Domina Tempora

In this modern age, the poems of the 13th century Persian poet Muhammad Jalal ad-Din Rumi have sold millions of copies, making him one of the most popular poets in the world. Considered a provocative figure, Rumi continued the long tradition of ecstatic seers in the style of ancient Greek’s Sappho. His poems have also been compared to Shakespeare’s for their resonance. Meanwhile, for political theorists and historians, Rumi’s writings on tolerance have further value in offering a glimpse of the beliefs and tradition in which Rumi experienced in his lifetime.

Rumi’s poems are the product of his time. He was born at the close of the period said to be the “Golden Age of Islam”, a time where the Islamic world became a major intellectual center for science, education and the arts, embracing Muslims and non-Muslims alike, which gave rise to a lot of inventions and scholars well known to this day.

The Rise of New Ideas and Polymaths

The Golden Age of Islam is traditionally dated from the seventh to the 13th century, in which Muslim rulers established one of the largest empires in history. It was during this period that artists, scholars, poets and traders in the Islamic world made their biggest contribution to a wide range of disciplines by preserving earlier traditions and by adding inventions and innovations of their own.

Through trading, the Islamic empires significantly contributed to globalization when the knowledge, trade and economies from many previously isolated regions and civilizations began integrating through their contacts with explorers and traders. The empire’s trade networks extended from the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Indian Ocean and China Sea in the east, helping to establish the Islamic empires as the world’s leading economic power. As a result, Islamic civilization is unique in that it grew and expanded on the basis of its merchant economy, in contrast to their Christian, Indian and Chinese peers who generally expanded their societies from agricultural landholding nobility. Merchants from the Islamic empires, especially the Umayyad, and later the Abbasid caliphate brought goods and ideas to China, India, South-east Asia, and the kingdoms of Western Africa to return with fresh ideas and inventions.

In the middle of all these exchanges of goods and ideas, the first stage of a mystic movement known as Sufism appeared in the early Umayyad period (661–749 CE). Islamic mysticism is called tasawwuf which literally means “to dress in wool” in Arabic. However, since the early 19th century, the movement has been called “Sufism” in western languages. Sufism derives from a somewhat looser Arabic term for a mystic, sufi, which is in turn derived from ṣuf, (“wool”). This may be a reference to the woolen garment of early Islamic ascetics.

One of the Sufi orders’ contribution to the rise and expansion of the Islamic civilization was their missionary activities. The members of different Sufi orders who settled in India from the early 13th century attracted thousands of Hindus by preaching the equality of men. These missionary activities were often joined with political activity. An example of this could be found in the 17th and 18th century Central Asia, where the Naqshbandīyyah, a mystical order, exerted strong political influence.

This extensive networking allowed the Bayt al-Hikma (“House of Wisdom”) to be established in Baghdad, where scholars from different cultures and faiths gathered and translated the world’s knowledge into Arabic. Knowledge was synthesized from works originating in all the ancient civilizations, and many classic works of antiquity were translated into Arabic, as well as Turkish, Persian, Hebrew and Latin.

This inclusiveness extended to the labor force. Both men and women were involved in diverse occupations and economic activities. Women were employed in a wide range of commercial activities and diverse occupations such as farming and construction work. There were also women occupying posts such as doctors, nurses, scholars and many others.

A number of distinct features of the modern library were introduced in the Islamic world, where libraries expanded the primary function of ancient libraries as center of collection of manuscripts. A library became a public and lending library, a center for the instruction of sciences and ideas, a place for meetings, discussions, and sometimes lodging for scholars or boarding school for pupils. The concept of the library catalogue was also introduced in medieval Islamic libraries, where books were organized into specific genres and categories.

These developments would have demanded a great degree of knowledge and flexibility from workers and scholars alike to be able to compete with their countrymen and the rest of the world. This gave birth to the large number of Muslim polymath scholars, who were known as Hakeems, each of whom contributed to a variety of different fields of learning comparable to the later European renaissance men such as Leonardo da Vinci. Due to the demands in this period, polymath scholars with a wide breadth of knowledge in different fields were more common than scholars who specialized in any single field of learning.

The Islamic Contribution to Literature and Music

Apart from the demand at the time for people to have a wide variety of knowledge and interests, an extensive range of Islamic writings on love, poetry, history and theology show the thought at the time as being open to a broad spectrum of philosophical ideas. Although society was controlled under Islamic values, a certain degree of religious freedom helped create multi-faith, cross-cultural networks by attracting those of the Muslim, Christian and Jewish faiths.

The most well-known work of fiction from the Islamic world was kitāb ʾalf layla wa-layla (“The Book of One Thousand and One Nights”) or Arabian Nights, which was a compilation of many earlier folk tales from different cultures such as China and Africa, which were translated or retold to Persian. It took form in the 10th century and reached its final form by the 14th century. Arabian Nights was translated in the 18th century by Antoine Galland and since then became an influential work of literature in the west.

Another literary genre benefitted from the development of the Golden Age of Islam is Science Fiction. Theologus Autodidactus (“Self-taught Theologian”), written by polymath Ibn al-Nafis (1213–1288), is an early example of this. It uses various elements such as spontaneous generation, futurology and doomsday, all of which would not be out of place in the science fiction works today. However, rather than giving the supernatural or mythological explanations for these events which were common then, Ibn al-Nafis attempted to explain these plot elements using the scientific knowledge of biology, astronomy, cosmology and geology known in his time.

The Moors also had some influence in the western literature. Said to be due to Moorish delegations from Morocco to Elizabethan England at the beginning of the 17th century, the Moors inspired, and consequently featured in works such as George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar and Shakespeare’s Othello.

A number of musical instruments utilized in classical music today are believed to have been derived from Arabic musical instruments. Later, Ottoman military bands, known by the Persian-derived word Mehter, are thought to be the oldest variety of military marching band in the world. Some standard instruments employed by a Mehter are the bass drum, the kettledrum, the cymbals, oboes, flutes and triangles. These military bands inspired many marching bands and orchestras in the west, which then heavily inspired the works of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.

The End of the Golden Age

The crusades from the west resulted in the instability of the Islamic Empire during the 11th century, leaving the Islamic empires weakened when the Mongol invasions came in the 13th century. In 1206, Genghis Khan from Central Asia established the powerful Mongol Empire.

The Mongols and Turks conquered most of the Eurasian land mass, including both China in the east and parts of the Islamic empires, as well as Russia and Eastern Europe in the west. Later Turkic leaders, such as Timur, destroyed many cities, slaughtered thousands of people, and did irreparable damage to the ancient irrigation systems of Mesopotamia. However, due to the lack of a powerful uniting leader after the Mongolian invasion and the Turkish settlement, some local Turkish kingdoms appeared in the Islamic empires and waged war against each other for centuries. Eventually, they invaded very wide parts of the Islamic world and entered in a series of bloody wars until the middle of 17th century.

Traditionalist Muslims at the time, including the polymath Ibn al-Nafis, believed that the Crusades and Mongol invasions were a divine punishment against Muslims deviating from the Sunnah or the Muslim Law. As a result, the falsafa (“Muslim philosophy”), some of which held ideas incompatible with the Sunnah, became targets of criticism from many traditionalist Muslims, though other traditionalists such as Ibn al-Nafis made attempts at reconciling and blur the line between the two. However, some Sufis rejected the widespread belief of divine punishment and instead blamed Muslims for committing a series of errors in their policies, especially regarding social stability, and on the battlefield.

North Africa’s Islamic civilization collapsed after exhausting its resources in internal fighting and salvaging what they could out of the devastation from the invasion of the Arab Bedouin tribes of Banu Sulaymand Banu Hilal. The Black Death ravaged much of the Islamic empires in the 14th century and plagues kept returning to the Islamic world up to the 19th century. There also an increasing lack of tolerance of intellectual debate and freedom of thought, with some seminaries systematically forbidding metaphysical discussions, while debates in this field appear to have been abandoned after the 14th century.

Institutions of science comprising Islamic universities, libraries – including the House of Wisdom, observatories, and hospitals, were later destroyed by foreign invaders like the Crusaders and the Mongols, and were rarely promoted again in the devastated regions. Wide illiteracy overwhelmed the devastated lands, leaving only a small trace of the Golden Age and its polymaths.