اضمحلال التأثير الإسلامي - القرن 13 عصر التعليم .. السيمياء تنتقل من الشرق الى الغرب

The Decline of Islamic Influence - The Thirteenth Century: The Age of Education... Alchemy Moves from East to West

The Decline of Islamic Influence

In the thirteenth century, the spirit of free inquiry that characterized Muslim scholars was doomed to disaster by a Mongolian military leader known as Genghis Khan, who surged his forces from Asia in 1227 and became the greatest conqueror the world had ever known. Terror was his plan; those who surrendered were required to pay tribute; those who refused were subjected to plunder, pillage, murder, and destruction. After his death, his sons invaded Europe and Russia. The third Great Khan attacked the Islamic state. After eliminating the Assassins along the way, he marched on Baghdad, where his forces sacked and pillaged the city. They wrapped the last Caliph in a carpet and killed him under the hooves of horses, as a superstition warned against shedding his blood.

The Mongol invasion shattered major Arab cities, destroying libraries, manuscripts, and schools. The Arabs' task became to salvage what could be salvaged without developing anything new. In 1260, the myth of the invincible Mongols was shattered with the defeat of one of their generals, and an era of terror and fear came to an end. However, by this time, Arab thought had been completely obscured. The Arabs—like other nations that preceded and followed them—had built intellectual and physical walls. Their knowledge had been preserved and then passed on to the West by then.

The 13th Century: The Age of Learning

Invasions continued to ravage Europe during the 13th century, but what remained of the former Roman Empire was strong enough to resist them.

The population was small, and feudalism was prosperous, but the free cities were growing, and with them centers of learning. Universities were established in Naples, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Seville, and Siena.

The universities of the time were of two types: those of Italy, Spain, and southern France were owned and run by students themselves. They appointed (and dismissed) teachers and set their salaries. In contrast, universities in northern Europe were composed of teachers' associations. Each faculty of arts, theology, law, and medicine had an elected dean. The faculty provided financial support for boarding for poor students.
But when it became clear that the system worked best if all students resided at the colleges, the colleges became centers of study and residence.

Students at that time were similar to students today, except for the entry age, which in the 13th century was between 12 and 15 years old. There were reports of drunken confrontations between students and local bullies. Students in Paris were caught playing dice in the altar at Notre Dame. The public often denounced universities as harbors of heresy, paganism, and worldly indulgence. Students were said to seek theology in Paris, law in Bologna, and medicine at Montpellier, but nowhere were they seeking a life pleasing to God (4).

Yet, even amid these celebrations, the educational process took place. The medium of instruction was the lecture, with students writing their notes on wax tablets and later discussing their writings. The curricula at these early universities included grammar, rhetoric, and logic or dialectics for the bachelor's degree, while studies for the master's degree included arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. There was little history or natural science. Monks from the Mendicant Order, or alms-bearing groups such as the Franciscans or Dominicans, taught at universities for a living, and through this process, Arabic translations spread from monasteries into the medieval world.

The Church initially denounced the newly translated works of Aristotle, and there were some points of contention and controversy, such as Aristotle's concept of an eternal world and the idea of ​​no reward or punishment after death. Furthermore, the Church was hostile to rationalism, the use of human reason as a substitute for faith in the search for answers. The Church Fathers were particularly hostile to Aristotle's works on natural science, even forbidding their teaching. However, the study of these sciences continued (perhaps the ban encouraged their illegal study). Thanks to the efforts of religious apologists such as Thomas Aquinas—who argued that reason and faith were not incompatible if they both originated from the same divine source—natural sciences were once again legitimately studied, and by the mid-thirteenth century, they had become a requirement for a Master of Arts degree.

Information continued to flow as a result of contact with the Arabs and Asia. But the Mongols were focused on the economic benefits of conquest rather than on intellectual disciplines. They were tolerant of local religions and customs as long as they did not interfere with tax collection. Trade by road between China and Europe became easier during the Mongol era, and they actually encouraged this trade.

Venetian merchants, including Marco Polo, as well as Muslim and Jewish traders, made these trade journeys (in 1163, there was a Jewish lodge in China). Chinese technologies found their way through These paths, such as the use of gunpowder in bombs and rockets, were similar. At this time, India was commercially and alchemically active, and the "Sucranites" were written, providing numerous recipes for manufacturing gunpowder. Muslim alchemists were not as productive as before, but they continued to quietly contribute to the West through trade and translation.

The exchange of information was not always regular. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Crusaders—motivated by various motives, including the search for wealth, cultural zeal, and religious fervor—attacked Constantinople, plundered and burned it, looted it, killed and raped many, and trampled underfoot its treasure trove of books. The Venetian Crusaders, who later joined the Crusades, recognized the value of books and attempted to save some of them. However, most of them were lost, and with them the channel of knowledge and learning that connected the West to the East, represented by Constantinople, was cut off.

Regardless of how knowledge arrived in the West, much of it was already in the hands of new academics in their new institutions. Historically, these scholars did the logical thing to expect: they began collecting and recording everything they knew, both new and old, in a condensed and convenient format. They began writing encyclopedias.