Amira Bennison on Science and Islam

Cambridge lecturer Dr Bennison says that the scientific tradition in the Islamic world underpinned a lot of things that happened in the European Renaissance, and that Muslim doctors were removing cataracts with hollow needles more than 1,000 years before Western physicians.

Your first choice is Ehsan Masood, Science and Islam.

This book dovetailed with a television programme of the same name last year and looks at different areas of science in which the Islamic world excelled. It uses the word ‘science’ in the medieval sense, including, for example, philosophy working from Aristotelian material. It all started in Baghdad, Iraq, with the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate in 750AD, and for about 200 years material was translated from Greek into Arabic. This was called The Translation Movement and it started slowly but was in full swing by about 800AD.

The Arabs particularly excelled at mathematics, and algebra is an Arab innovation from that time, created by the Muslim mathematician al-Khwarizmi (born in Baghdad in 780AD). He also developed the Hindu-Arabic numerical system which is used around the world today and includes the concept of zero which was unknown in Roman mathematics. Al-Khwarizmi worked at the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) in Baghdad. The House of Wisdom acquired and translated scientific and philosophic treatises, particularly Greek, as well as publishing original research.

They were also good at geography and astronomy. They weren’t just translating material and leaving it at that – they then had their own ideas, for example to prove Ptolemy wrong. They were brilliant at maps and calculated the circumference of the earth almost exactly in the 9th century ­– they knew it was a sphere.

Who did?

The Banu Musa brothers in 830AD. They were courtiers of the caliphate but also scientists and patrons themselves. There were three brothers: Jafar Muhammad ibn Musa ibn Shakir, Ahmad ibn Musa ibn Shakir and al-Hasan ibn Musa ibn Shakir. The Banu Musa brothers were among the first group of mathematicians to begin to carry forward the mathematical developments begun by the ancient Greeks.

Nearly 50 years before, in 786, not long after the father of the Banu Musa brothers, Musa ibn Shakir, was born, Harun al-Rashid became the fifth caliph of the Abbasid dynasty. Harun ruled from his court in Baghdad over the whole Islamic empire, which stretched from the Mediterranean to India. He tried to establish the intellectual disciplines – an example of this change is seen in the life of Musa ibn Shakir, who was a robber in his youth but then turned to astronomy.

The next caliph, al-Ma’mun, continued the patronage of learning started by his father. Musa ibn Shakir had become a friend and when he died al-Ma’mun became guardian to his sons. The brothers were given the best education in Baghdad, studying geometry, mechanics, music, mathematics and astronomy. Al-Ma’mun built up a library of manuscripts, collecting important works from Byzantium. In addition to the House of Wisdom, he set up observatories in which Muslim astronomers could build on the knowledge acquired by earlier peoples.

In astronomy the brothers made many contributions. They were instructed by al-Ma’mun to measure a degree of latitude and they made their measurements in the desert in northern Mesopotamia. They also made many observations of the sun and the moon from Baghdad. Muhammad and Ahmad measured the length of the year, obtaining the value of 365 days and 6 hours. Observations of the star Regulus were made by the three brothers from their house on a bridge in Baghdad in 840-41, 847-48, and 850-51.

Then there was al-Sarabi, the first Arab philosopher who engaged with translated material, almost certainly Plato’s Republic. With the Translation Movement it’s often tempting to assume people were simply absorbing the translated material, but they were genuinely engaging with it, often disproving what came before.

The book includes a chapter entitled ‘Beyond The Abbasids’, demonstrating that science didn’t die a completely natural death at the end of the Abbasid era. The author does looks at the contemporary myth of Islam being backward and not promoting scientific thought or independent thought of any kind – the idea that Islam is very tradition-bound. People tend to extrapolate from that that there is a contradiction between Islam and science. This attitude is also a product of the enlightenment in Europe, a product of a Christian context not a Muslim one. In the enlightenment the idea did develop that there was this conflict between faith and reason and that you couldn’t really have the two side by side. Obviously that’s an ongoing debate – how do you reconcile faith and science? That kind of discussion is part of a product of the imperial age, where the Islamic world was seen as stagnant and backward.

What about your second book, George Saliba’s Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance?

This again stresses that it’s not just that the Arabs were so nice for translating and preserving a lot of ancient Greek texts, but that there was a great deal of selectivity in the translations and a lot of building on what had been translated. The thriving scientific tradition in the Islamic world underpins a lot of things that happen in the European Renaissance.

So, all these Greek texts were translated into Arabic in the 8th and 9th centuries and then translated back into European languages again in the 12th century European Renaissance?

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