Islam’s Golden Age: Misconception or Reality?

The Golden Age of Islam: Reality or Myth?

Some authors present the medieval Islamic world as a golden age of achievement and feudal Europe as backward and barbaric. The Islamic world was peaceful, educated, enlightened, advanced, and culturally superior to the West. But is this so?

Professor Rodney Stark states, “Muslim technology lagged far behind that of the West.” Technology often went backwards when Islam took over. Almost all advancements in the Muslim world were derived from cultures they conquered rather than originating from within; according to Professor Stark, “to the extent that Arab elites acquired a sophisticated culture, they learned it from their subjected peoples…That is, the sophisticated culture so often attributed to Muslims (more often referred to as ‘Arabic’ culture) was actually the culture of the conquered people–the Judeo-Christian-Greek culture of Byzantium, the remarkable learning of heretical Christian groups such as the Copts and the Nestorians, extensive knowledge from Zoroastrian (Mazdean) Persia, and the great mathematical achievements of the Hindus.”

Professor Dario Fernández-Morera points out that the Greeks’ works were protected and translated in Europe and that Greek-speaking Christians in conquered Byzantine areas translated Greek manuscripts into Arabic, allowing Muslims to read them. He wrote, “It was Christian scholars who were responsible for bringing Greek knowledge to Islam, and this knowledge came to Islam only because Muslim forces had conquered areas (the Middle East and North Africa) where a rich Greek Christian civilisation had developed…Muslim ‘commentators’ of Aristotle…read him not in the original Greek but in translations made by Christians, from Greek to Syriac and then from Syriac to Arabic.”

In 948, Christian emperor Arminius sent Abd al-Rahman III, the Umayyad caliph of Córdoba, an original Greek manuscript as a gift; the Muslims had no one who could read it, so the emperor sent a monk who taught the slaves to read it for them.

Muslims burned Greek texts along with Bibles, Christian manuscripts and works, or anything deemed heretical. When Muslims conquered a people, they would keep under them the “best,” the most educated (and as we saw earlier, the best-looking for sex slaves, etc.), and they in turn would help Muslim rulers, working for them to stay alive. For example, Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule did most of the scholarship and translated key works into Arabic. Much of the architecture followed a Byzantine pattern, including the famous Dome of the Rock and the Great Mosque in Damascus. Naval advancements were made mainly by Italians. Science, astronomy, and medicine were advanced by Nestorian Christians and pagans who published their works in Aramaic, the dominant language of their society. They also translated the classics of Plato and Aristotle. Most of the libraries in the Islamic world were acquired from the conquered Byzantium and Nestorian Christians. The “heart” of the “House of Wisdom” in 9th-century Baghdad was a Nestorian Arab Christian, Hunain ibn Ishaq, who translated Greek works into Arabic. India and the Greeks influenced mathematics.

Unfortunately, some scholars have wrongly attributed many of these advances, actually the achievements of Christians and Jews under Muslim rule or derived from lands further to the East, to the Muslims themselves, due to their being published in Muslim countries and Arabic. Of course, Islam’s invaluable role as a conduit for knowledge from India and China and in preserving and disseminating much of the corpus of Classical learning should be fully acknowledged, as should achievements that genuinely did originate from Muslim scholars, such as the application of Hindu numerals to the representation of decimal fractions, a crucial advance that the Hindus themselves had never thought of.

But still, Islam gets a good deal too much credit. What led to the eventual “enlightened” Muslim Córdoba of Spain was that centuries later, the Muslim culture had partly assimilated into Spanish culture, and the Spanish converts had also assimilated and helped produce the Caliphate of Córdoba!

At the time, Muslims were seen as extraordinarily superstitious and backward, derived from the Qur’an and its pagan origins. Their treatment of women would appal modern sensibilities and certainly lacked the attitude of the Christian West. One historian writes, “About the position of women, the Qur’an could show nothing of the chivalry that was to develop in Christendom through the respect felt by Christians for the mother of Christ and for the many women martyrs and saints who suffered during the early persecutions.” When the Prophet was informed that the people of Persia had made the daughter of Chosroes their queen, he said “the tribe that constitutes a woman its ruler will not find redemption.” You won’t find women rulers in Islam like in medieval Europe, nor will women be respected and admired as they were in chivalrous Christian culture.

Great inequality existed in that the government and rulers dwelt in expensive palaces, benefiting from massive slave labour while leaving most of the population poor. Slave markets and the slave trade across the Islamic world began before and continued after the transatlantic trade, over time, trafficking more than ever came to America. While feudal Europe almost completely eradicated slavery, Muhammad insolubilized it saying, “God has ordained that your brothers should be your slaves.”

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise

Was Muslim-controlled Spain the golden age of tolerance and enlightenment of the Medieval world, as some claim?

Professor Dario Fernández-Morera, who studied medieval Spain and wrote a book to “demystify” misconceptions about the purported Islamic Golden Age’s tolerance and love of diversity, says the modern population in general, in America much more than in Spain, receive a misleading perception of Islamic rule in Spain due to modern ideological and multicultural biases, along with Enlightenment historians who desired to portray a backwards “dark age” Catholic Europe.

Wherever they went, Muslims destroyed churches and religious buildings, enslaved, forced everything under the control of Islam, and eradicated the cultures they subjugated. Thus, Spain was conquered and colonised by Muslims who destroyed a more advanced, enlightened, and cultured society than their own. Before the Islamic conquest of various lands, including Spain, great learning, manuscripts, agriculture, and so on were produced by Greek and Coptic Christians as well as pagans native to the lands, but they were eradicated after the Islamic conquest. Islamic invaders were astonished at what they saw as they conquered Spain, its advancements, architecture, wealth, gems, buildings, books, libraries, statues, craftsmanship, artwork, etc. In their words, they “had never before contemplated such a degree of civilisation.”

Spanish Christians were unprepared for and not expecting such warlike people and the forcing of captive young women into sexual slavery; it was not what they were used to before coming into contact with Islamic armies.

Jihad: The Drive for Religious and Territorial Domination

When Muslim raiders first entered Spain during the 8th century, they brought back gorgeous women as sex slaves, and this, in part, fueled the desire for the Islamic armies to conquer Spain. However, the prime motivator was religion; Islam is to conquer the entire world until everything is under its rule.

To be a genuine Islamic ruler, one must wage jihad. Dario Fernández-Morera wrote, “Although the lust for booty and slaves was undoubtedly part of the Muslim armies’ motivation, the fundamental impulse for the movement of these armies through North Africa and then on to Europe was to carry out a religious war—jihad. Both Muslim and Christian sources referring to the invasion of North Africa and Spain, as well as archaeological evidence, attest to the importance of the religious factor in the Islamic conquest.”

The noted historian of Islam, Majid Khadduri, wrote “Islam, emerging in the seventh century as a conquering Power with world domination as its ultimate objective, refused to recognise legal systems other than its own. It was willing to enter into temporary peaceful relations with other states pending consummation of its world mission…In contrast with the modern law of nations…the law of Islam recognises no nation other than its own.” Professor Khadduri was writing about how this view has evolved over the centuries until today, but our concern here is with the attitude he describes that prevailed in Islam’s earlier days.

Jihad warriors were given plenty of incentives derived from their holy book and prophet. They could keep the property of anyone they killed in battle, they could keep captured women as sex slaves (in addition to four wives), or rape them, and if they died in battle, they were rewarded with eternal paradise, which also includes sex slaves. Indeed, this message came across to the soldiers when the Muslim commander Khalid ibn al-Walid told the Persians to submit; he declared that if they resisted, “You will face men who love their death as much as you love life.”

When Muslim forces conquered territories, they regularly exterminated any who dared resist and enslaved women and children, at one point burning alive Christians locked in a Church. Fear and intimidation were part of Islamic warfare to subdue non-Islamic cultures.

Islamic law allowed Muslim commanders and diplomats to lie to and deceive nonbelievers, and so they often violated treaties made if that benefited the expansion of Islam. After all, “Allah is also a deceiver and the greatest of them.”

Islam and Slavery: A Complex Legacy

Professor Wilfred Reilly referred to Arab Muslims as the “premier slave traders” of the world. Historian Dario Fernández-Morera wrote, “The massive trade in captured or bought black and white slaves was a cultural feature of Islamic Spain, as it was of the Muslim world in general…Islamic warriors pioneered the slavery of African blacks.”

Long before any white slave ship came to Africa (and after), Arab Muslims enslaved hundreds of thousands of Africans, especially desiring gorgeous women and children. Incidents of racially motivated crimes towards blacks also occurred. Spanish Muslim ruler An-Nasir “hanged the sons of the blacks from the well of his palace as a sort of counterweight to draw water, making them die.” Muhammad himself made many politically incorrect comments about blacks. Historian Dario Fernández-Morera wrote, “Although the Quran does not proclaim the superiority of any racial group, both Muslim Arabs and Muslim North African Berbers considered themselves different from and superior to blacks, whom they enslaved.”

Of all the sex slaves, blond girls were the most desired, selling for a much higher price. Many Muslim rulers had thousands of sex slaves, and they literally bred slaves for sex and trained them to be better sex slaves. Again, Fernández-Morera wrote, “Such was the cultural impact on the Islamic Middle Ages of Caucasian sexual slaves from Christian lands that the Turkish word kız, meaning ‘girl,’ ‘slave girl,’ and ‘sexual slave girl’ (or *concubine”) came to mean also ‘Christian woman’ in Islamic usage.”

Other slaves, often ethnically white, were bred and trained to be warriors, making up substantial portions of Islamic armies. During jihad, Muslims usually killed adult men, and so they raised the young boys as either sex slaves or soldiers for the next generation. Even though many of the Muslim rulers were white European in appearance, the children and further descendants of slave mothers, the massive amount of white Christian slaves impacted, to a large extent, the genetic makeup of Muslim peoples.

Unequal Status of Christians and Jews Under Islamic Rule

Muslim nations killed their heretics, freethinkers, nonbelievers, witches, blasphemers and gays, stoned adulteresses and apostates and conducted inquisitions. They forbade wine and other forms of alcohol; offenders were punished with 80 lashes, even if the smell was on their breath, let alone if they were drunk. No music or musical instruments were allowed. Unequal laws based on religion were maintained. Christians were not allowed to display or celebrate their religion in public. They could be crucified, tortured, impaled, beheaded or killed in various other inventive ways, for example, one nun was “thrown into a cauldron of molten lead.”

Christians received unequal status under Islam and were denied self-rule. Faced with death if they said anything hostile towards Islam or proclaimed Jesus in public, many Spanish Christians chose martyrdom by stating in public that Jesus is Lord or declaring Muhammad a false prophet and Islam a false religion. On multiple occasions, Muslim rulers expelled the entire Christian population from Spanish cities, sending them to Africa.

It can reasonably be concluded that moderns who love to extol the peaceful, tolerant, enlightened Islamic world of the medieval period would not like it very much if they could somehow be sent to live there.