Science & Islam: A History
by Ehsan Masood
The Sunday Times review by Philip Ball
From The Sunday Times, February 1, 2009
Last November, scientists using the Hubble space telescope reported the first sighting with visible light of a planet circling a star other than our own sun. It orbits 25 light years away around one of the brightest stars in the sky, called Fomalhaut.
Isn’t that a curious name for a star? Not obviously mythological, it sounds as if it derives from some forgotten French astronomer. Not so; it is, in fact, from the Arabic fum u’l haut, meaning “mouth of the fish”. And Fomalhaut is not alone in having an Arabic derivation – there are well over 100 others, including Betelgeuse, Aldebaran and Deneb. How did the Arabs get to name stars?
The answer, as these two revealing books make clear, is that they once led the world in astronomy. Muslim scientists were mapping the heavens, and pondering our place in them, while Europeans were still gazing at the night sky with baffled awe. To judge from some scientific narratives, the baton of knowledge about astronomy passed directly from the Greek Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD to Copernicus in the Renaissance. In fact, just about everything that the western world knew of the celestial sphere in the 16th century had come to it via the Arabs, who translated and refined Ptolemy’s works between the 9th and the 13th centuries. And they didn’t just read Ptolemy; they added to and challenged him, with data gathered at observatories such as the one established in the 820s in Baghdad by the greatest of the “scientific” rulers, al-Mamun of the Abbasid caliphate.
Astronomy is just one example of the enormous debt that the West owes to the achievements of Islamic science during the periods we still insist on calling the Dark and Middle Ages. While Europeans struggled until at least the 12th century with the mere rudiments of mathematics and natural philosophy, the Abbasid caliphs of the 8th to 13th centuries were promoting a rationalistic vision of Islam within which it was a sacred duty to inquire into the workings of the world. This programme was founded on the remnants of Roman and Hellenic culture, to which the Muslims had direct access in centres such as Alexandria. They prepared Arabic versions of the works of Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy and Archimedes, and set up schools and libraries such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
As well as preserving classical scholarship, Muslim thinkers also innovated in many fields: astronomy, optics, cartography and medicine. The camera obscura, for instance, a kind of pinhole camera in which an outside scene is projected onto a wall in a darkened chamber as light enters through a small hole, was first studied experimentally by Hassan ibn al-Haitham (Alhazen) in the 11th century. Roger Bacon later used the device to study solar eclipses, and old masters from Van Eyck to Vermeer may have employed the projection method to achieve their micro-realist detail.
Islamic mapmakers, meanwhile, were drawing recognisable outlines of Europe, the Gulf and the Indian subcontinent while westerners were still dividing a disc world into absurdly stylised quadrants. (It was a Muslim map that guided Vasco da Gama beyond the Cape of Good Hope to India at the end of the 15th century.) And in chemistry the Arabs went far beyond the tentative efforts of the classical world, bequeathing us words such as alkali and alcohol, alembic, elixir and alchemy. The standard theory of the alchemical transmutation of metals was laid out in the writings ascribed to the 8th-century Persian Jabir ibn-Hayyan, in which nitric, hydrochloric and sulphuric acids – central to practical chemistry then and now – made their debut.
The Muslims also benefited from contact with China, from where they learnt how to make paper, and India, from where they got the “Arabic” numerals that were far superior to the cumbersome Roman system for arithmetic calculations, along with the concept of zero (the word itself is Arabic). These and other discoveries were passed on to the West in due course.
The fruits of the golden age of Islamic science are summarised briskly and engagingly in Ehsan Masood’s Science & Islam, which was written to accompany a recent BBC television series. Both he and Jonathan Lyons in The House of Wisdom are keen to dismantle the myth that Islam is fundamentally opposed to science, and both show that the words of Muhammad can be read as obliging rational inquiry.
Lyons’s more specific focus is on the story of how this knowledge opened western eyes in the 12th century, a period now regarded as a kind of medieval renaissance. The hero of his book is an Englishman, Adelard of Bath, one of the few Europeans open-minded enough to see that they had much to learn from the “heathens”. Too often dismissed as a mere translator, Adelard not only gave the West its first view of Euclid’s Elements and the astronomy and algebra of the Baghdad mathematician al-Khwarizmi (whose name is preserved now in the word algorithm), but was also an original thinker who helped introduce medieval Europe to the Islamic vision of a universe governed by the rational design of a hands-off God.
One can’t read these two lucid accounts without becoming acutely aware of the contrast between the former Islamic supremacy in science and its parlous state today. This contrast brings to mind the “Needham question”, which the English biochemist Joseph Needham posed in the parallel case of ancient China’s technological and scientific superiority. Why is the West, not the East, now at the heart of science?
The answer is complex, but must partly lie in the more doctrinaire Ottoman theocracy that eventually succeeded the Abbasids at the end of the 13th century. The Ottoman sultans frowned on printing and forbade clocks because the muezzins were the keepers of sacred time. As Lyons shows, the irony is that the Arabs were once leaders in both astronomical and technological time-keeping, precisely because of the importance of prayer times.
In any event, by the mid-19th century the tables had turned. Instead of westerners marvelling at eastern learning, it was Ottoman ambassadors to Europe who were reporting back on western technological wonders to a country that had few roads and no trains or telephones. Many worried, too, that an acceptance of the western approach to science would mean abandoning Islamic principles. The result is that there have been only two Nobel laureates from Islamic countries, and, as Masood says, the scientific performance today of the members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference – many of them wealthy oil states – “is not far off that of some of the poorest countries of the world”. This won’t be changed by luring foreign scientists with oil money; as in Africa, grassroots education is the only way.
Science & Islam: A History (As seen on BBC)
by Ehsan Masood, Icon Books
