The pursuit of learning

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1991 by Juan Vernet

IT was only in al-Andalus that scholars of the early Middle Ages had access to the entire corpus of scientific knowledge of their time written in Arabic, Hebrew, Greek or Latin.

To take one example of the transmission of knowledge to Muslim Spain, Byzantine envoys took there a copy of the Materia Medica, a well-known treatise by the first-century-AD Greek doctor Dioscorides. By comparing it with an existing Arabic version, it was possible to fill in many gaps, notably with regard to the precise identification of plant species. This task was carried out in collaboration with a monk named Nicolas, who came from the East expressly for the purpose.

In the same circle of scholars were the Jewish minister and doctor Hasday ben Shaprut; Ibn Juljul, historian of medicine and pharmacology; and also perhaps the great surgeon Abu al-Qasim az-Zahrawi, known to Christians as Albucasis, whose work was soon translated into Latin. He wrote an outline of all the medical knowledge of the day, providing descriptions of such diseases as haemophilia and scabies, of various surgical instruments, even of a way of using a particular variety of ant to heal wounds.

Maslama al-Magriti's name also belongs on the list. The works of this Madrid-based astronomer and alchemist circulated in digest form in Western Europe almost as soon as they were written, thanks to Latin adaptations prepared by the Mozarabic monks of the monastery of Ripoll in Catalonia. From there they were dispatched to monasteries in the Rhine valley, notably Saint Gall in Switzerland and Reichenau in Germany.

In the tenth century the natural passage still used by modern tourists travelling from central Europe to Spain was the only means of communication between the peninsula and the rest of the continent. The route through the central and western Pyrenees had been closed since the defeat of Charlemagne at the battle of Roncevaux in 778.

The importance thus accordedk to Catalonia explains why the oldest surviving astrolabe, a hybrid product of the Arab and Visigothic cultures, is set to function at the latitude of Barcelona. It was to the Catalan marches that the young Gerbert of Aurillac, later to become Pope Sylvester II, travelled to study science. By the time he returned to France, he had learned so much that at first he was taken for a necromancer or magus. It was some time before the new knowledge that he helped to introduce to Europe--of such subjects as decimal numbers, the abacus, the construction of astrolabes, sun-dials, armillary spheres and other instruments--became widely available there.

When the quit the Iberian peninsula, Gerbert knew that he was leaving behind him not jut a land whose scientific culture was vastly superior to that of Christendom but also one whose researchers (if one can use that word to describe tenth-century scholars) were making continued progress in their respective fields. In order to keep abreast of their work, Gerbert corresponded with an acquaintance in Barcelona--one Lupitus, recently identified as the archdeacon Sunifred--whom he requested to send him the latest writings from al-Andalus.

A fruitful partnership

In the same way, Christian envoys to Cordoba such as Gomar, the future Bishop of Gerona, profited from their residence in al-Andalus to cooperate with their Muslim counterparts. Gomar wrote a chronicle of the Frankish kings at the request of the future caliph al-Hakam II al-Mustansir. An edited version of this work was soon circulating in the Orient, and it has come down to us in the great Arab traveller and encyclopaedist al-Masudi's Murudj al-Dhahab.

The same ruler was also responsible for the enlargement of the palace library, which eventually contained some 400,000 volumes,k only one of which has survived. His bibliomania drove him to pay a fortune for any book that caught his interest. That is why the first copy of Abu al-Faradj' Ali Al-Isfahani's "Book of Songs", a collection of poems set to music that contains much information on social and cultural life during the first centuries of Islam, was known in Cordoba before it was in the Orient.

It has been established from the dates at which some surviving works were important that it was possible for books to make the journey from the Orient to Cordoba and then on into the Christian world in less than two years. The speed with which knowledge was transmitted can be explained by the close collaboration that existed between scholars of different religious and cultures. For instance the monk Recemundo, author of a celebrated liturgical calendar, was successively Andalusian envoy to the Holy Roman Empire, to Constantinople and to Jerusalem. His work, which was amalgamated into the Book of Maladies of Arib ben Sa'd, a doctor and civil servants who was his contemporary, contains popularized elements of Indian and Iraqi astronomy as well as a mention of the great astronomer al-Battani.

The Christian writer Orosius's Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans (Historiarum adversus paganos Libri VII) was translated into Arabic by two men, Qasim ben Asbagh, a Muslim cadi or judge, and his Christian counterpart, Walid ben Khayzuran. The treatise known as the Mathematica Alhandrea probably had a similar genesis. A series of brief texts in Latin, it contains in more or less accurate form the Arabic names of many stars, among them Rigel, Betelgeuse, Altair, Vega and Aldebaran--appellations that are still familiar today.