0.6 The end of the west  (Page 4/19)

The destruction of these led to decline. The Seljuks (1052–1157 CE) suppressed diversity of thought in the east, standardizing schooling in the madrassahs and enforcing political consolidation and religious orthodoxy. In Baghdad, the Asharite scholar Al-Ghazali (1058–1111CE) denounced the ancient Greeks as non-believers and attacked those who employed their methods and ideas as ‘corrupters of the faith’. The Abbasid caliph closed the doors of ijtihad (interpretation of the Qur’an and sunna) in the Sunni tradition in the 13th century, restricting it to the heads of the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafi’i, and Hambali schools of law. The motivation was political: experiencing challenges on many fronts, the Abbasids sought to outlaw other sects. Restricting ijtihad, however, led to intellectual stagnation as new solutions to new challenges gave way to taqleed (imitation).

The Mongol invasion ended the Abbasid caliphate in 1258; and the Spanish Inquisition brought the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Iberia in the West. The success and advancement of the European paradigm led to the dominance of the ‘West’, through the Italian renaissance, the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of discovery, then those of the Dutch and the English, the Protestant Reformation, the Peace of Westphalia, the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. While there was a cultural renaissance in the East under the Ottomans, under whose patronage Sin’an designed the Suleymaniye mosque and 334 other buildings and whose empire survived until the end of the First World War; the Safavids in Iran, and the Moguls in India, the dominance of the Islamic realm had passed.

The Rise of the West

In the 13th century, when the Abbasids were near their nadir, the papacy began to assert itself, aiming to establish control over Christendom. Scholars in the monasteries and the new universities debated doctrinal aspects of the relations between church and state. These exchanges, informed by Latin translations of Aristotle and Ibn Rushd’s commentaries, led to a new role for the Scholastics, the most famous of whom was Thomas Aquinas. These scholars and their successors facilitated the progressive unification of Christian Europe. Latin, in the Christian realm, paralleled the role of Arabic in the Islamic and new insights in theology, law, philosophy, liberal arts and architecture spread as leading scholars travelled between monasteries and courts, across kingdoms.

Aquinas’ greatest contribution was his application of Aristotelian methods to the natural and political orders, paving the way for the secular state. Robert Grosseteste introduced experimental method into science in Christian Europe, and emphasised the importance of measurement. Thanks to these two men, scientific method, exact measurement and secular efficiency became, over the next few centuries, the defining features of Western modernity. The first two features had characterised the Islamic realm. Aquinas and Grosseteste were deeply indebted to their Islamic predecessors.