Hazhir Teimourian - Middle East Analyst and Commentator
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Did Islam help, or hinder, civilization

The History of paper from China to Europe 2002

An intriguing question for me in history is what course would civilisation have taken in the Middle East if, early in the seventh century, the Byzantines and Persians had not fought each other to exhaustion for 20 years and laid themselves open to the ill-equipped, ill-trained fighters of an impoverished new sect in the hinterland of Arabia. Could it have been that, if Islam had been quashed or confined to Mecca as yet another Jewish heresy to die out later, the ancient civilisations of Persia, Syria and Egypt would have continued to flourish? Or would they have ceased to innovate because Islam did not come along to blow new breath into them?

This is not idle daydreaming for want of something better to do. Life is too busy for that. In these days of renewed Islamic assertiveness, it is a question that constantly imposes itself on us. In particular, it rams itself down this writer's throat whenever a scholar produces a book, or the BBC makes a new documentary series, that lavishes praise on the achievements of "Islam". But it is not generally approved to ask it, specially by the powers that be. It challenges the propagandists of the 'multi-cultural society' and goes for the very jugular of the exploding number of Islamic studies departments in western universities, let alone the millions of Saudi-financed imams who claim that the whole world grappled in the darkness of Jahiliyah, ignorance, before the Muslims came out of the Arabian desert to make the planet an environment fit for angels.

So when I began to read this wonderful book*, I expected the worst, especially since its author, a professor at Boston College in the United States, had been behind a BBC television series entitled: Islam, the Empire of Faith, not long ago. But my fears did not prove wholly justified. Professor Bloom only occasionally gets carried away by his enthusiasm for his speciality and, in the meantime, the story of how the knowledge of paper making travelled through the Islamic lands on its way from China to Europe to make possible the modern age of printing is hypnotically told every stride of the journey.

It is a pity, then, that the book's title is likely to lead many potential readers into assuming that it is exclusively about the world of Islam. Leaving aside the index and a bibliographical chapter, a whole quarter of it describes the beginnings of paper making in China over 2000 years ago and, later, how it made printing with movable type economically viable in fifteenth century Europe. Furthermore, even the parts that deal with the Islamic lands make frequent digressions into other corners of the world. If you make a habit of skipping over the occasional unfamiliar name, you will find your persistence richly rewarded.

What makes paper possible is the tendency of tiny fibres of cellulose to bond together to make a material of exceptional strength and durability. Combine this with the abundance of wood fibre in the world and you can see why, once invented, paper would beat its most tenacious rivals, papyrus and parchment, with ease. One more advantage, specially for the keepers of commercial accounts and official decrees was that, once touched with ink, paper could not be washed or scratched without crying forgery.

Not that good quality paper could be produced from the beginning without several centuries of experimentation and ingenuity. At first, the sheets of refined and dried fibre were too rough and uneven. Gradually, finer pulps were found and sizes such as starch were applied to produce a surface that allowed a brush to glide over it without splodges. By the early seventh century, when Islam was born, paper in China had become so cheap and common – at least among the well-to-do – that it was used as lavatory paper.

Long before Islam, though, Buddhist monks had taken the knowledge of making paper, ink and brush everywhere they went in Asia to help spread their creed. So it is that, we find, the merchants of Samarkand on the eastern fringes of the Iranian world wrote letters in their local, Soghdian, language as far back as the fourth century.

That for our knowledge of the history of paper in the early medieval world we are dependent on samples of the medium having survived the ravages of climate and time, reveals one of the weaknesses of this book. It would seem that for paper to survive in any particular place, the clouds needed to take their moisture elsewhere, the local barbarians had reign in their instinct to burn every book they saw, and the local mice had to educate their stomacks. Thus very few fragments of ancient paper have survived the wet climate of eastern China, while it is more than sad that, as some historians would have us believe, India, the centre of Buddhism, "did not have paper until, in the late Middle Ages, the Muslims arrived with it".

The discovery of that Soghdian letter from Samarkand was one of the most fortuitous finds in the history of western scholarship. Early in the last century, the British explorer Sir Marc Aurel Stein found an undelivered mail bag in an abandoned watchtower along the Silk Road in north-western China. The Soghdian letter, now in the British Library, is so legible that it would seem it were written yesterday. It is also of such high quality that it makes the reader ask for how long had the inhabitants of Samarkand been accustomed to paper by the time it was written. Another 30,000 paper rolls were discovered elsewhere in the region. Most are in Chinese, but they also include some written in Sanskrit and Middle Persian. The implication for historians is immense.

Iran at that time had thriving populations of Jews and Christians who were in constant communication with Constantinople and Alexandria. Is it conceivable that they would not have taken paper – and perhaps even the technique of making it – deep into the western world a long time before the Muslims say they discovered paper in Central Asia in the eighth century? Is it also not likely that Muslim Arabs found many hundreds of books written on paper in the Persian royal library of Ctesiphon (near today's Baghdad) when they burnt it down in 637? What about the several libraries of Alexandria which were burnt down on the orders of the caliph Umar (r. 634-44)? According to one Muslim account, there were so many books in those libraries that they kept dozens of public baths in the city fuelled for weeks.

Contrary to the message that professor Bloom conveys, it would seem to me that Islam actually interrupted the transfer of paper to Europe. As with the resistance that they later showed towards printing – it took them several hundred years after Gutenberg had invented movable type around 1450 – the early Muslims wrote their few records on papyrus. Furthermore, after they acquired the knowledge of making paper from the Buddhists of Samarkand, they clung to it jealously. It was not until the eleventh century that the Italians were able to set up their first paper mill.

More generally, it is said that the vastness of the early Muslim empire, with its single official language, unified currency and drunkard, fun-loving caliphs, facilitated the transfer of goods and ideas from the east to the west, as well as in the other direction. The claim implies that if Sasanian Iran and Byzantine Egypt had remained as they were, such commercial and social intercourse would have been impeded. This surely runs in the face of all historic evidence. As far back as the year 53 BC, the Parthian emperor of Iran, Orodes II, habitually watched ancient Greek plays in the original language, and in the late fifth century, when the Byzantine emperor Zeno closed the main school of Aristotelian philosophers in Edessa, the learned men migrated to Iran. As for Greek-speaking Egypt under the Byzantines, it was a centre of intellectual ferment before the Muslims almost ruined it.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell had this opinion of the contribution of Muslims to the modern world:-

"Arabic (i.e. Muslim) philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna (a Persian) and Averroes (a Spaniard) are essentially commentators. Speaking generally, the views of the more scientific philosophers come from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists in logic and metaphysics, from Galen in medicine, from Greek and Indian sources in mathematics and astronomy; and among mystics religious philosophy has also an admixture of old Persian beliefs".

Enough ranting! This luxuriously produced and most satisfying history ought to be bought by every self-respecting library and by every lover of books. I have touched upon only a few of its delights here.

*Paper Before Print : The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World
By Jonathan M. Bloom, Yale University Press, Cloth Bound 270pp, 48 colour plates, £35.

By Courtesy of the Literary Review, London, May 2002
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