Science and Islam_A History_Icon Science

by Ehsan Masood

  The price of freedom

  When faced with how to react to modern science and technology, India’s Muslims in the British empire had much the same dilemma as those in the Ottoman territories – with the added complication that the new learning was greeted with perhaps even more scepticism because of its links to an occupying power.

  Thanks to a mountain of archive material, the British empire, like that of the Ottomans, is one of the most studied in the world. The story of how, within the space of 150 years, a mercantile operation became an imperial one is well told. The first traders from Britain arrived in 1616 and sought permission to buy goods and export them back home. They also sought permission to carry arms. A key concern from the earliest days was language. The Mughal empire had used Persian (and to some extent Arabic) as the language of trade and government business. The new traders needed to learn Persian to do business with the Mughal state, and they continued to use Persian even after large parts of the country had begun to be annexed by the mid-1700s. Teaching Persian to the few hundred officials who ran a trading company was relatively easy. But by the late 1700s, many more had begun to travel to India to work as judges and magistrates, lawyers, doctors, teachers, traders and tax collectors. The Court of Directors of what was called the East India Company refused to provide the necessary tuition for such large numbers of learners, and knew that an alternative had to be found – and it came in the shape of a young surgeon from Scotland.

  A lost science

  In 1782, an enterprising 23-year-old from Edinburgh, John Gilchrist, had arrived in Bombay to work as a surgeon. Unusually for the time, he spent many of his spare hours walking the streets and meeting people, and even grew a beard and changed to wearing Eastern clothes so as to blend in. Gilchrist had been told that Persian was India’s main language, but he quickly discovered that none of the people he was meeting could actually speak Persian or Arabic very well. At the same time, he found that his new acquaintances all had some knowledge of a language he called ‘Hindoostanee’. Gilchrist had in fact discovered what today is Urdu. This is one of Pakistan’s major languages and is still spoken by older generations of India’s Muslims. The existence of this language was known to some in the East India Company – it was referred to as ‘Moors’, or ‘Jargon’. The genius of Gilchrist was in how he recognised that ‘Moors’ could become the new language of administration for Britain in India.

  Gilchrist found that if someone needed an official document in Persian, he would go to the nearest government office and explain his request (in Urdu) to a translator sitting outside, who would then produce the Persian translation. When Gilchrist tried to learn Urdu, he found that there were no textbooks, no dictionary and no written grammar. He then set about, in his own time and at his own expense, writing a dictionary. This he did by collecting a group of people he understood to be fluent in the language. Gilchrist sat down with them for hours at a time and, using an English dictionary, picked out words and asked them to describe the equivalent in Urdu. The Hindoostanee Grammar and Dictionary was published in 1786, and Gilchrist’s efforts eventually led to Urdu replacing Persian and Arabic as the language used by Britain to administer its Indian territories.

  The promotion of Urdu as India’s main language for administration was something of a mixed blessing. It gave the majority population – Muslims and Hindus – immediate access to the new rulers, and undoubtedly created a future for Urdu, which it might not otherwise have had. But at the same time it gradually had the effect of cutting off future generations from the original sources that had recorded learning and science during the Mughal period. Today, a minority of people in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh have knowledge of Persian. And as a direct consequence, much less is known about the history of science during the Mughal period than during other Islamic empires.

  The promotion of Urdu was not the only policy decision that widened the gap between India and its Mughal-era scientific heritage. An arguably more damaging decision was made in the late 1700s when the colonial administration decided to ask educational institutions to pay rents for the first time. Throughout the Mughal period, all institutions of learning had been allowed to live rent-free. This helped education to spread, and most villages had at least one primary and one secondary school. Tax collectors from Britain, however, took a different view and insisted that the schools needed to pay. One official went so far as to describe the previous arrangement as ‘a long leaky pipe’ on account of the fact that a stable and regular source of revenue for the state was not being tapped. The vast majority of schools had no way of paying and subsequently closed. In the mid-1800s, an official who had been sent to do a schools survey in Madras reported that out of one million school-age children, he calculated that just 7,000 were at school. ‘In many villages where formerly there were schools, there are now none.’

  The Queen’s English

  India’s Muslims now appeared to be caught in a bind. From one direction, the institutions of science and learning were being pulled from under their feet. From another, an internal debate was raging in their communities regarding the merits, or otherwise, of learning to speak English.

  In addition to making profits for their shareholders, some of the empire’s administrators had begun to believe that their mission was also to bring enlightenment and modernity to India. Some, such as Thomas Babington Macaulay, a member of parliament, once famously said that a single shelf of a good European library was worth more than the entire literature from India and the Arab world. Charles Trevelyan, India’s minister for finance from 1860 and 1865, went further and said: ‘The peculiar wonder of the Hindu system is, not that it contains so much or so little true knowledge, but that it has been so skilfully contrived to arrest the progress of the human mind. To perpetuate them is to perpetuate the degradation and misery of the people. Our duty is not to teach, but to un-teach.’

  As a result, in 1835, Macaulay engineered a decision in which Arabic and Persian schooling would be phased out, to be replaced by English and modern science. A small number of the Muslim elite saw little or no conflict between being Muslim and learning English and modern science, studying at Western institutions, and retaining the ability to be critical of the colonial presence. They included the philosopher Muhammad Iqbal and the barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah, along with others who would coalesce into the team that created Pakistan.

  Engaging with the West

  One prominent Islamic reformer, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, established a scientific society aimed at Muslims, and later a university, modelled on Oxford and Cambridge, that would impart both traditional and modern learning. He argued that looking to the West for knowledge of modern science was no different to when Muslims from the 9th century translated the works of Galen and Aristotle. ‘And the Greeks didn’t even believe in God’, he told his critics. Other advocates of engagement with the new science included the Zoroastrian and Ismaili communities. When Pakistan eventually became independent, some of the institutions of modern learning it inherited, such as schools, hospitals and engineering colleges, had in fact been established by philanthropists from these communities – the descendants of much earlier dynasties and empires, for whom science and learning would always be important and would not be seen as a threat to their cultures or way of life.

  But others – perhaps a majority – couldn’t bring themselves to see the new Western-style education in the same light, albeit for different reasons. Some, such as Nawab Aliuddin, the Muslim ruler of one of India’s feudal states, felt that the new science was a path to godlessness:

  And do you suppose, sir, that I would put the evidence of one of your doorbeens [telescopes] in opposition to that of the Holy Prophet? No, sir, depend upon it that there is much fallacy in a telescope. It is not to be relied upon. I have conversed with many excellent European gentlemen and their great fault appears to me to lie in the implicit faith they put in these telescopes. They hold their evidence above that of the prophets – Moses, Abraham and Elijah. It is dread
ful to think how much mischief these telescopes may do. No, sir, let us hold fast by the prophets. What they tell us is the truth, and the only truth that we can entirely rely upon in this life. I would not hold the evidence of all the telescopes in the world as anything against one word uttered by the humblest of the prophets named in the Old Testament or the Holy Qur’an.

  (A Moral Reckoning, Mushirul Hasan, Oxford, 2005)

  Others felt that anyone who advocated more knowledge of the West was effectively a mouthpiece for the new rulers, and therefore was someone not to be trusted. They regarded Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s analogy with 9th-century Baghdad to be misleading, for the simple reason that Galen and Aristotle never forcibly ruled over Baghdad in the way that Britain was ruling over India. It was not that they were against new knowledge per se; what they objected to was its direct association with an occupying power.

  Plagued with problems

  One of the most persuasive examples of this interplay between politics, science and religion in India at the time is in the difficulties encountered by the colonial authorities in their attempts to control and eradicate plague. In late 19th- and early 20th-century India, plague was a real killer disease, sometimes causing more than a million deaths per year. Microbiology was already an established field, scientists had isolated the bacterium that caused plague and a vaccine was available in India. Britain wanted to vaccinate the population of India, but one major obstacle it faced was that modern medicine was barely heard of, still less in use, in India. Ayurvedic medicine was the dominant force and most Muslims still used Unani medical therapies – prescriptions based on a combination of ibn-Sina’s Canon of Medicine and the more faith-based Medicine of the Prophet. Colonial authorities knew they needed the support of traditional healers, hakims, to help isolate infected populations and also to encourage people to get vaccinated. But most refused to get involved, meaning that the inoculation campaigns had little impact and more lives were lost. They refused for a mixture of reasons, including the belief that a foreign power was trying to interfere in the practice of their faith.

  The idea that plague was God’s wrath on India was widespread. The view was that God had become angry because society had become immoral, as demonstrated by the fact that punishments for acts such as adultery were relatively light and not at all in accordance with what God had prescribed in sacred texts. Moreover, the placing of infected populations in quarantine also put new medical knowledge in direct opposition to what people believed were Muhammad’s teachings. The advice attributed to him is that people should stay where they were if they came into contact with plague. One healer, Muhammad Sufi, went so far as to say that it was ‘inhumane’ to isolate people, especially women, from their families. On a more basic level, some other hakims were genuinely afraid that the content of the vaccine might itself make someone ill, or lead to loss of virility, blindness, even death.

  But perhaps more fundamentally, hakims didn’t regard plague as being contagious. Instead, they understood it to spread through ‘bad air’ rising from the earth and entering the body through the nose, after which it would pass on to the liver, brain and heart. Signs that the air had become infected with plague included animal behaviour, especially the death of rats. As Unani medicine regarded the liver, brain and heart as being the body’s vital organs, early treatment was seen as being crucial to saving lives.

  However, it wasn’t the case that all traditional healers kept a distance. Some of the most established practitioners saw the offer to help as an opportunity to improve their knowledge of the new healthcare practices and in particular to learn alternative explanations for the spread of disease. But according to the work of Guy Attewell, a historian of medicine in South Asia, it was true that these hakims were in a minority.

  The language of empire

  Anyone who studies the British and Islamic empires will discover that, for their many differences, they also shared a few things in common. For example, both empires ruled in many of the same territories. They both – to varying degrees – encouraged converts to their respective religions. And in both cases we find examples of the use of science and technology to meet an expanding empire’s many and complex needs.

  In Britain’s case, many of the leading lights from the Victorian scientific era cut their teeth working in India on projects that had commercial or political aims. Botanists were employed to search for rare plants with commercial potential. Surveyors and geographers were given the task of creating accurate maps, and philologists were tasked with understanding the many languages spoken by India’s diverse peoples. One of the most comprehensive studies ever to have been done was George Grierson’s monumental, nineteen-volume Linguistic Survey of India, published at the beginning of the 20th century. Finding or creating a common language is clearly central to empire-building. The Islamic empires opted to promote Arabic, and the consequences of this for other languages are still being discovered. Britain, on the other hand, chose first Urdu, then English in India and in the rest of the empire. This was a decision destined to have both good and bad consequences for science and learning in the countries that were once colonies. Ending teaching and learning in languages such as Arabic and Persian would cut off the majority of younger generations from their scholarly heritage. But at the same time, providing education in European languages would give – albeit to a minority of wealthier people – access to the latest science and technology and the tools to pursue advanced science and higher education in the countries of Western Europe, which many did.

  A number of those who ran the empires of Britain and of Islam’s early years have something else in common. In each case, examples can be found where force or coercion was used in the desire to create societies based on science and reason. And where this happened, the reaction from ordinary people – though not scientists – was to recoil and withdraw. The Abbasid caliphs tortured those who openly disagreed with their project to install rationalism as the religion of the Islamic state. British attempts at introducing science and English-language education were rebuffed in part because they represented the wishes of an occupying power, and also because their policies had already resulted in indigenous languages and learning institutions being run down.

  The fact that both empires gave much support to talented intellectuals who wanted Muslims to engage with modern ideas often ended up having the opposite effect to that which was originally intended. Men such as the 9th-century mathematician al-Khwarizmi, the astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, or Sayyid Ahmad Khan in India would have been regarded as being too close to unpopular rulers – Khan was knighted by Queen Victoria. The tragedy for many predominantly Muslim societies has been that the voice of science has too often been associated with the blade of a ruler’s sword, or the barrel of his gun.

  15

  Science and Islam: Lessons From History

  I have been asking the ulema why their sermons should not exhort Muslims to take up the subjects of science and technology – considering that one-eighth of the holy book speaks of science and technology. Most have replied that they would like to do so, but do not know enough modern science. They only know the science of the age of Avicenna.

  Muhammad Abdus Salam, Nobel physics laureate, 1979

  It is clear that the colonisation of many developing countries played a part in precipitating the decline of advanced science and learning in the Islamic world. Moreover, the empires of Islam were feeling many pressures from the 16th century onwards, and cost-conscious caliphs would have seen the funding of scientists and scientific programmes as among the first budget items to cut.

  Unlike in the modern world, science in the Islamic era was not on the scale that it is today. There were no government departments for science, nor were there science-based multinational companies like Google or Microsoft employing thousands to create the next big thing. Nor were scientists part of enduring institutions, such as colleges or universities. If anything, the genesis of colleges in the Islamic world seems to have been a way
to organise those scholars who were opposed to philosophy and rationalism. Knowledge and science in ancient times were supported by individual patrons and when these patrons changed their priorities, or when they died, any institutions that they might have built often died with them. This is a major reason why no observatory lasted more than 30 years in any of the Islamic empires.

  Back to the future

  Conversations on science’s Islamic past often end with a volley of further questions, such as the following: If things were so good before, then why (even in the richer countries of the Middle East) are standards of research, development, discovery and innovation so much lower than those of the developed world? Why are there just two scientists from Muslim countries that have won a Nobel prize in science – Abdus Salam, a physicist from Pakistan who won in 1979, and Ahmed Zewail, a chemist from Egypt, in 1999? Or: Why did science come to an end in the way that it did? If we are talking about countries with large Muslim populations, did the rise and the decline have something to do with religion, or were there other factors? Last but not least: What needs to be done; what can be done, to revive and give a boost to science and learning?

  Overall, the scientific performance today of the 57 member states of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) is not far off that of some of the poorest countries of the world – this is in spite of the fact that OIC states include some of the world’s wealthiest oil-producing nations. Yet if you look at indicators of scientific performance – such as how much is invested in universities; or the quantity and quality of scientific research published in the leading journals; or the numbers of scientists per head of population – then the Islamic world as a whole is not in good shape.