By Hillel Ofek
Winter 2011
Contemporary
Islam is not known for its engagement in the modern scientific project. But it
is heir to a legendary “Golden Age” of Arabic science frequently invoked by
commentators hoping to make Muslims and Westerners more respectful and
understanding of each other. President Obama, for instance, in his June 4, 2009
speech in Cairo, praised Muslims for their historical scientific and
intellectual contributions to civilization:
It was
Islam that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the
way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim
communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools
of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how
disease spreads and how it can be healed.
Such
tributes to the Arab world’s era of scientific achievement are generally made in
service of a broader political point, as they usually precede discussion of the
region’s contemporary problems. They serve as an implicit exhortation: the
great age of Arab science demonstrates that there is no categorical or
congenital barrier to tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and advancement in the
Islamic Middle East.
To anyone
familiar with this Golden Age, roughly spanning the eighth through the
thirteenth centuries A.D., the disparity between the intellectual achievements
of the Middle East then and now — particularly relative to the rest of the
world — is staggering indeed. In his 2002 book What Went Wrong?, historian
Bernard Lewis notes that “for many centuries the world of Islam was in the
forefront of human civilization and achievement.” “Nothing in Europe,” notes
Jamil Ragep, a professor of the history of science at the University of
Oklahoma, “could hold a candle to what was going on in the Islamic world until
about 1600.” Algebra, algorithm, alchemy, alcohol, alkali, nadir, zenith,
coffee, and lemon: these words all derive from Arabic, reflecting Islam’s
contribution to the West.
Today,
however, the spirit of science in the Muslim world is as dry as the desert.
Pakistani physicist Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy laid out the grim statistics in a
2007 Physics Today article: Muslim countries have nine scientists, engineers,
and technicians per thousand people, compared with a world average of
forty-one. In these nations, there are approximately 1,800 universities, but
only 312 of those universities have scholars who have published journal
articles. Of the fifty most-published of these universities, twenty-six are in
Turkey, nine are in Iran, three each are in Malaysia and Egypt, Pakistan has
two, and Uganda, the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and
Azerbaijan each have one.
There are
roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, but only two scientists from Muslim
countries have won Nobel Prizes in science (one for physics in 1979, the other
for chemistry in 1999). Forty-six Muslim countries combined contribute just 1
percent of the world’s scientific literature; Spain and India each contribute
more of the world’s scientific literature than those countries taken together.
In fact, although Spain is hardly an intellectual superpower, it translates more
books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand
years. “Though there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working
productively in the West,” Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg has
observed, “for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or
astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading.”
Comparative
metrics on the Arab world tell the same story. Arabs comprise 5 percent of the
world’s population, but publish just 1.1 percent of its books, according to the
U.N.’s 2003 Arab Human Development Report. Between 1980 and 2000, Korea granted
16,328 patents, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and
the U.A.E., granted a combined total of only 370, many of them registered by
foreigners. A study in 1989 found that in one year, the United States published
10,481 scientific papers that were frequently cited, while the entire Arab
world published only four. This may sound like the punch line of a bad joke,
but when Nature magazine published a sketch of science in the Arab world in
2002, its reporter identified just three scientific areas in which Islamic
countries excel: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. The recent
push to establish new research and science institutions in the Arab world —
described in these pages by Waleed Al-Shobakky (see “Petrodollar Science,” Fall
2008) — clearly still has a long way to go.
Given that
Arabic science was the most advanced in the world up until about the thirteenth
century, it is tempting to ask what went wrong — why it is that modern science
did not arise from Baghdad or Cairo or Córdoba. We will turn to this question
later, but it is important to keep in mind that the decline of scientific
activity is the rule, not the exception, of civilizations. While it is
commonplace to assume that the scientific revolution and the progress of
technology were inevitable, in fact the West is the single sustained success
story out of many civilizations with periods of scientific flourishing. Like
the Muslims, the ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations, both of which were
at one time far more advanced than the West, did not produce the scientific
revolution.
Nevertheless,
while the decline of Arabic civilization is not exceptional, the reasons for it
offer insights into the history and nature of Islam and its relationship with
modernity. Islam’s decline as an intellectual and political force was gradual
but pronounced: while the Golden Age was extraordinarily productive, with the
contributions made by Arabic thinkers often original and ground-breaking, the
past seven hundred years tell a very different story.
Original Contributions of Arabic Science
A
preliminary caution must be noted about both parts of the term “Arabic
science.” This is, first, because the scientists discussed here were not all
Arab Muslims. Indeed, most of the greatest thinkers of the era were not
ethnically Arab. This is not surprising considering that, for several centuries
throughout the Middle East, Muslims were a minority (a trend that only began to
change at the end of the tenth century). The second caution about “Arabic
science” is that it was not science as we are familiar with it today.
Pre-modern science, while not blind to utility, sought knowledge primarily in
order to understand philosophical questions concerned with meaning, being, the
good, and so on. Modern science, by contrast, grew out of a revolution in
thought that reoriented politics around individual comfort through the mastery
of nature. Modern science dismisses ancient metaphysical questions as (to
borrow Francis Bacon’s words) the pursuit of pleasure and vanity. Whatever
modern science owes to Arabic science, the intellectual activity of the
medieval Islamic world was not of the same kind as the European scientific
revolution, which came after a radical break from ancient natural philosophy.
Indeed, even though we use the term “science” for convenience, it is important
to remember that this word was not coined until the nineteenth century; the
closest word in Arabic — ilm — means “knowledge,” and not necessarily that of
the natural world.
Still,
there are two reasons why it makes sense to refer to scientific activity of the
Golden Age as Arabic. The first is that most of the philosophical and
scientific work at the time was eventually translated into Arabic, which became
the language of most scholars in the region, regardless of ethnicity or
religious background. And second, the alternatives — “Middle Eastern science”
or “Islamic science” — are even less accurate. This is in part because very
little is known about the personal backgrounds of these thinkers. But it is
also because of another caution we must keep in mind about this subject, which
ought to be footnoted to every broad assertion made about the Golden Age: surprisingly
little is known for certain even about the social and historical context of
this era. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, a now-retired professor of the history of Arabic
science who taught at Harvard, described his field to the New York Times in
2001 as one that “hasn’t even begun yet.”
That said,
the field has advanced far enough to convincingly demonstrate that Arabic
civilization contributed much more to the development of science than the
passive transmission to the West of ancient thought and of inventions
originating elsewhere (such as the numeral system from India and papermaking
from China). For one thing, the scholarly revival in Abbasid Baghdad (751-1258)
that resulted in the translation of almost all the scientific works of the
classical Greeks into Arabic is nothing to scoff at. But beyond their
translations of (and commentaries upon) the ancients, Arabic thinkers made
original contributions, both through writing and methodical experimentation, in
such fields as philosophy, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, physics,
optics, and mathematics.
Perhaps the
most oft-repeated claim about the Golden Age is that Muslims invented algebra.
This claim is largely true: initially inspired by Greek and Indian works, the
Persian al-Khwarizmi (died 850) wrote a book from whose title we get the term
algebra. The book starts out with a mathematical introduction, and proceeds to
explain how to solve then-commonplace issues involving trade, inheritance,
marriage, and slave emancipations. (Its methods involve no equations or
algebraic symbols, instead using geometrical figures to solve problems that
today would be solved using algebra.) Despite its grounding in practical
affairs, this book is the primary source that contributed to the development of
the algebraic system that we know today.
The Golden
Age also saw advances in medicine. One of the most famous thinkers in the
history of Arabic science, and considered among the greatest of all medieval
physicians, was Rhazes (also known as al-Razi). Born in present-day Tehran,
Rhazes (died 925) was trained in Baghdad and became the director of two
hospitals. He identified smallpox and measles, writing a treatise on them that
became influential beyond the Middle East and into nineteenth-century Europe.
Rhazes was the first to discover that fever is a defence mechanism. And he was
the author of an encyclopaedia of medicine that spanned twenty-three volumes.
What is most striking about his career, as Ehsan Masood points out in Science
and Islam, is that Rhazes was the first to seriously challenge the seeming
infallibility of the classical physician Galen. For example, he disputed
Galen’s theory of humors, and he conducted a controlled experiment to see if
bloodletting, which was the most common medical procedure up until the
nineteenth century, actually worked as a medical treatment. (He found that it
did.) Rhazes provides a clear instance of a thinker explicitly questioning, and
empirically testing, the widely-accepted theories of an ancient giant, while
making original contributions to a field.
Breakthroughs
in medicine continued with the physician and philosopher Avicenna (also known
as Ibn-Sina; died 1037), whom some consider the most important physician since
Hippocrates. He authored the Canon of Medicine, a multi-volume medical survey
that became the authoritative reference book for doctors in the region, and —
once translated into Latin — a staple in the West for six centuries. The Canon
is a compilation of medical knowledge and a manual for drug testing, but it
also includes Avicenna’s own discoveries, including the infectiousness of
tuberculosis.
Like the
later European Renaissance, the Arabic Golden Age also had many polymaths who
excelled in and advanced numerous fields. One of the earliest such polymaths
was al-Farabi (also known as Alpharabius, died ca. 950), a Baghdadi thinker
who, in addition to his prolific writing on many aspects of Platonic and
Aristotelian philosophy, also wrote on physics, psychology, alchemy, cosmology,
music, and much else. So esteemed was he that he came to be known as the
“Second Teacher” — second greatest, that is, after Aristotle. Another great
polymath was al-Biruni (died 1048), who wrote 146 treatises totaling 13,000
pages in virtually every scientific field. His major work, The Description of
India, was an anthropological work on Hindus. One of al-Biruni’s most notable
accomplishments was the near-accurate measurement of the Earth’s circumference
using his own trigonometric method; he missed the correct measurement of 24,900
miles by only 200 miles. (However, unlike Rhazes, Avicenna, and al-Farabi,
al-Biruni’s works were never translated into Latin and thus did not have much
influence beyond the Arabic world.) Another of the most brilliant minds of the
Golden Age was the physicist and geometrician Alhazen (also known as Ibn
al-Haytham; died 1040). Although his greatest legacy is in optics — he showed
the flaws in the theory of extra mission, which held that our eyes emit energy
that makes it possible for us to see — he also did work in astronomy,
mathematics, and engineering. And perhaps the most renowned scholar of the late
Golden Age was Averroës (also known as Ibn Rushd; died 1198), a philosopher,
theologian, physician, and jurist best known for his commentaries on Aristotle.
The 20,000 pages he wrote over his lifetime included works in philosophy,
medicine, biology, physics, and astronomy.
Why Arabic Science Thrived
What
prompted scientific scholarship to flourish where and when it did? What were
the conditions that incubated these important Arabic-speaking scientific
thinkers? There is, of course, no single explanation for the development of
Arabic science, no single ruler who inaugurated it, no single culture that
fueled it. As historian David C. Lindberg puts it in The Beginnings of Western
Science (1992), Arabic science thrived for as long as it did thanks to “an
incredibly complex concatenation of contingent circumstances.”
Scientific
activity was reaching a peak when Islam was the dominant civilization in the
world. So one important factor in the rise of the scholarly culture of the
Golden Age was its material backdrop, provided by the rise of a powerful and
prosperous empire. By the year 750, the Arabs had conquered Arabia, Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and much of North Africa, Central Asia,
Spain, and the fringes of China and India. Newly opened routes connecting India
and the Eastern Mediterranean spurred an explosion of wealth through trade, as
well as an agricultural revolution.
For the
first time since the reign of Alexander the Great, the vast region was united
politically and economically. The result was, first, an Arab kingdom under the
Umayyad caliphs (ruling in Damascus from 661 to 750) and then an Islamic empire
under the Abbasid caliphs (ruling in Baghdad from 751 to 1258), which saw the
most intellectually productive age in Arab history. The rise of the first
centralized Islamic state under the Abbasids profoundly shaped life in the
Islamic world, transforming it from a tribal culture with little literacy to a
dynamic empire. To be sure, the vast empire was theologically and ethnically
diverse; but the removal of political barriers that previously divided the
region meant that scholars from different religious and ethnic backgrounds
could travel and interact with each other. Linguistic barriers, too, were
decreasingly an issue as Arabic became the common idiom of all scholars across
the vast realm.
The spread
of empire brought urbanization, commerce, and wealth that helped spur
intellectual collaboration. Maarten Bosker of Utrecht University and his
colleagues explain that in the year 800, while the Latin West (with the
exception of Italy) was “relatively backward,” the Arab world was highly
urbanized, with twice the urban population of the West. Several large metropolises
— including Baghdad, Basra, Wasit, and Kufa — were unified under the Abbasids;
they shared a single spoken language and brisk trade via a network of caravan
roads. Baghdad in particular, the Abbasid capital, was home to palaces,
mosques, joint-stock companies, banks, schools, and hospitals; by the tenth
century, it was the largest city in the world.
As the
Abbasid Empire grew, it also expanded eastward, bringing it into contact with
the ancient Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Chinese, and Persian civilizations, the
fruits of which it readily enjoyed. (In this era, Muslims found little of
interest in the West, and for good reason.) One of the most important
discoveries by Muslims was paper, which was probably invented in China around
A.D. 105 and brought into the Islamic world starting in the mid-eighth century.
The effect of paper on the scholarly culture of Arabic society was enormous: it
made the reproduction of books cheap and efficient, and it encouraged
scholarship, correspondence, poetry, recordkeeping, and banking.
The arrival
of paper also helped improve literacy, which had been encouraged since the dawn
of Islam due to the religion’s literary foundation, the Koran. Medieval Muslims
took religious scholarship very seriously, and some scientists in the region
grew up studying it. Avicenna, for example, is said to have known the entire
Koran by heart before he arrived at Baghdad. Might it be fair, then, to say
that Islam itself encouraged scientific enterprise? This question provokes
wildly divergent answers. Some scholars argue that there are many parts of the
Koran and the hadith (the sayings of Muhammad) that exhort believers to think
about and try to understand Allah’s creations in a scientific spirit. As one
hadith urges, “Seek knowledge, even in China.” But there are other scholars who
argue that “knowledge” in the Koranic sense is not scientific knowledge but
religious knowledge, and that to conflate such knowledge with modern science is
inaccurate and even naïve.
The Gift of Baghdad
But the
single most significant reason that Arabic science thrived was the absorption
and assimilation of the Greek heritage — a development fuelled by the
translation movement in Abbasid Baghdad. The translation movement, according to
Yale historian and classicist Dimitri Gutas, is “equal in significance to, and
belongs to the same narrative as … that of Pericles’ Athens, the Italian
Renaissance, or the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.” Whether or not one is willing to grant Gutas the comparison, there
is no question that the translation movement in Baghdad — which by the year
1000 saw nearly the entire Greek corpus in medicine, mathematics, and natural
philosophy translated into Arabic — provided the foundation for inquiry in the
sciences. While most of the great thinkers in the Golden Age were not
themselves in Baghdad, the Arabic world’s other cultural centers likely would
not have thrived without Baghdad’s translation movement. For this reason, even
if it is said that the Golden Age of Arabic science encompasses a large region,
as a historical event it especially demands an explanation of the success of
Abbasid Baghdad.
The rise to
power of the Abbasid caliphate in the year 750 was, as Bernard Lewis put it in
The Arabs in History (1950), “a revolution in the history of Islam, as
important a turning point as the French and Russian revolutions in the history
of the West.” Instead of tribe and ethnicity, the Abbasids made religion and
language the defining characteristics of state identity. This allowed for a
relatively cosmopolitan society in which all Muslims could participate in
cultural and political life. Their empire lasted until 1258, when the Mongols
sacked Baghdad and executed the last Abbasid caliph (along with a large part of
the Abbasid population). During the years that the Abbasid Empire thrived, it
deeply influenced politics and society from Tunisia to India.
The
Greek-Arabic translation movement in Abbasid Baghdad, like other scholarly
efforts elsewhere in the Islamic world, was centered less in educational
institutions than in the households of great patrons seeking social prestige.
But Baghdad was distinctive: its philosophical and scientific activity enjoyed
a high level of cultural support. As Gutas explains in Greek Thought, Arabic
Culture (1998), the translation movement, which mostly flourished from the
middle of the eighth century to the end of the tenth, was a self-perpetuating
enterprise supported by “the entire elite of Abbasid society: caliphs and princes,
civil servants and military leaders, merchants and bankers, and scholars and
scientists; it was not the pet project of any particular group in the
furtherance of their restricted agenda.” This was an anomaly in the Islamic
world, where for the most part, as Ehsan Masood argues, science was “supported
by individual patrons, and when these patrons changed their priorities, or when
they died, any institutions that they might have built often died with them.”
There seem
to have been three salient factors inspiring the translation movement. First,
the Abbasids found scientific Greek texts immensely useful for a sort of
technological progress — solving common problems to make daily life easier. The
Abbasids did not bother translating works in subjects such as poetry, history,
or drama, which they regarded as useless or inferior. Indeed, science under
Islam, although in part an extension of Greek science, was much less
theoretical than that of the ancients. Translated works in mathematics, for
example, were eventually used for engineering and irrigation, as well as in
calculation for intricate inheritance laws. And translating Greek works on
medicine had obvious practical use.
Astrology
was another Greek subject adapted for use in Baghdad: the Abbasids turned to it
for proof that the caliphate was the divinely ordained successor to the ancient
Mesopotamian empires — although such claims were sometimes eyed warily, because
the idea that celestial information can predict the future clashed with Islamic
teaching that only God has such knowledge.
There were
also practical religious reasons to study Greek science. Mosque timekeepers
found it useful to study astronomy and trigonometry to determine the direction
to Mecca (qibla), the times for prayer, and the beginning of Ramadan. For
example, the Arabic astronomer Ibn al-Shatir (died 1375) also served as a
religious official, a timekeeper (muwaqqit), for the Great Mosque of Damascus.
Another religious motivation for translating Greek works was their value for
the purposes of rhetoric and what we would today call ideological warfare:
Aristotle’s Topics, a treatise on logic, was used to aid in religious
disputation with non-Muslims and in the conversion of nonbelievers to Islam
(which was state policy under the Abbasids).
The second
factor central to the rise of the translation movement was that Greek thought
had already been diffused in the region, slowly and over a long period, before
the Abbasids and indeed before the advent of Islam. Partly for this reason, the
Abbasid Baghdad translation movement was not like the West’s subsequent
rediscovery of ancient Athens, in that it was in some respects a continuation
of Middle Eastern Hellenism. Greek thought spread as early as Alexander the
Great’s conquests of Asia and North Africa in the 300s B.C., and Greek centers,
such as in Alexandria and the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (238-140 B.C., in what is
now Afghanistan), were productive centers of learning even amid Roman conquest.
By the time of the Arab conquests, the Greek tongue was known throughout the
vast region, and it was the administrative language of Syria and Egypt. After
the arrival of Christianity, Greek thought was spread further by missionary
activity, especially by Nestorian Christians. Centuries later, well into the
rule of the Abbasids in Baghdad, many of these Nestorians — some of them Arabs
and Arabized Persians who eventually converted to Islam — contributed technical
skill for the Greek-Arabic translation movement, and even filled many
translation-oriented administrative posts in the Abbasid government.
While
practical utility and the influence of Hellenism help explain why science could
develop, both were true of most of the Arabic world during the Golden Age and
so cannot account for the Abbasid translation movement in particular. As Gutas
argues, the distinguishing factor that led to that movement was the attempt by
the Abbasid rulers to legitimize their rule by co-opting Persian culture, which
at the time deeply revered Greek thought. The Baghdad region in which the
Abbasids established themselves included a major Persian population, which
played an instrumental role in the revolution that ended the previous dynasty;
thus, the Abbasids made many symbolic and political gestures to ingratiate
themselves with the Persians. In an effort to enfold this constituency into a
reliable ruling base, the Abbasids incorporated Zoroastrianism and the imperial
ideology of the defunct Persian Sasanian Empire, more than a century gone, into
their political platform. The Abbasid rulers sought to establish the idea that
they were the successors not to the defeated Arab Umayyads who had been
overthrown in 650 but to the region’s previous imperial dynasty, the Sasanians.
This
incorporation of Sasanian ideology led to the translation of Greek texts into
Arabic because doing so was seen as recovering not just Greek, but Persian
knowledge. The Persians believed that sacred ancient Zoroastrian texts were
scattered by Alexander the Great’s destruction of Persepolis in 330 B.C., and
were subsequently appropriated by the Greeks. By translating ancient Greek
texts into Arabic, Persian wisdom could be recovered.
Initially,
Arab Muslims themselves did not seem to care much about the translation
movement and the study of science, feeling that they had “no ethnic or
historical stake in it,” as Gutas explains. This began to change during the
reign of al-Mamun (died 833), the seventh Abbasid caliph. For the purposes of
opposing the Byzantine Empire, al-Mamun reoriented the translation movement as
a means to recovering Greek, rather than Persian, learning. In the eyes of
Abbasid Muslims of this era, the ancient Greeks did not have a pristine
reputation — they were not Muslims, after all — but at least they were not
tainted with Christianity. The fact that the hated Christian Byzantines did not
embrace the ancient Greeks, though, led the Abbasids to warm to them. This
philhellenism in the centuries after al-Mamun marked a prideful distinction
between the Arabs — who considered themselves “champions of the truth,” as
Gutas puts it — and their benighted Christian contemporaries. One Arab
philosopher, al-Kindi (died 870), even devised a genealogy that presented
Yunan, the ancestor of the ancient Greeks, as the brother of Qahtan, the
ancestor of the Arabs.
Until its
collapse in the Mongol invasion of 1258, the Abbasid caliphate was the greatest
power in the Islamic world and oversaw the most intellectually productive
movement in Arab history. The Abbasids read, commented on, translated, and
preserved Greek and Persian works that may have been otherwise lost. By making
Greek thought accessible, they also formed the foundation of the Arabic Golden
Age. Major works of philosophy and science far from Baghdad — in Spain, Egypt,
and Central Asia — were influenced by Greek-Arabic translations, both during
and after the Abbasids. Indeed, even if it is a matter of conjecture to what
extent the rise of science in the West depended on Arabic science, there is no
question that the West benefited from both the preservation of Greek works and
from original Arabic scholarship that commented on them.
Why the Golden Age Faded
As the
Middle Ages progressed, Arabic civilization began to run out of steam. After
the twelfth century, Europe had more significant scientific scholars than the Arabic
world, as Harvard historian George Sarton noted in his Introduction to the
History of Science (1927-48). After the fourteenth century, the Arab world saw
very few innovations in fields that it had previously dominated, such as optics
and medicine; henceforth, its innovations were for the most part not in the
realm of metaphysics or science, but were more narrowly practical inventions
like vaccines. “The Renaissance, the Reformation, even the scientific
revolution and the Enlightenment, passed unnoticed in the Muslim world,”
Bernard Lewis remarks in Islam and the West (1993).
There was a
modest rebirth of science in the Arabic world in the nineteenth century due
largely to Napoleon’s 1798 expedition to Egypt, but it was soon followed by
decline. Lewis notes in What Went Wrong? that “The relationship between
Christendom and Islam in the sciences was now reversed. Those who had been
disciples now became teachers; those who had been masters became pupils, often
reluctant and resentful pupils.” The civilization that had produced cities,
libraries, and observatories and opened itself to the world had now regressed
and become closed, resentful, violent, and hostile to discourse and innovation.
What
happened? To repeat an important point, scientific decline is hardly peculiar
to Arabic-Islamic civilization. Such decline is the norm of history; only in
the West did something very different happen. Still, it may be possible to
discern some specific causes of decline — and attempting to do so can deepen
our understanding of Arabic-Islamic civilization and its tensions with
modernity. As Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, an influential figure in
contemporary pan-Islamism, said in the late nineteenth century, “It is
permissible … to ask oneself why Arab civilization, after having thrown such a
live light on the world, suddenly became extinguished; why this torch has not
been relit since; and why the Arab world still remains buried in profound
darkness.”
Just as
there is no simple explanation for the success of Arabic science, there is no
simple explanation for its gradual — not sudden, as al-Afghani claims — demise.
The most significant factor was physical and geopolitical. As early as the
tenth or eleventh century, the Abbasid empire began to factionalize and
fragment due to increased provincial autonomy and frequent uprisings. By 1258,
the little that was left of the Abbasid state was swept away by the Mongol
invasion. And in Spain, Christians reconquered Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in
1248. But the Islamic turn away from scholarship actually preceded the
civilization’s geopolitical decline — it can be traced back to the rise of the
anti-philosophical Ash’arism school among Sunni Muslims, who comprise the vast
majority of the Muslim world.
To
understand this anti-rationalist movement, we once again turn our gaze back to
the time of the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun. Al-Mamun picked up the pro-science
torch lit by the second caliph, al-Mansur, and ran with it. He responded to a
crisis of legitimacy by attempting to undermine traditionalist religious
scholars while actively sponsoring a doctrine called Mu’tazilism that was
deeply influenced by Greek rationalism, particularly Aristotelianism. To this
end, he imposed an inquisition, under which those who refused to profess their
allegiance to Mu’tazilism were punished by flogging, imprisonment, or
beheading. But the caliphs who followed al-Mamun upheld the doctrine with less
fervor, and within a few decades, adherence to it became a punishable offense.
The backlash against Mu’tazilism was tremendously successful: by 885, a half
century after al-Mamun’s death, it even became a crime to copy books of
philosophy. The beginning of the de-Hellenization of Arabic high culture was
underway. By the twelfth or thirteenth century, the influence of Mu’tazilism
was nearly completely marginalized.
In its
place arose the anti-rationalist Ash’ari school whose increasing dominance is
linked to the decline of Arabic science. With the rise of the Ash’arites, the
ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and
any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of
private and public life. While the Mu’tazilites had contended that the Koran
was created and so God’s purpose for man must be interpreted through reason,
the Ash’arites believed the Koran to be coeval with God — and therefore
unchallengeable. At the heart of Ash’ari metaphysics is the idea of
occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural causality. Put simply, it
suggests natural necessity cannot exist because God’s will is completely free.
Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, so that the world is a series
of discrete physical events each willed by God.
As
Maimonides described it in The Guide for the Perplexed, this view sees natural
things that appear to be permanent as merely following habit. Heat follows fire
and hunger follows lack of food as a matter of habit, not necessity, “just as
the king generally rides on horseback through the streets of the city, and is
never found departing from this habit; but reason does not find it impossible
that he should walk on foot through the place.” According to the occasionalist
view, tomorrow coldness might follow fire, and satiety might follow lack of
food. God wills every single atomic event and God’s will is not bound up with
reason. This amounts to a denial of the coherence and comprehensibility of the
natural world. In his controversial 2006 University of Regensburg address, Pope
Benedict XVI described this idea by quoting the philosopher Ibn Hazm (died
1064) as saying, “Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.”
It is not difficult to see how this doctrine could lead to dogma and eventually
to the end of free inquiry in science and philosophy.
The
greatest and most influential voice of the Ash’arites was the medieval
theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (also known as Algazel; died 1111). In his book
The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali vigorously attacked philosophy
and philosophers — both the Greek philosophers themselves and their followers
in the Muslim world (such as al-Farabi and Avicenna). Al-Ghazali was worried
that when people become favorably influenced by philosophical arguments, they
will also come to trust the philosophers on matters of religion, thus making
Muslims less pious. Reason, because it teaches us to discover, question, and
innovate, was the enemy; al-Ghazali argued that in assuming necessity in
nature, philosophy was incompatible with Islamic teaching, which recognizes
that nature is entirely subject to God’s will: “Nothing in nature,” he wrote,
“can act spontaneously and apart from God.” While al-Ghazali did defend logic,
he did so only to the extent that it could be used to ask theological questions
and wielded as a tool to undermine philosophy. Sunnis embraced al-Ghazali as
the winner of the debate with the Hellenistic rationalists, and opposition to
philosophy gradually ossified, even to the extent that independent inquiry
became a tainted enterprise, sometimes to the point of criminality. It is an
exaggeration to say, as Steven Weinberg claimed in the Times of London, that
after al-Ghazali “there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic
countries”; in some places, especially Central Asia, Arabic work in science
continued for some time, and philosophy was still studied somewhat under
Shi’ite rule. (In the Sunni world, philosophy turned into mysticism.) But the
fact is, Arab contributions to science became increasingly sporadic as the
anti-rationalism sank in.
The Ash’ari
view has endured to this day. Its most extreme form can be seen in some sects
of Islamists. For example, Mohammed Yusuf, the late leader of a group called
the Nigerian Taliban, explained why “Western education is a sin” by explaining
its view on rain: “We believe it is a creation of God rather than an
evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain.” The Ash’ari
view is also evident when Islamic leaders attribute natural disasters to God’s
vengeance, as they did when they said that the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s
Eyjafjallajökull volcano was the result of God’s anger at immodestly dressed
women in Europe. Such inferences sound crazy to Western ears, but given their
frequency in the Muslim world, they must sound at least a little less crazy to
Muslims. As Robert R. Reilly argues in The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010),
“the fatal disconnect between the creator and the mind of his creature is the
source of Sunni Islam’s most profound woes.”
A similar
ossification occurred in the realm of law. The first four centuries of Islam
saw vigorous discussion and flexibility regarding legal issues; this was the
tradition of ijtihad, or independent judgment and critical thinking. But by the
end of the eleventh century, discordant ideas were increasingly seen as a
problem, and autocratic rulers worried about dissent — so the “gates of
ijtihad” were closed for Sunni Muslims: ijtihad was seen as no longer
necessary, since all important legal questions were regarded as already
answered. New readings of Islamic revelation became a crime. All that was left
to do was to submit to the instructions of religious authorities; to understand
morality, one needed only to read legal decrees. Thinkers who resisted the
closing came to be seen as nefarious dissidents. (Averroës, for example, was banished
for heresy and his books were burned.)
Why Inquiry Failed in the Islamic World
But is
Ash’arism the deepest root of Arabic science’s demise? That the Ash’arites won
and the Mu’tazilites lost suggests that for whatever reason, Muslims already
found Ash’ari thought more convincing or more palatable; it suited prevailing
sentiments and political ideas. Indeed, Muslim theologians appeared receptive
to the occasionalist view as early as the ninth century, before the founder of
Ash’arism was even born. Thus the Ash’ari victory raises thorny questions about
the theological-political predispositions of Islam.
As a way of
articulating questions that lie deeper than the Ash’arism-Mu’tazilism debate,
it is helpful to briefly compare Islam with Christianity. Christianity
acknowledges a private-public distinction and (theoretically, at least) allows
adherents the liberty to decide much about their social and political lives.
Islam, on the other hand, denies any private-public distinction and includes
laws regulating the most minute details of private life. Put another way, Islam
does not acknowledge any difference between religious and political ends: it is
a religion that specifies political rules for the community.
Such
differences between the two faiths can be traced to the differences between
their prophets. While Christ was an outsider of the state who ruled no one, and
while Christianity did not become a state religion until centuries after
Christ’s birth, Mohammed was not only a prophet but also a chief magistrate, a
political leader who conquered and governed a religious community he founded.
Because Islam was born outside of the Roman Empire, it was never subordinate to
politics. As Bernard Lewis puts it, Mohammed was his own Constantine. This
means that, for Islam, religion and politics were interdependent from the
beginning; Islam needs a state to enforce its laws, and the state needs a basis
in Islam to be legitimate. To what extent, then, do Islam’s political
proclivities make free inquiry — which is inherently subversive to established
rules and customs — possible at a deep and enduring institutional level?
Some clues
can be found by comparing institutions in the medieval period. Far from
accepting anything close to the occasionalism and legal positivism of the
Sunnis, European scholars argued explicitly that when the Bible contradicts the
natural world, the holy book should not be taken literally. Influential
philosophers like Augustine held that knowledge and reason precede
Christianity; he approached the subject of scientific inquiry with cautious
encouragement, exhorting Christians to use the classical sciences as a
handmaiden of Christian thought. Galileo’s house arrest notwithstanding, his
famous remark that “the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes
to heaven, not how heaven goes” underscores the durability of the scientific
spirit among pious Western societies. Indeed, as David C. Lindberg argues in an
essay collected in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion
(2009), “No institution or cultural force of the patristic period offered more
encouragement for the investigation of nature than did the Christian church.”
And, as Baylor University sociologist Rodney Stark notes in his book For the
Glory of God (2003), many of the greatest scientists of the scientific
revolution were also Christian priests or ministers.
The
Church’s acceptance and even encouragement of philosophy and science was
evident from the High Middle Ages to modern times. As the late Ernest L. Fortin
of Boston College noted in an essay collected in Classical Christianity and the
Political Order (1996), unlike al-Farabi and his successors, “Aquinas was
rarely forced to contend with an anti-philosophic bias on the part of the
ecclesiastical authorities. As a Christian, he could simply assume philosophy
without becoming publicly involved in any argument for or against it.” And when
someone like Galileo got in trouble, his work moved forward and his inquiry was
carried on by others; in other words, institutional dedication to scientific
inquiry was too entrenched in Europe for any authority to control. After about
the middle of the thirteenth century in the Latin West, we know of no instance
of persecution of anyone who advocated philosophy as an aid in interpreting
revelation. In this period, “attacks on reason would have been regarded as
bizarre and unacceptable,” explains historian Edward Grant in Science and
Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550.
The success
of the West is a topic that could fill — indeed, has filled — many large books.
But some general comparisons are helpful in understanding why Islam was so
institutionally different from the West. The most striking difference is
articulated by Bassam Tibi in The Challenge of Fundamentalism (1998): “because
rational disciplines had not been institutionalized in classical Islam, the
adoption of the Greek legacy had no lasting effect on Islamic civilization.” In
The Rise of Early Modern Science, Toby E. Huff makes a persuasive argument for
why modern science emerged in the West and not in Islamic (or Chinese)
civilization:
The rise of
modern science is the result of the development of a civilizationally based
culture that was uniquely humanistic in the sense that it tolerated, indeed,
protected and promoted those heretical and innovative ideas that ran counter to
accepted religious and theological teaching. Conversely, one might say that
critical elements of the scientific worldview were surreptitiously encoded in
the religious and legal presuppositions of the European West.
In other
words, Islamic civilization did not have a culture hospitable to the
advancement of science, while medieval Europe did.
The
contrast is most obvious in the realm of formal education. As Huff argues, the
lack of a scientific curriculum in medieval madrassas reflects a deeper absence
of a capacity or willingness to build legally autonomous institutions.
Madrassas were established under the law of Waqf, or pious endowments, which
meant they were legally obligated to follow the religious commitments of their
founders. Islamic law did not recognize any corporate groups or entities, and
so prevented any hope of recognizing institutions such as universities within
which scholarly norms could develop. (Medieval China, too, had no independent
institutions dedicated to learning; all were dependent on the official
bureaucracy and the state.) Legally autonomous institutions were utterly absent
in the Islamic world until the late nineteenth century. And madrassas nearly
always excluded study of anything besides the subjects that aid in
understanding Islam: Arabic grammar, the Koran, the hadith, and the principles
of sharia. These were often referred to as the “Islamic sciences,” in contrast
to Greek sciences, which were widely referred to as the “foreign” or “alien”
sciences (indeed, the term “philosopher” in Arabic — faylasuf — was often used
pejoratively). Furthermore, the rigidity of the religious curriculum in
madrassas contributed to the educational method of learning by rote; even
today, repetition, drill, and imitation — with chastisement for questioning or
innovating — are habituated at an early age in many parts of the Arab world.
The
exclusion of science and mathematics from the madrassas suggests that these
subjects “were institutionally marginal in medieval Islamic life,” writes Huff.
Such inquiry was tolerated, and sometimes promoted by individuals, but it was
never “officially institutionalized and sanctioned by the intellectual elite of
Islam.” This meant that when intellectual discoveries were made, they were not
picked up and carried by students, and did not influence later thinkers in
Muslim communities. No one paid much attention to the work of Averroës after he
was driven out of Spain to Morocco, for instance — that is, until Europeans
rediscovered his work. Perhaps the lack of institutional support for science
allowed Arabic thinkers (such as al-Farabi) to be bolder than their European
counterparts. But it also meant that many Arabic thinkers relied on the
patronage of friendly rulers and ephemeral conditions.
By way of
contrast, the legal system that developed in twelfth- and thirteenth-century
Europe — which saw the absorption of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian
theology — was instrumental in forming a philosophically and theologically open
culture that respected scientific development. As Huff argues, because European
universities were legally autonomous, they could develop their own rules,
scholarly norms, and curricula. The norms they incorporated were those of curiosity
and skepticism, and the curricula they chose were steeped in ancient Greek
philosophy. In the medieval Western world, a spirit of skepticism and
inquisitiveness moved theologians and philosophers. It was a spirit of “probing
and poking around,” as Edward Grant writes in God and Reason in the Middle Ages
(2001).
It was this
attitude of inquiry that helped lay the foundation for modern science.
Beginning in the early Middle Ages, this attitude was evident in technological
innovations among even unlearned artisans and merchants. These obscure people
contributed to the development of practical technologies, such as the
mechanical clock (circa 1272) and spectacles (circa 1284). Even as early as the
sixth century, Europeans strove to invent labor-saving technology, such as the
heavy-wheeled plow and, later, the padded horse collar. According to research
by the late Charles Issawi of Princeton University, eleventh-century England
had more mills per capita than even the Ottoman lands at the height of the
empire’s power. And although it was in use since 1460 in the West, the printing
press was not introduced in the Islamic world until 1727. The Arabic world
appears to have been even slower in finding uses for academic technological
devices. For instance, the telescope appeared in the Middle East soon after its
invention in 1608, but it failed to attract excitement or interest until
centuries later.
As science
in the Arabic world declined and retrogressed, Europe hungrily absorbed and
translated classical and scientific works, mainly through cultural centers in
Spain. By 1200, Oxford and Paris had curricula that included works of Arabic
science. Works by Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Galen, along with
commentaries by Avicenna and Averroës, were all translated into Latin. Not only
were these works taught openly, but they were formally incorporated into the
program of study of universities. Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, the
dissolution of the Golden Age was well underway.
A Gold Standard?
In trying
to explain the Islamic world’s intellectual laggardness, it is tempting to
point to the obvious factors: authoritarianism, bad education, and underfunding
(Muslim states spend significantly less than developed states on research and
development as a percentage of GDP). But these reasons are all broad and
somewhat crude, and raise more questions than answers. At a deeper level, Islam
lags because it failed to offer a way to institutionalize free inquiry. That,
in turn, is attributable to its failure to reconcile faith and reason. In this
respect, Islamic societies have fared worse not just than the West but also
than many societies of Asia. With a couple of exceptions, every country in the
Middle Eastern parts of the Muslim world has been ruled by an autocrat, a
radical Islamic sect, or a tribal chieftain. Islam has no tradition of
separating politics and religion.
The decline
of Islam and the rise of Christianity was a development that was and remains
deeply humiliating for Muslims. Since Islam tended to ascribe its political power
to its theological superiority over other faiths, its fading as a worldly power
raised profound questions about where a wrong turn was made. Over at least the
past century, Muslim reformers have been debating how best to reacquire the
lost honor. In the same period, the Muslim world tried, and failed, to reverse
its decline by borrowing Western technology and sociopolitical ideas, including
secularization and nationalism. But these tastes of “modernization” turned many
Muslims away from modernity. This raises a question: Can and should Islam’s
past achievements serve as a standard for Islam’s future? After all, it is
quite common to imply, as President Obama did, that knowledge of the Golden Age
of Arabic science will somehow exhort the Islamic world to improve itself and
to hate the West less.
The story
of Arabic science offers a window into the relationship between Islam and
modernity; perhaps, too, it holds out the prospect of Islam coming to benefit
from principles it badly needs in order to prosper, such as sexual equality,
the rule of law, and free civil life. But the predominant posture among many
Muslims today is that the good life is best approximated by returning to a
pristine and pious past — and this posture has proven poisonous to coping with
modernity. Islamism, the cause of violence that the world is now agonizingly
familiar with, arises from doctrines characterized by a deep nostalgia for the
Islamic classical period. Even today, suggesting that the Koran isn’t coeternal
with God can make one an infidel.
And yet
intellectual progress and cultural openness were once encouraged among many
Arabic societies. So to the extent that appeals to the salutary classical
attitude can be found in the Islamic tradition, the fanatical false nostalgia
might be tamed. Some reformers already point out that many medieval Muslims
embraced reason and other ideas that presaged modernity, and that doing so is
not impious and does not mean simply giving up eternal rewards for
materialistic ones. On an intellectual level, this effort could be deepened by
challenging the Ash’ari orthodoxy that has dominated Sunni Islam for a thousand
years — that is, by asking whether al-Ghazali and his Ash’arite followers
really understood nature, theology, and philosophy better than the
Mu’tazilites.
But there
are reasons why exhortation to emulate Muslim ancestors may also be misguided.
One is that medieval Islam does not offer a decent political standard. When
compared to modern Western standards, the Golden Age of Arabic science was
decidedly not a Golden Age of equality. While Islam was comparatively tolerant
at the time of members of other religions, the kind of tolerance we think of
today was never a virtue for early Muslims (or early Christians, for that
matter). As Bernard Lewis puts it in The Jews of Islam (1984), giving equal
treatment to followers and rejecters of the true faith would have been seen not
only as an absurdity but also an outright “dereliction of duty.” Jews and
Christians were subjected to official second-class socio-political status
beginning in Mohammed’s time, and Abbasid-era oppressions also included
religious persecution and the eradication of churches and synagogues. The
Golden Age was also an era of widespread slavery of persons deemed to be of
even lower class. For all the estimable achievements of the medieval Arabic
world, it is quite clear that its political and social history should not be
made into a celebrated standard.
There is a
more fundamental reason, however, why it may not make much sense to urge the
Muslim world to restore those parts of its past that valued rational and open
inquiry: namely, a return to the Mu’tazilites may not be enough. Even the most
rationalist schools in Islam did not categorically argue for the primacy of
reason. As Ali A. Allawi argues in The Crisis of Islamic Civilization (2009),
“None of the free-thinking schools in classical Islam — such as the Mu’tazila —
could ever entertain the idea of breaking the God-Man relationship and the
validity of revelation, in spite of their espousal of a rationalist
philosophy.” Indeed, in 1889 the Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher noted in his
essay “The Attitude of Orthodox Islam Toward the ‘Ancient Sciences’” that it
was not only Ash’arite but Mu’tazilite circles that “produced numerous
polemical treatises against Aristotelian philosophy in general and against
logic in particular.” Even before al-Ghazali’s attack on the Mu’tazilites,
engaging in Greek philosophy was not exactly a safe task outside of auspicious
but rather ephemeral conditions.
But more
importantly, merely popularizing previous rationalist schools would not go very
far in persuading Muslims to reflect on the theological-political problem of Islam.
For all the great help that the rediscovery of the influential Arabic
philosophers (especially al-Farabi, Averroës, and Maimonides) would provide, no
science-friendly Islamic tradition goes nearly far enough, to the point that it
offers a theological renovation in the vein of Luther and Calvin — a
reinterpretation of Islam that challenges the faith’s comprehensive ruling
principles in a way that simultaneously convinces Muslims that they are in fact
returning to the fundamentals of their faith.
There is a
final reason why it makes little sense to exhort Muslims to their own past:
while there are many things that the Islamic world lacks, pride in heritage is
not one of them. What is needed in Islam is less self-pride and more
self-criticism. Today, self-criticism in Islam is valued only insofar as it is
made as an appeal to be more pious and less spiritually corrupt. And yet most
criticism in the Muslim world is directed outward, at the West. This prejudice
— what Fouad Ajami has called (referring to the Arab world) “a political
tradition of belligerent self-pity” — is undoubtedly one of Islam’s biggest
obstacles. It makes information that contradicts orthodox belief irrelevant,
and it closes off debate about the nature and history of Islam.
In this
respect, inquiry into the history of Arabic science, and the recovery and
research of manuscripts of the era, may have a beneficial effect — so long as
it is pursued in an analytical spirit. That would mean that Muslims would use
it as a resource within their own tradition to critically engage with their
philosophical, political, and founding flaws. If that occurs, it will not arise
from any Western outreach efforts, but will be a consequence of Muslims’ own
determination, creativity, and wisdom — in short, those very traits that
Westerners rightly ascribe to the Muslims of the Golden Age.
-----
Hillel Ofek is a writer living in Austin,
Texas.
Hillel Ofek, “Why the Arabic World Turned Away
from Science,” The New Atlantis, Number 30, Winter 2011, pp. 3-23.
Original Headline: Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science
Source: The New Atlantis
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-science/on-lost-golden-age-rejection/d/123048
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