and the left. On the right, it tends
to be associated with a neoconservative point
of view, on the left it tends to be associated with
the new atheists. And the one example
that I would mention, and there are several others, would be Christopher Hitchens'
book, God Is Not Great. It strikes me as utterly
understandable that a polemic against religion would take
the form of, as it were, poking fun at an Islamic expression
"God is great," God is not great. So, we find ourselves in a
world with 1.7 billion Muslims. We find ourselves in a world in
which Islam is the world's largest, fastest growing religion. A child born in 2017 will
probably live in a world in which Islam is more
populist than Christianity, by the end of this century. And that will be the
first time in roughly four or five hundred years
that's been the case. So, I return to this question
of the scholar's responsibility, and I turn now directly
to the book that I wrote, a book which gave me
great pleasure to write. It's a scholars responsibility
obviously, this is benow, but I'll say it all the same, to
speak out, to educate, to inform, to escape from disciplinary jargon,
to escape the vernacular or the cant of an academy which can be,
shall we say very forbidding to those outside of it. In my case, what I wanted to
do was to make a millennium of Islamic history, a thousand
years of Islamic history readable, intelligible, provocative,
interesting. The way I organized the book
was in 30 short chapters. Let me say one or two, three words
about the organization of the book, and then I'll talk about
the context of the book. 30 short chapters, we live in an age of shall we say declining
attention span, in which shorter form literature ... I was more than happy as it were,
to embrace the challenge of writing in such a way that one could spend
10 or 15 minutes and come away with an appreciation for an aspect of Islamic history,
Islamic civilization. I chose obviously to
write biography. Why biography? For a few reasons. Number one, there is a
continuing, a vexed in my view, an entirely inconclusive, and increasingly sterile
literature about what is Islam. Some of you will know Sahaba Maad's
most recent book, hundreds of pages of long, it really doesn't
answer the question. It tells you what Islam
is not, not what Islam is. Biography to my thinking, refocuses
the questions to what do Muslims do? What do Muslims think? What form do they give to Islam? It I think allows us
to avoid, if not all, at least some of these problems
of essentialism, and perennialism that attach whenever you try to
define a religious tradition. I also found biographical writing
an attractive medium because, and this ... Excuse me if it sounds a bit trite. Every day we write our
own biographies by living, and remembering, and narrating. And I really wanted people, and this
is fundamental purposes of the book, something about which I feel
almost a kind of missionary zeal, I wanted people to understand
Muslims as individuals. What better way than
to tell their stories? And finally those of you who know
the Islamic literary tradition, and it is an extraordinary
literary tradition, you will know that biographical
writing is a huge component. There are biographical dictionaries
that feature biographies of hundreds of thousands of individuals. So this was a kind of
homage, in my very modest way to such an important feature of
the Islamic literary tradition. Islam is commonly seen as narrowly,
sometimes severely legalistic. It is often seen as intrinsically
violent, even nihilistic. I set out in this book not just
to make Islamic history readable or accessible, but to complexify,
to debunk, and I'll do a little bit of debunking in a moment,
but never to apologize. If there are any apologetics in the book then it's a
mistake, which I deeply regret. Islamic history, the Islamic
tradition, intellectual and otherwise is an
extraordinary feature, an extraordinary accomplishment
which deserves respect, but is resilient to
criticism in my mind. The achievement is so
significant, 1400 years of history, the cultural productivity is
so prolific, the insights are so trenchant, the creativity, the
productivity are so impressive that to my mind the
responsibility that a scholar has is to understand it, and present
it, not to apologize for aspects which may seem less attractive
than people would wish them to be. You will find, those of you
who know something about Islam, and Islamic history,
some familiar figures. There's a little bit of a test
that I put to experts in the field. Only one person in the
field knows all 30 subjects. Most of my colleagues know
26, or 27, I put a few jokers in the deck just to make things
interesting for my fellow scholars. Salah ad-Din Saladin is
the subject of a biography. Someone named al-Ma'mun who is a son of H r n al-Rash d is
the subject of a biography. Muhammed Ali the cousin,
and son in law of Muhammed, of course one can't
understand Sunniism and shiism without understand Ali. A'isha some of you will know. Ibn Taymiyya, here we're one remove
I think from a broad awareness, but those of you who follow
Islamism and Salafism will be aware of Ibn Taymiyya as a very
significant 14th century scholar. So, on the one hand, and this is
by way of amplifying my comments about explaining the tradition
as comprehensively as I can within the framework of 30
biographies, I do address legalism, men commanders, fighters, caliphs. On the other hand, and of
course you'll sense that this is where my provocative part of my work
settles, an area in which I thought that most of my readers
would be unfamiliar, you will find free thinkers, you
will find philosophers, scientists, cartographers, historians,
poets, one merchant tycoon of whom I'll say a word or two,
mystics, and one courtesan, and I'll say a word about
that courtesan as well. Let me just, for the sake of
being a little bit more precise, read just a paragraph
from the introduction. It puts the best words I could
put to my ideas at the time. I've composed 30 brief biographies
which can hint at the scale, diversity, and creativity
of Islamic civilization over about a millennium. I should like to emphasize from the
start that diversity and creativity which were generated in
large measure by that scale. Not merely the size of
polities, cities, wealth, networks of learning,
even libraries, but also intellectual,
and political ambition. We shall see that for
some Muslim thinkers, the sky, not God was the limit. In using the terms, diversity and
creativity, I aim to capture a wide and inadequately acknowledged
spectrum of ideas, social practices, and personal styles,
and commitments. There was legalism, and
dogmatism of course, but so too was their hyper
rationalism, skepticism, inventiveness, iconoclasm,
and eccentric individuality. For the Islamic civilization that I
shall be describing here, dynamism, experimentation, and risk
taking were the rule. And I stop in the early 16th
century, not because that diversity and creativity dried up, not because
that civilization stultified, but because the underlying
economic and political framework of the preindustrial Middle East
began to undergo major changes. >> CHASE ROBINSON: Let me give
you four examples very briefly. And I have considered
pausing the scrolling. I considered pausing
the scrolling images, but I realize I probably wouldn't
be able to start it again. So I said earlier on
that I wanted to debunk and problematize four examples,
each a theme, each trying to debunk, problematize, what I regard to be, and I hope you'd agree
a misunderstanding at the popular level. Islam and women, the
stereotypes are about veiling, they're about seclusion, about
privatized domestic space, they're about women disempowered
by political tradition, even infantilized by Islamic law. I tackle four women, A'isha, a
woman named Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya who was a mystic, a
woman named Arib, and a great scholar named
Karima al-Marwaziyya, she's one of the jokers in the deck. Very few scholars know
of Karima al-Marwaziyya, a very significant
scholar in her day. Let me say a word or two about Arib. Arib was born in the early 9th
century in Iraq, Southern Iraq. She was born in unclear
circumstances, it would appear that she was born to a very wealthy
family, a family even part of, or certainly closely connected to
the Abbasid court, but for reasons that we don't fully understand,
misfortune fell upon that family, she was sold into slavery, not
an altogether uncommon event. Slavery was widespread
in the ancient world, it survives into Islamic
civilization as it does others. Now the story could have ended
there, but Arib who lived to probably 95, or 97, we're not
really sure, she died just two or three years left
in the 9th century. She was someone of some
extraordinary talents. She had a gift for music, she
had a gift for literature. By the time she was a late teenager,
she had gained the attention of many members of the court, and she had embarked upon what would
be a six or seven decade long career as a performer, as a courtesan,
as a public figure in Baghdad, a city with which you're all
familiar, at least on the map, and also the city of Samarra. It is hard for a historian of Islam to watch what's happened
in Samarra take place. Because Samarra in the middle of the
9th century was an imperial capital. Just again a few sentences to
give you some sense of Arib. Arib confounds the social
and gender categories that we typically impose
upon Islamic civilization, a slave who sold her
musical and personal services to the most powerful men of her
time, she was pilot of a career that rode the waves of Baghdad
culture for nearly a century. A self-promoting performer, an inventor of her own brand
of fearless insouciance. In her time she was at once the most
famous, and infamous of the qiyan, female slave performers
of an urban elite in Iraq. Nowadays we would call
her a singer songwriter, because she composed poetry
that she set to music, reportedly some 1000 songs. But above all she was a celebrity, a mix of Elizabeth
Taylor and Amy Winehouse. The glory and scourge of
Abbasid Baghdad, and Samarra. "I never saw a more beautiful,
or refined woman than Arib, " the leading 9th century
authority on music held. "Nor one who sang, played
music, wrote poetry, or played chess so well." If you were to be a serious
member of the Abbasid court in this learned culture you
had to be a mean chess player. "She possessed every
quality of elegance and skill that one could wish for in a woman." There is on one of the
slides a picture of one of these slave performers, which
is from an 8th century palace, probably drawn, painted, 40 or
50 years before Arib was born. Second theme, science in Islam. Again the popular imagination,
well education is in crisis in the Middle East. A report issued in 2015, showed
that although Muslim populations are about 25% of the world's population, the majority of Muslim
populations produce about 6% of the worlds published research. Of course there are all
sorts of reasons for that, but in the popular imagination
there is an incompatibility between the irrationality
of Islam and science. My answer to that, Biruni. Biruni is an extraordinary
figure of 11th century learning. He was a genuine polymath. We tend to use the word
a little bit recklessly. In Biruni's case he was a polymath. He was born in what
is now Uzbekistan, he appeared to have been
something of a prodigy as a child, studied music, but by the time
he was advancing towards higher education, it became clear that
he had very significant talents in the exact sciences, mathematics. By the age of 20, he was observing
the summer solstice and deducing from observations, a number
of astronomical facts. He was a very mean theoretical
as well as an applied physicist. He was as I said, a quite
extraordinary mathematician. He commanded the full
spectrum of the sciences, a term used in Islamic learning
to denote disciplined bodies of knowledge in ways that
nowadays is hard to fathom. I mean the closest one would
find would be a Voltaire, the person who's operating
across that full spectrum of knowledge before what CP Snow
infamously called the two cultures, humanities, the division between
humanities and the sciences emerged. In addition to his
extraordinary feats applied in theoretical science, he
also was a prodigious historian who wrote arguably one of the earliest works
of comparative history. And at the same time, and this
is why one of the respects in which he's so interesting,
he was born in Uzbekistan, but he was patronized by what's
called the Ghaznavid dynasty, and the Ghaznavids were a dynasty
that ruled from Afghanistan, and waged war, at least for the
first 20 years almost ceaselessly in what is now India
on the subcontinent. And Biruni followed
those campaigning armies, sucking up Indian learning. Biruni had not only Arabic,
and Persian, and some Greek, and some Hebrew, and some
Syriac, he also learned Sanskrit. So, in addition to being this
extraordinary exact scientist, he was a very mean
historian as well, and he certainly wrote what I
would feel comfortable describing as the world's first work
of comparative religion, a book on India in which he
conceptualizes religious traditions and compares them to each
other- an Indian tradition, a Jewish tradition, a Christian
tradition, an Islamic tradition. There's really nothing else
like it, and he's operating in the 11th century,
quite extraordinary. Islam and capitalism. This is another one of my favorites. Capitalism is retarded one
reads in the Islamic world, either because of Sharia
, or because of politics, inheritance law, the relative
weakness of partnerships, impossibility of joint
stock companies, endowments that alienate capital
from investment, tax evasion. There are a whole range of cultural and religious reasons given why
Islamic economies don't prosper the way they should, or so we read. Abu al-Qasim Ramisht
belongs to the 12th century. He was from what's now South
West Iran on the coast. We know very little about him. I had to really work hard to
piece together some details. Interestingly enough he
appears in some histories as well as some archives. Let me read to you what one witness, someone who knew Abu al-Qasim
Ramisht, how he described him. "Abu al-Qasim Ramisht was one
such wealthy man, a merchant, a tycoon, and a benefactor." A native of the province Fars which
lay in the South West part of Iran. He made his fortune
by trade and shipping, especially through
the port of Siraf. One observer has it
that Ramisht was one of Siraf's most wealthy
and celebrated men. I quote, "It's inhabitants
are very rich. I was told that one of them
feeling ill drew up his will, and a third part of his
fortune which he had in cash, amounted to a million gold
coins, not including the capital in which he laid out to
people who undertook to trade with it in a partnership." Those are technical terms actually, that partnership is a
financial arrangement, according to which Ramisht and his
colleagues pooled their capital and shared at least some of the
risk for long distance shipping. "Then there is Ramisht." The source continues, "whose son
Musa I met in Aden in year 539." Which corresponds to 1144, or 1145. "He told me that the
silver plate used by him, when weighed was found
to weigh about a ton. Musa is the youngest of his sons,
and he has the least merchandise. Ramisht himself has four
servants, each of whom is said to be richer than his son Musa. I met someone named Alia Nili
from the countryside of Hela." A town in Southern Iraq. "Who was Ramisht's clerk,
his secretary, and he told me that when he returned from China 20
years earlier his merchandise was worth half a million gold coins. If that's the wealth of the clerk,
what must Ramisht himself be worth? It was Ramisht who removed
the silver water spout Kaaba." The Kaaba as you know sits in the
middle of the sanctuary in Mecca. "Replacing it with a gold
one, and who draped the Kaaba in Chinese cloth whose
value is beyond estimate. In some I have heard
of no merchant nowadays who is equal Ramisht
in wealth or prestige." These were acts of conscientious,
he was showing off his wealth. He also established benefactions,
and sheltered his wealth. He made his wealth by
being just one example, and there would have been hundreds
indeed thousands of shippers, merchants, by extension
bankers because they lent money, who were part of a network of trade that connected the
Western Mediterranean with the South Indian and China Sea. All of that trade was possible-
it was facilitated by capital, by legal instruments,
by coinage, by trust. In many respects, in fact many
historians have argued this, this was preindustrial capitalism. This was a form of
capitalism at work. A final example, and I'll end here. Islam and religious dogma. Islam we read more less constantly
as fettered by faith, irrational. My answer there of course is Ibn
Rushd, extraordinary philosopher. I mentioned Abu al-Qasim Ramisht
belongs to the 12th century, I've just stayed here in the
9th, 10th, 11th, 12th century, of course there other examples. The book begins with Muhammed and
ends in the early 16th century, but I'm sticking with
the 12th century. Ramisht was born Iran,
Arib was born in Iraq. Ibn Rushd or Averroes was born
in Cordoba, of course Spain in the 12th century was
part of the Islamic world. He was born into a very
distinguished family of jurists, of lawyers, but he clearly had had
from an early moment in his life, a disposition to asking
fundamental questions of the truth. How does one know things? What are the epistemological
basies upon which the law sits? How do I understand revelation? How do I understand truth? Those are not always
questions seek to answer. Lawyers like to find answers to
problems, either applied problems or theoretical problems as
thrown up by the law itself, not the underpinnings of the law. At a young age he clearly manifested
an interest in that direction and he had the great good
fortune to run into a patron, a ruler who commissioned and
fueled his philosophical appetite. I'll read to you very
briefly the anecdote, which in many respects is the pivot
upon which Ibn Rushd's life swings. "When I entered into the
presence of the caliph Abu Ya'qub, I found him with someone named
Abu Bakr Ibn Tufayl alone." Ibn Tufayl was a philosopher
himself. "Abu Bakr Ibn Tufayl
began by praising me." This is Ibn Rushd speaking
in the first person. "Mentioning my family, and my
ancestors, and generously including in the recital achievements
well beyond my real merits, he was flattering me in the presence of someone who's patronage he was
trying to arrange for Ibn Rushd. The first thing he said to me after
asking my name, my father's name, and my genealogy, his
bonafides, where do you from, are you come from a
good family or not? The first thing he asked me
was this, what is your opinion about the heavens referring to
the views of the philosophers. Are they eternal, or
are they created?" That's a fundamental question in
Islamic and premodern philosophy, is the world created,
or is it eternal? "Confusion and fear took hold of
me, and I began making excuses and denying that I'd ever concern
myself with philosophical learning. It was problematic to ask
these fundamental questions. For I did not know what
Ibn Tufayl had told him." In other words, his philosopher
companion had already the caliph to the idea that here
is a fellow philosopher who asks fundamental questions. Ibn Rushd didn't know that. "But the caliph understood
my fear and confusion, and turning to Ibn Tufayl began
talking about the question of which he had asked me,
mentioning what Aristotle, Plato, and all the philosophers had said, and bringing in beside
the objections of the Muslim thinkers
against them." What's the point here? If we think about our own
tradition, if we think about some of the categories of religion and
secular, we think about the rise of modern science in the
17th and 18th century. We don't think really
about Islamic learning. In fact Ibn Rushd is
a fascinating example in which hyper skepticism was cross
pollinating into Southern Europe. Ibn Rushd had more than a passing
acquaintance with Aristotle. Ibn Rushd, in fact wrote three
separate series of commentaries on Aristotle, the last of which
deeply learned which were translated into Latin very quickly, and began to inform Christian European
learning in the 13th century. In fact there were
controversies in Paris, and other European cities
based on Ibn Rushd's ideas. And in fact historians of
the enlightenment will say that there was an underground heresy
that is to say highly iconoclastic, highly skeptical views which passed
fundamental questions about God, and the world, which owe themselves to the Islamic philosophical
tradition, and particular to Ibn Rushd's contribution. "An underground intellectual
heresy" is as one scholar put it. 13th, 14th, 15th century
Europe, the soil out of which our own tradition
grows that was mixed in with this Islamic
form of hyper skepticism. I could go on, but
I've run out of time. I hope I've given you some sense
of what I've tried to achieve in the book, and I'd be more than
happy to answer any questions. Thank you. [applause] >> CHASE ROBINSON: The process as
[inaudible] put it, was organic. The process was non deliberate. On the one hand I wanted to say
something about figures who are, for very good reasons
extraordinary influential, and about whom your average reader
may know already a thing or two, Ibn Khaldun, Salah ad-Din. On the other hand, and maybe
it's just deeply selfish of me, I wanted to learn things. I wanted to say new things as
well, and I wanted to stir not just to stimulate the curiosity of
readers who don't know much about Middle Eastern
Islamic history. But at the same time I did
want to introduce figures into, if not the canon, then some sense
of personalities and figures, who although not widely known,
exemplifies certain traits. And a good example would
be Karima al-Marwaziyya, she was a Hadith scholar,
and as I said, only one Islamicist knows Karima,
and that's because a student of his wrote a thesis
about Karima al-Marwaziyya. She's a wonderful example of how women negotiated
these challenging issues of modesty and privacy. So, Karima had enormous significance
within the legal tradition, or more precisely the transmission
of Hadith, those are sayings about the prophet,
because she'd studied under a scholar who'd
studied under a scholar who who'd studied under Bahari. So she was very close to Bahari who is a late 9th century
Hadith compiler, and an immensely important figure. So how do you study with Karima
al-Marwaziyya who is a woman? You want to study her Hadith because
they come on such high authority. So, there are interesting stories
about her just teaching girls, or interesting stories about
her teaching boys before they become men. There are interesting
stories of how she negotiates that public private space. She was arguably the most
significant Hadith transmitter of the time, even though
she was a woman. So. [pause] >> AUDIENCE: [inaudible] >> CHASE ROBINSON: It's a very
interesting book about Islamic Spain which makes the argument very
forcefully for [inaudible], this idea of Muslims,
Christians, and Jews in Iberia, especially the 12th, 13th,
14th Century, 10th, 11th, 12th. Ideas, languages, themes,
problems crossing disciplines that in retrospect, we
tend to see as separate. An extraordinarily fecund, cultural
environment which produced the likes of Maimonides, a great
Jewish medieval thinker who in many respects is a
Muslim, an Islamic thinker. Categories for instance, the
law that Maimonides writes about is simply not understandable
unless you understand Islamic law. So, it's also a beautifully
illustrated book. I can recommend it. So, I think it's a
very complex question and I won't even try to
answer it adequately. But, I will say that the situation
differs quite dramatically from one context to the next. So, for instance, I mentioned that
I lived in Egypt for a couple years. At that point, this was
the early 80's, early 90's. Birth control was being
widely advertised and was having real effect on
reducing population growth. There's no question- part of the
reason the main driver of growth of islamicism demography
in the sense that the Muslim populations
tend to be younger than non-Muslim populations
and they tend to be more prolific of children. Those populations are concentrated
in Southeast Asia especially. Of course Indonesia as you know, is
the world's most populous country, as well as sub-Saharan
Africa and other parts. I would say this, that as female
education is a very strong correlation to levels of female
education and birth-rights. And those levels are
going up all of the time. Algeria, Tunisia and there's
a strong argument to be made, in fact it has been made, that
population growth is starting, in the Middle East, given that close
correlation, because of increasing. Places like Libya where there was
a lot of women's education as well. So, I think in that respect,
the problem is a complex one, but also one which is easing because of those other
changes that are taking place. [pause] >> MUHANNAD SALHI: Thank you
very much, Dr. Chase Robinson. Thank you all for coming. [applause] >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc dot gov.
