SCIENCE AND ISLAM
A History
By Ehsan Masood
Icon Books, 240pp
Reviewed:2 May 2009
When most Westerners associate Islam with faith-based politics and socio-religious dogmatism, it is valuable to be reminded that the Quran, and the words of the Prophet Mohammed, have also provided inspiration for regimes of strenuously rational and empirical scientific enquiry.
In 833AD, Caliph al-Mamun of Baghdad conducted a stern inquisition throughout his Islamic realm. Scholars and officials were required, on pain of punishment or even death, to attest that the Quran was not the dictated word of God, but rather the work of men inspired by their understanding of God.
Perhaps lacking in subtle people skills, the Caliph was a passionate believer in scientific enquiry, and a student of the Greek, Persian and Indian philosophers. He represented a consistent strand of Islamic thinking: that curiosity about the world is the greatest sign of respect to the Creator.
Among many scientific projects, he had his researchers confirm from astronomical observations that the circumference of the Earth was 24,000 miles – six centuries before our European savants could accept that the world was round.
The great surge of Islamic knowledge-seeking began in the Persian Abbassid Caliphate period from 750AD, with a sustained and systematic program to collect and translate all the wisdom of the world. Agents scoured the libraries and markets not only of lands under Islamic rule, but also of Byzantium, India, Africa, and Central Asia with its links to China.
Scholars from all corners of the world were attracted to the courts and institutions or Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo or Cordoba, and were paid well for their work in translation and research. In four centuries of Islamic enlightenment, the work of scholarship proceeded in conditions of religious tolerance. Many of the scholars were Christians, Jews or other non-Muslims, but were supported by powerful patrons. Islamic religious purists also flourished and made their arguments, but were not allowed to stand in the way of the quest for understanding of the world.
Ehsan Masood is a British Muslim, a commissioning editor at the prestigious peer-reviewed Nature magazine, and an established writer on contemporary science and cultural policy. The book is a companion to a BBC television series. Science and Islam targets a broad audience, and at times struggles to present its flood of fact and explanation with enough background to satisfy this reader, who found himself keeping Wikipedia open on the computer screen for cross-reference on fleeting names and events. To be fair, Masood has attempted a very broad historical scope in a limited page-count.
There is much here to challenge Eurocentric assumptions. In 2009, as we celebrate Charles Darwin’s 19th Century studies, it is salutary to read the 9th Century Baghdad naturalist al-Jahiz describing the evolution of species by natural selection – a full millennium earlier than Darwin. The “algorithm” (the foundation of computer programming) is named for al-Khwarizmi, another 9th Century scholar, of Central Asian origins, who not only introduced the Indian base-10 number system to the West (what we now call Arabic numerals), but also established the foundations of “algebra” (another Arabic word) to radically extended the possibilities of calculation in every field of science. Al-Khwarizmi developed algebra specifically to assist the Caliph’s officials in resolving the complex family property divisions required under Islamic law.
Other scholars established the foundations of modern chemistry, the experimental method, systematic medicine, optics, astronomy, navigation, and developed mechanical theory and practice.
At the life-style end of the knowledge market, the Andalusian Islamic culture of southern Spain attracted bright sparks from throughout the accessible world to its eclectic and tolerant society. Former slave Ziryab, possibly from Zanzibar, is credited with leading style revolutions in Cordoba in seasonal clothing, oud music (the ancestor of the guitar), food (defining the three-course meal), and even under-arm deodorants and toothpaste. This in the “dark ages” of the 9th Century.
Ibn-Firnas, also of Cordoba, is reported making a successful hang-glider flight that lasted several minutes and was marred only by a too-fast landing that cost him an injured back. Ibn-Firnas had also built a functioning projection planetarium using glass lenses in the floor, centuries before Leonardo or Galileo.
Importantly, this book goes well beyond boasting about Islamic wonders and achievements. Its serious theme is to explore the relationship between religion, science, and state power. Masood notes that science can flourish under authoritarian rule, ancient or modern, but suggests a fundamental link between cultural self-confidence and the liberation of rational enquiry. Thus for the period when the Islamic empires were flourishing and embracing a world of knowledge, Byzantium retreated into conservative orthodoxy and Western Europe lapsed into centuries of defensive, Church-ridden repudiation of almost everything new from the East. This was the darkness of the Dark Ages.
When European maritime empires began to expand, first the Ottoman Islamic empire and then the South Asian Mughal empire were pushed into defensive postures that encouraged a retreat from enquiry to the comforting certainties of faith-defined dogmatism. Modern Islamic societies, Masood suggests, are still defined by their state of reaction to Western colonialism. Conservatism is a political artifact, and no more intrinsic to Islam than it is to Christianity.
A little reflection on current trends in Western cultures might confirm this.
The book seems to have been produced by a team and to a deadline, and shows a few ragged edges. None the less, it is stimulating reading. This is an overdue, accessible contribution to discussion of cultural issues that are too often presented to us in politicized sterotype.
Richard Thwaites has personal interests in aspects of Islamic history