When Asia Was the World: Ibn Sina and the Intan Shipwreck

I talked last week about the ease of travel that Islamic cultural hegemony brought to the Asian world before Europe dealt itself into the game. The next two chapters in Stewart Gordon's When Asia Was the World illustrate what things actually traveled along the regulated, if not entirely pacified, paths under the Caliphate. Each chapter deals with one of the two most enduring things in history, ideas and commerce.

Now, a lot of people when they think of history think of the rise and fall of empires, the triumph of armies, the erection of great wonders, or the biographies of conquerors on horseback. But all of that fades with time. What endures is the progress of technology, the dangerous evolution of new ideas, and the sustenance of daily barter. And these things depend on conquered highways to move from town to town, region to region, culture to culture. Who has conquered these highways will always change with time--Umayyads yield to Abbasids, Khans yield to Tamerlanes, who yield in turn to Turks to Crusaders to Hapsburgs to redcoats. The sun sets on all empires. But whoever holds the umbrella, the busy traffic of goods and gimmicks, of truck and tricks of science, carries on. And to the extent that the traffic in education, science, engineering, and commerce, a civilization advances.

Chapter three tells us about a man known then as Ibn Sina, the son of an Afghan scholar cum court official. His name and groundbreaking advances in sciences was transmitted to the western world as Avicenna. He lived in an age when the unity of Islam was splitting into regional powers--Persia in the east, Spain in the Maghreb, Damascus and Baghdad and Cairo and Istanbul holding regional power in indirect competition. Ibn Sina himself held onto ideas that the ruling powers in Persia considered dangerous and spent his life on the move, traveling from one minor kingdom to the next, seeking a court sponsorship to carry on his research in exchange for his counsel in war, his engineering advice for improving civic life and health, and the prestige of hosting a brilliant, if dangerous mind.

The critical availability of paper in this age made learning more transferable than in ages past. Ibn Sina wrote numerous books that became an important bridge between classical Europe and the medieval world. He was a Neoplatonist--a dualistic worldview that led men to question God's plans and intentions and challenged the strongly material and more Aristotelian approach of mainstream Islam. Building on Galen's flawed theory of the four humors, Ibn Sina wrote books describing his experiments in treating medical patients. Although the theory itself was seriously misdirected from scientific truth, his unwavering commitment to recording his trials and errors in medicine led to improved medical care and more detailed examinations of medicines, anatomy, and hygiene. He was a polymath, as most learned men were in those days, the fields of science having yet to calcify into the distinct fields we think of. He wrote books on philosophy, politics, metaphysics, pharmacology, geology, and a range of other topics. Whatever stuck his ranging intellect, he dove in and the scope of his inquiry led generations of his readers--thanks to the spread of paper technology--to expand on this thinking.

His exchange of ideas with leading Jewish, Chinese, and Hindu scholars led to a flowering of human knowledge on scale with the golden days of Athens. He and his contemporaries laid the foundation for the European Renaissance. This was the real import of the Asian community in the years we call medieval--not that an intellect like Ibn Sina occurred, but that he had so wide of range of prior leaning to draw on and that so many others would benefit from his thoughts in future centuries.



What sustained this world was greatly what sustains today's "integrated world" in our current post-Cold War world of globalization. Trade, even a thousand years ago was the donkey that pulled the cart of human intellect and science. Professor Gordon is able to focus this fact into one recent shipwreck undergoing aquatic archaeology today: the Intan shipwreck found 45 miles off the south coast of Borneo in 2004. Buried in the sands on the floor of the Javan Sea for most of the past 10 centuries, the shifting currents allowed the wrecked Chinese merchant vessel to reemerge and reveal its forgotten artifacts.

Aboard in transit were mirrors, ironwares, and ceramics from China, glass beads from Indochina, Buddhist statuettes of bronze and terra cotta from Bengal, spices from around the Indian Ocean rim, cotton from the Malabar Coast of western India, and middling quality glass wares from the Fertile Crescent area--probably slated for recycling. Tin, which is common in the western half of the Old World, was rare and greatly prized in the Orient. And thus tin ingots, probably slated for alloys, was possibly the second greatest prize aboard the all wood vessel that sank in Javan waters those ten centuries past. All together, they tell the story of a hemisphere connected more by trade than by diplomacy and conquest.

It's instructive to us today to realize that where trade of roughly mutual benefit prevailed, peace held and learning blossomed. By implication, where trade in later centuries become less even handed and governments more intrusive into the business of business, the peace could not hold and nations resorted to arms.

Of course it's fanciful to think of trade being a truly global experience for most sailors and merchants of the day. Traders moved not from one extreme of the known map to another as their cargoes did. Rather, each leg of the journey for this far traveling cargo would have been handled by a different ship and crew, with each subsequent merchant pulling a slight profit off the top. Transportation was the greatest cost added to swatch of silk moving from China to India to Persia to Egypt. Trade alone made few men wealthy--the risks, as revealed by the fact that it's a shipwreck that informs us of the past, usually offset most of the occasional profits.

But still the trade happened, through successes and failures. Hope, as much as imperial rules, held a community of medieval Asia together. What we've learned since has rested more on peace and commerce than war, including the resulting technologies that have made each subsequent descent into war ever less civilized.

Wallabies are malicious drug fiends

This is something I would have never guessed. I know that some animals like to get their buzz on. I've seen birds in my neighborhood eat the inedible-for-human berries that grow on some bushes and then flit about in a stoned out state. But when it comes to wallabies, I just assumed these level headed marsupials knew better than to get high and cause mischief.

I was wrong.

These violent, antisocial hooligans get doped up old school--eating poppies straight off the flower and then go about vandalizing nature with reckless abandon. Goddamn you, you freaked out stoner wallabies, Goddamn you indeed!

from the Beeb online:

'Stoned wallabies make crop circles'

Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said.

Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania, said the kangaroo-like marsupials were getting into poppy fields grown for medicine.

[...snip...]

Australia supplies about 50% of the world's legally-grown opium used to make morphine and other painkillers.

"The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," Lara Giddings told the hearing.

"Then they crash," she added. "We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."

I fear this is only the tip of the iceberg. Marsupials on poppies may be humorous at first glance, but what happens when these vicious hoppers start developing a tolerance for raw opiates? This could be their gateway drug to the hard stuff--cocoa beans, cannibus, ecstasy. When will the madness end?

When Asia Was the World: Ibn Fadlan

One of the most annoying people on tv is the celebrated conservative drunkard Christopher Hitchens. Now I'm not without some admiration for the man. He writes well and he rigorously applies the principles of his thinking without partisan coloring. This is not to say he has no party--he's clearly a doctrinal conservative--but the man does not sacrifice his principles for the sake of party loyalty, adapting his opinions to the convenience of the leaders he agrees with most of the time. He calls them as he sees them, even if the way he sees them is, as noted above, terribly annoying.

So I don't fault the consistency of his intellect; I only fault the maturity of it. It's more than the open contempt he shows for anyone who disagrees with him, but maybe it's that core of disrespect, that surface only quality to his thinking that bothers me. A case in point is the book he wrote last year and paraded about on all the talk shows on which he gives good face, God Is Not Good. The title itself displays the bluntness of his plodding faculties. The title, as the book itself does, invokes a simplistic world view--things are either good or not good, no room for nuance or perspective here. Now I'm not a person to dismiss that there are moral absolutes in the world; I believe there are. But I wouldn't infer from that that we live in a world that is cluttered with absolutes. In the subtle universe of human behaviors and beliefs, true moral absolutes are a rarity. How the conception of the divine interacts with humans in their historical affairs is certainly one area that woud be entirely too filled with subtleties and complexities to allow us to say revering and following the dictates of God can be something entirely good or entirely bad.

Hitchens, of course, isn't really arguing that God is good or not good. In his book, he argues that God isn't at all. With all the zeal and surety of an 8th grade intellect, he lays out a two point case that (1) God is the figment of a collective superstition and (2) that figment has caused deep and irreparable harm to human society without a compensating good during the history of the world. Of course we all can recall arguments from fellow adolescents to the effect, "What good is religion? After all, religion caused the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition; religion causes terrorism today. All the wars and suffering of history got justified by men in the name of God. Grown ups only tell you to believe in God so that you'll go to heaven and not worry about things sucking right here on earth."

Hitchens lays out the case a bit more cleverly, but doesn't deviate much from this thesis. He holds to the view that religion is little more than a parasite feeding off of the material success of civil society. The inadequacy of this view is underscored in the second chapter of Stewart Gordon's When Asia Was the World. Gordon, in reviewing the journey from Baghdad to the kingdom of the Bulgars by Ibn Fadlan in the 10th century, draws out the absolute necessity of religion in the creation of civil society. That is, without the development of patriarchal, monotheistic, domineering religions, with all their harms and benefits to mankind, civilization would never have become secure and stabilized enough for religions to feed off of them.


In the first chapter, Gordon walks us through the Buddhist world of 7th century east and south asia. In the story of Ibn Fadlan 300 years later, it is the Islamic empire built by the Caliphs while the Tang Dynasty stagnated and the Europeans wallowed in the Dark Ages that a violence-justifying religion brought commerce, luxury, enlightenment, and peace to a wide swath of the known world. It wasn't the human propensity to truck and barter that laid the foundation for the success of the Caliphate; it was the Muslim faith, acting as a social cement.

Gordon provides an instructive contrast. Whether it's Mongolia, Macedonia, Rome, Tsarist Russia, Gilded Age America, or Arabia Felix, new empires always arise from the periphery. In the medieval world on the fringes of settled civilizations, Ibn Fadlan traveled in his life from the semi nomadic region of his birth to the semi nomadic lands that his fame today rests on. The patterns of interaction between the Cains and Abels, between the settled communities and the nomads of both the Arab desert and the central Asian steppes were nearly identical. While there was a necessary commerce between the wandering herdsmen and the town dwellers, trading animal hides and meat for grains, metalworks, and handicrafts, more often than not the conflicts between their cultures led to feuding and violence.

Herding tribes fought one another for dominance of the wilds between towns in ever expanding and shifting systems of alliance of tribute. Towns competed with each other across barriers of language, culture, and positioning along the great transAsian trade routes. The small kingdoms pushed back the barbarian nomads and the nomads raided the towns for plunder. Without a coherent system for consolidating identities and loyalties to the diverse language and culture groups, no empire could ever hold sway for long. The introduction of a coherent monotheistic faith gave an overarching common ground for these cultural mosaics; and being a religion, this common ground could realistically assert itself as the moral high ground when disputes between regional interests erupted.

Now this is not to suggest that 10th century Islam was a peaceful or culturally homogenous realm--far from it. Islam surpasses even Christianity in the intractability and vehemence of its doctrinal schisms. The blend of local customs into the faith and the politics of regal conversions as always complicated the religious, commercial, and military alliances that held the civilization together. Ibn Fadlan's mission itself was a political and economic failure. The king of the Bulgars had been less than honest in his supplications to the Caliph. King Almish didn't want to convert to Islam--he was already a Muslim--but only sought a display of wealth from the Caliph to intimidate his local rivals.

Ibn Fadlan himself never delivered the money the king had requested--and which it turned out Almish didn't need anyway. The importance today of Ibn Fadlan's journey isn't his political accomplishments, but the journal of descriptions he left of the Viking raiders he called the "Rus." His objective and accurate descriptions, coming from a scientific culture that valued factual accuracy more than mythology gives a unique outsider's view of this preliterate Norse culture as well as the scope of world commerce afforded by the stability of the Islamic unification of central Eurasia.


Both the political stability and the rational historical records are gifts of monotheism, whether Abrahamic or Taoistic. Next time your teenager, or your inner teenager, starts ranking on how insidious religion is, remind him that religion also created as well as corrupted human society. I mean, after you beat him senseless in the name of Baby Jesus, that is.