Between Hell and Heritage

The ingenious way how cultures trademark their intellectual heritage

Photo by Sam@Carlton School

Around the twelfth century, amidst the brooding courts-men of the Spanish Caliphate, a meekly figured man with a kind regard for both Aristotelian philosophy and popular ideals of his time, spoke on the vulnerability of the nature of truth. This, however did not earn him much respect, instead he was disdainfully thrown out of the court, and his philosophy labelled as impure and corrupt. That man, which is today hailed as Averroes did struggle quiet, in his time, to avoid problems with the Islamic authorities, moreover this was his unlucky moment.

A sophisticated view of the past would reveal that there is a plethora of similar instances, when the intellectual minority of a community or civilization got into screeching friction with the mass populace. This is not confined to only philosophy or the study of the natural world, but also art, poetry and music. Some of it, do make itself into the popular consciousness, but some of the more non-digestible forms remain seated on the shelves, yellowing and rotting with time, and only occasionally discussed in the academic squares.

Averroes, or more precisely, Ibn-Rushd was not alone in the staggering ‘clash of the philosophies’, there were many who were received and seen with contempt by the larger population in their own times, and even in times today. Amongst them, the more famous or rather infamous were Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi, who were considered “too deviant” that some scholars discussed their status as Muslims. Ibn al-Qayyim (1292- 1350) and other Islamic scholars, clearly declared them as extreme and disbelieving.

The history of intellectual developments, is not simply the history of the people. It is the history of class, caste, economics, and politics. To say that Egyptians made the pyramids, Indians wrote the Kamasutra, Westerners drafted democracy and freedom of thought, and Muslims made algebra would be an exceedingly immature and unsavory assessment of the past. Today, many Christians in the West would proudly boast about the “civilized” modes of thinking possessed by the westerners but they would surely not like to talk about how historically those civilized modes of thinking, which they take for so much granted came about in the first place. And they assuredly would not like to mention the incalculable exiles, torments and blood sheds of the free-thinkers and rationalist who gave and perpetuated the modern ideals by putting the Church’s teachings under scrutiny. But the way cultural trademarks rulebook works, the “credit goes to the whole Western civilization! Big round of applause, everyone”

The Kamasutra and other pieces of writings from the Gupta and subsequent periods, popularly regarded as the golden age of Hindu civilization too divulges a similar picture. The philosophical and sensual writings were the product by and for the elitist rulers and courtesans. The clergy and religious perception of the wider population resembled nowhere close to it. Indians did not write the Kamasutra, the people who had leisure, time in vain and tax money in their pockets did. The masses simply ploughed land, sowed seeds, prayed to gods and harvested food, only to give it away in the taxes.

                                                                                                                                        We don’t know how many Averroes were expelled or scorned at, and how many got into serious troubles, but it is vehemently celebrated as the “golden age of Islamic civilization”. Only a few however, will ever bother to dig and know, for example what al-Razi, whose contributions in chemistry and medicine were unmatchable at the time, thought about miracles and revelation.  And what his “heretical” works such as The Prophet’s fraudulent tricks, or On the refutation of revealed religion undertake about the wider orthodox conceptions.

This takes us back to the ingenious way how cultures mark their intellectual territories through panoramic generalizations and uniformity, throwing the scrupulous contextualization of history, politics, economics and socials far off in the reality dustbin, never to be hunted and picked out again.