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"Muzaffar Iqbal, who is a
well-known scientist and Islamic scholar based
in Canada, has written a book about science and
Islam that is weighted towards the Middle Ages
...He has an agreeably caustic and aggressive
approach to outdated and erroneous ideas about
the history of science. The book is a
polemical essay, rather than a history, and
welcome as such...
...He points out that the
Arab scientific movement in the eighth century
pre-existed the translation movement of the
ninth and tenth centuries. He draws attention to
a curious genre of literature that developed
later, called shukuk, which was devoted
to casting doubt on the findings of the Greeks,
and he has no difficulty in adducing instances
of Muslim scientists improving on, empirically
testing or refuting Greek ideas...
...But Iqbal is successful
in arguing that the “Quran itself lays out a
well-defined and comprehensive concept of the
natural world, and this played a foundational
role in the making of the scientific tradition
in Islamic civilization”. Faith impelled
rather than impeded the Islamic scientist.
The Koran commands man to study Allah’s
creation. The eleventh-century cosmologist al-Biruni
wrote: “Sight was made the medium so that [man]
traces among the living things the signs and
wisdom, and turns from the created things to
the Creator”....
...It is odd that the life
and writings of al-Ghazali should ever have been
selected as marking some kind of watershed in
the history of Islamic science....Furthermore,
it is perfectly clear that important advances in
science were made after the twelfth century. For
example, Ibn al-Shatir (d 1375) improved on the
Ptolemaic model of the solar system by removing
its eccentrics and equants, and his model for
the rotation of the Sun anticipated that of
Copernicus. Again, Al-Kashi (d 1429), besides
compiling an improved set of astronomical
tables, also provided the first systematic
exposition of decimal fractions, as well as a
way of extracting the nth root of a number....
...So problems remain. Why
was there an apparent decline in scientific
achievement sometime after the fifteenth century
and why were there no scientific and industrial
revolutions in the Islamic world?
Iqbal, though he is clear
and convincing about Islam being not to blame,
has no answers and takes the reasonable view
that the field is still too under-researched for
even provisional answers to be attempted. Did
scientific progress in the Islamic world really
grind to a halt after the twelfth century?"
-Editor
SCIENCE AND ISLAM
Publisher: Greenwood Press
(A Book Review by Robert Irwin)
courtesy: Times Literary Supplement,
January 23, 2008
Is there really a problem? To judge
by the correspondence in the TLS in January and
February of 2007, there is. In a review (January 19)
of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, the Nobel
Prizewinning physicist Steven Weinberg denied that
there had been any developments in Islamic science
after the death of the scholar and mystic al-Ghazali
in 1111. In response, James Ragep, a historian of
science, adduced, in rather general terms, all sorts
of advances in Islamic science that had occurred
after al-Ghazali’s death. Weinberg responded by
denying or diminishing some of Ragep’s examples,
such as the discovery of the pulmonary circulation
of the blood, or a pre-Copernican presentation of a
heliocentric system by Muslims. Weinberg, having
reiterated that Islamic science never achieved much
of importance after the early twelfth century, ended
by quoting a 2002 survey by Nature which “identified
just three areas of science in which Islamic
countries excel: desalination, falconry and camel
reproduction”.
Evidently there is more at stake here than getting
the chronology of the advance of science right. Ever
since the nineteenth century there have been
European thinkers, such as Ernest Renan, who have
argued that the scientific outlook and Islam are
incompatible; that the explosion of scientific
translation and discovery was largely the
achievement of non-Arabs; and that an increasingly
strict and ossified Islam curtailed further
scientific and speculative thought. Historians have
wondered why the scientific movement in Islamic
lands from the eighth to the eleventh centuries did
not lead on to a scientific and an industrial
revolution. Some Muslims might choose to detect an
anti-Islamic agenda among those historians. After
all, the scientific and industrial revolutions did
not occur anywhere in the world except in Europe,
and therefore one needs to explain the peculiarity
of European history, rather than adduce some kind of
Islamic brake or blinker.
Muzaffar Iqbal, who is a well-known scientist and
Islamic scholar based in Canada, has written a book
about science and Islam that is weighted towards the
Middle Ages and has nothing to say about camel
breeding or falconry. He has an agreeably caustic
and aggressive approach to outdated and erroneous
ideas about the history of science. The book is a
polemical essay, rather than a history, and welcome
as such. One of the targets is the notion that
Islamic science was little more than a reheated
version of ancient Greek science: “many histories of
science tend to regard the eight hundred years of
scientific activity in the Muslim world as being no
more than some kind of depot where Greek science was
parked and from where it was retrieved by Europe in
later centuries”.
He points out that the Arab scientific movement in
the eighth century pre-existed the translation
movement of the ninth and tenth centuries. He draws
attention to a curious genre of literature that
developed later, called shukuk, which was devoted to
casting doubt on the findings of the Greeks, and he
has no difficulty in adducing instances of Muslim
scientists improving on, empirically testing or
refuting Greek ideas. But, while he has some good
sources to support the early development of what can
be seen as an Islamic science, Iqbal is unwise to
rely so heavily on the alleged writings of Jabir ibn
Hayyan (whose notional dates are c721–815).
People who are only aware of Jabir (or Geber as he
was known in the medieval West) as the name of an
early scientist, may not be aware of what richly
bizarre treasures are to be found in his strangely
diverse writings: sperm is a crucial ingredient in
the elixir of life; bird sperm is needed for
producing a man with wings; the effigy of a Chinaman
in bed will keep one awake at night; a picture of a
man killing snakes done in magical ink will actually
kill snakes; there is a fish called “the doctor of
the sea” that carries a stone in its head that has
the power to cure all ills; putrefied hair generates
serpents; demons can be usefully trapped in statues.
In the monumental Jabir ibn Hayyan: Contribution à
l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam,
Paul Kraus (1904–44), a genius who committed suicide
at an early age, surveyed the Jabirian corpus, which
covered sexology, alchemy, the art of warfare, the
manufacture of talismans, artisanal techniques,
religious polemic, grammar, music, invisible inks,
the artificial generation of human beings and much
else. Kraus showed that the corpus was not the work
of a single hand. Moreover, most of the treatises
dated from the late ninth and early tenth centuries
and contained radical Shia propaganda. Iqbal is
aware of Kraus’s findings but oddly refuses to
engage with them and continues to treat Jabir as a
real person who lived when he is supposed to have
done and who wrote several hundred miscellaneous
treatises. In general, Iqbal elides the
pervasiveness of occult thinking in Islamic science.
Also when writing about cosmology, he refers en
passant to a genre of literature known as the
“Wonders of Creation” (in Arabic aja’ib al-makhluqat),
but the treatises in this genre that I have
consulted have more in common with Ripley’s Believe
It or Not! than anything seriously scientific.
But Iqbal is successful in arguing that the “Quran
itself lays out a well-defined and comprehensive
concept of the natural world, and this played a
foundational role in the making of the scientific
tradition in Islamic civilization”. Faith impelled
rather than impeded the Islamic scientist. The Koran
commands man to study Allah’s creation. The
eleventh-century cosmologist al-Biruni wrote: “Sight
was made the medium so that [man] traces among the
living things the signs and wisdom, and turns from
the created things to the Creator”. At a more
practical level, astronomy and mathematics were
studied and further developed to assist in such
matters as the orientation of mosques, the
determination of prayer times and the division of
inheritances according to Islamic law.
It is odd that the life and writings of al-Ghazali
should ever have been selected as marking some kind
of watershed in the history of Islamic science.
However, the immensely influential Hungarian
Orientalist, Ignaz Goldziher, in his essay “Stellung
der alten islamischen Orthodoxie zu den antiken
Wissenschaften”, published in 1915, argued that
there was from the first an inherent antagonism
between the ancient sciences and orthodox Islam.
Those who studied these sciences were regarded with
suspicion by the conservative religious
establishment and, according to Goldziher, al-Ghazali’s
Tahafut al-falasifa (“Incoherence of the
Philosophers”) was accepted by the Muslim community
as a decisive refutation of the independent validity
of science. After al-Ghazali, an intellectual
darkness spread over the Islamic lands.
Although Iqbal misrepresents Goldziher in presenting
him as hostile to Islam, he is right to argue that
the Tahafut al-falasifa was not really the attack on
science that Goldziher claimed it to be. Indeed, al-Ghazali
was explicit in his approval of mathematics, the
exact sciences and medicine. What he was concerned
to refute philosophically was the notion of
causality espoused by Ibn Sina and other
philosophers. For al-Ghazali, God is the real cause
of all that happens. The notion of causality
espoused by the philosophers whom he was criticizing
was something that he thought was conjured up by men
on the basis of what they regularly perceived.
Whatever one thinks of al-Ghazali’s idea of
causality (which allowed space for miracles to
happen), it is hard to imagine the Muslim scientific
community of the twelfth century downing tools once
word of the contents of the Tahafut got about.
Furthermore, it is perfectly clear that important
advances in science were made after the twelfth
century. For example, Ibn al-Shatir (d 1375)
improved on the Ptolemaic model of the solar system
by removing its eccentrics and equants, and his
model for the rotation of the Sun anticipated that
of Copernicus. Again, Al-Kashi (d 1429), besides
compiling an improved set of astronomical tables,
also provided the first systematic exposition of
decimal fractions, as well as a way of extracting
the nth root of a number. Quite a large part of the
religious establishment was opposed to alchemy, but,
given the fraudulent tripe written by most of the
alchemists, that was no bad thing (and of course
many scientists, doctors and philosophers joined in
the attack on the practice). In most other respects
there was no conflict between science and Islam in
the pre-modern period, and Iqbal shows this.
So problems remain. Why was there an apparent
decline in scientific achievement sometime after the
fifteenth century and why were there no scientific
and industrial revolutions in the Islamic world?
Iqbal, though he is clear and convincing about Islam
being not to blame, has no answers and takes the
reasonable view that the field is still too
under-researched for even provisional answers to be
attempted. Certainly, decades of further research
are necessary. No less certainly, most readers of
the TLS are too impatient to wait for the outcome. I
would suggest that the spread of the madrasa, or
religious teaching college, throughout the Middle
East in the central and late Middle Ages led to a
certain narrowing of intellectual horizons. While
scientists continued to do research and publish,
they do not seem to have founded scientific
societies of the sort that proliferated in Western
Europe in the seventeenth century. The Middle East
is poor in the resources needed to get an industrial
revolution going. It lacks iron, copper, wood and
much else, including lots of rivers that could be
harnessed for industrial purposes. There was also a
kind of imperial complacency among the subjects of
the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires (a
complacency that finds its parallel among the
citizens of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in
the same period). There had been plenty to be
complacent about and Iqbal points out “that at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, the entire
Middle East, a large part of Africa, the whole
middle belt of Asia and the Malayan archipelago were
under Muslim control . . .”. Thereafter, things
changed rapidly.
Iqbal is at his most agreeably acerbic when dealing
with the relationship between Islam and science in
the past two centuries. He gives a fascinating
account of how a kind of tafsir, or exegetical
literature, developed that was devoted to
demonstrating that the Koran had anticipated modern
embryology and the theory of the expanding universe.
The Turkish scholar, Said Nursi (1877– 1960)
maintained that the Koran alludes to railways and
electricity. Iqbal describes the Islamic world’s
encounter with Western science from 1950 as being
“like a rude awakening from a medieval siesta”.
Modern Muslim states produce “a caricature of
Western science” and he remarks with only slight
exaggeration that “Almost all Muslim states have
ministries and ministers of science and technology,
who ceaselessly issue statements on the need to
acquire modern science, but none of these
fifty-seven states produce any science worth its
name and most able Muslim scientists live outside
these states”.
Given that Iqbal is capable of penetrating criticism
of writings on science and the transmission of
knowledge by such scholars as Goldziher, George
Sarton and Dmitri Gutas, I am surprised at the bland
endorsement he gives to the Philosophia Perennis, a
body of doctrine espoused by the followers of René
Guenon (d 1951) and Frithjof Schuon (d 1998), both
of them converts to Islam. That body of doctrine is
unmistakably Gnostic, elitist, occultist,
misogynist, right-wing, opposed to the theory of
evolution and ultimately anti-scientific. On the
other hand, Iqbal is sometimes rather hard on
Western Orientalists. It is not true, for example,
that most of the translations of the Koran into
European languages derived ultimately from that by
Robert of Ketton in the twelfth century. The great
seventeenth-century translations by Lodovico
Marracci and André du Ryer were largely guided by
works by Muslim exegetes, and George Sale’s
eighteenth-century translation drew on Marracci and
similarly gave prominence to Muslim commentaries.
Orientalism owes more to Muslim scholarship than
most Muslims realize.
Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists
and their enemies was published in 2006. He is the
Middle East editor of the TLS.
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