Free God's Battalions by Rodney Stark, David Drummond Page A

found the great guide; to them he became the ‘first teacher.’ Having accepted this a priori, Muslim philosophy as it evolved in subsequent centuries merely chose to continue in this vein and to enlarge on Aristotle rather than to innovate.” 29 This eventually led the philosopher Averroës and his followers to impose the position that Aristotle’s physics was complete and infallible, and if actual observations were inconsistent with one of Aristotle’s teachings, those observations were either in error or an illusion. 30
    Attitudes such as these prevented Islam from taking up where the Greeks had left off in their pursuit of knowledge. In contrast, knowledge of Aristotle’s work prompted experimentation and discovery among the early Christian scholastics. Indeed, then as now, one’s reputation was enhanced by disagreeing with received knowledge, by innovation and correction, which motivated scholastics to find fault with the Greeks. 31 And there were many faults to be found.
    BOOKS AND LIBRARIES
     
    As noted, central to all claims concerning the superiority of Muslim culture has been their possession of translations of many books by classical authors. But books must be kept somewhere, and large collections of books can be identified as libraries—whether these are the collection of books belonging to individuals or are institutions devoted to acquiring and preserving books. There is sufficient evidence of the existence of both kinds of libraries in Islam, dating back to early days. Indeed, libraries confronted the conquering Muslim armies all across the Middle East and North Africa. Some of these libraries had survived from pagan times; others were created by Christians and Jews. Among the Copts in Egypt, “every monastery and probably every church once had its own library of manuscripts.” 32 All across Byzantium, the Orthodox clergy sustained libraries. At their great centers of learning, the Nestorian Christians maintained huge collections of books. There seems to have been nothing very unusual about the story of a Nestorian monk who checked out a book from the monastery library every week and devoted most of his waking hours to pondering and memorizing it. 33 Thus it was demonstrated to the early Muslims that if they “were to make use of the diversified knowledge to which they fell heir, they must have books, preferably in the Arabic language, and these books must be preserved in safety and rendered accessible to readers.” 34
    However, the notion that Muslims valued libraries is contrary to the controversial claim that they burned the huge library at Alexandria. 35 The story is told that after the conquest of Alexandria, the Muslim commander inquired of the caliph ‘Umar back in Damascus as to what should be done with this immense library, said to contain hundreds of thousands of scrolls. ‘Umar is said to have replied, “[I]f what is written in them agrees with the Book of God [the Qur’an], they are not required: if it disagrees, they are not desired. Therefore destroy them.” 36 Thus the general distributed the scrolls to the four thousand baths of the city to be used as fuel, and the burning took six months.
    This story has provoked very angry responses from many admirers of Islam despite the fact that the leading Western historians (including Edward Gibbon) have rejected it, most being satisfied with the tradition that the library was burned by accident when Julius Caesar conquered Egypt. Nevertheless, Asma Afsaruddin angrily charged that the story reflects nothing more than Christian hatred of Muslims, 37 ignoring the fact that the story first appeared in the thirteenth century in an account written by a Muslim Egyptian historian! It was then repeated by other Muslim writers, including the famous Ibn Khaldn. 38 That the charge that the caliph caused the great library to be burned was leveled by Muslims does not increase the likelihood that it is true; the first account was written about six