First we may notice a separating out of certain parts of philosophy that are more popular than others. In the world of Islam, we see a number of consequences of this playing out through the centuries. Writing it down is imperative for them, in order that this new knowledge may exist after the death of the original thinker. For philosophers at the highest level, it will be likely that whatever they come up with in terms of new ideas, they will be the only ones to know of it in their lifetime. When a subject is so arcane or advanced, it will be near impossible to find somebody else to impart this unique knowledge to. In order for knowledge to survive and to be accessible, it needs to spread among a large enough number of people to sustain the inevitable death of each of these people. If that person passes away, the knowledge will be lost too. The first time an idea is conceived, there will be only one person who knows that idea: the one who invented it. By that I mean that many ideas expressed by philosophers are of such difficulty that only very few will be able to understand them. Secondly, philosophy is bookish because of the unique nature of the knowledge that it produces. So, those interested in philosophy will have to work with written texts from the very beginning of their studies. It cannot be broken up into smaller pieces that live on their own.
For a philosophical idea, only all the logical steps together form one thing (namely, the idea). This means that one Hadith can stand on its own and it is merely the desire to know an ever larger quantity of them that requires an expert in Hadith to write them down. This complicated nature is similar to the large quantity that required pursuers of Hadith to write books, but with the difference that whereas one Hadith is still cogent, one step of a philosophical argument is not.
This is firstly because the ideas expressed in philosophy are of such a complicated nature, involving so many logical steps, that people would quickly lose their train of thought would they have to do it without the aid of a written text. Philosophy is one of the disciplines that has made Islam such a ‘bookish’ civilization, because philosophy is done mostly on paper. The oral nature of Hadith Studies remains visible in the written Hadith collections, in the isnād that precedes every Hadith: a chain of people that details from who the author heard the Hadith, back to the source.įor philosophy, the case becomes more complicated. The sheer volume of Hadith required people to take some of the burden off their memory and onto paper, much like an external hard drive. This is clear from the writings on Hadith, one of the first genres to be committed to paper. As in any culture, Muslims started writing as an aid for their memory. This flies in the face of the oft-repeated idea that the Islamic civilization was firstly an oral culture.
“Life withers but writing remains,” wrote master-calligrapher Abū ʿAmr ʿUthmān al-Warrāq in the eleventh century, as he finished another copy of the Koran. It has been said that “in spite of all the real and affected reverence paid to memorized knowledge, Muslim civilization, as much as any higher civilization, was a civilization of the written word.” As such, the civilization of Islam has been called “one of the most bookish of pre-modern cultures.” And it is not just modern scholars who think so. It appeared last year in Turkish, in Sabah Ülkesi vol. A small article on why manuscripts kept being popular in the Islamic world until very late.
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