Excerpts from Landmarks in Western Science (1999)



Excerpts from Landmarks in Western Science (1999)

by Peter Whitfield

Chapter Three: Science in Religious Cultures

The Abbasid Court

It is related that in a dream the great Abbasid Caliph, al-Mamun, saw a vision of a blue-eyed, noble-headed man, reclining on a couch. To the Caliph's question 'Who are you?' the figure replied 'Aristotle'. The Caliph was delighted, and proceeded to discuss goodness, law and faith with the great philosopher. This legend perhaps surprises us, and we wonder why a ruler of the fiercely religious world of Islam should find inspiration in an ancient pagan philosopher. In fact the legend embodies one of the central intellectual events of the middle ages: the process by which the achievements of Greece became part of Islamic culture, and were in turn transmitted to the west.

What happened to Greek science as the Roman Empire decayed? In AD 549 the Emperor Justinian closed the pagan schools in Athens, an event that is taken as symbolizing the end of the classical era; but the links between Roman and Greek thought had been severed much earlier, and knowledge of the Greek language became virtually extinct [in the west]. . . . This decline of science was matched by the decline of urban society, the shift towards a predominantly rural culture, with learning centered in the monasteries. In this post-classical world [i.e., the early Middle Ages], learning was overwhelmingly religious and literary, not scientific. In the [Byzantine] east however, in Athens, Alexandria and Antioch, where the language barrier did not exist, the texts of Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates and Galen were known and read, even if they no longer inspired a living tradition of original thought. At the eastern margins of the empire too, intellectual life flourished: in the cities of Sassanian [i.e., Sassanid] Persia . . . Certain elements of Greek science are known to have spread through this region, and Ptolemaic astronomy, for example, had reached India by the fifth century . . .

Into this intellectual mélange swept the ferocious tide of Arab conquest, so irresistible that by AD 750 all the cultural centres of the east, except Constantinople itself, were in Islamic hands [i.e., the Umayyads]. It would hardly have been surprising if the all-powerful religious conquerors had deliberately destroyed the pagan elements of the civilisations which they now controlled, but they did not; instead they set out to absorb what they recognized as being, in some important way, higher cultures. This process is seen at its clearest at the Abbasid court in Baghdad, where the Caliph al-Mamun (r. AD 813-833) established the 'House of Wisdom' [Bayt al-Hikmah], dedicated to the translation into Arabic of Greek philosophical and scientific works. It has been said that one of the chief scientific inventions of Islam was patronage, for nothing like this form of political direction in intellectual life had ever been seen in Greece or Rome. Greek texts were gathered from Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria and taken to Baghdad in a highly international enterprise, with many of its leading figures being Christians, Jews or pagans, and in addition, works were translated from Persian and Sanskrit. Syriac, the cultivated tongue of the Middle East at this period, was often an intermediate stage between Greek and Arabic. The intellectual context of this whole extraordinary process was the movement known as Mu'tazilah, whose adherents held that unaided human reason was capable of discovering truth and goodness, and that the revelations of the Koran were not the sole pathway to divine truth. This form of rational faith became virtually the official religion of the caliphate in the ninth century, but met periodically with strong resistance and reaction.

The most famous translator was Hunayn Ibn Ishaq (died AD 873), a [Nestorian] Christian who served at the House of Wisdom, translating Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen into Syriac, which was then rendered into Arabic. Hunayn's son Ishaq (died AD 911) made all-important Arabic versions of Euclid's Elements and Ptolemy's Almagest, which were immediately recognized as the supreme authorities in Islamic mathematics and astronomy. It was the process of translating these fundamental works that raised Arabic to the status of the lingua franca of a new science. The versatility of the scientists in the House of Wisdom was truly astonishing, and this remained a characteristic of Islamic scholars. A figure such as Thabit Ibn Qurra (AD 836-901) mastered the exact sciences of mathematics and astronomy, was a practising physician and prolific medical author, and still made serious contributions to philosophy, logic and philology.

It is easy to see why Islamic rulers, like all rulers in the ancient and medieval world, should be interested in cultivating sciences such as astrology and medicine. Moreover certain practices within Islam itself served to encourage an appreciation of precise science. One was the need to devise a new calendar dating from the Hegira of Muhammad in AD 622, and to regulate the prescribed times of prayer, while the other was the Qibla, the sacred direction of Mecca, which must be ascertained for the purposes of prayer; both these objectives could only be achieved through a mastery of astronomy, and both became the subject of an extensive literature. In one wall of every mosque, a niche called the mihrab marked the direction in which worshippers faced during prayer. Prayer times were determined by solar altitude and by the length of shadows, and this information was embodied in written tables, while the Qibla involved a knowledge of coordinate geometry and trigonometry. These were important technical matters and they gave mathematics and astronomy a high status in Islamic culture . . .

The Abbasid Golden Age

Contemporary with Hunayn Ibn Ishaq and Abu'Mashar at the House of Wisdom were the mathematician al-Khwarizmi, the philosopher al-Kindi and the astronomer al-Farghani, whose works constituted the first golden age of Islamic science. The fame of al-Khwarizmi (c. AD 790-850) rests on his popularization of two great mathematical principles: the use of algebra and the use of Indian numerals. The very word algebra comes from the title of one of his works, 'The Book of al-Jabr and al-Muqabala', meaning respectively 'restoration' and 'balancing'. The two essential operations of algebra were the elimination of negative quantities, and the reduction of positive quantities on both sides of an equation. Al-Khwarizmi explains the purpose of his work as setting out 'what is easiest and most useful in arithmetic, such as men constantly require in cases of inheritance, legacies, partition, lawsuits and trade . . . or where the measuring of lands, the digging of canals, geometrical computations and other objects are concerned.' . . .

Like the Egyptians and Babylonians before him, al-Khwarizmi had not arrived at anything approaching modern algebraic notation, but expressed his calculations in verbal, rhetorical form, in steps which we would call an algorithm—a word which is a corruption of his own name. Thus the problem which we would write as:

(x/3 + 1)(x/4 +1) = 20

al-Khwarizmi expresses as 'A quantity: I multiplied a third of it and a dirham by a fourth of it and a dirham: it becomes twenty' (the dirham was a unit of coinage, here representing 1). Further algorithms are given for finding plane areas and solid volumes . . . The Arabs had previously used an alphabetic system, in which numerals were represented by different letters, and higher values were made up of compounds which proved unwieldy for calculation, like the Roman system. By the sixth century AD the decimal place-value system was in use in India, and al-Khwarizmi was the first to expound it systematically to his Islamic contemporaries . . .

Al-Kindi (c. 801-c. 866) is traditionally known as the 'first Arab philosopher', and he directed enormous effort to reconciling rational philosophy with revealed religion. He taught that the truth of the Greek philosophers was the same as that of the prophets, but that the latter was given at sudden moments by the divine will, while the former was discovered gradually by the disciplined exercise of reason. The purification of human life is the path offered by both philosophers and prophets, and the ultimate goal was the apprehension of the divine. Al-Kindi was a prolific researcher, and wrote extensively on optics, medicine, pharmacology and musical theory, seeking always to preserve the discoveries of the past, and test them in the light of reason. If al-Kindi can be regarded as a founder of Arab philosophy, then al-Farghani (fl. AD 830-860) occupies a similar position in astronomy. He produced a summary of Ptolemaic science so clearly and attractively presented that it was still being used in the west in printed Latin editions in the sixteenth century. In non-mathematical language al-Farghani dealt not only with Ptolemy's planetary system and star catalogue, but with his theory on the size of the universe, and with his terrestrial geography. He also composed one of the most extensive descriptions of the astrolabe, the instrument which was widely used by astronomers of the ninth century . . .

Not surprisingly, the importation of pagan science into Islamic civilization, and especially the central, philosophical importance accorded to it by figures such as Abu'Mashar and al-Kindi, provoked opposition among orthodox [Muslim] believers. In the eleventh century AD a systematic refutation of the methods of the falasifa (there was no equivalent Arabic term for 'philosopher') was launched by the mystic al-Ghazali in his Destruction of the Philosophers. Still more hostile was the jurist Ibn Taymiyya in the early fourteenth century, who argued that Greek principles of science and logic were wholly reconcilable with revealed religion. Yet the first scholarly experiment in Baghdad's House of Wisdom was no brief golden age, and the party of reason out-manoeuvered the party of orthodoxy to the extent that Islamic science flourished for five hundred years, spreading to other centres, to Cairo, Persia, Central Asia, Sicily and Spain. In Persia the first great Islamic physician, al-Razi (c. AD 854-925) who was known to the west as Rhazes, directed hospitals, and wrote comprehensive medical treatises in which he compared descriptions of diseases in classical authors with his own observations . . .

Al-Razi's more famous Persian successor Ibn Sina ('Avicenna' to the west) also combined medicine with philosophy, but a philosophy of a deeply religious kind. Ibn Sina (AD 980-1037) sought to reconcile the religion of the Koran with both an Aristotelian attention to nature and a Platonic idealism. Religion and science were twin pathways to the divine, for all things emanate from God and desire to return to God . . .

Science in a Religious Culture?

To sum up the nature of Islamic science is exceptionally difficult because certain central questions stubbornly refuse to be answered. How homogeneous was Islamic thought—were scholars in Spain and Egypt, in Arabia and Persia truly aware of each others' activities? Why is there such an absence of landmark discoveries which should give shape and coherence to any study of the development of knowledge? The sheer versatility of the leading scholars . . . suggests an imperfect commitment to any one pathway of knowledge. The dominance of the Greek authorities was so pervasive that that the entire intellectual tradition sometimes appears as an extended commentary on Greek models. Yet if brilliant discoveries are missing, one is left with an overwhelming sense of the depth and vitality of scientific practice in Islam, of a culture deeply engaged with scientific thought in a way that far surpassed the Christian west. Christendom’s intellectual energy was poured above all into theological argument, into biblical exposition or ecclesiastical law. Of course Islam had its theologians and jurists, but the striking thing is that a strong tradition of rational and secular thought was able to flourish in this culture, whose very identity was supposedly founded on an imperious religion . . .

QUESTIONS:

1) What were the reasons why Islamic science flourished under the Abbasid court centered on Baghdad?

2) What are the main similarities and differences between Islamic scholarship and scholarship in the Western Kingdoms or Byzantine East? [You may need to consult your textbook for this question]

3) Evaluate the historical validity of the following: “Islamic scholars were interested in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and other areas because they were simply smarter than the people living in the Western kingdoms.”

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