Science and Islam_A History_Icon Science

by Ehsan Masood

  To other readers, however, if something is ‘Islamic’ this means it is related to the practice of faith. To this group of readers, therefore, Islamic science might mean a science that is influenced by Islamic values, much as, say, Islamic banking is used to describe financial systems that are governed according to Islamic guidelines; or in the same way that an Islamic school is an institution that educates children according to Islamic values.

  Just to be clear, Islamic science in the context of this book also includes a science that has been shaped by the needs of religion.

  The second challenge relates to the word ‘science’ itself and what it means in languages such as Arabic, Persian and Urdu. The word ‘science’ in its modern context means the systematic study of the natural world, using observation, experimentation, measurement and verification. It comes from the Latin word (from around the 14th century) scientia, which means ‘to know’.

  Arabic manuscripts from Islamic times did not have a word for ‘science’ as we know it today. Instead, they had a word similar in meaning to scientia, which is ilm (plural, uloom). Ilm means ‘knowledge’: this could be knowledge of the natural world, as well as knowledge of religion and other things.

  Scientists in the Ottoman empire came closest to realising that ilm is not the same as the scientific method. They introduced a new word, fen (plural, funoon), which means ‘tools’ or ‘techniques’. For example, a university of science would be written in Turkish Arabic as darul funoon, or a home for the techniques of science.

  The new Ottoman convention, however, did not catch on. Turkish Arabic is all but extinct and Modern Arabic has retained the original dual usage for the word ilm. So, while the Arabic edition of Scientific American magazine is called Majalla Uloom (magazine of knowledge), at the same time, darul uloom (a home for knowledge) is used to describe religious seminaries all over the world.

  Those who continue to use ilm to mean both scientific and religious knowledge argue that it represents an idea (common to Islamic cultures) that science and faith are two sides of the same coin: that they are equally valid forms of knowledge, and with similar – if not equal – claims to seek the most truthful answers to questions.

  Others would disagree. Ilm may well be an accurate description for religious knowledge; however, there is a case to be made for finding a word that can distinguish between scientific and religious knowledge.

  In languages such as Arabic and Urdu, ‘acquiring ilm’ is a phrase that is commonly used in textbooks, in print and in the broadcast media. Knowledge of religion can of course be ‘acquired’ or memorised, as can much scientific knowledge. But science has an important added dimension: it is also about experimenting, innovating, building, refuting and pushing at the boundaries of what we know.

  Prologue

  Picture, if you will, images from the 1969 moon landings: those grainy black-and-white photos or slow-motion TV shots of rockets and astronauts in space, and awe-inspired spectators watching from below. Or recall the television footage from 2000 when the human genome had been sequenced, with the news announced jointly by US President Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair.

  What do these and so many more pictures of modern scientific discovery tell us? One message is very clear: that science is more than just ‘science’. It is the result of the vision of those who govern us about where they want to take their societies in the future. The moon landings told anyone watching that here was an empire at the top of its game. Having established its domain on earth, the most technologically-advanced society of its age was ready to claim the heavens – or at the very least, a small part of it.

  More than 1,000 years ago, another empire, that created by the coming of Islam, was at the top of its form. This empire was in fact a network of what are called caliphates, united by a belief in God and in the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. Its rulers and citizens spanned from Indonesia in the east to Spain in the west, and the last of the caliphates ended only in the last century, in 1923 with the fall of the Ottoman empire.

  Science and Islam describes the scientific revolution that took place during the empires created by Islam, between the 8th and the 16th centuries. It is a story about the discoveries and inventions of a sophisticated culture and civilisation; the political and religious conditions surrounding it; and an extraordinary cast of characters – scientists, engineers and their patrons – who helped to make it all happen.

  It describes an age when religion and science had a much closer relationship. Perhaps paradoxically, it was the needs of religion that in some ways helped to advance new knowledge. One example can be seen in efforts to develop quality standards in religious scholarship. After Muhammad’s death in 632, scholars of religion wanted to find a way of checking and verifying the many records of his sayings. This led to a kind of early peer-review system, which later scholars of religion had to train themselves in. A century later, when scientific fields began to develop, it was theologians who encouraged the first scientists to adopt similar standards for authenticating their scientific work.

  In its heyday, scientists and engineers from the Islamic world made groundbreaking discoveries and inventions, and we can see traces of their contributions today in our everyday lives. Moreover, many of the leaders of Islam’s empires saw the relationship between science and society as would politicians in the modern age. They believed that the power of the mind could take us to places where no human had ventured in the past; they wanted the latest knowledge in order to help govern their territories and eliminate their enemies; and they wanted to shape societies in which people made decisions based on evidence and in which science, technology and rational thinking were important.

  But then is not the same as now. Today’s scientific endeavour is on a scale that is unprecedented in human history. In the United States, more is spent on healthcare research than the total spending of some of the world’s poorest nations. And on the question of belief, today’s scientists tend to keep their faith strictly private. Indeed, in the Western world at least, organised religion and individual religious faith are regarded by perhaps the majority of scientists as impediments to research, discovery and invention.

  Today, knowledge is a highly specialised business: it is almost unheard of for a leading physicist to make ground-breaking discoveries in biology, or a chemist to push the envelope in philosophy. But many of the names that leap out of the pages that follow were polymaths who worked to the highest standards of the day.

  In the pages that follow, you will meet many great thinkers such as ibn-Sina, a Persian-speaking scientist from the 10th century who also made important contributions to the study of the nature and philosophy of religious belief. He also found time to invent an early example of the micrometer, and his book The Canon of Medicine was taught to trainee doctors in universities in France and Italy from the 12th to the 16th century. Or there is Hassan ibn al-Haitham, an experimental physicist from the 11th century who helped to modernise our understanding of vision and who is credited with describing an early imaging device (a camera obscura), as well as writing about and researching the motion of planets.

  You will also meet some of their patrons. Caliphs and governors such as al-Mamun of the Sunni Abbasid dynasty, who ruled from 813 to 833 from Baghdad, and al-Hakim of the Shia Fatimid dynasty who ruled from Cairo from 996 to 1021. These and many others employed personal scientific advisors, paid for libraries and observatories, and even personally took part in scientific experiments.

  And you will meet some of the critics of the new science. These were men such as the theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, who wrote a famous polemic, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, against the claims of scientists to be able to explain everything. And you will meet those scholars who suffered greatly for the right to criticise science and rationalism, men such as Ahmad ibn-Hanbal, who was tortured for refusing to accept that science should become the official religion of the Islamic state.

  Turn the page and enter a br
ave, new and undiscovered world.

  Ehsan Masood

  1

  The Dark Age Myth

  If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure which stems, I think, from the strait-jacket of history which we have inherited.

  HRH Prince Charles in a speech at Oxford University, 27 October 1993

  In 410 CE, Alaric, the Germanic king of the Visigoths, swept into Rome and sacked the great city in a three-day rampage. Sixty-six years later, Romulus Augustus, the last Roman emperor of the West, was deposed, and the regalia of empire was rudely despatched to Constantinople. With that, the lights went out on civilisation, and the Western world was plunged into an age of darkness – a night in which there was no scholarship, literacy or even civilised life. Only 1,000 years later did the world finally rediscover classical learning and bring the world’s night of darkness to an end with the bright new dawn of the Renaissance. Or so the story goes.

  This is the myth of the Dark Ages, the idea that history and progress pretty much stopped for a millennium after the fall of Rome. The trouble is that the myth is just that, a myth. But it has been a myth so potent that it has thoroughly distorted our understanding of how civilisations emerge and how science and learning progress. Advances in our understanding of the natural world happen when scientists absorb the latest knowledge in fields such as physics or biology, and then modify or improve it. They work rather like runners in a relay race, passing the baton of learning from one scientist to the next. Modern science, regarded as a hallmark of modern Western civilisation, achieved its place through the passing of many successive batons, which were handed to the scientists of Europe from those of the world’s non-Western cultures. These included those who lived in the cultures of Islam over a period of some 800 years from the 8th to the 16th centuries.

  The fact that we know little of this is what Michael Hamilton Morgan of the New Foundation for Peace speaks of as ‘lost history’. The historian Jack Goody goes further and calls it ‘the theft of history’. It is as if the memory of an entire civilisation and its contribution to the sum of knowledge has been virtually wiped from human consciousness. Not simply in the West but in the Islamic world too, the achievements of Islamic scientists were, until recently, largely forgotten or at least neglected, except by a few diligent specialists such as Harvard University’s Abelhamid Sabra, David King, Jamil Ragep and George Saliba.

  In mainstream science education in Britain – until very recently – the history of scientific progress has tended to leapfrog from the classical era of Euclid, Aristotle and Archimedes straight to the birth of the Age of Science in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, with only a cursory mention, if any, of the great swathe of Islamic science in between. In some versions of history, the ‘dark age’ only really ends, and the progress of science only really begins, with the famous conflict in the early 17th century in which Galileo confronts the Catholic Church with the assertion that the earth moves around the sun. As the world eventually acknowledges that Galileo is right, this is presented as the world-changing triumph of the light of reason over superstition. Thereafter, from the 17th century onwards, Western Europe’s scientists are set free to unlock the world’s secrets – William Harvey discovers blood circulation, Isaac Newton launches the study of physics, Robert Boyle pioneers the study of chemistry, Michael Faraday, electricity, and so on. And so we move forward into the Age of Reason and the dramatic progress of modern science.

  Filling the gap

  In reality, though, scientific inquiry did not simply stop with the fall of Rome, only to get going again in the 17th century. In fact, as this book will show, recent research is beginning to reveal just how thoroughly the 800-year gap was filled by a wealth of scientific exploration in medieval Islam, and how it fed directly into the first stirrings of Western science.

  The Cairo-based physician ibn al-Nafis, for example, discovered pulmonary circulation, the circulation of blood through the lungs, in the 13th century. Andalusian engineer Abbas ibn-Firnas worked out theories of flight, and is believed to have carried out a successful practical experiment six centuries before Leonardo drew his famous ornithopters. And in Kufa in Iraq, Jabir ibn-Hayyan (translated by Latin scholars as Geber) was among those laying the foundations of chemistry around 900 years before Boyle.

  Moreover, some researchers are now showing that some of the great pioneers of modern science were building directly on the work of scientists from Islamic times. George Saliba of Columbia University, for instance, demonstrates in his book Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance how the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus drew on the work of Islamic astronomers for the groundwork to his breakthrough claim in 1514 that the earth moved round the sun.

  Historians of mathematics have also shown how algebra, a branch of maths that allows scientists to work out unknown quantities, was developed in 9th-century Baghdad by Musa al-Khwarizmi, building on work that he had discovered from mathematicians in India. Historians think that al-Khwarizmi would have had access to manuscripts through Islam’s first encounter with India, which happened a century earlier. Modern science depends, too, on the solutions to complex quadratic equations devised by the poet and scientist Omar Khayyam. And much of our understanding of optics and light is built on the pioneering work of Hassan ibn al-Haitham (translated in Latin as Alhazen) in 11th-century Cairo.

  Inventing the future?

  The Islamic middle ages also left a strong legacy in the applied sciences. The nature of Islam, and the energy of a new empire, meant that there were many inventive and practical minds at work. According to Salim al-Hassani of the University of Manchester, some modern labour-saving devices such as the drinks dispenser could have an Islamic influence. Professor al-Hassani has recently introduced the world to some of the engineering achievements of al-Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish engineer, which include the crank, the camshaft and the reciprocating piston – all essential components of the modern car engine and much more besides. Meanwhile, a remarkable trio of irreverent but brilliant showman brothers, called Banu Musa, entertained 9th-century Baghdad with such ingenious trick machines and automatons that they would astonish even today.

  If all these examples were fleeting moments of brilliance, they would be fascinating enough. But as many more teachers and historians are realising, they are much more than that. Names such as al-Khwarizmi and ibn al-Haitham are as integral to the history of science and technology as are Newton and Archimedes, James Watt and Henry Ford, but the Arabic-sounding names somehow became lost in the myth of the Dark Ages. The reasons for this are the subject of an intense debate, which is as much about the relationship between the West and Islam as it is about the history of science and technology.

  Lost in the dark

  The idea that the Renaissance world was emerging from a period of darkness can be traced back to at least the 1330s, when the Italian historian Petrarch wrote of how it was that the world finally saw the light. ‘Amidst the errors,’ he said, ‘there shone forth men of genius, no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom.’ It may be that Petrarch was simply trying to link the emergence of Italian culture in his own time with its former heyday in Ancient Rome. But it is through men such as Petrarch that the notion of the dark ages was sustained, as Europe progressed towards the Enlightenment years of the 18th century and beyond. Perhaps tellingly, it reached its apogee, and acquired capital letters, when nations such as Britain, the Netherlands and Portugal introduced both Christianity and colonial rule into the continents of Africa and Asia. By this time, the Dark Ages had come to be seen as a time of decline into brute ignorance, full of ‘rubbish’, as Gibbon had earlier sneered in his Decline and Fall.

  Perhaps it is no coincidence that this negative picture of the Dark Ages finally began to crumble along with the colonial empires. Many Western historian
s are now generally embarrassed by the distortion of history implied by the idea, and if they talk about dark ages, it tends only to be in a less pejorative sense, about periods that remain little known because of the dearth of written evidence. It is hard for them to see how an age that produced the Book of Kells, the scholarship of Alcuin and Bede, and countless great churches and monasteries could ever be thought of as an age of brute ignorance. More significantly, though, a tide of recent archaeological and textual research is now painting a much richer, fuller picture of life in Western Europe in the centuries after the fall of Rome, and even the idea that this is an unknowable period for the West is evaporating.

  But of course the most distorting effect of the Dark Ages myth was the way it seemed to sideline, in the popular imagination at least, the history of the world beyond Western Europe – and virtually ignore the fact that learning had simply shifted eastwards, not completely flickered out. First of all, the Dark Ages myth seemed to turn a blind eye to the fact that the Roman empire did not actually end with the fall of Rome, but moved its centre to Byzantium. As the work of the historian Judith Herrin of King’s College London shows so well, we are just beginning to wake up to the fact that cultural life – a rich cultural life – existed in Byzantium for the entire duration of the Dark Ages. And if Christian Byzantium was left in the shadows, equally telling has been the neglect of the achievements of early Islam.

  The Dark Ages myth proved so powerful that even in some academic circles the best that could be said of Islamic scholarship was that it saved the great classical texts so that Europe could rediscover them in the Renaissance – as if retrieving them from a hole where they had been squirrelled away while the thousand-year storm blew past. With the old treasures retrieved, it was surmised, Islam was no longer needed and it was up to Europe alone to take knowledge forward.