De Lacy O'Leary

“ Philosophy was no longer a subject confined to one group of scholars who were interested in Greek writings, but had spread out until it reached the mosques, and could no longer be thrust aside as an heretical aberration, and in its outspread it had penetrated the Jewish schools as well. ”

“ The activity of brain and nerves, according to Ibn Rushd, are due to the presence of an external force; not only, as Aristotle teaches, at least according to Alexander Aph.'s interpretation, is the highest faculty of the reason due to the operation of the external one Agent Intellect, but the passive intellect on which this agent acts is itself part of a great universal soul, which is the one source of all life and the reservoir to which the soul returns when the transitory experience of what we call life is finished. ”

“ In ethics the only distinction between good and evil is based on God's will, and our only knowledge of that distinction is obtained from revelation. If God forbids theft it is wrong only because God forbids it ”

“ In this story we have the picture of two islands, one inhabited by a solitary recluse who spends his time in contemplation and thereby raises his intellect until he finds that he is able to apprehend the eternal verities which are in the One Active Intellect. The other island is inhabited by ordinary people who are occupied in the commonplace incidents of life and follow the practices of religion in the form known to them. ”

“ Ibn Rushd's views do not receive much attention or criticism from Muslim scholars, but the Christian scholastics brought two main arguments against this theory, one psychological, the other theological. The psychological objection is that it is entirely subversive of individuality: if the conscious life of each is only part of the conscious life of a universal soul there can be no real ego in any one of us; but there is no fact to which consciousness bears clearer witness than the reality and individuality of the ego. ”

“ In all the earlier systems this passive intellect was regarded as purely individual and as operated on by the emanation of the universal Agent, but Ibn Rushd regarded the passive intellect also as but a portion of a universal soul and as individual only in so far as temporarily occupying an individual body. Even the passive powers are part of a universal force animating the whole of nature. ”

“ In course of time the recluse, who is perfectly well aware of the neighbouring island and its inhabitants, begins to feel great pity for them in that they are excluded from the more perfect felicity which he enjoys, and in an honest desire for their welfare, goes over to them and preaches the truth as he has found it. ”

“ In treating the doctrine of the Divine Unity he is chiefly concerned with opposing the Christian teaching of the Trinity, but incidentally is compelled to deal with the idea of God and the Divine attributes, and in doing so maintains that none of the Aristotelian categories can be applied to God. As to the human will he defends its freedom, and his task is mainly an effort to reconcile this with the omnipotence and omniscience of God. In the fragment on Exodus he refers to the commands of revelation and the commands of reason, these latter, he asserts, being based on philosophical speculation. ”

“ The series of Greek, Punic, Roman, and Gothic settlements had left no permanent mark on the Berber population, on their language, or on their culture. At the time of the Arab invasion the country was theoretically under the Byzantine Empire, and the invading Arabs had to meet the resistance of a Greek army; but this was not a very serious obstacle, and the invaders were soon left face to face with the Berber tribes.
The Muslim invasion of North Africa followed immediately after the invasion of Egypt, but the internal disputes of the Muslim community prevented a regular conquest. ”

“ Intermediate between these two strata are those who have not attained the use of pure reason—which, with Ibn Rushd, seems to be simply intuition—but are capable of argument and controversy by means of which their faith can be defended and proved; "demonstration" proper is not to be laid before these, but it is right to enter into argument with them and to assist them to rise above the level of those whose belief is based only upon authority. ”

“ Amongst the Muslims Ibn Rushd has not exercised great influence; it was the Jews who supplied the bulk of his admirers, and they, scattered in Provence and Sicily by Muwahhid persecution, seem to have been chiefly instrumental in introducing him to Latin Christendom.
His chief medical work was known as the Kulliyat, "the universal," which, under the Latinized name of "colliget," became popular as a manual in the mediæval universities where the Arabic system of medicine was in use. ”

“ Modern historians tend to condemn the later severities of Christian rulers towards their Muslim subjects, and often seem to speak of those subjects as the peaceable and cultured population which had lived under the Umayyads and the Murabits. But Spain's last experience of the Muslims was of the fierce, bigoted, and persecuting Muwahhids, whose tone was very different. Strangely, however, it was under these intolerant rulers that Spanish Islam passed through its golden age of philosophical speculation, and not only so, but the philosophers were protected and favoured by the Muwahhid court. ”

“ The religion of Islam spread rapidly amongst the Berbers, but it took a particular development, which shows a survival of many pre-Islamic religious ideas. The worship of saints and the devotion paid at their tombs is a corruption which appears elsewhere, on lines quite distinct from the Asiatic beliefs as to incarnation or transmigration, and in the west this saint worship takes an extreme form, although here and there are tribes which reject it altogether, as is the case with the B. Messara, the Ida of South Morocco, etc. ”

“ The religious duty of the pilgrimage has always been an important factor in promoting the common life of Islam, and there is abundant evidence that the Spanish Muslims looked steadily eastwards for religious guidance, accepting the hadith, the canon law, and the development of a scientific jurisprudence as it took shape in the east. Both Muslims and Jews travelled to Mesopotamia in order to complete their education, and thus kept in contact with the more cultured life of Asia. ”

“ Muslim rule in North Africa west of the Nile valley was commenced under conditions very different from those prevailing in Egypt and Syria. The Arabs found this land occupied by the Berbers or Libyans, the same race which from the time of the earliest Pharaohs had been a perpetual menace to Egypt, and which, on the Mediterranean seaboard, had offered a serious problem to Phœnician, Greek, Roman and Gothic colonists. ”

“ Ibn Hazm lived at a time when the Umayyads of Cordova were already in their decay, and in 422 the dynasty fell. Very soon the whole of Andalusia was split into a number of independent principalities, and this was followed by a period of anarchy, during which the country was exposed more and more to Christian attacks, until at length Mu'tamid, King of Seville, fearing that the Muslim states would disappear altogether under the tide of Christian conquest, advised his co-religionists to appeal for help to the Murabit power in Morocco, which, with much misgiving, they did. ”

“ This leads us to the teaching of asceticism as the discipline of the soul for its spiritual progress, and the ascetic and solitary life is the ideal proposed by Avempace. This ascetic and contemplative hermit life is not, however, in any sense a religious life, for in this respect Avempace has advanced far beyond al-Farabi; he is fully conscious that pure philosophy cannot be reconciled with the teachings of revelation, a conviction which now marks the definite separation of the "philosophers" from the orthodox scholastics of Islam, such as al-Ghazali and his school ”

“ But between the purely spiritual being of God and the crudely material observed in the bodies existing in this world are intermediate forms of existence, such as angels, souls, etc., wherein the form is not impressed upon matter. ”

“ Gradually the Arabs spread all along North Africa and down to the desert edge, their tribes as a rule occupying the lower ground, whilst the older population had its chief centres in the mountainous districts. ”

“ The highest of these are those whose religious belief is based on demonstration (burhan) , the result of reasoning from syllogisms which are à priori certain; these are the men to whom the philosopher makes his appeal. The lowest stratum contains those whose faith is based on the authority of a teacher or on presumptions which cannot be argued out and are not due to the exercise of pure reason ”

“ Very often we find Jews occupying high positions at court and in the civil service, and these favourable conditions seem to have prevailed until the time of the Muwahhids, for it does not appear that the Murabits, for all their fanaticism, took any measures against Christians or Jews. ”

“ For centuries afterwards the Arab control was precarious in the extreme, revolts were constantly taking place, and many Berber states were founded, some of which had an existence of considerable duration. ”