SCIENCE AND ISLAM
Publisher: Greenwood Press

(A Book Review by Robert Irwin)
courtesy: Times Literary Supplement, January 23, 2008

Is there really a problem? To judge by the correspondence in the TLS in January and February of 2007, there is. In a review (January 19) of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, the Nobel Prizewinning physicist Steven Weinberg denied that there had been any developments in Islamic science after the death of the scholar and mystic al-Ghazali in 1111. In response, James Ragep, a historian of science, adduced, in rather general terms, all sorts of advances in Islamic science that had occurred after al-Ghazali’s death. Weinberg responded by denying or diminishing some of Ragep’s examples, such as the discovery of the pulmonary circulation of the blood, or a pre-Copernican presentation of a heliocentric system by Muslims. Weinberg, having reiterated that Islamic science never achieved much of importance after the early twelfth century, ended by quoting a 2002 survey by Nature which “identified just three areas of science in which Islamic countries excel: desalination, falconry and camel reproduction”.

Evidently there is more at stake here than getting the chronology of the advance of science right. Ever since the nineteenth century there have been European thinkers, such as Ernest Renan, who have argued that the scientific outlook and Islam are incompatible; that the explosion of scientific translation and discovery was largely the achievement of non-Arabs; and that an increasingly strict and ossified Islam curtailed further scientific and speculative thought. Historians have wondered why the scientific movement in Islamic lands from the eighth to the eleventh centuries did not lead on to a scientific and an industrial revolution. Some Muslims might choose to detect an anti-Islamic agenda among those historians. After all, the scientific and industrial revolutions did not occur anywhere in the world except in Europe, and therefore one needs to explain the peculiarity of European history, rather than adduce some kind of Islamic brake or blinker.

Muzaffar Iqbal, who is a well-known scientist and Islamic scholar based in Canada, has written a book about science and Islam that is weighted towards the Middle Ages and has nothing to say about camel breeding or falconry. He has an agreeably caustic and aggressive approach to outdated and erroneous ideas about the history of science. The book is a polemical essay, rather than a history, and welcome as such. One of the targets is the notion that Islamic science was little more than a reheated version of ancient Greek science: “many histories of science tend to regard the eight hundred years of scientific activity in the Muslim world as being no more than some kind of depot where Greek science was parked and from where it was retrieved by Europe in later centuries”.

He points out that the Arab scientific movement in the eighth century pre-existed the translation movement of the ninth and tenth centuries. He draws attention to a curious genre of literature that developed later, called shukuk, which was devoted to casting doubt on the findings of the Greeks, and he has no difficulty in adducing instances of Muslim scientists improving on, empirically testing or refuting Greek ideas. But, while he has some good sources to support the early development of what can be seen as an Islamic science, Iqbal is unwise to rely so heavily on the alleged writings of Jabir ibn Hayyan (whose notional dates are c721–815).

People who are only aware of Jabir (or Geber as he was known in the medieval West) as the name of an early scientist, may not be aware of what richly bizarre treasures are to be found in his strangely diverse writings: sperm is a crucial ingredient in the elixir of life; bird sperm is needed for producing a man with wings; the effigy of a Chinaman in bed will keep one awake at night; a picture of a man killing snakes done in magical ink will actually kill snakes; there is a fish called “the doctor of the sea” that carries a stone in its head that has the power to cure all ills; putrefied hair generates serpents; demons can be usefully trapped in statues. In the monumental Jabir ibn Hayyan: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, Paul Kraus (1904–44), a genius who committed suicide at an early age, surveyed the Jabirian corpus, which covered sexology, alchemy, the art of warfare, the manufacture of talismans, artisanal techniques, religious polemic, grammar, music, invisible inks, the artificial generation of human beings and much else. Kraus showed that the corpus was not the work of a single hand. Moreover, most of the treatises dated from the late ninth and early tenth centuries and contained radical Shia propaganda. Iqbal is aware of Kraus’s findings but oddly refuses to engage with them and continues to treat Jabir as a real person who lived when he is supposed to have done and who wrote several hundred miscellaneous treatises. In general, Iqbal elides the pervasiveness of occult thinking in Islamic science. Also when writing about cosmology, he refers en passant to a genre of literature known as the “Wonders of Creation” (in Arabic aja’ib al-makhluqat), but the treatises in this genre that I have consulted have more in common with Ripley’s Believe It or Not! than anything seriously scientific.

But Iqbal is successful in arguing that the “Quran itself lays out a well-defined and comprehensive concept of the natural world, and this played a foundational role in the making of the scientific tradition in Islamic civilization”. Faith impelled rather than impeded the Islamic scientist. The Koran commands man to study Allah’s creation. The eleventh-century cosmologist al-Biruni wrote: “Sight was made the medium so that [man] traces among the living things the signs and wisdom, and turns from the created things to the Creator”. At a more practical level, astronomy and mathematics were studied and further developed to assist in such matters as the orientation of mosques, the determination of prayer times and the division of inheritances according to Islamic law.

It is odd that the life and writings of al-Ghazali should ever have been selected as marking some kind of watershed in the history of Islamic science. However, the immensely influential Hungarian Orientalist, Ignaz Goldziher, in his essay “Stellung der alten islamischen Orthodoxie zu den antiken Wissenschaften”, published in 1915, argued that there was from the first an inherent antagonism between the ancient sciences and orthodox Islam. Those who studied these sciences were regarded with suspicion by the conservative religious establishment and, according to Goldziher, al-Ghazali’s Tahafut al-falasifa (“Incoherence of the Philosophers”) was accepted by the Muslim community as a decisive refutation of the independent validity of science. After al-Ghazali, an intellectual darkness spread over the Islamic lands.

Although Iqbal misrepresents Goldziher in presenting him as hostile to Islam, he is right to argue that the Tahafut al-falasifa was not really the attack on science that Goldziher claimed it to be. Indeed, al-Ghazali was explicit in his approval of mathematics, the exact sciences and medicine. What he was concerned to refute philosophically was the notion of causality espoused by Ibn Sina and other philosophers. For al-Ghazali, God is the real cause of all that happens. The notion of causality espoused by the philosophers whom he was criticizing was something that he thought was conjured up by men on the basis of what they regularly perceived. Whatever one thinks of al-Ghazali’s idea of causality (which allowed space for miracles to happen), it is hard to imagine the Muslim scientific community of the twelfth century downing tools once word of the contents of the Tahafut got about.

Furthermore, it is perfectly clear that important advances in science were made after the twelfth century. For example, Ibn al-Shatir (d 1375) improved on the Ptolemaic model of the solar system by removing its eccentrics and equants, and his model for the rotation of the Sun anticipated that of Copernicus. Again, Al-Kashi (d 1429), besides compiling an improved set of astronomical tables, also provided the first systematic exposition of decimal fractions, as well as a way of extracting the nth root of a number. Quite a large part of the religious establishment was opposed to alchemy, but, given the fraudulent tripe written by most of the alchemists, that was no bad thing (and of course many scientists, doctors and philosophers joined in the attack on the practice). In most other respects there was no conflict between science and Islam in the pre-modern period, and Iqbal shows this.

So problems remain. Why was there an apparent decline in scientific achievement sometime after the fifteenth century and why were there no scientific and industrial revolutions in the Islamic world? Iqbal, though he is clear and convincing about Islam being not to blame, has no answers and takes the reasonable view that the field is still too under-researched for even provisional answers to be attempted. Certainly, decades of further research are necessary. No less certainly, most readers of the TLS are too impatient to wait for the outcome. I would suggest that the spread of the madrasa, or religious teaching college, throughout the Middle East in the central and late Middle Ages led to a certain narrowing of intellectual horizons. While scientists continued to do research and publish, they do not seem to have founded scientific societies of the sort that proliferated in Western Europe in the seventeenth century. The Middle East is poor in the resources needed to get an industrial revolution going. It lacks iron, copper, wood and much else, including lots of rivers that could be harnessed for industrial purposes. There was also a kind of imperial complacency among the subjects of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires (a complacency that finds its parallel among the citizens of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the same period). There had been plenty to be complacent about and Iqbal points out “that at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the entire Middle East, a large part of Africa, the whole middle belt of Asia and the Malayan archipelago were under Muslim control . . .”. Thereafter, things changed rapidly.

Iqbal is at his most agreeably acerbic when dealing with the relationship between Islam and science in the past two centuries. He gives a fascinating account of how a kind of tafsir, or exegetical literature, developed that was devoted to demonstrating that the Koran had anticipated modern embryology and the theory of the expanding universe.

The Turkish scholar, Said Nursi (1877– 1960) maintained that the Koran alludes to railways and electricity. Iqbal describes the Islamic world’s encounter with Western science from 1950 as being “like a rude awakening from a medieval siesta”. Modern Muslim states produce “a caricature of Western science” and he remarks with only slight exaggeration that “Almost all Muslim states have ministries and ministers of science and technology, who ceaselessly issue statements on the need to acquire modern science, but none of these fifty-seven states produce any science worth its name and most able Muslim scientists live outside these states”.

Given that Iqbal is capable of penetrating criticism of writings on science and the transmission of knowledge by such scholars as Goldziher, George Sarton and Dmitri Gutas, I am surprised at the bland endorsement he gives to the Philosophia Perennis, a body of doctrine espoused by the followers of René Guenon (d 1951) and Frithjof Schuon (d 1998), both of them converts to Islam. That body of doctrine is unmistakably Gnostic, elitist, occultist, misogynist, right-wing, opposed to the theory of evolution and ultimately anti-scientific. On the other hand, Iqbal is sometimes rather hard on Western Orientalists. It is not true, for example, that most of the translations of the Koran into European languages derived ultimately from that by Robert of Ketton in the twelfth century. The great seventeenth-century translations by Lodovico Marracci and André du Ryer were largely guided by works by Muslim exegetes, and George Sale’s eighteenth-century translation drew on Marracci and similarly gave prominence to Muslim commentaries. Orientalism owes more to Muslim scholarship than most Muslims realize.


Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their enemies was published in 2006. He is the Middle East editor of the TLS.