Science and Islam (Icon Science) E-Book

Ehsan Masood

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: Icon Science
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 298

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Long before the European Enlightenment, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy. From Musa al-Khwarizmi who developed algebra in 9th century Baghdad to al-Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish engineer whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft and the reciprocating piston,  Ehsan Masood tells the amazing story of one of history's most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science, via the scholars, research, and science of the Islamic empires of the middle ages.

Leseprobe

Science and Islam

EHSAN MASOOD

Science and Islam

A HISTORY

This edition published in the UK in 2017 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

Originally published in 2009 by Icon Books Ltd

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia by Grantham Book Services, Trent Road, Grantham NG31 7XQ

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ISBN 978-178578-202-2

Text copyright © 2009 Ehsan Masood Introduction copyright © 2017 Ehsan Masood

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typesetting in Plantin by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Contents

Introduction to the second edition

A note on language

Prologue

1 The Dark Age Myth

Part I: The Islamic Quest

2 The Coming of the Prophet

3 Building Islam

4 Baghdad’s Splendour

5 The Caliph of Science

6 The Flowering of Andalusia

7 Beyond the Abbasids

Part II: Branches of Learning

8 The Best Gift From God

9 Astronomy: The Structured Heaven

10 Number: The Living Universe of Islam

11 At Home in the Elements

12 Ingenious Devices

Part III: Second Thoughts

13 An Endless Frontier

14 One Chapter Closes, Another Begins

15 Science and Islam: Lessons From History

Timeline

Acknowledgements

Sources

Index

Ehsan Masood is a science writer based in London. Since 2009 he has been the Editor of the science policy magazine Research Fortnight, and he teaches science and innovation policy at Imperial College London. He presented ‘Islam and Science’, a three-part series for BBC Radio on science in today’s Islamic world. His other books include The Great Invention, on the story of how GDP became the world’s dominant economic indicator.

For my parents, Shamsa and Hassan Masood

1. Urban knowledge: Islam’s cities of science from the 8th to the 16th centuries housed hospitals, observatories, libraries, colleges and schools for translation, as well as much individual research.

Introduction to the second edition

In writing this introduction to the second edition of Science and Islam: A History, I am grateful to the many readers who read the first edition, to those who reviewed it; those who wrote with comments and criticisms, and to those who organised and attended talks and launch events at venues around the world.

I am grateful especially to those of you who highlighted errors: errors of fact, errors of interpretation and errors of omission, many of which have been rectified in this second edition.

Samar Abou Zeid, the editor of the Arabic language edition, deserves particular praise. Samar corrected a number of factual inaccuracies in the first English language edition and also re-checked my largely European language sources and expert interviews against primary Arabic and Persian language sources, including copies of manuscripts. This process has rendered this second edition much better than the first.

A number of readers wrote to say that a book on such an expansive theme could have included the contributions of many more personalities. A notable absence for example is the great Ottoman architect, Sinan. It is true that Sinan gets the smallest of mentions in the timeline at the back of the book. Sinan, who achieved recognition by rescuing the collapsing dome of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, rose to lead the Imperial school of architecture. He is responsible, more than any other architect, for Istanbul’s distinctive skyline.

In thinking about Sinan, I am also conscious that more could have been said about the synthesis of humanities and science. Unlike today’s relatively isolated research fields, it was possible during Islamic times for the same individual to find fame as a scientist, medic, poet and more. However, I must say that in writing the first edition, I found this characteristic one of the more difficult aspects to penetrate.

My struggles with Ibn Sina (Avicenna) are a case in point. Much has been written on his philosophy and equally on his medicine. However, those who study him today work in different parts of the academy. Nancy Siraisi is a superb guide to his medicine and Oliver Leaman his philosophy. But today these are two fields that don’t often talk to each other, let alone intersect.

Areas of intersection between science and art include miniature paintings of astronomers working late into the night; the craftsmanship of scientific instruments; the chemistry of the cobalt blue that adorns so many buildings; paintings depicting scenes from natural history; the secrets of sacred geometry, and the carefully-calibrated medical images of the human body. All of this could well be material for a companion volume.

*

Some readers suggested that the book could have said more on how civilizations other than ancient Greece left their mark on Islamic science: indeed, that insufficient space is given to the transmission of ideas via Byzantium, China and India. This is undoubtedly true, though I was, and remain, at the mercy of the community of researchers who have written and published in these areas. And it is unfortunate that there are few academics today working to trace such transmission mechanisms.

Others, in contrast, wrote to say there could have been more material on the transfer of Islamic science to the Latin world. Here, more work is being done and I am especially indebted to John Davies and the trustees of the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution in England from whom I learnt about Adelaard of Bath.

At a time when the first English universities at Oxford and Cambridge had yet to be created, this early 12th-century scholar travelled to Syria where he spent seven years learning at institutions which would have been regarded in Europe as being at the leading edge. On his return to England, Adelaard remarked how his Arabic teachers had considered ‘reason’ alongside tradition as a source of authority. He was also aware that such a view was seen as ultra-modern among some conservatives back on home turf. Mathematics, for example, was described by one of his contemporaries, the historian William of Malmesbury, as ‘dangerous Saracen magic’.

One English institution that had no problem with appreciating new sources of knowledge was in fact the Royal Society of London. In 2011, Rim Turkmani of Imperial College London curated a remarkable exhibition at the Royal Society called ‘Arabick Roots’. Rim and the society’s then director of history of science, Peter Collins, helped unearth manuscripts from some of the giants who had stood on Newton’s shoulders. These were the early Fellows of the society who had recognised the need to mine the scholarly tradition of Arabic and Persian-speaking scientists in their own work.

Rim established that some 40 Fellows from the 17th and 18th centuries had an ‘Arabick’ interest in some way. They included the chemist Robert Boyle; Edmond Halley, the astronomer and one of the founders of actuarial science; and five professors of Arabic including Edmund Castell. Both Boyle and Halley felt they needed to study Arabic to avoid errors that can creep in when accessing secondary sources!

*

By far the most common question I have been asked by readers since the first edition’s publication is, ‘What about now?’

Even though this is dealt with in the book’s final section, readers remained curious to know why the nations of the Islamic world, as a group, occupy the bottom of many indices of science and innovation today? Why, in spite of such a productive heritage, do these nations (many of them among the world’s richest) collectively spend less than half of one per cent of their national income on science? And could I please point to any current examples of leading-edge discovery and invention in the member states of the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC).

To help answer that last question, I worked with two stellar talents from the world of science policy: James Wilsdon and Natalie Day (then of the Royal Society in London), and together we helped launch the Atlas of Islamic World Science and Innovation. This was a multi-year project, backed by the OIC, the Royal Society, Nature and Canada’s science funding agency IDRC, to map science and innovation in today’s Islamic world.

On our travels we discovered how Qatar was busy cementing its niche as the Gulf’s headquarters for world-class undergraduate higher education; how Abu Dhabi’s rulers were planning to build one of the world’s first zero carbon cities; how Iran had become a mini hub for nano-technology and Pakistan had created 50 new universities between 2002 and 2008.

In the years since, I am pleased to learn that Athar Osama, a fellow science policy analyst and member of Pakistan’s Planning Commission, and the indefatigable Nidhal Guessoum, professor of physics at the American University of Sharjah, have together been working on important next steps: how to reform science education curricula so there is more experiential learning, more and better education in history and philosophy of science and more cross-fertilisation between the disciplines.

*

In the few years after this book’s first edition appeared in 2008, there was a window, a blink in historical terms, when it seemed that the Arab Revolutions would lead to a different world for the peoples of Arabic-speaking countries. Many readers will recall the waves of excited young people, occupying squares and marching in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, demanding basic freedoms; the kinds of freedoms that readers in Western countries take for granted every time we wake up in the morning.

Millions were demanding their leaders give them more of a say in how they should be governed, and by whom. Teenage entrepreneurs dreamt of creating the next killer app in their parents’ garage. University researchers felt emboldened to critique state power, something that had been impossible before. One Egyptian academic likened the promise of his nation’s revolution to the philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s shifting paradigms: a passing of the old and embrace of the new. The Arab Revolutions were indeed a sign of a new dawn.

For a short while that world did appear to be materialising. Long-serving dictators were being felled, including Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. The richer Gulf monarchies nervously tried to buy off dissent with bigger perks for their citizens, and bigger investments in public services.

One evening in 2012 in Egypt’s second city Alexandria, I witnessed something I hadn’t seen in two decades of reporting from the Middle East. I was in a packed hall in the city’s library. On the podium was a junior minister for science. The 200-strong audience was predominantly young people, and they didn’t hold back.

‘How come you still have a job?’ ‘What do you earn?’ ‘I want to do a PhD. What will you do to improve my job prospects?’ A few years ago, such an event might have resulted in arrests and torture, but now the tables were turned. The man from the ministry had to behave as a servant of the people and try to answer.

There were no filters. No self-censorship. No one seemed to think, as they did before then, that the dictators would be back; that by speaking out they would once again risk prison, kidnap and torture. Egypt was changing and its young people felt at the vanguard of the revolution.

How wrong we all were. As I write this, eight years after the first publication of Science and Islam, large parts of Libya, Syria and Yemen are under daily bombardment. Egypt has returned to autocracy. Thousands of its brave, freethinking men and women languish in its jails, many academics and students among them. Hundreds of thousands have fled their countries to seek refuge, as my own parents did, in the West. Although with the election of Donald Trump to the White House, that door, too, appears to be closing.

Zia Sardar, my great friend, also one of my strongest critics, declared at a launch event at Asia House in London that this book is not so much a history of Islamic science as a history of Islamic science policy.

The book is indeed a history of policy as much as a history of science, because it is policies that, among other things, drive the process and direction of discovery and invention. Policies enable scientists and other researchers to be properly supported, and it is policies, especially state policies, that give researchers that much-needed, and often rare commodity: protection from those who would wish to silence them.

*

This book is an account of the building of a civilization, and the inevitable passing of a scientific torch.

The business of creating civilizations is often a global and inter-generational effort, a scientific relay if you will. There’s a pattern of sorts. Firstly, each contender for civilization status acquires a degree of military and political power. Secondly, it uses the proceeds of that power to enable the most talented among its citizens to become expert in all aspects of the known world. Citizenship is relatively open to outsiders who will use their access and privileges to further push boundaries in discovery and invention. Then, at some point, decades or centuries later, newer contenders will emerge, the pattern will be repeated and the baton of civilization will be passed.

That is how the world of Islam acquired and then gave up the torch. It is what characterises the rise and fall of the many civilizations that came before it. The ascendancy of Western nations can also be explained in similar terms. And there will, at some point in the future, be a decline.

No one wants to contemplate failure, which is partly why most of the great civilizations like to see their role in exceptional terms. We want to believe in our own inherent special-ness. We seek to claim, as the historian Kenneth Clark did in his landmark BBC series Civilization, that our achievements are unique to us. Such exceptionalism helps us to believe that our time will last for ever. Such an attitude makes the prospect of decline hard to come to terms with.

Today, many in Muslim communities are resistant to change and innovation. Such a position, not unlike that of William of Malmesbury in 11th-century England, is a belief that all of the best ideas happened in a previous ‘golden age’. It reflects the idea that things will only get worse as humankind proceeds towards the end of the world, which is why many insist that we must preserve the best of the old.

One problem with such an approach – apart from its denial of history – is that when decline sets in, it becomes hard to accept. If a different culture eclipses our own in its power to amaze, we remain unreconciled to our own loss. And that, to my mind, stops us picking ourselves up and moving ahead. This unrequited longing for a golden age diminishes the potential for discovery, invention and innovation today. It is difficult to move forward when all you’re doing is looking in the rear-view mirror.

I am extremely grateful to Duncan Heath and colleagues at Icon Books for bringing out this second edition, and I look forward to continuing the conversation with both new and existing readers. Those wishing to get in touch can do so via Twitter @EhsanMasood or by email: [email protected]

Ehsan Masood London, February 2017

A note on language

A book on science during the Islamic empires presents some interesting challenges for the science writer of today writing in English, and at a time when a good deal of sensitivity surrounds the use of words and phrases on all things Islamic, or Muslim.

Questions to do with God and religion are not mainstream to the process of how science is done, nor its many and varied products. Because of this, science writing (at least in English) has yet to develop a comprehensive vocabulary on the topic of science and religion.

The publishers of Science and Islam: a History, however, couldn’t wait for a dictionary on science and belief. They needed a consistent short-hand phrase to describe the science that took place during the empires that followed the birth of Islam. And several candidates were shortlisted for the job.

One option was to use ‘Muslim science’, except that not all of the scientists mentioned in the following pages were Muslims. Another option was to go for ‘Arab science’, except that many practitioners were not from the Arab world, even if they were Arabic-speaking.

As so often happens with dilemmas in cultural relations, the best solution was to look for a compromise. The phrase that this book employs to describe science in Islamic times is ‘Islamic science’. It isn’t perfect by any means, but it comes closest to the mark.

An explanation of why Islamic science was chosen is needed, because to many readers Islamic science will be as nonsensical as Jewish science, Christian science, or Hindu science. Science is a universal tool for knowing about the world we live in: the individual beliefs of scientists have no bearing on the nature of what it is that they are investigating. One of the best examples of this is the 1979 Nobel prize in physics: this was shared between Muhammad Abdus Salam, a devout believer, and Steven Weinberg, a devout atheist.

To other readers, however, if something is ‘Islamic’ this means it is related to the practice of faith. To this group of readers, therefore, Islamic science might mean a science that is influenced by Islamic values, much as, say, Islamic banking is used to describe financial systems that are governed according to Islamic guidelines; or in the same way that an Islamic school is an institution that educates children according to Islamic values.

Just to be clear, Islamic science in the context of this book also includes a science that has been shaped by the needs of religion.

The second challenge relates to the word ‘science’ itself and what it means in languages such as Arabic, Persian and Urdu. The word ‘science’ in its modern context means the systematic study of the natural world, using observation, experimentation, measurement and verification. It comes from the Latin word (from around the 14th century) scientia, which means ‘to know’.

Arabic manuscripts from Islamic times did not have a word for ‘science’ as we know it today. Instead, they had a word similar in meaning to scientia, which is ilm (plural, uloom). Ilm means ‘knowledge’: this could be knowledge of the natural world, as well as knowledge of religion and other things.

Scientists in the Ottoman empire came closest to realising that ilm is not the same as the scientific method. They introduced a new word, fen (plural, funoon), which means ‘tools’ or ‘techniques’. For example, a university of science would be written in Turkish Arabic as darul funoon, or a home for the techniques of science.

The new Ottoman convention, however, did not catch on. Turkish Arabic is all but extinct and Modern Arabic has retained the original dual usage for the word ilm. So, while the Arabic edition of Scientific American magazine is called Majalla Uloom (magazine of knowledge), at the same time, darul uloom (a home for knowledge) is used to describe religious seminaries all over the world.

Those who continue to use ilm to mean both scientific and religious knowledge argue that it represents an idea (common to Islamic cultures) that science and faith are two sides of the same coin: that they are equally valid forms of knowledge, and with similar – if not equal – claims to seek the most truthful answers to questions.

Others would disagree. Ilm may well be an accurate description for religious knowledge; however, there is a case to be made for finding a word that can distinguish between scientific and religious knowledge.

In languages such as Arabic and Urdu, ‘acquiring ilm’ is a phrase that is commonly used in textbooks, in print and in the broadcast media. Knowledge of religion can of course be ‘acquired’ or memorised, as can much scientific knowledge. But science has an important added dimension: it is also about experimenting, innovating, building, refuting and pushing at the boundaries of what we know.

Prologue

Picture, if you will, images from the 1969 moon landings: those grainy black-and-white photos or slow-motion TV shots of rockets and astronauts in space, and awe-inspired spectators watching from below. Or recall the television footage from 2000 when the human genome had been sequenced, with the news announced jointly by US President Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair.

What do these and so many more pictures of modern scientific discovery tell us? One message is very clear: that science is more than just ‘science’. It is the result of the vision of those who govern us about where they want to take their societies in the future. The moon landings told anyone watching that here was an empire at the top of its game. Having established its domain on earth, the most technologically-advanced society of its age was ready to claim the heavens – or at the very least, a small part of it.

More than 1,000 years ago, another empire, that created by the coming of Islam, was at the top of its form. This empire was in fact a network of what are called caliphates, united by a belief in God and in the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. Its rulers and citizens spanned from Indonesia in the east to Spain in the west, and the last of the caliphates ended only in the last century, in 1923 with the fall of the Ottoman empire.

Science and Islam describes the scientific revolution that took place during the empires created by Islam, between the 8th and the 16th centuries. It is a story about the discoveries and inventions of a sophisticated culture and civilisation; the political and religious conditions surrounding it; and an extraordinary cast of characters – scientists, engineers and their patrons – who helped to make it all happen.

It describes an age when religion and science had a much closer relationship. Perhaps paradoxically, it was the needs of religion that in some ways helped to advance new knowledge. One example can be seen in efforts to develop quality standards in religious scholarship. After Muhammad’s death in 632, scholars of religion wanted to find a way of checking and verifying the many records of his sayings. This led to a kind of early peer-review system, which later scholars of religion had to train themselves in. A century later, when scientific fields began to develop, it was theologians who encouraged the first scientists to adopt similar standards for authenticating their scientific work.

In its heyday, scientists and engineers from the Islamic world made groundbreaking discoveries and inventions, and we can see traces of their contributions today in our everyday lives. Moreover, many of the leaders of Islam’s empires saw the relationship between science and society as would politicians in the modern age. They believed that the power of the mind could take us to places where no human had ventured in the past; they wanted the latest knowledge in order to help govern their territories and eliminate their enemies; and they wanted to shape societies in which people made decisions based on evidence and in which science, technology and rational thinking were important.

But then is not the same as now. Today’s scientific endeavour is on a scale that is unprecedented in human history. In the United States, more is spent on healthcare research than the total spending of some of the world’s poorest nations. And on the question of belief, today’s scientists tend to keep their faith strictly private. Indeed, in the Western world at least, organised religion and individual religious faith are regarded by perhaps the majority of scientists as impediments to research, discovery and invention.

Today, knowledge is a highly specialised business: it is almost unheard of for a leading physicist to make ground-breaking discoveries in biology, or a chemist to push the envelope in philosophy. But many of the names that leap out of the pages that follow were polymaths who worked to the highest standards of the day.

In the pages that follow, you will meet many great thinkers such as ibn-Sina, a Persian-speaking scientist from the 10th century who also made important contributions to the study of the nature and philosophy of religious belief. He also found time to invent an early example of the micrometer, and his book The Canon of Medicine was taught to trainee doctors in universities in France and Italy from the 12th to the 16th century. Or there is Hassan ibn al-Haitham, an experimental physicist from the 11th century who helped to modernise our understanding of vision and who is credited with describing an early imaging device (a camera obscura), as well as writing about and researching the motion of planets.

You will also meet some of their patrons. Caliphs and governors such as al-Mamun of the Sunni Abbasid dynasty, who ruled from 813 to 833 from Baghdad, and al-Hakim of the Shia Fatimid dynasty who ruled from Cairo from 996 to 1021. These and many others employed personal scientific advisors, paid for libraries and observatories, and even personally took part in scientific experiments.

And you will meet some of the critics of the new science. These were men such as the theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, who wrote a famous polemic, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, against the claims of scientists to be able to explain everything. And you will meet those scholars who suffered greatly for the right to criticise science and rationalism, men such as Ahmad ibn-Hanbal, who was tortured for refusing to accept that science should become the official religion of the Islamic state.

Turn the page and enter a brave, new and undiscovered world.

Ehsan Masood

1

The Dark Age Myth

If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure which stems, I think, from the strait-jacket of history which we have inherited.

HRH Prince Charles in a speech at Oxford University, 27 October 1993

In 410 CE, Alaric, the Germanic king of the Visigoths, swept into Rome and sacked the great city in a three-day rampage. Sixty-six years later, Romulus Augustus, the last Roman emperor of the West, was deposed, and the regalia of empire was rudely despatched to Constantinople. With that, the lights went out on civilisation, and the Western world was plunged into an age of darkness – a night in which there was no scholarship, literacy or even civilised life. Only 1,000 years later did the world finally rediscover classical learning and bring the world’s night of darkness to an end with the bright new dawn of the Renaissance. Or so the story goes.

This is the myth of the Dark Ages, the idea that history and progress pretty much stopped for a millennium after the fall of Rome. The trouble is that the myth is just that, a myth. But it has been a myth so potent that it has thoroughly distorted our understanding of how civilisations emerge and how science and learning progress. Advances in our understanding of the natural world happen when scientists absorb the latest knowledge in fields such as physics or biology, and then modify or improve it. They work rather like runners in a relay race, passing the baton of learning from one scientist to the next. Modern science, regarded as a hallmark of modern Western civilisation, achieved its place through the passing of many successive batons, which were handed to the scientists of Europe from those of the world’s non-Western cultures. These included those who lived in the cultures of Islam over a period of some 800 years from the 8th to the 16th centuries.

The fact that we know little of this is what Michael Hamilton Morgan of the New Foundation for Peace speaks of as ‘lost history’. The historian Jack Goody goes further and calls it ‘the theft of history’. It is as if the memory of an entire civilisation and its contribution to the sum of knowledge has been virtually wiped from human consciousness. Not simply in the West but in the Islamic world too, the achievements of Islamic scientists were, until recently, largely forgotten or at least neglected, except by a few diligent specialists such as Harvard University’s Abelhamid Sabra, David King, Jamil Ragep and George Saliba.

In mainstream science education in Britain – until very recently – the history of scientific progress has tended to leapfrog from the classical era of Euclid, Aristotle and Archimedes straight to the birth of the Age of Science in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, with only a cursory mention, if any, of the great swathe of Islamic science in between. In some versions of history, the ‘dark age’ only really ends, and the progress of science only really begins, with the famous conflict in the early 17th century in which Galileo confronts the Catholic Church with the assertion that the earth moves around the sun. As the world eventually acknowledges that Galileo is right, this is presented as the world-changing triumph of the light of reason over superstition. Thereafter, from the 17th century onwards, Western Europe’s scientists are set free to unlock the world’s secrets – William Harvey discovers blood circulation, Isaac Newton launches the study of physics, Robert Boyle pioneers the study of chemistry, Michael Faraday, electricity, and so on. And so we move forward into the Age of Reason and the dramatic progress of modern science.

Filling the gap

In reality, though, scientific inquiry did not simply stop with the fall of Rome, only to get going again in the 17th century. In fact, as this book will show, recent research is beginning to reveal just how thoroughly the 800-year gap was filled by a wealth of scientific exploration in medieval Islam, and how it fed directly into the first stirrings of Western science.

The Cairo-based physician ibn al-Nafis, for example, discovered pulmonary circulation, the circulation of blood through the lungs, in the 13th century. Andalusian engineer Abbas ibn-Firnas worked out theories of flight, and is believed to have carried out a successful practical experiment six centuries before Leonardo drew his famous ornithopters. And in Kufa in Iraq, Jabir ibn-Hayyan (translated by Latin scholars as Geber) was among those laying the foundations of chemistry around 900 years before Boyle.

Moreover, some researchers are now showing that some of the great pioneers of modern science were building directly on the work of scientists from Islamic times. George Saliba of Columbia University, for instance, demonstrates in his book Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance how the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus drew on the work of Islamic astronomers for the groundwork to his breakthrough claim in 1514 that the earth moved round the sun.

Historians of mathematics have also shown how algebra, a branch of maths that allows scientists to work out unknown quantities, was developed in 9th-century Baghdad by Musa al-Khwarizmi, building on work that he had discovered from mathematicians in India. Historians think that al-Khwarizmi would have had access to manuscripts through Islam’s first encounter with India, which happened a century earlier. Modern science depends, too, on the solutions to complex quadratic equations devised by the poet and scientist Omar Khayyam. And much of our understanding of optics and light is built on the pioneering work of Hassan ibn al-Haitham (translated in Latin as Alhazen) in 11th-century Cairo.

Inventing the future?

The Islamic middle ages also left a strong legacy in the applied sciences. The nature of Islam, and the energy of a new empire, meant that there were many inventive and practical minds at work. According to Salim al-Hassani of the University of Manchester, some modern labour-saving devices such as the drinks dispenser could have an Islamic influence. Professor al-Hassani has recently introduced the world to some of the engineering achievements of al-Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish engineer, which include the crank, the camshaft and the reciprocating piston – all essential components of the modern car engine and much more besides. Meanwhile, a remarkable trio of irreverent but brilliant showman brothers, called Banu Musa, entertained 9th-century Baghdad with such ingenious trick machines and automatons that they would astonish even today.

If all these examples were fleeting moments of brilliance, they would be fascinating enough. But as many more teachers and historians are realising, they are much more than that. Names such as al-Khwarizmi and ibn al-Haitham are as integral to the history of science and technology as are Newton and Archimedes, James Watt and Henry Ford, but the Arabic-sounding names somehow became lost in the myth of the Dark Ages. The reasons for this are the subject of an intense debate, which is as much about the relationship between the West and Islam as it is about the history of science and technology.

Lost in the dark

The idea that the Renaissance world was emerging from a period of darkness can be traced back to at least the 1330s, when the Italian historian Petrarch wrote of how it was that the world finally saw the light. ‘Amidst the errors,’ he said, ‘there shone forth men of genius, no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom.’ It may be that Petrarch was simply trying to link the emergence of Italian culture in his own time with its former heyday in Ancient Rome. But it is through men such as Petrarch that the notion of the dark ages was sustained, as Europe progressed towards the Enlightenment years of the 18th century and beyond. Perhaps tellingly, it reached its apogee, and acquired capital letters, when nations such as Britain, the Netherlands and Portugal introduced both Christianity and colonial rule into the continents of Africa and Asia. By this time, the Dark Ages had come to be seen as a time of decline into brute ignorance, full of ‘rubbish’, as Gibbon had earlier sneered in his Decline and Fall.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that this negative picture of the Dark Ages finally began to crumble along with the colonial empires. Many Western historians are now generally embarrassed by the distortion of history implied by the idea, and if they talk about dark ages, it tends only to be in a less pejorative sense, about periods that remain little known because of the dearth of written evidence. It is hard for them to see how an age that produced the Book of Kells, the scholarship of Alcuin and Bede, and countless great churches and monasteries could ever be thought of as an age of brute ignorance. More significantly, though, a tide of recent archaeological and textual research is now painting a much richer, fuller picture of life in Western Europe in the centuries after the fall of Rome, and even the idea that this is an unknowable period for the West is evaporating.