Steiner's term for the Aristotelian scholarship of the Islamic courts, carried by reincarnating souls into Europe, where it surfaces as the materialist cast of modern science.
Arabism in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the Aristotelian and Alexandrian culture that was reshaped at the Islamic courts and then carried by its bearers into European civilization. In Karmic Relationships, Volume IV (GA 238, 1924), Steiner traces two routes. The outer route runs through North Africa into Spain, where Cordoba and the Averroist commentators handed Aristotle to the Latin schools. The inner route runs through reincarnation: the souls who shaped the academy of Harun al Rashid carried their unchristianised scholarship through death and returned inside Christendom, Harun al Rashid as Francis Bacon of Verulam, his counsellor as Amos Comenius. For Steiner the materialist cast of modern natural science is this Arabism in its newest clothing. The doctrine belongs to his mature karma research of 1924 and frames the scientific revolution as a karmic event rather than a purely European invention.
Arabism names one of the deepest currents in Steiner's karma research: a brilliant scholarship that would not unite with Christianity, cultivated at the court of Harun al Rashid, pressed outwardly into Europe through Spain, and pressed inwardly, after its bearers' deaths, into the spiritual life of the West. The Dornach lectures of September 1924 follow this stream from the Baghdad academy to the laboratories of the modern age.
In Steiner's Own Words
For looking at their further wanderings in the spiritual life, we find that the great organiser Haroun al Raschid who had lived so mightily on earth in the time of Charlemagne, returns again. He appears at a later time in the very midst of Christendom, but he has taken his Arabism with him through the life between death and a new birth. Nor need it be outwardly similar to the Arabic element in its outward configuration as it appears again in the physical world. It clothes itself in the new forms, the while in these new forms it still remains in essence the old, the Mohammedanism and Arabism. It appears again, active and effective in the European spiritual life, inasmuch as Haroun al Raschid is reincarnated in Francis Bacon of Verulam.
What it Means Today
The history of science already tells half of this story. Greek natural philosophy survived in Arabic translation; the Abbasid court at Baghdad systematised Aristotle, and Ibn Rushd of Cordoba, whom the Latin schoolmen called Averroes, wrote the commentaries through which the Philosopher re-entered Europe by way of Spain. Historians from Pierre Duhem to the Warburg Institute's transmission studies treat this as a movement of manuscripts. Steiner treats it as a movement of souls. His Bacon-of-Verulam reincarnation thesis is the sharpest statement of the doctrine: Harun al Rashid, organiser of the Baghdad academy, returns as Francis Bacon, organiser of the experimental method, while his counsellor returns in Central Europe as Amos Comenius, organiser of universal schooling.
Read this way, the Novum Organum of 1620 is no rupture with the medieval world. It is the Arabist impulse surfacing in a new body, and the will of modern science to weigh, measure, and count is mature Arabism rather than mature Christianity. Thalira synthesis: Arabism is the Cain Pattern of the scientific revolution, the builder's intellect perfected into instrument and method while the temple it once served falls out of memory. Steiner never asked his hearers to renounce science. He asked them to see that the one-sidedness of its materialism has a biography, and that what has a biography can meet its complement, the Michael stream he set against it in this same lecture cycle.
Where to Read More