Teaching and Learning the Sciences in Islamicate Societies (800-1700)

336 Pages·2018·2.609 MB·English

by  Sonja Brentjes

Teaching and Learning the Sciences
in Islamicate Societies (800–1700)
Studies on the Faculty of Arts
History and Influence
Volume 3
Editors
Luca Bianchi (Milano)
Jacques Verger (Paris)
Olga Weijers (Paris)
Editorial Board
Amos Bertolacci (Pisa)
Dragos Calma (Dublin)
David Lines (Warwick)
Colette Sirat (Paris)
Teaching and Learning
the Sciences in Islamicate
Societies (800–1700)
by
Sonja Brentjes
F
Cover illustration: Folio from a Mihr-u Mushtari (The Sun and Jupiter) by Shams al-Din
Muhammad Assar Tabrizi (d. ca. 1382); verso: Mihr at school; recto: text, Shah Shapur
sends Mihr and Mushtari to school. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.: Purchase – Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1932.5.
© 2018, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photoco-
pying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
A shorter and modified version of a part of chapter 2 has already been published in
IHIW Volume 5 number 1-2, 2017, Brill.
D/2018/0095/80
ISBN 978-2-503-57445-5
eISBN 978-2-503-57446-2
DOI 10.1484/M.SA-EB.5.112709
Printed on acid-free paper.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 9
CHAPTER 1: CONTEXTUALIZING LEARNING AND
TEACHING OF THE SCIENCES IN ISLAMICATE SOCIETIES 17
1.1. The Beginnings 18
1.2. The Early Abbasid Period 19
1.3. A Period of Consolidation, Synthesis, and Contests 21
1.4. B reakdown, Reorientation, and Reconfirmation in the
Wake of the Mongol Conquests 24
1.5. C hange as the Norm? A Further Wave of New
Empires and Dynasties 26
1.6. Consolidation, Climax, and New Challenges 27
1.7. Comparisons 30
1.8. Postface 31
CHAPTER 2: TEACHERS AND STUDENTS AT COURTS AND
IN PRIVATE HOMES (EIGHTH–TWELFTH CENTURIES) 33
2.1. Limited Resources 35
2.2. S tories about the Transfer of Philosophy and Medicine from
Alexandria to Baghdad 37
2.3. Teaching the Mathematical Sciences 38
2.4. Teachers and Students 42
2.5. Postface 65
CHAPTER 3: SCHOOLS OF ADVANCED EDUCATION 67
3.1. The Legal Status and Formalities of Advanced Education 68
3.2. Teaching Non-Religious Disciplines at Religious Institutions 70
3.3. Processes of Professionalization and Specialization 71
3.4. Secretaries, Animals, and Foreigners 75
CHAPTER 4: THE SCIENCES AT MADRASAS 77
4.1. Mathematical Disciplines 77
4.2. Medicine and Pharmacology 91
6 TABLE OF CONTENTS
4.3. Natural Philosophy 98
4.4. Divination, Magic, Alchemy 107
4.5. Postface 111
CHAPTER 5: OTHER TEACHING INSTITUTIONS 113
5.1. Learning and Teaching at Hospitals 115
5.2. Family Education 131
5.3. Travel for the Sake of Knowledge 135
5.4. Postface 144
CHAPTER 6: TEACHING AND LEARNING METHODS 147
6.1. Meetings, Teachers, and Goals 149
6.2. Reflections on Creativity and Professional Control 155
6.3. Reading, Writing, Speaking, Seeing 161
6.4. Tradition, Ingenuity, and Discursive Method 168
6.5. “The Etiquette of Scholarly Disputation” 177
6.6. Commentaries and Super-Commentaries 181
6.7. Postface 185
CHAPTER 7: ENCYCLOPAEDIAS AND CLASSIFICATIONS
OF THE SCIENCES 187
7.1. Philosophical Perspectives and Works 194
7.2. Administrators and Their Encyclopaedias and Knowledge Systems 204
7.3. Madrasa Teachers as Writers of Summas and Divisions 211
7.4. Postface 221
CHAPTER 8: TEACHING LITERATURE AND ITS TEMPORAL
GEOGRAPHIES 223
8.1. Euclid’s Elements and the Middle Books 227
8.2. Other School Texts for Geometry 237
8.3. Arithmetic, Algebra, and Number Theory 239
8.4. Astronomy and Astrology 243
8.5. Medicine 247
8.6. Logic and Natural Philosophy 255
8.7. Postface 262
TABLE OF CONTENTS 7
APPENDICES 263
Table 1. I slamicate Dynasties Prominently Mentioned
in this Book 263
Table 2. Ancient Scholars 264
Table 3. Scholars from Islamicate Societies 266
Table 4. Muslim Rulers 286
BIBLIOGRAPHY 289
Primary Sources 289
Secondary Sources 292
INDEX 305

INTRODUCTION
The learning and teaching of scientific disciplines has a long history in
Islamicate societies. The societies that play a role in this history may
appear surprisingly numerous to some readers. Contrary to the older
historiography that claimed that the sciences declined or even disappea-
red from Islamicate societies at some time – the precise timing of such a
“decline” varied from author to author, ranging from as early as the ele-
venth century to as late as the sixteenth – questions about nature, the
heavens, human bodies, numbers, surfaces, and solids continued to be
taught and studied at schools in many Islamicate societies well into the
nineteenth century. Since no one can cover all of them exhaustively, I had
to make some choices. The obvious selection criterion was the extant
material about particular societies and its relevance for a history of lear-
ning and teaching scientific disciplines. As a result, we will visit Baghdad,
Isfahan, Shiraz, Samarkand, Mecca, Damascus, Cairo, Tunis, Tlemcen,
Sivas, and Istanbul as important centres of learning and teaching. But
we will also hear of provincial towns, villages, or fortresses, where some
manuscripts were copied, read, and annotated. The main primary sources
of this book are handwritten texts, but also images of various kinds, ins-
truments, and other material objects. They are today found in museums
and public libraries across the world. Too many are also stored away in
private collections, often not accessible for research. The loss of pertinent
information through this private policy of investment and exclusion is
tremendous.
The scientific disciplines that will be discussed in this book appear in
Arabic, Persian, or Turkic texts and schemata under different classifica-
tions. The starting points can be found in Arabic and Syriac translations
of ancient Greek philosophical, medical, and doxographical texts com-
posed in the learning and teaching environments of the different Greek
philosophical and medical schools in Athens, Alexandria, Pergamon,
and Rome, to name only a few cities where such schools flourished in
Antiquity. Although Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars adhered
closely to what they learned from such translations, the many changes
in intellectual life caused visible modifications, rearrangements, and
10 TEACHING AND LEARNING THE SCIENCES
innovations in the ways they classified the sciences. Over time, the ori-
ginally much more narrow term ʿilm (religious knowledge), and in par-
ticular its plural ʿulūm, opened up to include all kinds of knowledge,
ranging from religious disciplines through philological, philosophical,
and mathematical disciplines to literary, historical, and the ghariba disci-
plines, often summarily translated as “occult sciences”.
Some of the last were clearly seen as mathematical sciences. In some
societies, they were even considered the most valuable of the sciences.
Examples are magic squares of numbers and letters, geomancy (a method
of divination through arrangements of groups of points in sand), and
astrology. In the eyes of its practitioners, astrology shared with alchemy
a scientific status grounded in natural philosophy, metaphysics, mathe-
matics, empirical knowledge, and experience. In this book, I will allow
some room for these disciplines, although our knowledge of how they
were learned and taught is often fairly limited. That is why my focus will
be on the mathematical sciences, as understood by their practitioners in
past Islamicate societies. For them, the mathematical sciences included
number theory, geometry, astronomy, and theoretical music as the funda-
mental sciences of mathematics, and optics, the science of weights/heavy
bodies, magic squares, algebra, systems of calculation, burning mirrors,
the science of timekeeping, and others as branches of these fundamental
sciences. I will also address medicine, and questions belonging to natural
philosophy in so far as the primary and secondary sources available to me
speak about their presence in the classroom or the textbook. My geogra-
phical and historical focus in most of the following chapters will be on
Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, partly because it is for cities in those regions
that I have information about what was taught and which methods were
applied in the classroom. But I will also – as far as possible – pay atten-
tion to North Africa west of Egypt, Anatolia, parts of Ottoman Europe,
Central Asia, and India. I will rarely mention al-Andalus, South East Asia,
and sub-Saharan Africa, simply because I do not know enough about the
schools, their literature, and the teaching methods in those regions.
My explicit acknowledgment that students are as important to a
history of education in the scientific disciplines as teachers reflects the
individualistic and informal character of education in Islamicate societies
before the introduction of modern Western systems to the Middle East,
North Africa, and South Asia during the nineteenth century. This is not