“Pathfinders – The Golden Age of Arabic Science”
The Arab scientists and philosophers of 12 centuries ago who collectively helped to shape our understanding of the world are largely unremembered in the West, says the Iraqi-born British author, broadcaster and physicist Jim Al-Khalili in his book, “Pathfinders – The Golden Age of Arabic Science”. (Published by Allen Lane, hardback, 302 pp., £25). Jim […]
The Arab scientists and philosophers of 12 centuries ago who collectively helped to shape our understanding of the world are largely unremembered in the West, says the Iraqi-born British author, broadcaster and physicist Jim Al-Khalili in his book, “Pathfinders – The Golden Age of Arabic Science”. (Published by Allen Lane, hardback, 302 pp., £25).
Jim Al-Khalili was born in Baghdad and educated in Iraq until the age of 16, and is professor of physics at the University of Surrey in the UK. He will be familiar to TV viewers as a presenter of BBC documentaries on science and mathematics.
Islam’s Scientific Heritage
“Pathfinders”, his account of science and Islam up to the present day, seeks to redress history by documenting the scholarship and rich scientific heritage of the Islamic world in the period between the eighth and fifteenth centuries.
In Al-Khalili’s view, most popular accounts of the history of science today suggest that the achievements of the ancient Greeks do not seem to have been matched until the European Renaissance in the 16th century. “In between, so we are told, Western Europe and, by extrapolation, the rest of the world, languished in the Dark Ages for a thousand years.”
But as Al-Khalili notes, by the eighth century, Islam had spread out from Arabia across an empire that stretched from India to Spain, covering an area “larger in expanse than either the Roman empire at its height or all the lands conquered and ruled by Alexander the Great.”
Arabic – International Language of Science
This Islamic empire was so powerful and influential that for 700 years, the international language of science was Arabic. It was the lingua franca not just of the Arab figures who populate this book, but of the many Persian, Christian and Jewish scientists and scholars who also made important contributions.
In 786 the future Caliph Ma’mun was born in Baghdad. He was destined to become the greatest patron of science in the cavalcade of Islamic rulers, and the person responsible for initiating the world’s most impressive period of scholarship and learning since Ancient Greece. The academy he created in Baghdad, known as the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), came to epitomise the golden age of Arabic science.
Under Ma’mun’s patronage, scholars from all over the Islamic empire gravitated towards Baghdad. By the middle of the ninth century, the city had become the centre of the civilised world, and continued to attract the very best Arab and Persian philosophers and scientists for several centuries to come.
Al-Khalili looks at the important part played by the “translation movement”, which saw much of the wisdom of the earlier civilisations of the Greeks, Persians and Indians translated into Arabic over a period of 200 years. He sees this not just as a separate process that led to a subsequent “golden age of science”, but as an integral early part of the golden age itself.
This cross-fertilisation of ideas and the bringing together for the first time of a wide range of different scientific traditions from around the world meant that “the scholars of Baghdad had at their disposal a far broader world-view than anyone before them”.
Arab Science – To Europe through Spain
By the end of the 10th century, the spotlight shifts from Baghdad to three other cities, thousands of miles apart, which had also developed as centres of scientific activity and scholarship: Bokhara in Central Asia, Cairo, and Cordoba in Muslim Spain.
For a century during the relatively brief Andalusian Umayyad caliphate (929-1031), Cordoba “became the most important city in Europe and saw wonderful achievements in science every bit as rich and varied as those under the Islamic dynasties of the East”.
Spain, Al-Khalili argues, was to become the main conduit for the transmission of Arabic science into Europe. “While there were other avenues of transmission and translation… it was first and foremost the recapture of Islamic Spain by the Christians that would give Europe access to the wealth of knowledge produced in the Islamic world.”
Among the eminent scholars with an African connection featured in the book are Tunis-born polymath Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), widely regarded as the founder of economics; Cairo-based Ibn Yunus (950-1009), considered by many as the greatest Muslim astronomer; and Abu Kamil, a mathematician known as “the Egyptian Calculator”, whose work on algebra influenced Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci).
Al-Khalili sets out in detail his thesis that the scientific revolution in 16th and 17th century Europe would not have happened without the numerous advances made in the medieval Islamic world in philosophy, medicine, mathematics, chemistry, physics and astronomy. But he is also careful not to dismiss the existence of original scientific scholarship in Europe during the Islamic “golden age”.
Al-Khalili concludes by turning a critical eye on what he views as the relative decline in contemporary scientific advancement in the Arab world. Although Muslims comprise around a quarter of the world’s population, in the 1990s Muslim countries on average spent less than half of 1 per cent of their GDP on research and development. Religious conservatism and anti-scientific attitudes in parts of the Muslim world are to blame to an extent, he says.
“The problem is that many Muslims see modern science as a secular, even atheist, Western construct, and have forgotten the many wonderful contributions made by Muslim scholars a thousand years ago.”
(suite101.com)