During the early days of the Islamic caliphate, around the 8th and 9th centuries, the Arab Muslim world was at the peak of civilization. These are the days when Europe was still in its dark ages, brought about by the fall of Rome and the collapse of Byzantium. The library of Alexandria had been in decline for a long time. Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun took the House of Wisdom, founded by his predecessor as a repository, and turned it into a major research library where they translated the ancient works of Aristotle and Plato and where they held the knowledge of the ages. Al-Ma’mun was a follower of the Mutazilite philosophy of rationalist (as opposed to mystical, which is Sufi or fundamentalist which is represented by Salafi) Islam, taken from extensive study of Aristotle in that great library in Baghdad. It was the Mu’tazila which made the Islamic Golden Age work — it was confident and purposeful and tolerant. But, as those with power are wont to do, al-Ma’mun became oppressive and, in order to silence Ahmad ibn Hanbal whose literalist, simplistic, fundamentalist, populist teachings on Islam he found distasteful, he unleashed what is called the Islamic Inquisition — or the Mihnah. Of course, as violence and oppression tend to, this only empowered the ideology of ibn Hanbal and created a martyr. Hanbal is, of course, the founder of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence, out of which has come the Wahhabi sect and the Salafi philosophy — both of which are the source of ISIS and Al Qaida.
Over the centuries, the Mu’tazila lost touch with the common people while the Hanbali school grew. Resentment built; frustration at inequality, military setbacks (to the Mongols), everyday failures were interpreted as disfavor by God towards a caliphate that lost its divine ordination. The sacking of the House of Wisdom is seen by many as the final nail in the coffin of the Golden Age, and Islam since then has entered its own dark ages, which it is still in.
The Mu’tazila is now seen as a cult, a little bit like Mormonism to Christians for example, and no good modern Muslim will admit to being an adherent.
The Mu’tazila is the point of departure for my novel, “Lords of Misrule,” set in the libraries of Timbuktu. Timbuktu reached its peak in the early 1300s, about 50 years after the sacking of the House of Wisdom. I imagine (though I don’t have definitive proof) that many of the books that escaped the Mongols’ wrath ended up in the Timbuktu libraries (along with many of the teachers and philosophers, or the next generation). Timbuktu ended up with a library of more than 500,000 books, most of which are untranslated (a lot of them are written in Bambara using middle Arabic script. Painstaking to translate though I think AI could probably do it quickly these days). They are sitting in Bamako today, since Timbuktu is again besieged by jihadis. My novel is about the radicalization of a young Tuareg boy, due to life circumstances, and his deradicalization in the libraries of Timbuktu — especially through contact with the al-Mughni, the definitive work of of Mutazilite philosophy written by Abd al-Jabbar in Basra in the early-to-mid 1000s (it was a 20 part commentary, of which only 12 have been found — in Yemen). I don’t mention the Mu’tazila in the novel, those who hear the thoughts of Aliuf, the protagonist, will know where his ideas are coming from. Mine is an uncommon novel, about an uncommon period and uncommon ideas that made a people great, before they fell away. It’s available in Spanish, English and French — for those interested.
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