Destiny Disrupted

100 DESTINY DISRUPTED

when they looked into Plotinus, they found that he had constructed his
system with rigorous logic from a small number of axiomatic principles,
which aroused the hope that the revelations of Islam might be provable
with logic.
Further exploration revealed that Plotinus and his peers were merely
the latest exponents of a line of thought going back a thousand years to a
much greater Athenian philosopher named Plato. And from Plato, the
Muslims went on to discover the whole treasury of Greek thought, from
the pre-Socratics to Aristotle and beyond.
The Abbasid aristocracy took great interest in all of these ideas. Anyone
who could translate a book from Greek, Sanskrit, Chinese, or Persian into
Arabic could get high-paying work. Professional translators flocked to
Baghdad. They filled whole libraries in the capital and in other major cities
with classic texts translated from other languages. Muslims were the first
intellectuals ever in a position to make direct comparisons between, say,
Greek and Indian mathematics, or Greek and Indian medicine, or Persian
and Chinese cosmologies, or the metaphysics of various cultures. They set
to work exploring how these ancient ideas fit in with each other and with
the Islamic revelations, how spirituality related to reason, and how heaven
and earth could be drawn into a single schema that explained the entire
universe. One such schema, for example, described the universe as ema-
nating from pure Being in a series of waves that descended to the material
facts of immediate daily life-like so:

Indivisible Being

J.

First Intelligence

J.

World Soul

J.

Primitive Matter

Nature

Spatial Matter

J.