Aristotle

Who are Oligarchs and Why are They Important to Trump’s Impeachment Hearings?

As the impeachment hearings in Washington take centre stage and talk turns to the politics of Ukraine, it’s important to understand what oligarchs are and what power they wield.

With the impeachment hearings for President Donald Trump underway, several American diplomats and ambassadors have testified about the influence of oligarchs on the Trump administration.

I am a scholar of international law who has been working in the Soviet and post-Soviet space since the early 1990s. As the impeachment hearings in Washington take centre stage and talk turns to the politics of Ukraine, I believe it’s important to understand what oligarchs are and what power they wield.

The history of oligarchs

Over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle coined the term oligarchy as he contemplated the forms of state governance.

Like aristocracy, oligarchy meant rule by the few, as contrasted with democracy, which is rule by the people. From Aristotle’s time until the early 1990s, the concept of an oligarchy – and oligarchs – largely remained the stuff of academic writing.

But with the breakup of the Soviet Union, a new group of actors emerged. In the early 1990s, these men ate lavish meals in the newest hotels and built massive houses on the outskirts of Moscow. They mostly were young players in the financial sector who were able to finance Russia’s first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin.

These oligarchs were not formally part of the government. They were private individuals who benefited from government connections to amass huge wealth in short periods.

This wealth came from the privatisation of state enterprises, a process developed and driven by American and Western European academics.

Oligarchs today

I covered the role of organised crime in Russia in the early 1990s and witnessed firsthand the transfer of wealth from the state to a handful of individuals, all of whom had ties to Russia’s leaders.

By owning the major industries – from oil and natural gas to steel, nickel and other basic industries – Russian oligarchs held sway over all aspects of daily life. With time, they expanded to other areas, such as media and sports. But, at their core, the oligarchs gained their wealth from industry and wielded their power openly and with impunity.

Over the past 20 years, the number of oligarchs has grown, but the base of their power remains the same: a relationship with the president that leads to personal financial gain.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin told the Financial Times earlier this year, “Oligarchs are those who use their proximity to the authorities to receive super-profits.”

Putin effectively offered an alternative, modern definition of an oligarch. And like Yeltsin, Putin has been responsible for the rise – and, on occasion, the fall – of Russia’s modern oligarchs.

Former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch arrives to testify in the US House of Representatives impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Photo: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

Impeachment and Ukraine

But oligarchs are not restricted to Russia. And this is why we have been hearing the term so often in recent months.

In Ukraine, the spring 2019 presidential election that led to the stunning rise of actor-turned-politician Volodymyr Zelenskiy was as much a referendum on Ukraine’s oligarchs as it was about the two men vying to become president.

I was in Ukraine during the first round of the presidential elections this year, and all of the Ukrainians I spoke to said the same thing about Zelenskiy: No one knew who he was, but it didn’t matter. That’s because the person in control, they said, was Ihor Kolomoisky, whose wealth had been threatened by Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s then-president, who was running for reelection.

In the eyes of Ukrainians, Kolomoisky needed a candidate to run Poroshenko out of office. And in Zelenskiy, he found his man. Zelenskiy was not just an actor before he turned to politics abruptly to run for president. He was an actor on the television channel owned by Kolomoisky.

So as we hear talk of oligarchs and Ukrainian politics, it is important to remember that while these ultra wealthy individuals are not formally part of the government, as Aristotle might have envisioned, they are very much in charge of the country’s economic, media and political interests.

Joel Samuels is professor of law at the University of South Carolina.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. You can read it here.

What 13th-Century Poet Amir Khusrow Had to Say About Engineering

One of the most well-known poets of his time, Khusrow made engineering the central topic of one of his long poems, ‘The Alexandrine Mirror’.

What did one of India’s greatest poets, who is also celebrated as one of the greatest poets of the pre-modern Persian canon, have to say about engineering, a profession of choice and aspiration for so many in modern India and elsewhere?

While many topics of interest to us today went unaddressed by pre-modern literary traditions, it turns out that engineering is as old a theme as Persian and Arabic literatures themselves.

Amir Khusrow (1253-1325), poet at the courts of successive Sultans of Delhi and the best-known devotee of the Sufi saint Nizāmuddin Awliyā, made it the central topic of one of his long poems – the Āiyna-yi Iskandarī or The Alexandrine Mirror, completed in 1302 in response to Nizāmī of Ganja’s Iskandarnāma or The Alexander Book of 1202.

Nizāmī, writing for a Turkic court in what is today Azerbaijan, wrote the life of Alexander of Macedon in two parts. The first related to his imperial adventuring and conquests and the second, his humbling by God into the role of one of the prophets anticipating the prophet Muhammad.

An elephant clock painted on Ismail al-Jazari’s manuscript on engineering marvels. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In Khusrow’s re-telling, Alexander was a “divinely inspired” Sufi king, not a prophet. This poetic licence made sense because Khusrow retold Alexander’s life for a distinctly different purpose than Nizāmī: to furnish his reader, above all Sultan Alāuddīn Khalji of Delhi who had given himself the title of ‘Second Alexander’, with a model of an ethical disposition towards engineering and engineers.

It is possible he did so because, as Khusrow’s friend and fellow courtier Ziyāuddin Barani complained, the Sultan had failed to adequately patronise the many Iranian and Central Asian artisans who had taken shelter in his capital after fleeing Mongol invaders in the West.

Whatever his immediate motivation, Khusrow modulated the praise of God with which his poems conventionally opened to present God as a world-engineer and the sole real agent in a creation whose every part (as in the Qur’anic vision of creation) locked like clockwork into the other. This implied that Khusrow’s Alexander, who was more inventor and patron of engineer-inventors than just a world-conqueror, was only a medium of God’s reason. He did not need to be humbled like Nizāmi’s Alexander.

Whereas Nizāmī’s opening verse was: “Yours, O Lord, is world emperorship”, Khusrow’s was an inversion of this in the same meter: “O Emperor of the world, lordship is yours”, thus already signalling that the poem to come would be less about God’s agency and more about His human medium, Alexander as philosopher-saint-king-engineer and patron of engineers.

On this folio of a Khusrow manuscript, the Khaqan of China prostrates himself before Alexander. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

What does all this mean for our opening question? What is Khusrow’s lesson on engineering? In a sense, his lesson is a Sufi amplification of what George Saliba, an eminent historian of science in Islamic lands, described as “an uninterrupted production of marvellous machines and toys from Hellenistic time and continuing well into Islamic times.”

In line with the earliest Arabic translations of Aristotle’s treatise Mechanica, Khusrow’s Alexander understands machines as devices by which things could be brought forth from potentiality to actuality. The Arabic word for such devices – hiyal, plural of hīla – literally means ‘tricks’, indicating as in Aristotle’s Greek, that the product was one that overcame natural resistance and executed functions contrary to natural tendency, ‘tricking’ nature.

But it also implied, as Aristotle said, that such devices had their origin in a maker outside themselves rather than within themselves like animate beings. They were simultaneously improvements on nature and dead.

Here we glimpse one of the oldest Islamic understandings of the work of literature as much as of technology: an ingenious mechanical and thus immortal imitation of an organic and thus mortal original. This is how Sa‘di’s Gulistān of 1258, the most famous work of medieval Persian prose (though mixed with verse), presents itself: a bejewelled verbal replica of a real rose-garden that would survive winters unlike the real one but only so long as it had human readers, eventually falling apart when human time ended with the Day of Judgement.

All artifice, for Aristotle’s Arabic-Persian interpreters, unfolded against such an eschatological horizon: prodigies of creaturely reason valuable only within the limited time humans were allotted. The ideal engineer was therefore civic-minded and god-fearing in the exercise of the intellect. Hence the memento mori of the concluding scene of Khusrow’s poem in which Alexander prepares for his own death by willing his corpse to be borne aloft that people may see that even he, world-conqueror, had died; and to be buried coffin-less in the dust of which all humans are made.

In this Mughal miniature attributed to Basawan of Lahore, Alexander is shown paying a visit to Plato. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Hence, too, Khusrow’s Plato who emerges from the sea to live in a cave, subsisting on seaweed, his emaciated body “purified by fasting”, showing its veins “like threads in amber” and refusing Alexander’s invitation to court but grudgingly dispensing valuable advice to the emperor. This was a Plato identical to the Socrates of Xenophon rather than the historical Plato himself; a Plato who tore himself away from the contemplation of nature to finally concede the importance of ethics and the ethical training of non-philosophers and thus towards the city, site of ethical cohabitation. It was the Plato of the earliest Islamic philosophers – al-Kindi (Baghdad, ca. d.866), Abu Bakr al-Rāzi (Rayy/Tehran, d.925) and al-Fārābi (Aleppo, d.950) – who saw Socrates as an exemplum of ethical transformation from severe asceticism to abstemious worldliness.

Not only did Khusrow belong to this Islamic reception of Aristotle, he may also have known, given his admiration for Sanskrit intellectual traditions, that the Sanskrit literature of western India around 1000 CE also absorbed something of the Abbasid Caliphate’s interest in marvellous machines. An example is the frame tale of Bhoja’s Śringāramañjarikathā or Stories for Śringāramañjari being told by a mechanical doll. But Khusrow subtly differentiated his lesson on engineering from that of his Islamic contemporaries and predecessors. The central mechanical

A manuscript, thought to belong to Nizami, shows Alexander building a wall against the people of Gog and Magog. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

device in The Alexandrian Mirror is a circular mirror Alexander has mounted on a watchtower in response to a complaint against Frankish pirates by seafaring merchants. The mirror discloses the location of the Frankish ships, allowing Alexander’s fleet to pursue them, clearing the waters for trade. The mirror episode itself appears right after a painting competition between the Greeks and the Chinese.

Khusrow re-tells a painting competition told earlier by Nizāmī and Rumi. In all three accounts, the winning side polishes the wall to mirror-brightness so that it only reflects what the other side has actually painted. In Khusrow’s version it is the Chinese who win, symbolising the superiority of Chinese engineering to Greek philosophy because the mirror, says Khusrow, was a Chinese invention to start with. In his pirate-disclosing mirror, Khusrow’s Alexander fuses together the functions of Jamshid’s world-disclosing goblet, the Chinese mirror and his teacher Aristotle’s astrolabe to produce a bricolage that valourised the artisanal multiculturalism of Sultanate Delhi.

In this, he echoed a foundational work of akhlāq or Aristotelian Islamic ethics, Nāsiruddīn Tūsī’s Akhlāq-i Nāsirī or The Nasirean Ethics of around 1235. Tūsī says the founder of a craft is superior to someone who knows it only slightly; and far superior to someone who lacks all capacity for invention and simply follows a master’s rules till he completes a task. He esteems invention most highly and then intelligent innovation on given inventions. This is the paradigm for Alexander’s bricolage in Khusrow.

But where Tūsī’s Nasirean Ethics teleologically submits its statements on craft to an overarching Aristotelian concern with individual and group perfection in the virtuous city where everyone tries to become more God-like, Khusrow’s poem is less interested in such civic progress. It instead concerns itself with the accomplishments of the engineer best exemplified in Alexander and Khusrow himself, but standing in principle for all humans.

Also read: What a Sufi Image of Cow Slaughter Tells Us About the Brahman in Classical Persian Literature

But it was precisely this profane valorisation of applications of the mind to machine-making that laid open Khusrow’s vision of technology to the risk of implying the sufficiency of the intellect. This was why he invoked a character already well known in earliest Islamic theology for asserting the sufficiency of the intellect – the Brahman.

Early in the poem, Khusrow tells a striking tale whose broad plot was completely derived from what were most probably oral versions of the written versions of the Advaitic treatise, Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha. It concerns a man near Damascus who doubted the literal possibility of Prophet Muhammad’s lightning-fast night journey to God’s throne and is humbled for it.

In this folio from a quintet by Amir Khusrow, a Muslim pilgrim learns a lesson in piety from a Brahman. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

On grounds of rational probability, the man suspects that the prophet’s ascension could only have been mental rather than actual. But when, one morning, he dips himself in the river he goes to bathe in he sees himself transformed into a woman in a distant land. The woman he has become gets married and, over 17 years, bears her husband seven children.

Then, one morning, the woman goes to the same river to bathe and, dipping herself in the water, sees herself re-transformed into the man she had been, his clothes left just where he had left them on that very dawn when he had immersed himself in the river. He instantly feels ashamed at having doubted the literal nature of the prophet’s ascension and grasps that God could suspend the laws of time and space.

And yet, it’s a strangely ambivalent tale because it is by insisting on the reality of the man’s rebirth – rebirth being doctrinally unacceptable in mainstream Sunni Muslim theology – that Khusrow insists, remarkably, on the reality of the prophet’s ascension. Whatever we make of this ambivalence, on the face of it The Alexandrine Mirror does humble the Syrian Brahman into submitting to Islam. Khusrow clarifies what this submission means in the context of this poem when he upholds this chastened Brahman as exemplary: it means restraining your intellect lest it harm your heart and faith.

But why choose an Indic tale to imply that the technological feats of Alexander’s life as Khusrow celebrated them, in fact, contained a warning against the excesses of the intellect?

Briefly, the answer lies in the earliest encounters, dating to around the ninth century CE, of Muslim and Jewish theologians with Brahman philosophers. “Early Islamic heresiographic traditions”, Sara Stroumsa argues, “attribute to the Barāhima the rejection of all prophets, on account of the supremacy and sufficiency of the human intellect”; and on account of the alleged impossibility that God might abrogate the laws of His creation and of the human nature He had created, laws He would have taught sufficiently to the first and last prophet, Adam.

Rendering the succession of prophets after Adam redundant or nonsensical, the Brahmans served as the straw men of Arabic rational theology against whom arguments continued to be made for the necessity and continuity of prophecy – Old Testament prophecy for Jews and Muhammad’s for Muslims.

But there was something else to this Brahman that was distinctive to Khusrow. Across his poetic corpus Khusrow sets up military and theological oppositions between the Hindu and Turk only to erotically dissolve them, this dissolution being one of the excitements of reading him as you realise that Khusrow has identified himself with his Brahman beloved as a Turkic Brahman or Brahman Turk. One of his 20 odd ghazals where the Brahman makes an appearance blends attributes of the Persian and Indian beloveds: the beloved as worthier than Somnath’s idol, as fire-worshipper and idolater too, his body as Jamshid’s world-disclosing goblet.

Also read: Rediscovering Forgotten Indo-Persian Works on Hindu-Muslim Encounters

The ghazal ends by identifying the beloved with Khusrow’s own writing, both the blackness of Khusrow’s Hindu or Indian slate and the chalk whiteness of his writing upon that blackness. It was arguably this kind of interchangeability of self and other that allowed the Brahman to so easily serve as an exemplum for Khusrow’s lesson in an ideally pious Muslim disposition towards technology.

Khusrow celebrated India in his poem Nine Skies for its distinctiveness in the Islamic world: not only was it distinguished by artisans from every corner of the Islamic world, it also boasted Brahman philosophers who put Aristotle to shame and the Sanskrit language he admired enough to try and learn. But he was also anxiously aware of the importance of technology in Sultan Alāuddin Khalji’s battles against Mongol incursions into the Punjab.

In the final analysis, his lesson on engineering assumed a disposition towards the ambient world that only diverted some of it towards human ends. It was a pre-capitalist artisanal ethic of engineering for civic benefit that worked on scales vastly smaller than scorched-earth capitalist approaches; and that was shot through with the Sufi awareness that the world, even when intellectually mastered with machines, brimmed with signs of what passed beyond the intellect and with reminders of human mortality.

Prashant Keshavmurthy is associate professor of Persian-Iranian Studies at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University.

Don’t Let the Rise of Europe Steal World History

Beginning world history in 1450 becomes a story about how Europeans came to dominate not one but all the continents, and excludes the origins of alphabets, agriculture, cities and civilisation.

The centre of a map tells you much, as does the choice where to begin a story, or a history. Arab geographers used to place the Caspian Sea at the centre of world maps. On a medieval Turkish map, one that transfixed me long ago, we find the city of Balasaghun at the heart of the world. How to teach world history today is a question that is going to grow only more and more important.

Last summer in the United States, a debate flared when the influential testing agency Advanced Placement (AP) announced a change to its attendant courses, a change in which ‘world history’ would begin in 1450. In practice, beginning world history in 1450 becomes a story about how Europeans came to dominate not one but all the continents, and excludes the origins of alphabets, agriculture, cities and civilisation. Before the 1400s, it was others who did the empire-building, drove sciences, medicine and philosophy, and sought to capitalise on and extend the trading networks that facilitated the flow and exchange of goods, ideas, faiths and people.

Also read: How Colonialism Actually Worked

Under pressure, the AP College Board retreated. ‘We’ve received thoughtful, principled feedback from AP teachers, students and college faculty,’ said a statement. As a result, the start date for the course has been nudged back 250 years to 1200. Consequently, said the board, ‘teachers and students can begin the course with a study of the civilisations in Africa, the Americas and Asia that are foundational to the modern era’.

Where that leaves Plato and Aristotle, or ancient Greece and Rome, is unclear – but presumably none are ‘foundational to the modern era’. That in itself is strange given that so many of the most famous buildings of Washington, DC (for example) are designed in classical style to deliberately evoke the world of 2,000 years ago; or that Mark Zuckerberg, a posterboy for new technologies and the 21st century, admits to the Emperor Augustus as his role model.

Gone too is China of the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) and the networks that linked the Pacific with the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago, and that allow us to understand that Asia, Africa and Europe were connected many centuries prior in a world that was effectively ‘globalised’. No space for the Maya civilisation and culture in Central America or for the kingdom of Igodomigodo in West Africa, whose economic, cultural, military and political achievements have been discarded as irrelevant to the ‘modern era’.

Who cares about the Indian emperor Ashoka, or the Chola dynasty of Southern India that spread eastwards into South East Asia in the 10th and 11th centuries?

The connections between Scandinavia and Central Asia that helped to bring all of northern Europe out of what used to be called ‘the Dark Ages’ don’t get a look-in either. And too bad for climate change and the ways in which looking at the changes in global temperatures 1,500 years ago led to the collapse of cities, the dispersal of populations and the spread of pandemics.

Also read: Looking Back at the Colonial Origins of Communal and Caste Conflict in India

History is at its most exciting and stimulating for students and teachers alike when there is scope to look at connectivity, to identify and work through deep rhythms and trends, and to explore the past by challenging assumptions that the story of the world can be charted through a linear progression – as the AP College Board seems to think with its statement linking 1200 with the ‘modern era’.

If you really want to see how foolish this view is – and how unfortunate it is to narrow down the scope of the World History course, then take a look at the front pages in just about any country in the world today. In China, news is dominated by the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese-led plan to regalvanise the ancient networks of the past into the modern-day Silk Roads: there are many and sharply divergent views about the aims, motivations and likely outcomes of the Belt and Road Initiative.

This is far and away the single most important geopolitical development in the modern world today. Understanding why Beijing is trying to return to the glory years of the Silk Roads (which date back 2,000 years) would seem to be both interesting, and important – and largely to be bypassed by the new World History scope.

We can look to the other end of Asia, to Istanbul where, every year, hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in Turkey to commemorate the Battle of Manzikert – which was fought in 1071. It might be useful to know why. Assessing the relationship between Russia and Ukraine might also be of some value in a period when the former has annexed part of the territory of the latter. A major spat broke out last summer between the two countries over whether Anne of Kiev was Russian or Ukrainian. She died in 1075.

Also read: What Shashi Tharoor Doesn’t Understand About Colonialism

It does not take an expert to see the resonance of the 7th century across the Middle East – where fundamentalists attempted to build an ‘Islamic State’ based on their model of the early Muslim world, destroying not only lives and the region in the process, but deliberately destroying history itself in places such as Palmyra. It does, though, take an expert to work out why they are trying to turn back the clock 1,400 years and what their utopian world looks like.

It matters because there are plenty of others who want to do the same thing: Imran Khan, the new Prime Minister of Pakistan, for example, has said that he wants to turn his country, with its population of almost 200 million people, into ‘an ideal welfare state’ on the model that Muhammad set in Medina in the 620s and 630s – a model that set up one of the world’s ‘greatest civilisations’.

Students taking world history courses that begin in 1200 will not learn about any of these topics, even though their peers in colleges and schools around the world will. Education should expand horizons and open minds. What a shame that, in this case, they are being narrowed and shuttered.

And what a shame too that this is happening at a time of such profound global change – when understanding the depth of our interconnected world is more important than ever.

That, for me anyway, is the most valuable conclusion that is ‘foundational to the modern era’.

Peter Frankopan is the director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and a senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He is the author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015). He lives in Oxford.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

How Al-Farabi Drew on Plato to Argue for Censorship in Islam

The Sufi philosopher who forged Islam from Plato: on Al-Farabi and the Hellenic ideas behind Islam’s representational taboo.

You might not be familiar with the name Al-Farabi, a tenth-century thinker from Baghdad, but you know his work, or at least its results. Al-Farabi was, by all accounts, a man of steadfast Sufi persuasion and unvaryingly simple tastes. As a labourer in a Damascus vineyard before settling in Baghdad, he favoured a frugal diet of lambs’ hearts and water mixed with sweet basil juice. But in his political philosophy, Al-Farabi drew on a rich variety of Hellenic ideas, notably from Plato and Aristotle, adapting and extending them in order to respond to the flux of his times.

The situation in the mighty Abbasid empire in which Al-Farabi lived demanded a delicate balancing of conservatism with radical adaptation. Against the backdrop of growing dysfunction as the empire became a shrunken version of itself, Al-Farabi formulated a political philosophy conducive to civic virtue, justice, human happiness and social order.

But his real legacy might be the philosophical rationale that Al-Farabi provided for controlling creative expression in the Muslim world. In so doing, he completed the aniconism (or antirepresentational) project begun in the late seventh century by a caliph of the Umayyads, the first Muslim dynasty.

Caliph Abd al-Malik did it with non-figurative images on coins and calligraphic inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the first monument of the new Muslim faith. This heralded Islamic art’s break from the Greco-Roman representative tradition. A few centuries later, Al-Farabi took the notion of creative control to new heights by arguing for restrictions on representation through the word. He did it using solidly Platonic concepts, and can justifiably be said to have helped concretise the way Islam understands and responds to creative expression.

Also Read: The Erased ‘Muslim’ Texts of the Nath Sampradāy

Word portrayals of Islam and its prophet can be deemed sacrilegious just as much as representational art. The consequences of Al-Farabi’s rationalisation of representational taboos are apparent in our times.

In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa sentencing Salman Rushdie to death for writing The Satanic Verses (1988). The book outraged Muslims for its fictionalised account of Prophet Muhammad’s life. In 2001, the Taliban blew up the sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. In 2005, controversy erupted over the publication by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten of cartoons depicting the Prophet. The cartoons continued to ignite fury in some way or other for at least a decade. There were protests across the Middle East, attacks on Western embassies after several European papers reprinted the cartoons, and in 2008 Osama bin Laden issued an incendiary warning to Europe of ‘grave punishment’ for its ‘new Crusade’ against Islam.

A Palestinian woman prays in front of the Dome of the Rock on the first Friday of the holy month of Ramadan at the compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount. Credit :Reuters/Ammar Awad/File

In 2015, the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine in Paris that habitually offended Muslim sensibilities, was attacked by armed gunmen, killing 12. The magazine had featured Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission (2015), a futuristic vision of France under Islamic rule.

In a sense, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was no different from the Rushdie fatwa, which was like the Danish cartoons fallout and the violence wreaked on Charlie Hebdo’s editorial staff. All are linked by the desire to control representation, be it through imagery or the word.

Control of the word was something that Al-Farabi appeared to judge necessary if Islam’s biggest project – the multi-ethnic commonwealth that was the Abbasid empire – was to be preserved. Figural representation was pretty much settled as an issue for Muslims when Al-Farabi would have been pondering some of his key theories.

Within 30 years of the Prophet’s death in 632, art and creative expression took two parallel paths depending on the context for which it was intended. There was art for the secular space, such as the palaces and bathhouses of the Umayyads (661-750). And there was the art considered appropriate for religious spaces – mosques and shrines such as the Dome of the Rock (completed in 691).

Caliph Abd al-Malik had already engaged in what has been called a ‘polemic of images’ on coinage with his Byzantine counterpart, Emperor Justinian II. Ultimately, Abd al-Malik issued coins inscribed with the phrases ‘ruler of the orthodox’ and ‘representative [caliph] of Allah’ rather than his portrait. And the Dome of the Rock had script rather than representations of living creatures as a decoration.

The lack of image had become an image. In fact, the word was now the image. That is why calligraphy became the greatest of Muslim art forms. The importance of the written word – its absorption and its meaning – was also exemplified by the Abbasids’ investment in the Greek-to-Arabic translation movement from the eighth to the 10th centuries.

Also Read: The Future of Free Speech in Pakistan Is Looking Bleaker Than Ever

Consequently, in Al-Farabi’s time, what was most important for Muslims was to control representation through the word. Christian iconophiles made their case for devotional images with the argument that words have the same representative power as paintings. Words are like icons, declared the iconophile Christian priest Theodore Abu Qurrah, who lived in dar-al Islam and wrote in Arabic in the ninth century. And images, he said, are the writing of the illiterate.

Al-Farabi was concerned about the power – for good or ill – of writings at a time when the Abbasid empire was in decline. He held creative individuals responsible for what they produced. Abbasid caliphs increasingly faced a crisis of authority, both moral and political. This led Al-Farabi – one of the Arab world’s most original thinkers – to extrapolate from topical temporal matters the key issues confronting Islam and its expanding and diverse dominions.

Al-Farabi fashioned a political philosophy that naturalised Plato’s imaginary ideal state for the world to which he belonged. He tackled the obvious issue of leadership, reminding Muslim readers of the need for a philosopher-king, a ‘virtuous ruler’ to preside over a ‘virtuous city’, which would be run on the principles of ‘virtuous religion’.

Like Plato, Al-Farabi suggested creative expression should support the ideal ruler, thus shoring up the virtuous city and the status quo. Just as Plato in the Republic demanded that poets in the ideal state tell stories of unvarying good, especially about the gods, Al-Farabi’s treatises mention ‘praiseworthy’ poems, melodies and songs for the virtuous city. Al-Farabi commended as ‘most venerable’ for the virtuous city the sorts of writing ‘used in the service of the supreme ruler and the virtuous king.’

It is this idea of writers following the approved narrative that most clearly joins Al-Farabi’s political philosophy to that of the man he called Plato the ‘Divine’. When Al-Farabi seized on Plato’s argument for ‘a censorship of the writers’ as a social good for Muslim society, he was making a case for managing the narrative by controlling the word. It would be important to the next phase of Islamic image-building.

Also Read: A Sad Song of Musical Censorship in India and Pakistan

Some of Al-Farabi’s ideas might have influenced other prominent Muslim thinkers, including the Persian polymath Ibn Sina, or Avicenna, (c980-1037) and the Persian theologian Al-Ghazali (c1058-1111). Certainly, his rationalisation for controlling creative writing enabled a further move to deny legitimacy to new interpretation.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is an international affairs columnist for The National, The Arab Weekly and The Independent, among others.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Why Sexist and Racist Philosophers Might Still Be Admirable

Kant was racist, Aristotle was sexist, but can we really blame thinkers for the moral blindnesses of their times?

Write a eulogy to David Hume, as I recently did here, and you will be attacked for singing the praises of someone who wrote in 1753-54: ‘I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men … to be naturally inferior to the whites.’

We seem to be caught in a dilemma. We can’t just dismiss the unacceptable prejudices of the past as unimportant. But if we think that holding morally objectionable views disqualifies anyone from being considered a great thinker or a political leader, then there’s hardly anyone from history left.

Emmeline Pankhurst, her British sister in the struggle, became a vociferous supporter of colonialism, denying that it was ‘something to decry and something to be ashamed of’ and insisting instead that ‘it is a great thing to be the inheritors of an empire like ours’. Both sexism and xenophobia have been common in the trade union movement, all in the name of defending the rights of workers – male, non-immigrant workers that is.

Also Read: Karl Marx: Flawed, Manic, and One of Us

However, the idea that racist, sexist or otherwise bigoted views automatically disqualify a historical figure from admiration is misguided. Anyone who cannot bring themselves to admire such a historical figure betrays a profound lack of understanding about just how socially conditioned all our minds are, even the greatest. Because the prejudice seems so self-evidently wrong, they just cannot imagine how anyone could fail to see this without being depraved.

Their outrage arrogantly supposes that they are so virtuous that they would never be so immoral, even when everyone around them was blind to the injustice. We should know better. The most troubling lesson of the Third Reich is that it was supported largely by ordinary people who would have led blameless lives had they not by chance lived through particular toxic times. Any confidence we might have that we would not have done the same is without foundation as we now know what people then did not know. Going along with Nazism is unimaginable today because we need no imagination to understand just what the consequences were.

Why do so many find it impossible to believe that any so-called genius could fail to see that their prejudices were irrational and immoral? One reason is that our culture has its own deep-seated and mistaken assumption: that the individual is an autonomous human intellect independent from the social environment. Even a passing acquaintance with psychology, sociology or anthropology should squash that comfortable illusion. The enlightenment ideal that we can and should all think for ourselves should not be confused with the hyper-enlightenment fantasy that we can think all by ourselves. Our thinking is shaped by our environment in profound ways that we often aren’t even aware of. Those who refuse to accept that they are as much limited by these forces as anyone else have delusions of intellectual grandeur.

When a person is so deeply embedded in an immoral system, it becomes problematic to attribute individual responsibility. This is troubling because we are wedded to the idea that the locus of moral responsibility is the perfectly autonomous individual. Were we to take the social conditioning of abhorrent beliefs and practices seriously, the fear is that everyone would be off the hook, and we’d be left with a hopeless moral relativism.

Also Read: The History of Indian Philosophy, Told Anew

But the worry that we would be unable to condemn what most needs condemnation is baseless. Misogyny and racism are no less repulsive because they are the products of societies as much, if not more, than they are of individuals. To excuse Hume is not to excuse racism; to excuse Aristotle is not to excuse sexism. Racism and sexism were never okay, people simply wrongly believed that they were.

Accepting this does not mean glossing over the prejudices of the past. Becoming aware that even the likes of Kant and Hume were products of their times is a humbling reminder that the greatest minds can still be blind to mistakes and evils, if they are widespread enough. It should also prompt us to question whether the prejudices that rudely erupt to the surface in their most infamous remarks might also be lurking in the background elsewhere in their thinking. A lot of the feminist critique of Dead White Male philosophy is of this kind, arguing that the evident misogyny is just the tip of a much more insidious iceberg. Sometimes that might be true but we should not assume that it is. Many blindspots are remarkably local, leaving the general field of vision perfectly clear.

The classicist Edith Hall’s defence of Aristotle’s misogyny is a paradigm of how to save a philosopher from his worst self. Rather than judge him by today’s standards, she argues that a better test is to ask whether the fundamentals of his way of thinking would lead him to be prejudiced today. Given Aristotle’s openness to evidence and experience, there is no question that today he would need no persuading that women are men’s equals. Hume likewise always deferred to experience, and so would not today be apt to suspect anything derogatory about dark-skinned peoples. In short, we don’t need to look beyond the fundamentals of their philosophy to see what was wrong in how they applied them.

One reason we might be reluctant to excuse thinkers of the past is because we fear that excusing the dead will entail excusing the living. If we can’t blame Hume, Kant or Aristotle for their prejudices, how can we blame the people being called out by the #MeToo movement for acts that they committed in social milieus where they were completely normal? After all, wasn’t Harvey Weinstein all too typical of Hollywood’s ‘casting couch’ culture?

Also Read: Should Ethics Professors Observe Higher Standards of Behaviour?

But there is a very important difference between the living and the dead. The living can come to see how their actions were wrong, acknowledge that, and show remorse. When their acts were crimes, they can also face justice. We just cannot afford to be as understanding of present prejudices as we are of past ones. Changing society requires making people see that it is possible to overcome the prejudices they were brought up with. We are not responsible for creating the distorted values that shaped us and our society but we can learn to take responsibility for how we deal with them now.

The dead do not have such an opportunity, and so to waste anger chastising them is pointless. We are right to lament the iniquities of the past, but to blame individuals for things they did in less enlightened times using the standards of today is too harsh.

Julian Baggini is a British writer and philosopher.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

How to Deal With the Racism and Sexism of Famous Philosophers

If we think that holding morally objectionable views disqualifies anyone from being considered a great thinker or a political leader, then there’s hardly anyone from history left.

Admiring the great thinkers of the past has become morally hazardous. Praise Immanuel Kant, and you might be reminded that he believed that ‘Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites,’ and ‘the yellow Indians do have a meagre talent’. Laud Aristotle, and you’ll have to explain how a genuine sage could have thought that ‘the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject’. Write a eulogy to David Hume, as I recently did here, and you will be attacked for singing the praises of someone who wrote in 1753-54: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men … to be naturally inferior to the whites.”

The problem does not go away if you exclude dead white establishment males. Racism was common in the women’s suffrage movement on both sides of the Atlantic. The American suffragette Carrie Chapman Catt said that: “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.” Emmeline Pankhurst, her British sister in the struggle, became a vociferous supporter of colonialism, denying that it was “something to decry and something to be ashamed of” and insisting instead that “it is a great thing to be the inheritors of an empire like ours”. Both sexism and xenophobia have been common in the trade union movement, all in the name of defending the rights of workers – male, non-immigrant workers that is.

Julian Baggini is a British writer and philosopher. His latest book is How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy (2018).

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Featured image credit: Wikipedia

Why Bertolt Brecht Matters Even More in Our Post-Truth World

In a context of rising intolerance and irrationality, German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht insisted on establishing a rational, scientific attitude between the story on the stage and its viewers, between fiction and reality.

In a context of rising intolerance and irrationality, the German playwright, whose 120th birth anniversary was on February 10, insisted on establishing a rational, scientific attitude between the story on the stage and its viewers, between fiction and reality.

Brecht with Helene Weigel on the roof of the Berliner Ensemble during the International Workers’ Day demonstrations in 1954. Credit: Wikimedia Commons via CC BY-SA 3.0

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) is one of the world’s most performed playwrights. In Mumbai alone in the last few months, two major Brecht productions have been mounted – Quasar Padamsee directed Arundhati Nag in Mother Courage and Her Children, while Imaad Shah, following his father Naseeruddin’s steps, debuted as a theatre director with The Threepenny Opera. It is extraordinary that in our tired, post-ideology, cynical, hopeless world, this German Marxist playwright should continue to speak to younger directors and theatre-makers the world over. Barely a week goes by without a new Brecht production opening somewhere on the planet. Along with Shakespeare, Brecht is a global playwright. Last week, on February 10, was Brecht’s 120th birth anniversary.

Brecht’s plays are, of course, superb – well crafted, entertaining, complex, hard-hitting. But what makes Brecht particularly relevant to our post-truth world is that in a context of rising intolerance and irrationality, Brecht insists on establishing a rational, scientific attitude between the story on the stage and its viewers, between fiction and reality.

European theatre, following Aristotle, was premised upon maintaining the three unities of time, space, and action. Simply put, a single scene has to be set in continuous and chronological time; it has to take place at one location; and it has to have unbroken, continuous action.

When you watch this sort of play in an auditorium, there is a convention that posits that there is an invisible ‘fourth wall’ between the actors and the audience. The actors, therefore, are supposed to be unaware of the presence of the audience and the audience, on their part, are supposed to feel that they are looking into a real-life kind of situation. Everything on stage is supposed to be ‘realistic’ – the sets, the costumes, properties, gestures, speech, everything is aspires to verisimilitude.

Arundhati Nag (right) in Mother Courage and Her Children. Credit: YouTube

The characters on stage seem psychologically and emotionally well rounded and complex. They have a ‘motivation’ or reason to behave the way they do. Even seemingly illogical actions have a logical basis in the emotional makeup of the character. You feel as if you’re watching a slice of life. The play pretends to be real life.

The play, then, is supposed to create for the audience the experience of catharsis – a feeling of increasing emotional saturation, eventually bursting forth in a kind of explosive purification or cleansing. The vicarious experiencing of the fate of the hero, especially if it is a tragic fate, purges the audience of its own emotions.

The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci called this kind of theatre something between a digestive and an aphrodisiac, served to the bourgeois who has three hours to kill between dinner and bedtime.

These settled, bourgeois ideas were shattered by the October Revolution of 1917. As masses of peasants, workers and soldiers blew apart what Lenin called the ‘weakest link’ in the imperialist chain, the world watched with fascination, awe, and delight/terror, depending on the viewpoint of the observer, a world historical drama unfold.

It was a time of innovations. In both Russia, where the revolution succeeded, and Germany, where it failed, writers and directors such as Mayakovsky and Meyerhold, and Brecht and Piscator, created plays that challenged the bourgeois notions of theatre. These were plays that used modern technology extensively, with film projections of real events, recorded radio broadcasts, placards, massive constructivist (therefore ‘non-realistic’) sets, the entry of cars, horses and even armoured vehicles on stage, and ‘historical’, rather than ‘psychological’, characters.

Also read: The Russian Revolution Catalysed an Array of Experiments in Art

On the third anniversary of the October Revolution, in 1920, over 100,000 people watched a recreation of the storming of the Winter Palace of the erstwhile Tsarist regime, staged by literally hundreds of actors, dancers, circus performers and others, at the very place where the events took place.

More than anybody else, Brecht gave these innovations a theoretical basis. He came to call it ‘epic’ theatre. Deeply inspired by Eastern traditions, this was a theatre that strips away its pretense of reality. At all times, it reminds people that what they are watching is only a play. The actors break out into song, or they look through the fourth wall to address audiences directly. Instead of emotional identification, it seeks social distancing. The actor doesn’t inhabit a character by seeming to become one with it; she distances herself from the character by ‘demonstrating’, rather than becoming it. This is the famous ‘alienation’ effect.

The A-effect is perhaps the most misunderstood of all Brechtian strategies. It is often taken to mean that the audiences should feel no emotion, and that they must relate to characters and their actions purely cerebrally. But Brecht didn’t mean that at all. He was all for emotions, so long as they didn’t lead to a cathartic release. In other words, we mustn’t exit the theatre having vicariously enjoyed the protagonist’s story, and thereby absolving ourselves of any responsibility to take action in the real world. For Brecht, theatre did only half the work – the rest had to be finished by the audience, outside the theatre.

For this, Brecht needed a different type of storytelling. In his plays, the story doesn’t move in only one direction to inexorable denouement, it takes a zigzag route, sometimes getting caught up in sub-plots, sometimes jumping events.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Think of our great epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata for instance. The epics keep going off into subplots. Even though they have a small set of central characters, they are teeming with a large cast of very important characters, each of whom has a back story, and who become central characters in their own plots. The narrative jumps forward and back, and often shifts viewpoint from one character to another.

When the epics are played on the stage, as Ramlila for instance, everybody in the audience already knows what is going to happen. No one asks, ‘what next?’ There is no mystery. What keeps the audience engaged is how events unfold – the artistry of the actors, the shifts in perspective, the emotional resonance, the philosophical stance of that particular telling, and so on.

Our theatrical traditions break the three unities all the time. Hanuman stands on the stage, looking into the distance, where he can ‘see’ with his divine sight Sita, imprisoned by Ravan. With one circle of the stage, he announces that he is now in Lanka, at which point Sita walks in and takes her position, seemingly unaware of Hanuman’s presence. The unities of time, space and action are broken effortlessly, delighting audiences who know exactly what is to unfold.

Brecht wrote (and directed) plays that were ‘epic’ in this sense. He frequently announced the main action of the scene before it began, as text on a half-curtain. If the audience already knew what was going to happen, they would have an easier time focusing on why. His was not a theatre that said, ‘This is reality, fixed and immutable.’ Rather, his focus was on getting audiences to be surprised by the commonplace. In other words, rather than blaming Fate or God or Circumstances – often the same thing – and saying ‘This is how it is’, Brecht strove to make audiences see that his characters’ choices were limited by social, historical and economic conditions, and that these conditions themselves were a product of history. If history makes the present, history can also unmake the future.

Think of what some consider Brecht’s greatest play, Mother Courage and Her Children (1939). Set in the 17th century’s Thirty Years’ War, it is the story of a woman who runs a canteen for the Swedish army. Since she sells rations to the soldiers, her very existence depends on the continuation of the war; but this very war also consumes, one by one, her three children. It is impossible to take a moralistic position here. You can hardly condemn her, for she, with all her feistiness, manages to make the most of an impossible situation, but you cannot also see her as a ‘victim’, complicit as she is in an inhuman system that produces war as business.

A scene from a play by Brecht. Credit: Twitter/National Theatre

When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Brecht fled Germany. He was right to fear for his life. Too many of his contemporaries were killed by fascists. Poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, also born in 1898, was killed at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936; the historian Marc Bloch was shot dead by the Gestapo for his role in the French Resistance in 1944; and Brecht’s close friend, the philosopher Walter Benjamin, committed suicide in 1940 even as he attempted to escape Nazi forces on the Spanish-French border.

Changing countries as frequently as people change shoes (as he put it), Brecht landed up eventually in the US in 1941. Here he produced some of his finest work, famously collaborating with the great British actor Charles Laughton on Life of Galileo. He also sought work in Hollywood, mostly unsuccessfully. The only completed Hollywood film he worked on was Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die, which he co-wrote.

In the US, the post-War years were marked by intense anti-communism. Brecht also became a target, and was made to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. His deposition before the Committee almost reads like one of his own plays – he is cunning, clever, ingenious. He plays dumb, pretends he doesn’t understand the language, and blames the translation. He escapes without telling an untruth, or giving anything away either.

As writers and artists face more and more hostile governments, right-wing assertion and a general rise in intolerance, Brecht’s witty, sly, street-smart cunning is yet another reason to rediscover and celebrate him.

Sudhanva Deshpande is an actor and director with Jana Natya Manch, and editor at LeftWord Books.

Voluntary Taxation: A Lesson From the Ancient Greeks

In ancient Athens, taxes were not how the wealth of the rich was shared with the people. Instead, this was achieved by a voluntary alternative: liturgy.

Elements of the Acropolis are thought to have been provided for through the public service of liturgy. Credit: Francesco Bandarin/UNESCO

Imagine a progressive tax – in other words, a tax that falls on those most able to pay; a tax that results in the rich paying – quite voluntarily – more than they are obliged, instead of trying to avoid it; a tax that’s spent according to the person who paid it; a tax that involves little bureaucracy. We have a great deal to thank the ancient Greeks for: to mathematics, science, drama and philosophy, add their taxation system – or rather, lack of – to the list.

The Greeks put taxation in the field of ethics: the liberty or despotism of a society could be measured by its system of taxes. We should admire them not so much for the way that they taxed, but the way that they didn’t. There was no tax on income. Taxes were not the way by which the wealth of the rich was shared with the people. Instead, this was achieved by a voluntary alternative: liturgy.

The word liturgy – from the ancient Greek leitourgia – means ‘public service’ or ‘work of the people’. The idea of benefaction was embedded in the ancient Greek psyche, and had roots in mythology. The Titan Prometheus created humanity and was its greatest benefactor, giving the gift of fire, which he stole from Mount Olympus. The Goddess Athena gave the citizenry the olive tree, symbol of peace and prosperity, and so the city of Athens was named after her.

The philosopher Aristotle developed the theme. His ‘magnificent man’ gave vast sums to the community. But poor men could never be ‘magnificent’ because they did not have the financial means. True wealth consists in doing good, Aristotle argued in the Art of Rhetoric: in handing out money and gifts, and helping others to maintain an existence. The physician Hippocrates, the founder of medicine, was another who believed in this social responsibility, advising doctors: ‘Sometimes give your services for nothing, calling to mind a previous benefaction or present satisfaction. And if there be an opportunity of serving one who is a stranger in financial straits, give full assistance to all such.’

Perhaps the city needed some kind of improvement to its infrastructure – a new bridge, for example. Perhaps a war loomed and military spending was required. Perhaps some kind of festivity was deemed necessary. Then the rich were called upon. They were expected not only to pay for the undertaking, but to carry it out as well: it was their responsibility to oversee the work in question.

The rationale was that the rich should shoulder the expenses of the city, given the unequal share of the community’s wealth they enjoyed. Any contribution was not enforced by law or bureaucracy, but by tradition and public sentiment. The motivation of the liturgist was benevolence, a sense of public duty and – significantly – the reward of honour and prestige. If an assignment was carried out well, the patron’s standing among his fellow elites, as well as ordinary people, would rise. While in early ancient Greece only warriors could become ‘heroes’, later, liturgists could earn heroic status by acting in the public interest for the welfare of others. The result was that many gave more than was expected, as much as three or four times, a far cry from today’s culture of paying as little as legally possible.

The Panathenaic Games were funded by the rich and donated to the city, as was the theatrical festival of Dionysia. The ‘choregy’ involved selecting, financing and training teams to compete in athletic, dramatic or musical contests at the many religious festivals in Athens. To be a choregos was an honour. Many gave more than the minimum required. They would share the praise and the awards their contestants won. Bronze tripods and monuments were erected – many of which remain even today – to commemorate the choregoi who had sponsored the best works.

Many of the buildings of ancient Greece were also constructed by benefactors competing for honour. The Stoa Poikile or Painted Porch of Peisianax in Athens, for example, where stoicism was taught and many paintings displayed, alongside spoils of war. Many works on the Acropolis, possibly even the Parthenon, were also funded by liturgy. Although firm evidence on the latter is lacking, the chryselephantine cult statue of Athena by the sculptor Phidias, who also supervised the construction of the Parthenon in which it was housed, was there through liturgy. (It cost more to build than the Parthenon itself.)

The most prestigious and important liturgy – and by far the most expensive – was the navy, known as ‘trierarchy’. The trierarch had to build, maintain and operate a warship – a ‘trireme’. Triremes kept the Athenian navy strong and shipping lanes free from pirates. Given that Athens was a trading centre (indeed, taxes on trade were another source of government revenue), their role was essential. In many cases, the trierarch was also expected to take command of the ship, unless he chose to pay a concession and leave the fighting to a specialist.

There were anywhere between 300 and 1,200 liturgists in Athens – depending on need (in times of war the number went up) – and the liturgical class was constantly being renewed. Those who were responsible for liturgy volunteered in most cases, although some were assigned by the state. There were also major and minor liturgies, which varied according to the liturgist’s wealth.

No doubt the system was exploited for individual gain, in particular political gain. One of the ways that the young Pericles made his mark, before becoming general of Athens, was by presenting the play The Persians of Aeschylus at the Greater Dionysia festival, as a liturgy, to demonstrate his benefaction. His principal political opponent, Cimon, did the same, gaining public favour by lavishly handing out portions of his sizable personal fortune.

Liturgists who didn’t want to participate risked public scorn. But there were also exemptions – particularly for those with other ongoing liturgies and for previous services rendered to the city. And there was antidosis. A liturgist could argue that another citizen was in fact wealthier and therefore more able to bear the financial burden of the liturgy. That other citizen then had three choices: to accept the liturgy; to submit to a trial in which a jury determined who was the wealthier; or to swap assets. It’s a pretty effective system for determining how wealthy somebody actually is, as opposed to how rich he says he is.

The beauty of the liturgy system was that public works tended to be funded and managed by people with relevant expertise, rather than by some less accountable state official. The benefit was that both personal wealth and personal expertise were shared through the community, without bureaucratic or government involvement. The job tended to be done well because the liturgist’s reputation was on the line.

In this age of the super-rich, perhaps it’s time to revive liturgy. It worked for the ancient Athenians, and perhaps it could work for us.

Dominic Frisby is a financial writer from London. His books are Bitcoin: The Future of Money? (2014) and Life After the State (2013). He co-wrote the documentary Four Horsemen (2012) and hosts the Virgin Podcast.

This article was originally published at Aeon. Read the original here.

When Philosophy Needed Muslims, Jews and Christians Alike

Yahya ibn ‘Adi, once a significant teacher of Aristotelian philosophy, is a fine illustration of the inter-religious nature of philosophy in the Islamic world.

Scholars in a library from the Maqama of Hariri manuscript. Credit: Bibliotheque Nationale/Wikipedia

If you were asked to name the most important philosopher of 10th-century Baghdad, you would presumably not hesitate to say ‘al-Farabi’. He’s one of the few thinkers of the Islamic world known to non-specialists, deservedly so given his ambitious reworking of Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics and political philosophy. But if you were yourself a resident of 10th-century Baghdad, you might more likely think of Yahya ibn ‘Adi. He is hardly a household name now, but was mentioned by the historian al-Mas‘udi as the only significant teacher of Aristotelian philosophy in his day. But ibn ‘Adi is not just a good example of how fame wanes across the centuries. He is also a fine illustration of the inter-religious nature of philosophy in the Islamic world.

Ibn ‘Adi was a Christian, as were most of the members of the group of philosophers who wrote commentaries on Aristotle at this time in Baghdad. The Muslim al-Farabi, who was apparently ibn ‘Adi’s teacher, was an exception to the rule. Completing the ecumenical picture, ibn ‘Adi was involved in an exchange of letters with a Jewish scholar named Ibn Abi Sa‘id al-Mawsili, who wrote to him with questions about Aristotle’s philosophy that he was hoping to have cleared up. Admittedly, Baghdad was an exceptional place, the capital of empire and thus a melting pot that drew scholars from all over the Islamic world. But philosophy was an interfaith phenomenon in other times and places too. The best example is surely Islamic Spain, celebrated for its culture of convivencia (‘living together’). Two of the greatest medieval thinkers, the Muslim Averroes and the Jew Maimonides, were rough contemporaries who both hailed from al-Andalus. After Toledo fell into the hands of the Christians, the Jew Avendauth collaborated with the Christian Gundisalvi to translate a work by the Muslim thinker Avicenna from Arabic into Latin.

That last example is a revealing one. Philosophy in these times often involved representatives of different faiths because it often presupposed translation. Hardly any philosophers of the Islamic world could read Greek, not even Averroes, the greatest commentator on Aristotle. He and other Muslim enthusiasts for Hellenic wisdom had to rely on translations, which had mostly been executed by Christians in the 8th to 10th centuries. Knowledge of Greek had been maintained by Christian scholars in Byzantine Syria, which explains why Muslim patrons turned to Christians to render works by Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen and many other ancient thinkers into Arabic. Thus the very existence of Hellenic-inspired philosophy in the Islamic world was a manifestation of inter-religious cooperation.

All of which is not to say that the Islamic world was free of inter-religious dispute. On the contrary, it seems that one reason those Muslim patrons were interested in Aristotle was that his logic would give them the tools to keep up with Christian opponents in theological debate. A vivid example is provided by al-Kindi, the first Muslim thinker to draw on Hellenic sources. He wrote a short refutation of the Trinity in which he used Greek logic to argue that God must be wholly one, not one and three – mentioning that Christian readers should be able to follow the argument, given their familiarity with logical concepts. A nice twist to the story is that we know of this refutation only thanks to the aforementioned ibn ‘Adi, who quoted al-Kindi in order then to rebut his attack on the Christian dogma.

While men such as al-Kindi were appropriating Greek ideas to defend Islam and attack Christianity, others disapproved of the importation of these same ideas into Muslim culture: al-Kindi responded to unnamed critics who deplored the use of pagan philosophy, and the founder of the Christian Baghdad school got into a public dispute with a Muslim grammarian over the usefulness of Aristotle’s logic. The grammarian mocked the pretensions of the Christian Aristotelians and delighted in pointing out that all this logic had not prevented them from believing that God can somehow be both one and three.

Still, it remains the case that philosophy and the sciences more generally offered a kind of meeting point or neutral ground for intellectuals of different faiths. Muslims, Christians and Jews who shared an interest in Aristotle’s metaphysics or the medical theories of Galen read each others’ commentaries and elaborations on the Hellenic tradition. This is shown even by the disputes that they had with one another: using Greek logic to debate the Trinity implicitly suggested that this was a topic that could be resolved by appeal to reason. And many of the thinkers mentioned above argued that philosophy offered the best resource for the interpretation of sacred texts, whether the Torah, the Christian Bible or the Quran. So it is no coincidence that in the Muslim al-Kindi, the Christian ibn ‘Adi, and the Jew Maimonides, the One God of Abrahamic tradition bears a striking resemblance to the god of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Their shared enterprise as elite philosophers meant that they had more in common with one another than they did with most of their co-religionists.

Peter Adamson is a professor of philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

This article was originally published on Aeon.

Arabic Translators Did Far More than Just Preserve Greek Philosophy

In 10th-century Baghdad, readers of Arabic had about the same degree of access to Aristotle that readers of English do today.

Ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were highly respected in the medieval Islamic world. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In European antiquity, philosophers largely wrote in Greek. Even after the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean and the demise of paganism, philosophy was strongly associated with Hellenic culture. The leading thinkers of the Roman world, such as Cicero and Seneca, were steeped in Greek literature; Cicero even went to Athens to pay homage to the home of his philosophical heroes. Tellingly, the emperor Marcus Aurelius went so far as to write his Meditations in Greek. Cicero, and later Boethius, did attempt to initiate a philosophical tradition in Latin. But during the early Middle Ages, most of Greek thought was accessible in Latin only partially and indirectly.

Elsewhere, the situation was better. In the eastern part of the Roman Empire, the Greek-speaking Byzantines could continue to read Plato and Aristotle in the original. And philosophers in the Islamic world enjoyed an extraordinary degree of access to the Hellenic intellectual heritage. In 10th-century Baghdad, readers of Arabic had about the same degree of access to Aristotle that readers of English do today.

This was thanks to a well-funded translation movement that unfolded during the Abbasid caliphate, beginning in the second half of the eighth century. Sponsored at the highest levels, even by the caliph and his family, this movement sought to import Greek philosophy and science into Islamic culture. Their empire had the resources to do so, not just financially but also culturally. From late antiquity to the rise of Islam, Greek had survived as a language of intellectual activity among Christians, especially in Syria. So when Muslim aristocrats decided to have Greek science and philosophy translated into Arabic, it was to Christians that they turned. Sometimes, a Greek work might even be translated first into Syriac, and only then into Arabic. It was an immense challenge. Greek is not a Semitic language, so they were moving from one language group to another: more like translating Finnish into English than Latin into English. And there was, at first, no established terminology for expressing philosophical ideas in Arabic.

What drove the political class of Abbasid society to support this enormous and difficult undertaking? Part of the explanation is no doubt the sheer utility of the scientific corpus: key texts in disciplines such as engineering and medicine had obvious practical application. But this doesn’t tell us why translators were paid handsomely to render, say, Aristotle’s Metaphysics or Plotinus’ Enneads into Arabic. Research by leading scholars of the Greek-Arabic translation movement, especially by Dimitri Gutas in Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998), has suggested that the motives were in fact deeply political. The caliphs wanted to establish their own cultural hegemony, in competition with Persian culture and also with the neighbouring Byzantines. The Abbasids wanted to show that they could carry on Hellenic culture better than the Greek-speaking Byzantines, benighted as they were by the irrationalities of Christian theology.

Muslim intellectuals also saw resources in the Greek texts for defending, and better understanding, their own religion. One of the earliest to embrace this possibility was al-Kindī, traditionally designated as the first philosopher to write in Arabic (he died around 870CE). A well-heeled Muslim who moved in court circles, al-Kindī oversaw the activity of Christian scholars who could render Greek into Arabic. The results were mixed. The circle’s version of Aristotle’s Metaphysics can be almost incomprehensible at times (to be fair, one could say this of the Greek Metaphysics too), while their ‘translation’ of the writings of Plotinus often takes the form of a free paraphrase with new, added material.

It’s a particularly dramatic example of something that is characteristic of the Greek-Arabic translations more generally – and perhaps of all philosophical translations. Those who have themselves translated philosophy from a foreign language will know that, to attempt it, you need a deep understanding of what you are reading. Along the way, you must make difficult choices about how to render the source text into the target language, and the reader (who might not know, or not be able to access, the original version) will be at the mercy of the translator’s decisions.

Here’s my favourite example. Aristotle uses the Greek word eidos to mean both ‘form’ – as in ‘substances are made of form and matter’ – and ‘species’ – as in ‘human is a species that falls under the genus of animal’. But in Arabic, as in English, there are two different words (‘form’ is ṣūra, ‘species’ is nawʿ). As a result, the Arabic translators had to decide, every time they came across the word eidos, which of these concepts Aristotle had in mind – sometimes it was obvious, but sometimes not. The Arabic Plotinus, however, goes far beyond such necessary decisions of terminology. It makes dramatic interventions into the text, which help to bring out the relevance of Plotinus’ teaching for monotheistic theology, repurposing the Neoplatonic idea of a supreme and utterly simple first principle as the mighty creator of the Abrahamic faiths.

What was the role of al-Kindī himself in all this? We’re not entirely sure, actually. It seems clear that he did no translating himself, and he might not even have known much Greek. But it is recorded that he ‘corrected’ the Arabic Plotinus, which could have extended to adding his own ideas to the text. Evidently, al-Kindī and his collaborators thought that a ‘true’ translation would be one that conveys truth, not just one that has fidelity to the source text.

But al-Kindī wasn’t satisfied with this. He also wrote a series of independent works, usually in the form of letters or epistles to his patrons, who included the caliph himself. These letters explained the importance and power of Greek ideas, and how these ideas could speak to the concerns of ninth-century Islam. In effect, he was like a public relations man for Hellenic thought. Which is not to say that he slavishly followed the ancient predecessors who had written in Greek. To the contrary, the originality of al-Kindī’s circle lay in its adoption and adaptation of Hellenic ideas. When al-Kindī tries to establish the identity of the first principle in Aristotle and Plotinus with the God of the Quran, the way has been prepared by translations that already treat that principle as a creator. He knew what we are apt to forget today: that translating philosophical works can be a powerful way of doing philosophy.

Peter Adamson is a professor of philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is the author of several books, including The Arabic Plotinus (2002) and Great Medieval Thinkers: al-Kindi (2007) and Philosophy in the Islamic World (2016), and hosts the ‘History of Philosophy’ podcast.

This article originally appeared on Aeon.