From the ninth century and for about 500 years, the Arabic language was synonymous with learning and science. The Golden Age of Islam is credited with, among other things, a significant part in laying the foundations for modern universities, the theory of algebra, astronomy and even the concept of science as empirical research. Why did science decline under the auspices of Islam
By Dennis Overbey
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was still a teenager when the "Assassins" made him an offer he couldn't refuse. His hometown was destroyed by the Mongol armies, and so, at the beginning of the 13th century, al-Tusi, a promising astronomer and philosopher, came to settle in the legendary city of Alamut in the northern Persian mountains. Al-Tusi lived among members of a secret Shiite heretical sect, whose members adopted murder as a tactical method, and who were called "Hashashun" because of their use of hashish.
Although he later claimed that he was held in Alamut against his will, the library there was renowned for its quality, and Al-Tusi made a splash there. He published studies on astronomy, ethics, mathematics and philosophy, which made him one of the great intellectuals of his generation.
Al-Tusi's version of Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean theorem
However, when the troops of Al-Lagu, Genghis Khan's grandson, gathered outside the city in 1256, al-Tusi did not hesitate and crossed the lines. He joined the Lago and accompanied him to Baghdad, which was conquered in 1258. As a token of respect, the Lago built an observatory for him in Mara'a, in the northwest of today's Iran.
Al-Tusi's efforts and ideological flexibility in seeking funding for his scientific research paid off. The path to modern astronomy, the researchers say, passes through the studies carried out by Al-Tusi and his successors in Mara'a and Alamat in the 13th and 14th centuries. This is a winding path from Athens to Alexandria, Baghdad, Damascus, Cordoba, through the palaces of caliphs and laboratories in the cellars of alchemists.
The Muslims, commanded by the Koran to acquire knowledge and discover the fingerprints of the Creator in nature, and who drew inspiration from ancient Greek wisdom, created in the Middle Ages a society that was the scientific center of the entire world.
For 500 years, the Arabic language was synonymous with learning and science, this golden age can be credited with, among other things, laying the foundations for modern universities, the theory of algebra, the names of the stars, and even the concept of science as empirical research. According to historians, the assimilation of this knowledge in Western Europe fueled the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.
"Cultures don't just collide with each other," says Abdel-Hamid Sabra, a former lecturer in the history of Arab science at Harvard University. "Cultures can learn from each other. Islam is a good example of this." The intellectual encounter between Arabia and Greece was one of the most important events in history, he says.
However, historians admit that very little is known about the days of the Golden Age. Only a few of the important scientific works from that period were translated from the West, and thousands of manuscripts have not been read at all by modern researchers. The rich intellectual culture of Islam, the researchers emphasize, stands in contrast to the image created by recent events.
The Islamic tradition encouraged the study of science and education. "There is no contradiction between Islam and science," says Osman Bacher, from the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington. "Knowledge is part of faith," adds Farouk Al-Baz, a geologist from Boston University who was the scientific advisor to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. "The more you know, the more evidence you discover of God's existence."
Therefore, the perception that modern Islamic science is nowadays considered "inferior", as expressed in the past by Abd al-Salam, the first Muslim to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, haunts researchers from the East. "Muslims feel longing for the past, for the days when they could claim that they were the main cultivators of science," says Bacher. The relationship between science and religion has caused much controversy in the Islamic world, many say. There are scientists and historians who advocate "Islamic science" accompanied by spiritual values, which they say do not exist in Western science. Others claim, on the other hand, that religious conservatism in the East suppressed the spirit of skepticism, which is essential for good scientific work.
^^Golden Age^^
When Muhammad's armies broke out of the Arabian Peninsula, in the seventh and eighth centuries, and annexed territories from Spain and Persia, they also annexed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Hippocrates and other Greek thinkers.
Hellenistic culture spread eastward through the armies of Alexander the Great and religious minorities, including various Christian sects, says Dr. David Lindbergh, a University of Wisconsin historian who specializes in the Middle Ages. The Muslim conquerors, who were mostly illiterate, turned to the local intelligentsia to help them govern. In the process, they absorbed Greek knowledge and wisdom that had not yet been seriously transmitted to the West or translated into Latin. "The West had a poor and abbreviated version of Greek wisdom," says Dr. Lindberg. "The East had everything".
In Baghdad of the ninth century, the caliph Abu al-Abbas al-Ma'mun established an institute called "Bait al-Hikama", (House of Knowledge) for the translation of manuscripts. Among the first works to be translated into Arabic was the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy's "Great Treatise", which described a universe in which the sun, moon, planets and stars revolved around the earth. The work was known to Arab researchers as "Almagist", and it became the basis of cosmology for the next 500 years.
Jews, Christians and Muslims participated in this flowering of science, arts, medicine and philosophy, which lasted at least 500 years and spread from Spain to Persia. Its peak, historians say, was in the 10th and 11th centuries, a period when three great thinkers stood out in the East: Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, also known as al-Khazan, Abu al-Rayham al-Biruni; And Abu Ali al-Hussein Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna.
Al-Haytam, who was born in Iraq in 965, conducted experiments on light and vision, and laid the foundations for modern optics and the idea that science should also be based on experiment, in addition to philosophical arguments. "He ranks with Archimedes, Kepler and Newton as a great scientist and mathematician," says Dr. Lindberg.
The mathematician, astronomer and geographer Al-Biruni, who was born in 973 in the province that is now part of Uzbekistan, wrote about 146 works, including an extensive sociological and geographical study of India.
Ibn Sina was a physician and philosopher born near Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan), in 981 he compiled a medical encyclopedia called "The Canon of Medicine", which contained about a million words and was used as a textbook in some parts of the West until the 17th century
According to the researchers, science flourished within medieval Islam for several reasons. Part of the attraction to science was mystical; This was another way to experience the unity of creation, which is the central message of Islam. "Belief in one God, almighty, is strengthened in the heart of everyone who studies anatomy," says a proverb attributed to Ibn Rushd, a 13th-century philosopher and anatomy researcher.
^^The Gates of Heaven^^
Another reason for the flourishing of science is that Islam is among the few religions in human history where scientific procedures are necessary for religious worship, claims David King, a historian of the history of science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, in his book "Astronomy in the Service of Islam", published in 1993. The Arabs have always been oriented in the stars and used them to navigate their way through the desert, but Islam further raised the status of astronomy.
The Muslim commandment to turn toward Mecca during prayer, for example, required knowledge of the Earth's dimensions and shape. The minds of the best astronomers in the Muslim world were engaged in the production of astronomical tables and diagrams, according to which it was possible to locate the "qibla" - the direction of prayer towards Mecca - from anywhere in the Islamic world. According to Dr. Al-Baz, the astronomers at the Samarkand observatory, which was established around 1420 by the ruler Ulog Beg, measured the positions of the stars to an accuracy of a fraction of a degree.
Islamic astronomy reached its peak, at least from the Western point of view, in the 13th and 14th centuries when al-Tusi and his successors expanded the boundaries of the Ptolemaic worldview that had dominated for a thousand years.
According to the philosophers, the celestial bodies (the crystal balls that carry the planets) were supposed to move in circles at fixed speeds. However, Ptolemy's attempt to explain completely the irregular movements of the planets and the sun, as seen from the earth, forced him to introduce additions and corrections. For example, Ptolemy, in accordance with the accepted Greek tradition, stated that the trajectory of the movement of each of the planets is the sum of several regular circular movements, but in order to adapt his theory to the phenomena, he claimed that some of the circular movements that make up the final movement are not regular.
Al-Tusi managed to reach a system where all movements are timed. With the help of the addition of two suspended circles that rotate at a fixed speed, he was able to reach a result very similar to the untimed movement of a single circle of Ptolemy. Following al-Tusi, the 14th-century astronomer Ala al-Din Abu al-Hasan Ibn al-Shatir succeeded in taking another step and building a completely symmetrical model.
Copernicus, who in 1530 overturned the Ptolemaic universe and claimed that the stars revolved around the sun, expressed ideas similar to those of the Muslim astronomers in his early writings. This led some historians to claim that there was a previously unknown link between Copernicus and the Muslim astronomers, even though they did not know of existing translations of the works of Ibn al-Shatar and al-Tusi into Latin, and therefore assumed that these were unknown to the West.
^^The Sunset of the East^^
Despite the flaws in Ptolemy's theory, Muslim astronomers were very far from discarding his model; Its rejection would have required a complete philosophical and cosmological revolution. But the East had no need for heliocentric models of the universe, says Dr. King of Frankfurt. Since all movement is relative, the question of whether the sun revolves around the earth or vice versa was not relevant to Muslim worship.
From the 10th to the 13th century, the Europeans, mainly the Spaniards, translated Arabic works into Hebrew and Latin. The result was a renaissance of research that completely changed Western culture.
Why didn't science also advance in the East? Historians point, among other things, to the undermining of the Islamic empire by the crusaders in the west and the Mongols in the east. The Christians reconquered Spain and the wonderful libraries in Córdoba and Toledo, which were full of Arabic writings. As a result, the Islamic research centers began to disconnect from each other, and from those in the West, and a gradual erosion of two main pillars on which science rests began - a connection between the various factors and funding sources.
In the West, science was able to finance itself thanks to technological innovations, such as the steam engine, and to raise funds from industry. The East, however, remained dependent on the patronage and curiosity of sultans and caliphs. The Ottomans, who took over the Arab territories in the 16th century, were builders and conquerors, not thinkers, says Al-Baz.
Other researchers claim that the decline of Islamic science is only visible through Western and secular eyes. "It is possible to exist even without an industrial revolution, if you have enough camels and food," says King. The question "Why is there a decline in Muslim science?" It is an essentially Western question, he claims. "He prospered for a thousand years - there is no culture on earth that was able to prosper like that, for such a long period of time."
The East's humiliating encounters with the colonial powers in the 19th century created a hunger for Western science and technology, or at least for the economic and military power they could produce, researchers say. Reformists who were determined to modernize educational programs in the East to include Western science could argue that the Muslims were merely reclaiming their own, because the West had inherited science from the Muslim world in the first place.
In some ways these efforts were successful. "In some countries, the science curriculum is quite modern," says Georgetown's Dr. Bacher, specifically mentioning Malaysia, Jordan and Pakistan. Even in Saudi Arabia, one of the most conservative Muslim countries, science classes are held in English, says Dr. Sabra.
Nevertheless, science is still lagging behind in the Muslim world, according to Dr. Parvez Hoodboy, a Pakistani physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, who has written on Islam and science. According to the survey he conducted, included in his book Religious
"Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality" "Islam and Science
,1991
Muslims are extremely underrepresented in science, making up less than 1% of the world's scientists, while they make up almost a fifth of the world's population. In Israel, he reports, the number of scientists is almost twice as many as in all other countries
Muslims together.
Among other sociological and economic factors, such as the lack of a middle class, Dr. Hodboy attributes the decline of Muslim science in the last millennium to the fact that an increasing emphasis was placed on memorization and learning by heart based on the Koran.
"The view that all knowledge is found in the 'big text' does not create an incentive for research and study," he says. "This is a destructive process, if we want to create a thinking person, someone who can analyze, question and create something new," says Dr. Bruno Guidroni, a Muslim and an astrophysicist at the "National Center for Scientific Research" in Paris, "The fundamentalists attack science simply because it is Western" .
Other researchers claim that, more than conservative Muslims are hostile to science, they are ambivalent towards it: interested in its benefits but not in its worldview. "They may use modern technology, but they do not deal with issues of religion and science," says Dr. Bacher.
One of the responses to the invasion of Western science, say the scientists, was an effort to bring about the "Islamization" of science, through the description of the Koran as a source of scientific knowledge.
Dr. Hoodboy says that such groups criticized the principle of natural causality. The educational guidelines issued by the "Institute of Policy Studies" in Pakistan, for example, rejected the idea that natural phenomena can be explained physically, since there is no natural causality.
For example, it is un-Muslim to claim that the combination of hydrogen and oxygen creates water. "It should be said," says Dr. Hudboy, "that if you put hydrogen and oxygen together, then by God's will, water is created."
But even Muslims who reject fundamentalism have expressed doubts about whether it is desirable to follow the Western scientific style, arguing that it undermines traditional spiritual values and promotes materialism and alienation.
"No science is created in a vacuum," said Dr. Seyed Hussein Nasser, historian of science, philosopher and professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, in a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) several years ago. "Science appeared in the West out of certain circumstances and with certain philosophical assumptions regarding the nature of reality."
Dr. Muzaffar Iqbal, a chemist and the president and founder of the "Center for Islam and Science" in Alberta, Canada, explained: "Modern science does not pretend to address the purpose of life; It's out of bounds. In the Islamic world, purpose is an integral part, it is part of this life."
Most scientists tend to scoff at the idea that science can be divided on ethnic, religious or any other basis. There is only one universe. The process of raising questions about nature and seeking answers to them, they say, ultimately erases the private circumstances from which those questions arose.
In his book, Dr. Hodboy tells how Dr. Salem and Dr. Steven Weinberg, who now work at the University of Texas, and Dr. Sheldon Glasho of Harvard, together received a Nobel Prize for proving that electromagnetism and the so-called weak nuclear force are different manifestations of a single force .
Dr. Salam and Dr. Weinberg reached the same conclusion separately and independently, he writes, despite the fact that Dr. Weinberg is an atheist while Dr. Salam is a devout Muslim who prays regularly and quotes from the Koran. Dr. Salam confirmed this description in the introduction he wrote to the book, describing himself as "geographically and ideologically distant" from Dr. Weinberg.
"Science is a universal pursuit," says Dr. Al-Baz. ” There is no such thing as Islamic science. Science is like building a big structure, a pyramid. Each person places one brick. These whites never had a religion. The skin color of the person who placed the brick is irrelevant."
