Science and Islam_A History_Icon Science

by Ehsan Masood

  However, by the mid-14th century, the critics had begun to make their presence felt. By the 15th and 16th centuries, the attacks on ‘Avicenna’, and on those who defended his work, were indiscriminate and sweeping. The attacks were of three kinds. There were the traditionalists, those who felt that true medicine resided in Greek thought and that ibn-Sina had got Galen wrong. Second were those who felt that the Christian West had no reason to learn medicine from a non-believer. This was after the time of the Crusades, of course. A third group of critics were those scientists who thought the book to be out of date, and who argued that its method of teaching was of little use in hospitals and surgeries. Refreshingly, the critics didn’t ban the book: they published their own commentaries alongside the Latin text.

  In the 14th century, the humanist writer Francisco Petrarch described the Canon as ‘Arab lies’. Bassiano Landi, a 16th-century professor of medicine at Padua, lamented how his predecessors had been ‘misled by the bad leadership of the Arabs’. In 16th-century Germany, medical professor Leonhart Fuchs said: ‘the Arabs had taken all their knowledge from the Greeks and, like Harpies, defiled all that they touched’. In 16th-century France, Symphorien Champier accused ibn-Sina of being part of ‘that filthy and wicked Muhammadan sect, which legitimises divorce and takes the view that all miracles have a natural explanation’.

  Fortunately, ibn-Sina had robust defenders too. Girolamo Cardano, a distinguished professor at Bologna in the 1500s, said that ibn-Sina was arguably the greatest medical practitioner since Hippocrates. It was laughable, he believed, to criticise ibn-Sina for being a Muslim when Galen worshipped idols; and no religion, according to Cardano, had a monopoly on science or philosophy. Furthermore, Benedetto Rinio, a physician from Venice, said that it was absurd to attack ibn-Sina for drawing on the work of his predecessors – when this is exactly what Aristotle and Galen had done.

  Where did we come from?

  One less-known field of knowledge which Islam’s scientists explored is the area of human origins. Two questions in particular exercised much thinking and searching for answers: where did we come from, and what happens when we die?

  As you would expect, their starting point was the Qur’an, which contains a welter of material on human origins in particular. But like any religious text, it can be interpreted in many ways, and this allowed scientists and philosophers to suggest alternative explanations to the story that is still told to millions of children and adults.

  Like the biblical texts, Islam teaches that God punished Adam and Eve for falling into Satan’s trap and eating from the forbidden fruit tree. Muslims believe that the world will eventually come to an end, after which there will be a judgement day in which humans will rise again and be called to account for their time on earth. The righteous will live forever in a place called heaven, while sinners will burn forever in hell. Islamic texts, however, differ in that Adam and Eve were later forgiven by God and were told to create life on earth, which was always part of God’s plan.

  Most interestingly in terms of science, the Qur’an says that God created humans in ‘stages’. Several verses also talk about the aquatic origins of life. Islamic teachings such as these provided scientists with room to speculate about the nature of human origins and what happens at the end of life.

  Speculating about evolution

  Historical speculation about human origins is not new, and the Islamic world, like many of the world’s cultures, presents a long paper-trail of thinking and writing on the subject.

  The first documented example is from someone who could well be the Islamic world’s first professional science-writer – as he earned a living from writing about science. This was al-Jahiz, who was from East Africa but moved to Baghdad in the 9th century and was known to the Caliph al-Mamun. The most famous of his some 200 books is The Book of Animals, in which he describes the characteristics of 350 different varieties: ‘Animals engage in a struggle for existence [and] for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed.’ He continues: ‘Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to [their] offspring.’

  Another example can be found in a 10th-century text called The Book of the Yield by Muhammad al-Nakhshabi, an Ismaili thinker from Central Asia, who wrote: ‘While man has sprung from sentient creatures [animals], these have sprung from vegetal beings [plants] and these, in turn, from combined substances, these from elementary qualities, and these [in turn] from celestial bodies.’

  Later writers to speculate about evolution included the 13th-century poet Jalaluddin Rumi and the early-20th-century philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who was also Pakistan’s national poet. Iqbal had read Darwin and got into a debate (using the Qur’an in support of his position) on the issue of whether or not humans are still evolving. For Iqbal, God could not possibly have created human life and then left it stagnant. Improvement, modification and innovation in human life and consciousness were all part of God’s plan for variety and diversity, in his view. ‘There is nothing more alien to the Qur’anic world,’ he wrote, ‘than the idea that the Universe is a temporal working-out of a pre-conceived plan; an already completed product, which left the hand of its maker ages ago and is now lying stretched in space as a dead mass of matter to which time does nothing.’

  Iqbal believed strongly that human evolution has not come to an end, though his reasons for thinking this were rooted firmly in the realms of faith, and were based on the idea that there is such a thing as a perfect human. Muslims are taught to emulate the Prophet Muhammad, who is seen in many Islamic traditions as the perfect man. He argued that it was the will of God that humans could one day achieve such perfection in carrying out God’s work on earth, so that they could become close to the ideal of Muhammad. Elsewhere, in a verse of poetry, Iqbal challenges God to improve on what he sees as the inferior qualities of the human race, especially the tendency towards cruelty and meanness:

  Design a new pattern

  Create a more perfect Adam

  This making of playthings of clay

  Is not worthy of God, the creator

  If the pattern is poor

  What does repetition achieve?

  How can the cheapness of man

  Meet your approval?

  (From Iqbal’s Educational Philosophy, by K.G. Saiyidain, 1938.)

  14

  One Chapter Closes, Another Begins

  As the story so far has clearly demonstrated, manuscripts show how scientists from the Islamic era were experimenting, innovating and pushing the boundaries all the way up to the 16th century. After that point, however, the records for this kind of work start to become thin. Not only that, but bricks-and-mortar evidence of scientific activity also proves hard to come by. Travel today to the former capitals of the Islamic era, such as Baghdad, Bukhara, Cairo, Damascus and Istanbul, and, with a small number of exceptions, you will be pushed to find evidence of the great institutions that leap out of manuscripts and history books: the observatories, hospitals, schools and colleges which so much of this book has described. A centuries-old tradition of learning seems to have largely disappeared.

  Many observatories and hospitals, for example, stand as neglected ruins. In some cases, the destruction was so complete as to leave no trace. In other cases, former institutions of science and learning are now sites of national heritage. Why what was once a working hospital or an observatory should become a candidate for a heritage site is a key question for historians of Islamic science. It’s one that can best be answered by looking more closely at two related issues: the final years of the last two Islamic empires, the Mughals and the Ottomans; and the traumatic experience of colonisation, whose seeds were planted around the same time as advanced Islamic-era science was coming to the end of its life. Thinning evidence of advanced science during the Islamic era coincides with the final centuries of Islamic rule and the rise of Western European n
ations as military and trading powers.

  Searching for a new science

  The principal players in Europe’s military and trading encounters with Eastern nations included Austria, Britain, France, Holland, the Papacy, Portugal, Venice and Russia. Between the 15th and 20th centuries, these nations would eventually come to control, or exert a strong influence over, many of the countries that were once ruled by the Mughals and the Ottomans. The Mughals of South and Central Asia ruled from the early 1500s to 1857, just twenty years before Britain formally declared India to be a British colony. Ottoman rule lasted longer, from 1281 to 1922, and came to an end partly as a result of their decision to back Germany during the First World War.

  The collapse of the Islamic empires was regarded by Muslims the world over as a hammer-blow. For centuries, generation after generation had grown up being (even if only nominally) part of an institution to which they had both a physical and a spiritual allegiance. And then it had all gone. It was the equivalent of both the Church and the monarchy suddenly (and violently) coming to an end in Britain. The sense of loss was very deep and remains to this day. In 1919, the Muslims of colonial India even launched a movement to re-establish the Ottoman empire, as did (in the early 1950s) political activists in Palestine.

  Perhaps surprisingly given this great sense of loss, a century before the end, senior figures in the Ottoman empire were in fact preparing to give it all up. They were tired of having to run a costly empire that many no longer believed in, and of having to fight wars on many fronts. Because of this, the Ottoman elite had by the late 1800s begun to reach out to Western Europe. They had forged friendly links with Britain and France, and were impressed by what they saw. Ottoman ambassadors in Paris and London sent dispatches home about the new museums and scientific societies, and how these were far ahead of anything inside their own borders. One group of Ottoman diplomats who were based in Europe pushed for a series of liberalising reforms to their own constitution. These included equality before the law; guarantees of certain fundamental rights, such as the right to life, property and public trials; a promise of elections to local councils; and the development of new legal codes to harmonise trade with Western Europe. All were to be written in a way so as to conform to Islamic principles. ‘Europeanization will in no way reduce the value and importance of our religion’, wrote one commentator, Ahmed Hilmi, who supported the reforms. ‘In fact through Europeanization we may be able to resurrect the ancient civilization of Islam.’

  However, not everyone wanted change. Yes, the empire was much weakened after years of conflict, and yes, there was little money in the treasury. But these were not considered strong enough reasons for what many saw as capitulation before Western powers. According to the historian Halil Inalcik, the critics agreed that the Ottoman state needed more Western science and technology to improve its prowess on the battlefield and to help improve living standards, but that was still to be at the exclusion of Western laws and Western culture. The former would be enough, they argued, to make the empire strong again, and need not violate Islamic laws. After a long and very public debate, the critics had their way. And by the late 1870s, broader reforms to social and political institutions were put aside and efforts to import Western science and technology were stepped up. What the Ottomans did next was quite breathtaking even by today’s dizzying speed of technological change.

  Up until the mid-1800s, Ottoman society was seen in today’s terms as being pre-modern. There were few roads, no trains, little electricity, no phones. The system of medicine was still the same as that in ibn-Sina’s Canon of Medicine. Yet, within a generation an incredible transformation had occurred. New hospitals that treated infectious diseases using vaccines based on the latest microbiology were created in 1862. The metric system of weights and measures came seven years later, and time zones were changed to Greenwich Mean Time at the turn of the 20th century. A network of post offices came in the 1830s, telegraph lines in the 1850s, and telephone lines in 1881. A railway linking Istanbul with Mecca in Saudi Arabia – the Hijaz Railway – was built between 1900 and 1908, and Istanbul saw its first school of aviation in 1912, run by pilots and engineers from France (though they were recalled by France at the outbreak of the First World War). Popular science, too, saw a boost. When the Ottoman Scientific Society opened in Istanbul in 1861, its first lecture was on modern physics and included a demonstration of experiments with electricity. A capacity crowd of 400 turned up and late-comers had to be turned away. In publishing, 28 science books were printed between 1727 and 1839. Between 1840 and 1876 that figure increased to 242.

  The Ottomans had been using Western and other European technology long before the 19th century – firearms, clock-making, the magnetic compass and the printing press all found their way to Istanbul and beyond. But much of this earlier adoption of modern technology was aimed at improving the military. In 1773, for example, the Imperial School of Naval Engineering was created under the supervision of a French officer, Baron de Tott, to provide cadets with an education in modern science and engineering, but alongside more traditional subjects such as Arabic and religion. In 1806, a military school of medicine opened, teaching in French and Italian and using textbooks from Western Europe. In 1834, a whole new Imperial Military School opened on the model of France’s École Militaire.

  What is clear, as detailed by Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, a historian who studies the transfer of Western technology to the Ottoman world, is that each of the above illustrations shows that Ottoman rulers believed that they could just purchase ‘black box’ applied science and technology ‘solutions’. As a result, their understanding of what was really needed to create rail networks and postal systems was superficial – they were interested in science and technology only as an instrument for getting things done rather than as a form of acquired knowledge; ‘knowing something from first principles’ was not a phrase they would have appreciated. Almost by extension, they were not interested in adopting mass higher education, nor were they inclined to create institutions of learning so that their own scientists and engineers could build on the new knowledge and carry out research and development for themselves. This view may have been reinforced by their mistaken belief that encouraging research and inquiry amounted to an adoption of Western culture, which therefore had to be opposed.

  Education reforms

  Attempts to encourage greater – and friendlier – contacts with Western Europe meant that by the year 1900, the Ottoman state had given international organisations permission to run 702 primary and secondary schools. Of these, 465 – the single largest share – were led by missionaries from the US, and 100 of these schools had been established during the past twenty years alone. American schools were so popular with parents that in Anatolia one in three school-age children was enrolled at such a school. Why were they so popular? One explanation seems to be that they were not just educational institutions; through these schools, children and their families were able to access the modern hospitals, pharmacies and printing facilities which the schools had established alongside their teaching function. Yet this presented a dilemma for the rulers. They wanted a degree of foreign influence in their educational system, but they did not want the system itself to be taken over by Washington, something which seemed to be in danger of happening. In one official report, for example, the minister for education described the American schools system as an ‘epidemic disease’.

  The government felt that it had to act. It would have liked to close the schools down, but recognised that this would lead to serious diplomatic problems. Instead, it ordered the schools to reapply for permission to teach. In addition, the American schools were told that they could no longer recruit Muslim students, nor could they locate their premises in areas where Muslims were the majority community. After much foot-dragging, the schools agreed to reapply for permission to teach, but they did not stop enrolling Muslim pupils. When the US government was pushed on this, it replied that the US, like France, Britain and Russia, ha
d millions of nationals who were Muslims; it would change its enrolment policy only if all other foreign schools did so, too. America was too big a power for the Ottomans to mess with, and the matter was quietly dropped.

  Evidence of the Ottoman state’s ambivalence about Western education can also be found in its approach to building universities, known in Turkish Arabic as darul funoon, or home of the sciences. It took four attempts and 37 years before the first university was established in Istanbul in 1900. On the first attempt, the university opened in 1863 but closed abruptly after two years when its building was taken over by the ministry of finance. It reopened in a new building in 1869, but had to close again three years later – due this time to a combination of poor organisation and bad luck. There was a shortage of both teachers and books; many of the 450 students, who had come from traditional Islamic schools, known as madrassas, found the curriculum too difficult, and some were unable to afford the fees. To make matters worse, the university found itself at the centre of an ill-timed controversy over an invited lecture on the Prophet Muhammad. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a reformist theologian from Egypt had been asked to speak during the month of Ramadan. The topic he chose was to interpret prophecy as a craft. As most Muslims believe that God creates the institution of the prophet, calling it an art or craft produced a volley of complaints to the government office of religious affairs. After this incident, rumours began to circulate that the university would soon be shut down.

  Classes reopened at the third attempt in 1874 and the university stayed open for seven years, managing this time to graduate one entire class. The administrators had learnt some lessons from the previous two experiences; on this occasion the university had no faculty of science, and when it opened there was no publicity and no formal launch event. The students appear to have been taught in secret, and a public announcement was made only when they entered their final year of study in 1876. The university struggled on for five more years before it closed its doors in 1881. The reason this time appears to have been a reluctance on the part of the state to continue to fund it. The university that did eventually succeed opened nineteen years later in 1900, when the state finally became serious about science and higher education.