Book Reviews: The House of Wisdom; Science & Islam

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The Times has prodigiously published books reviews of two effulgent books on the West’s debt to Islam in science and technology. Inundated with negatives images of a demonized population, to many in the West this is news. To many in the East this is not news. Muslims have grown up with the knowledge that the stars have Arab names, the instruments of navigation used by Columbus and other sailors were Islamic in origin. The Muslims of South Asia know that the Britishers destroyed all local manufacturing in Bengal and Bihar and make way for cheap cotton imports from Manchester and Bradford.

Islamic map of the world by Idris (1154). South is at the top

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?

10th Century Islamic map of the the world showing America as Ard e Majhoola or (Unknown Area). This map and maps like this one from Arab sources was used by Columbus centuries later when he sailed from Spain (which had been Muslim Andulusia 'till the 15th cnetury)

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.

"The Cappella Palatina, at Palermo, Saracen Arches. the most wonderful of Roger's churches, with Norman doors, Saracenic arches, Byzantine dome, and roof adorned with Arabic scripts, is perhaps the most striking product of the brilliant and mixed civilization over which the grandson of the Norman Trancred ruled" (EB1911).

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. The Sunday Times review by Philip Ball

One of the most tolerant societies on the planet was brought to end end in Cordoba not because it lacked plurality or assimilation–it was brought to end by the force or arms by barbarians who killed and deported every jew and Muslim in the land.

Mao Zedung said it best “Political Power grows out the barrell of the gun“. Lord Clive did not conquer South Asia because there were a dearth of art, literature, music, science and technology in South Asia. The “British East India Company” conquered South Asia by craftly using cunning and wicked and ruthless application of power.

The Muslim world represeented by the Organization of Islamic Countries the OIC; The OIC condemned the violence on Kashmir

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 Sunday Times review by Philip Ball. Science & Islam by Ehsan Masood, Icon £14.99 pp256, The House of Wisdom by Jonathan Lyons, Bloomsbury £20 pp272. From The Sunday Times,February 1, 2009, Science & Islam: A History by Ehsan Masood plus The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilisation by Jonathan Lyons

Burmese Muslims a forgotten minority
———————————— Thai Occupied Muslim Sultanate of Patani”
———————————— Muslims in Latin America before Columbus
———————————– Muslims before Columbus in the Caribbean
———————————– Muslims in Suriname and Guyana before Columbus
Moorish Marronage Muslims of Jamaica
Linguistic heritage of Pre-Columbus Muslims
Cherokee Muslims in the USA before Columbus
Current day Muslims in Germany

Islamic Sicily fed the Christian Renaissance
Melungeon Muslims in America escaping the Spanish Inquisition

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While there is huge discussion of the Gutenberg press, there is no discussion of the fact that way past the decline of the Ottomans, the Mughals took the torch in Hindustan and kept science and technology alive in civil engineering, construction of bridges, roads, and building.

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.

Roger II himself spoke Arabic perfectly and was fond of Arabian culture.[11] He used Arab troops and siege engines in his campaigns in southern Italy. He mobilized Arab architects to build monuments in the Arab-Norman style. The various agricultural and industrial techniques which had been introduced by Arabs into Sicily over the two preceding years were kept and developed, allowing for the remarkable prosperity of the Island”]

Roger II of Sicily, who had Islamic soldiers, poets and scientists at his court.[10

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.

Last Arab attack on Rome in 849 painting by Raphael

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. The Sunday Times review by Philip Ball. Science & Islam by Ehsan Masood, Icon £14.99 pp256, The House of Wisdom by Jonathan Lyons, Bloomsbury £20 pp272. From The Sunday Times,February 1, 2009, Science & Islam: A History by Ehsan Masood plus The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilisation by Jonathan Lyons

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Book Reviews: The House of Wisdom; Science & Islam

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