Islam and the West… for a better world @
between the Arab Muslims and their Arab Christian cousins in lower Euphrates and the Jazira regions engendered the early Muslim theological debate, evolving later into Islamic theology, or kalam . 5 Muslims, too, were exposed to Byzantine legal culture, not only in the form of legal rulings but also in the form of social and economic organizations. 6 Although the debate is still raging about the origin of the waqf and muhtasib institutions, 7 it is hard to imagine that the existence of similar institutions in the Byzantine city exercised no influence on their development in Islamic traditions. Some students of Islam believe that even the Islamic problematic notion of abode of war/abode of Islam ( dar al-harb / dar al-Islam ) is, in fact, a reflection of the Roman understanding of the world. In most cases, Muslims inherited Byzantine cities in Syria intact, and chose to maintain these cities as they found them, with only some modifications that included, among others, the introduction of the all-embracing mosque ( al-masjid al-jami‘ ) into the urban environment. 8 Byzantine design and architecture can be easily discerned in early Islamic buildings, including the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. The impact of Greek philosophy on Islamic philosophy has been widely recognized and extensively studied. Muslim-Arab translations of Greek sources began in earnest in the early decades of the third Islamic century. Later Muslim attacks on philosophy, most notably by al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyya, on the one hand, and the elitist nature of the Islamic 5 W. Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Oxford: Oneworld, 1998), 183. 6 Hallaq, The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law , 25-28. 7 The office of muhtasib developed, perhaps during the time of al-Ma’mun, from the office of sahib al-suq , whose functions were similar to that of the agoranomos in the Byzantine city. For a discussion of the office of muhtasib , see Cl. Cahen and M. Talbi, EI2 , s. v. “Hisba”. On the debate about the waqf institution, see Patricia Crone, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law: The Origins of the Islamic Patronate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); R. Peters, et . al. , EI2 , s. v. “Wakf”. 8 Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1991), 27-28; S. M. Stern, “The Constitution of the Islamic City,” in A. H. Hourani and S. M. Stern (eds.), The Islamic City (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1970), 25-50; Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies , 62-63.
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