History of science in the Islamic World
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- This article is about Science in the Islamic World. For science in a Muslim religious context, see Islamic science.
The history of science in the Islamic World examines the full range of scientific investigation in the Islamic World, whether performed within a religious or secular context, or for religious or secular motives. From this perspective it doesn't matter whether the particular scientist was Muslim (e.g., al-Khwarizmi), Sabian (e.g., Thabit ibn Qurra), Christian (e.g., Hunain ibn Ishaq), or Jewish (e.g., Hasdai ibn Shaprut), whether he advocated strict adherence to Muslim traditions (e.g. al-Ghazzali) or was critical of tradition and open to the ideas of foreign philosophers (e.g. Averroës), or whether his patron was Muslim (e.g., al-Ma'mun) or not (e.g., Hulagu Khan). If he studied natural phenomena and worked within the Islamic world, his work fits the historians' concern with science in the Islamic World.
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[edit] Rise of Islamic science
Accounts of Western European history typically divide the development of Western civilisation into the following periods:
- Ancient Greek period (BC)
- Ancient Roman period (0-500 AD)
- Early Middle Ages (500-1000 AD)
- High Middle Ages (1000-1350 AD)
- Renaissance (1350-1600 AD)
- Industrial Revolution (1800/1900 AD)
- Twentieth century (2000-).
Like historians of Medieval Europe, many Muslims feel that the term "Dark Ages" inaccurately suggests that for approximately 1,000 years nothing of value happened either scientifically or intellectually: no discovery, no invention, no progress. This ignores the vibrant scientific activity in the Islamic world during the period 750-1200; consequently, some Muslims prefer to call this period the Islamic Golden Age [2].
Islam began to grow in the 7th century and in the following centuries, the Islamic Empire expanded to include Northern Africa, Middle East and parts of Spain. The capital of this powerful empire was Baghdad, which became a major cultural centre, favored by its location at the crossroads of the Eastern and Western worlds.
Science was encouraged by the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad and they established the "House of Wisdom", an academy of science where they gathered important Sanskrit and Greek manuscripts and paid scholars to study and translate them. Some of these manuscripts were thus saved for humanity only through the Arabic medium.
The important contributions made by Islamic scholars can be seen in many words still in use today: alkali, algebra, alchemy, alcohol, Aldebaran, Altair, Algol, alembic, algorithm, almanac, Almagest, through to zenith and zero.
[edit] Decay of Islamic science
In the eleventh century muslim science and the numbers of scientists started to decline. After the thirteenth century they would still produce occasional scientists but they were the exception, not the rule (see list of Islamic scholars). One reason for the scientific decline can be traced back to the tenth century when the orthodox school of Ash'ari challenged the more rational school of Mu'tazili theology, or even earlier when caliph Al-Mutawakkil (847-861) started to suppress the Mu'tazili theology. The orthodox muslims fought the shia muslims and other muslim branches, as well as several invaders(mongols, crusaders etc) on the islamic lands between 1000 – 1300. In the end the sunni orthodox were victorious and the more strict Ash'ari school replaced Mu'tazili thoughts in the islamic lands. That replacement and numerous wars and conflicts created a climate which made islamic science less successful than before.
With the fall of Muslim Spain in 1492, scientific and technological initiative generally passed to Christian Europe and led to what we now call the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
[edit] Historiography of Islamic science
- See also: Historiography of early Islam
The history of science in the Islamic world, like all history, is filled with questions of interpretation. Historians of science generally consider that the study of Islamic science, like all history, must be seen within the particular circumstances of time and place. A. I. Sabra opened a recent overview of Arabic science by noting, "I trust no one would wish to contest the proposition that all of history is local history ... and the history of science is no exception."[1]
Some scholars avoid such local historical approaches and seek to identify essential relations between Islam and science that apply at all times and places. The Pakistani physicist, Pervhez Hoodbhoy, portrayed "religious fanaticism to be the dominant relation of religion and science in Islam". Sociologist Toby Huff maintained that Islam lacked the "rationalist view of man and nature" that became dominant in Europe. The Persian philosopher and historian of science, Seyyed Hossein Nasr saw a more positive connection in "an Islamic science that was spiritual and antisecular" which "point[ed] the way to a new 'Islamic science' that would avoid the dehumanizing and despiritualizing mistakes of Western science."[2]
Nasr identified a distinctly Muslim approach to science, flowing from Islamic monotheism and the related theological prohibition against portraying graven images. In science, this is reflected in a philosophical disinterest in describing individual material objects, their properties and characteristics and instead a concern with the ideal, the Platonic form, which exists in matter as an expression of the will of the Creator. Thus one can "see why mathematics was to make such a strong appeal to the Muslim: its abstract nature furnished the bridge that Muslims were seeking between multiplicity and unity."[3]
Rather than identifying such essential relations between Islam and science, some historians of science question the value of drawing boundaries that label the sciences, and the scientists who practice them, in specific cultural, civilizational, or linguistic terms. Consider the case of Nasir al-Din Tusi (1201–1274), who invented his mathematical theorem, the Tusi Couple, while he was director of Maragheh observatory. Tusi's patron and founder of the observatory was the non-Muslim Mongol conqueror of Baghdad, Hulagu Khan. The Tusi-couple "was first encountered in an Arabic text, written by a man who spoke Persian at home, and used that theorem, like many other astronomers who followed him and were all working in the "Arabic/Islamic" world, in order to reform classical Greek astronomy, and then have his theorem in turn be translated into Byzantine Greek towards the beginning of the fourteenth century, only to be used later by Copernicus and others in Latin texts of Renaissance Europe."[4]
[edit] Notes
- ^ A. I. Sabra, Situating Arab Science: Locality versus Essence," Isis, 87(1996):654-70; reprinted in Michael H. Shank, ed., The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and the Middle Ages," (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 2000), pp. 215-231.
- ^ F. Jamil Ragep, "Freeing Astronomy from Philosophy: An Aspect of Islamic Influence on Science," Osiris, topical issue on Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions, n.s. 16(2001):49-50, note 3
- ^ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Science and Civilization in Islam.
- ^ George Saliba, Whose Science is Arabic Science in Renaissance Europe?, 1999, [1]
[edit] Further reading
Hogendijk, Jan P. and Abdelhamid I. Sabra, eds. The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003. ISBN 0-262-19482-1. Reviewed by Robert G. Morrison at [3]
Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 2nd edition 2003. ISBN 0-521-52994-8. Reviewed by George Saliba at [4]
Toby E. Huff, "Science and Metaphysics in the Three Religions of the Books", Intellectual Discourse, 8, #2 (2000): 173-198.
[edit] External links
- Review article from the Science Creative Quarterly
