(All those who creep stealthily tremble [at the thought]!);
Their trouser-bands stymied my pleasure [at first]
But then, with subtle art, I untied them
To reveal each man’s quivering backside...^6
Although scurrilous, such poetry, beautifully and cleverly written, was appreciated as
adab, a literature (both in verse and prose) of refinement. (Adab means “good
manners.”)
Shoring up the regime with astrological predictions; winning theological debates
with the pointed weapons of Aristotle’s logical and scientific works; understanding the
theories of bridge-building, irrigation, and land-surveying with Euclid’s geometry—
these were just some of the reasons why scholars in the Islamic world labored over
translations and created original scientific works. Their intellectual pyrotechnics won
general support. Patrons of scientific writing included the caliphs, their wives,
courtiers, generals, and ordinary people with practical interests. Al-Khwarizmi
(d.c.850), author of a book on algebra (the word itself is from the Arabic al-jabr),
explained that his subject was useful for “inheritances, bequests, tax assessments,
legal verdicts, commercial transactions, land surveying, water rights, [the construction
of buildings, and the digging of canals].”^7 The same scholar also wrote the first
Arabic treatise on the Indian method of calculation—Indian numerals are what we
call Arabic numerals—and the use of the zero, essential (to give one example) for
distinguishing 100 from 1.
How should one live to be pleasing to God? This was the major question that
inspired the treatises on hadith (traditions about the Prophet) that began to appear in
the Abbasid period. Each hadith began with the chain of oral transmitters (the most
recent listed first) that told a story about Muhammad; there then followed the story
itself. Thus, for example, in the compilation of hadith by al-Bukhari (810–870) on
the issue of fasting during Ramadan (the yearly period of fasting from sunrise to
sunset), he took up the question of the distracted “faster who eats and drinks from
forgetfulness”:
‘Abdan related to us [saying], Yazid b. Zurai‘ informed us, saying,
Hisham related to us, saying: Ibn Sirin related to us from Abu Huraira,
from the Prophet—upon whom be blessing and peace—that he said: “If
