Djelloul Marbrook

This is far too specialized country for me to explore, but I would like to suggest that it might be worth exploring. We in the West are inheritors of the Greek ideal of physical beauty. But Middle Eastern thought is haunted by the idea of veiled beauty. We in the West are inheritors of the Aristotelian ideal of naming and categorizing, but Middle Eastern thought is comfortable with the nameless, mystery within mystery.

I suspect this difference lies at the heart of our misunderstanding, today more than in the Middle Ages, because the West is now less constrained by religious tenet from celebrating physical, especially female beauty. Our billboards, films, advertisements and fine art stand in stark contrast to the Islamic tendency to conceal what is treasurable. They offend Muslim sensibilities as surely as veiling women offends Western feminists.

Aristotle’s profound influence on Western thought has not stifled mysticism. There is a rich strain of it in Judeo-Christian tradition. But his influence has been decisive in science, medicine and mathematics, so much so that we tend in the West to obscure how much we owe the Muslim Arabs, Persians, Turks, Berbers and Indians in these fields.

In the West the dichotomy between these disciplines and metaphysics is broad and deep, deeper even than, say, the gap between homeopaths who treat symptoms and those who treat the whole body. But the Muslim East managed to make immense strides in science, medicine and mathematics without indulging such a dichotomy.

For example, the concept of the British exchequer, with its modernist money strategies, comes straight from the Arab mathematicians of Toledo, Spain, which the Arabs call al-Andalus. The Normans of England, like their Norman cousins in Sicily, appreciated the Arabs’ preeminence in these fields.

Similarly suggestive is our word for alchemy, which we associate with medieval attempts to turn base metals into gold; it is simply the Arab word for chemistry with its article, al-Khemiya. And while the Arabs certainly hoped to transmute base into noble metals they simultaneously entertained the notion that in its deepest sense alchemy is the transmutation of the human soul from base to noble. It has never been a stretch or a strain in Muslim thought to associate science and spirituality.

My hope is that by respecting these differences the East and West can defang the simpleminded dimwits in their midst. This would mean that the Muslims would come to appreciate that we can no more renounce our heritage from the Greeks, with its insistence on the connectedness of physical beauty and truth, than they can renounce their profound sense of the connectedness of spirituality and science. It would mean further that they must respect that we are as inspired by physical beauty as they are inspired by hidden mysteries.

Can they appreciate our reverence for Primavera? Can we appreciate that they would choose to veil what is prized, whether it be the chasteness of women or the beauty of secret gardens or truths secreted in poetry and song? Can there be such respect? It’s not a matter of live and let live, but of understanding.

I think the chances of such broad cultural understanding are as great or small as the chances of understanding between Shia and Sunni, Jew and Muslim, Christian and Muslim. Extremism is the enemy. Whoever insists that all must bow down before one religion or one sect is the enemy. If that shoe fits, wear it, whether you are Muslim, Christian or Jew.

—DM