Week: 7. Development of Muslim Culture under Umayyads and Social and Intellectual advancement in the fields of Education and Science

The thoughts of a people distant in time or space cannot be at all deeply shared without our becoming acquainted with things and ideas important to them but of which we have had no exact equivalent. As far as possible, one wants to read the works themselves in which the thoughts have been expressed; in these, even in translation, the special concepts and categories of the writers, as well as the personalities and places referred to, must be reproduced (if the translation is serious) in forms alien to the usual flow of English, no matter how much the resources of English may have been adapted or even twisted to do duty for what remain alien conceptions. The same is, in some degree, true of any "vork treating of the alien civilization. The serious reader must be prepared to think in novel ways. To this end, he must be prepared to absorb as readily as possible a whole range of new concepts and terms. Otherwise he cannot expect to profit seriously by a study of the culture; at most he will receive an impression of exotic quaintness, romance, or incongruity which does no justice to the human reality. Though Islamicate culture has been expressed in manylanguages essentially unrelated to each other, much terminology and customary practice has been common to them all. For instance, technical terms in religion and also in some other fields have commonly been derived from the Arabic or in some cases from the Persian, as have been Western terms from Latin and Greek. Just as is the case with Christian names, Muslim names form to a large degree a common stock that reappears substantially the same in every Muslim country. The manners of dating an event or of heading a letter tend to be constant, and of course the use of Arabic script. It is important to feel as much at ease as possible with all this. The problem is complicated by the fact that in many cases writers about Islarrldom as well as translators have been very inconsistent in their renderings of names and concepts. The reader will find the same term presented in many utterly different guises. The various sections of this Introduction give a number of aids for negotiating the resultant maze. Ways of transliterating from various Islamicate languages are outlined, with suggestions of how the reader can refer from one system to another if he reads different authors; Muslim personal names are grouped into common types, with suggestions for keeping them apart; the Muslim calendar is explained; short essays are offered on problems of studying a civilization; recurrent technical terms are briefly defined. Leaving most detail to the following special sections, I believe it necessary at this point to emphasize reasons for using exact 3 4 INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION transliteration, and to offer some suggestions of how the systems used in this work may at the same time assist approximate pronunciation.

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