Seeking
the Origins of Modern Science?
Review
Article by George
Saliba, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science, Department of Middle
East and Asian Languages and Cultures,
Columbia University.
Toby E. Huff.
The Rise of Early Modern Science:
Islam, China and the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993. Pb. ed., 1995. xiv, 409 pp. Hb. ISBN 0 521 43496 3. Pb. £14.95
(US$19.95), ISBN 0 521 49833 3.
“It
is not altogether easy to break the habit of thinking of history as
blindly groping toward a goal that the West alone was clever enough to
reach. . . .”
A.
C. Graham1
The
question of the origins of modern science has been debated for years and
will continue to be debated as long as the history of science is still
written as the history of various scientific traditions modified by
cultural labels such as Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Indian and
Arabic/ Islamic. And I am sure it is obvious to all that such terminology
simply masks a clear ideological, political and, at times, even hegemonic
language. For all pre-modern scientific traditions, the classificatory
principle of a particular tradition seems to be linguistic in nature,
contrary to what is usually done in the case of modern science itself.
Yet, while it is easy to understand why a scientific book written in the
pre-modern period, whether in Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese,
Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian or Turkish, may be readily classified as
belonging to a particular culture and tradition, it is not quite clear in
which language a modern scientific text must be written to allow its
affiliation with modern science.
As
historians of science survey the various scientific traditions, they seem
to be constantly prepared to shift the criteria that they use to classify
the scientific works which they encounter. No one would dispute the
classification of a scientific text written in Chinese or Greek as
belonging to the Chinese or Greek cultural spheres respectively. But when
it comes to other scientific works, say texts written in Arabic, Persian,
Turkish or Urdu, for example, the problem becomes slightly more
complicated and those same historians of science drop linguistic
classificatory terminology to resort instead to a cultural/religious
terminology which designates such works as Islamic. In the case of modern
science, both linguistic and cultural/religious designators seem to be
dropped and French, English, Italian, German and even Japanese scientific
works may be described as modern, with the underlying assumption that all
these works must have something in common that is neither linguistic, nor
cultural, nor religious, with the vague term ‘Western’, as in
‘Western science’, used to describe them.
A corollary of this methodological chaos is the notion that there
is a definable cultural entity out there that can be called ‘the
West’, with its own independent characteristics, and an equally clearly
definable scientific tradition that can be called ‘modern science’. In
addition, no one seems to question the proposition that the ‘modern’
scientific tradition made its first appearance in this very ambiguous
‘West’ and research is ongoing to determine why this phenomenon took
place there and nowhere else. Toby E. Huff’s The
Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West is one more
work which follows this line of enquiry.
Huff is by no means the first person to attempt to explain why
modern science arose in the West and not in the context of another
culture. People like Joseph Needham, in his famous Grand
Titration,2 or Max Weber, in several of his works, have made
similar attempts in the past. In the case of Needham, the question gained
much more urgency when he managed to demonstrate that, at the time when
modern science was supposed to have been born in the West―namely,
during the European Renaissance of the sixteenth century―both the
Chinese and Islamic civilizations had attained a level of scientific
knowledge, especially in natural science, which was superior to that in
the West. And yet, modern science was born in the West and not in those
other civilizations. Needham’s attempt to understand why this happened
had the unintended result of making the criteria for ‘modern’ science,
and the vague definitions of it, identical to the criteria and definitions
which would be applied to ‘Western’ science. During that process,
another unspoken and rather ill-considered principle also emerged, namely,
that one should assess the value and contribution of the sciences of other
cultures in terms of the specific aspects of those sciences that were
incorporated within the accumulative body of modern science, while passing
over other features of those same sciences in total silence. Thus, in the
case of Chinese science, the discovery of the geographically-orienting
magnet became an acceptable Chinese scientific achievement because it
could be translated, through intermediary steps, into the navigational
compass, while the whole body of Chinese medicine would be
discarded―until very modern times, that is―because it did not
have the same impact in the West.
The least that can be said about this methodology is that it does
not yield the kind of history of science that allows a specific science to
be spoken of and studied as just another facet of the culture that
produced it to meet its own needs. Instead, the works of one cultural
science are always evaluated in terms of the criteria of modern science.
As a result, the history of science is studied for the sake of discovering
the cumulative connecting links that led to the creation of modern science
and not as an attempt to understand one more feature of the originating
culture in order to comprehend it in its totality.
Although superficially quite reasonable and legitimate, this manner
of formulating the question of why modern science arose in the West,
rather than in culture ‘X’ or ‘Y’, hides further theoretical
pitfalls. Chief among them is the circularity embedded in this kind of
argumentation. For, in order to answer the question, one must exhibit yet
another culture, ‘Z’, that followed the same route as the
West―whatever that route may have been―and managed to produce
modern science in the same way that the West did. Otherwise, the argument
quickly collapses into a circular argument in the following manner. Most
proponents of this view, whether consciously or not, look at science in
our day and assign the term ‘modern’ to that science without defining
modernity, relying only on the sheer fact that it is contemporaneous with
us. They then ask which leading centres produced this ‘modern’ science
and find them in Europe and, by extension, the United States, or what is
ambiguously called the West. From there, it becomes easy to jump to the
conclusion that modern science is Western science. Thus, all other
cultures, no matter where they are located and at what point in their
history they are ‘captured’, if they may be ‘captured’ at all,
could not possibly contain the roots of modern science, nor allow modern
science to develop, by the mere fact that they are not Western cultures.
Moreover, this argument, and the many variations upon it that range
widely in sophistication and acuity, has been put forth now for more than
a hundred years without ever an attempt being made first to define what is
meant by science, in a culturally neutral fashion, or modernity itself, as
it applies to science, or the relationship between science and culture,
or, more potently, to determine what aspects of a culture, especially
Western culture, are responsible for the rise of a modern science that is
implicitly called Western science. Throughout this century and part of the
previous one, attempts have been made to define the singularity of modern
Western science by isolating factors responsible for its development. Such
factors as the emphasis on “experimentation,” the “mathematization
of nature” and “freedom from religion,” have been advanced at one
point or another as being the key elements in the development of modern
science. In the case of Huff, one may add to this list the emphasis on the
“institutionalization” or “legal context” of science, or the more
general “philosophical world view,” or even his ambiguous “neutral
space and free inquiry, concepts integral to modern science,” (Huff, i)
as also being pivotal. But as knowledge of non-Western cultural sciences
began to increase, especially in the latter half of this century―and
here the work of Needham on Science
and Civilization in China3 and the many new works on
Islamic/Arabic science are crucial―the foundations of the argument
for the singularity of modern science have been eroded. For it was found,
for example, that both the Islamic and Chinese civilizations derived
scientific results from experimentation at a time much earlier than the
Renaissance, that they criticized other authoritative scientific theories
on the basis of their own observations, and that they expressed the
results of their findings in mathematical language; and yet, they did not
manage to develop modern science in the manner in which this latter
concept is so poorly articulated.
In order to avoid the pitfalls of this simplistic line of
argumentation, one must appeal to the more rigorous grounds upon which
such arguments ought to be based. As intimated above, these grounds
require that one demonstrate the independence of Western science from
other cultural sciences in order to be able to say that whatever factors
led to the formulation of modern science in Western culture were, in fact,
the product of Western culture itself, while simultaneously determining
that any other culture which embodies the same factors would indeed
produce the same modern science under discussion. In addition, one must
demonstrate the real existence of such a culture.
When we learn, for example, that the most innovative mathematical
and astronomical ideas that were employed during the European Renaissance
were themselves borrowed from Islamic/Arabic or Chinese civilizations
through many circuitous routes that are now being investigated, then one
is forced to ask about the very roots of modern science and whether they
should be placed within the parameters of Western culture or the other
cultures where those innovative ideas originated.
This kind of predicament was easier to overcome in the last
century, when many of the findings of the Islamic/Arabic or Chinese
sciences were not really known in the West. During that time of ignorance,
people could speak freely of the so-called modern science and its roots in
the genius of Greek civilization―sometimes referred to as the Greek
miracle―and thus conceive of that science as a purely Western
enterprise, thereby making a direct connection between classical Greek
civilization and the modernity of Europe and bypassing the intervening
Roman, Islamic and medieval civilizations with impunity. But now, at the
end of the twentieth century, we know that the most dynamic revolutionary
ideas in astronomy, for example, were developed in the Islamic/Arabic
domain―and were developed explicitly to rebut the authority of the
Greek astronomical tradition―and yet, they were the very same ideas
that made the astronomy of the European Renaissance possible, in the
mathematical technical sense, after having been incorporated into that
astronomy. This view is quite eloquently expressed by the sinologist A. C.
Graham, in the same article quoted at the beginning of this essay, where
he says: “Indeed if we wish to find the best historical perspective for
looking forward toward the Scientific Revolution, there is much to be said
for choosing a viewpoint not in Greece but in the Islamic culture that
from A.D. 750 reached from Spain to Turkestan.”4
With Graham’s words in mind, one can quite legitimately ask about
the roots of modern science, and whether those roots should continue to be
placed in the context of Western culture, with its far-reaching, a
historical extension into classical antiquity. More particularly, one
should also ask whether it makes much sense to speak of science, whether
modern or not, in such cultural, linguistic, or national terms, when the
very processes of science themselves respect no such boundaries and pay no
heed to such sentiments. Moreover, since the terms defining the essential
characteristics of both ‘modern science’ and the ‘West’ are so
vaguely defined, is it not quite legitimate to examine as well the same
question that was asked by Graham when he said: “The question may also
be raised whether Ptolemy or even Copernicus and Kepler were in principle
any nearer to modern science than the Chinese and the Maya, or indeed than
the first astronomer, whoever he may have been, who allowed observations
to outweigh numerological considerations of symmetry in his calculations
of the month and the year.”5 Indeed, the empirical emphasis
placed by that very first astronomer on the value of his observations set
the inescapable course to modern science. So where would the origins of
modern science then lie?
In this context of trying to determine the building blocks of
modern science, Huff’s book is a refreshing and welcome contribution.
This is not because it applies a better methodology than previous works on
the subject, or because it answers the big question posed above more
satisfactorily, but rather because it benefits from the research into the
history of Islamic and Chinese sciences that has been going on for about
half a century now. As a result, and by bringing to light the complexity
of the scientific production itself and the dangers implicit in assigning
national, linguistic or cultural tokens to that production, his work has
had the unintended consequence of poking holes into the old arguments
regarding the singularity of western modern science, or the autonomy of
the western culture that produced it. In this regard, the present reviewer
is very sympathetic to Huff’s plight. After all, how could he be
critical of someone who writes a book on the history of modern science,
documenting in it a whole array of the achievements of Islamic and Chinese
sciences and acknowledging the integral relationship between those
sciences and modern science―a good part of that relationship being
based on research by the present reviewer on the history of Islamic
planetary astronomy―when others writing on the same subject find no
difficulty in jumping from Ptolemy (c. AD 150) to Copernicus (d. AD 1543)
without even blinking?6
Yet, writing general books of this nature, when neither one of the
scientific traditions under scrutiny is well understood, has intrinsic
difficulties. When one cannot yet demonstrate the exact cultural
relationship between modern science and the West, and when we have, at
best, truncated knowledge of both Islamic and Chinese
science―truncated because, as was stated above, those sciences have
been studied until now from the perspective of their relevance to Western
scientific tradition rather than for their own sake, as features of their
own cultures―how may one make claims to a comparative study of the
history of science, as Huff does, without falling into loose and banal
arguments and even, at times, contradictory statements? Concepts advanced
by Huff such as “neutral space and free inquiry,” concepts deemed
integral to modern science, may be argued and discussed, but by no means
presumed to be as established as Huff would like to assume. The whole
school of the sociology of science, or the more contemporary science
studies movement, devotes much space and energy specifically to proving
that there is no “neutral space” or “free inquiry” in the sense in
which Huff uses the terms. Besides, if it teaches us nothing else, our own
experience at the end of the twentieth century should teach us that
“free inquiry” is essentially a fiction determined, for the most part,
by the exigencies of the market-place and reigning ideologies much more
than by cultural imperatives, if there are any such imperatives. We also
learn by the end of this century that the best scientific
production―now difficult to separate from technological
production―does not always abide by the same rationality for which
Western culture is celebrated, but rather by the more mundane pressures of
economics and marketing which are always lurking behind every scientific
development.
In the following, I will give only a few examples of the kind of
statements from which such general books ultimately suffer. When Huff
says, for instance, that “science is especially the natural enemy of
authoritarian regimes,” (Huff, 1) he must be either ignoring the
tremendous achievements by the Nazi or the Soviet regimes in the most
technically sophisticated sciences, or suggesting that the
authoritarianism of these regimes fades in comparison to what one would
have to presume he sees in Islamic and Chinese cultures. The reviewer, who
knows Huff personally, is aware that he does not mean the latter, but such
statements are inherent in an enterprise which seeks to explain scientific
achievements as functions of “neutral space” and “free inquiry.”
From that prejudgement, he goes on to illustrate with a diagram (Huff, 4)
how “Law and Legal Thought” and the “Theology and Philosophy of
Nature,” when channelled through “Reason, Rationalism [and]
Rationality,” whatever those terms may mean in this context, lead to
“Institutional Structures,” on the one hand―and through those
institutions to “Modern Science”―or directly to “Modern
Science,” on the other. From that perspective, Arabic science indeed
becomes a “problem,” and is perceived as such in the subtitle of
chapter 2, since it is difficult to document the same “neutral space,”
“free inquiry,” “legal thought,” “theology and philosophy of
nature,” “reason, rationalism and rationality” and “institutional
structures” in Islamic civilization that would presumably give rise to
modern science. It is interesting that neither here, where it would be
most relevant, nor in any other place in the book, does Huff speak of the
economic factors that may be directly connected to the rise of modern
science in the West, from the “discovery” of the New World, to the Age
of Discovery and all of its implications and, finally, to
“colonization” and the ongoing imperialism of Western culture under
the newly-emerging concept of “globalization.” In order to be fair,
however, Huff is conscious (Huff, 5-6) of the connection made by Weber
between modern science and capitalism―a connection also accepted by
Needham―but avoids delving into it for, in his own words, it
“would entail another volume altogether.” That indeed will be a very
interesting volume if it is ever written.
Because he has avoided all of the implications of the relationship
between economic factors and modern science―and modern society in
general―Huff treats contemporary underdevelopment as a problem of
“barriers to freedom of thought, expression, and action in the interests
of primordial religious and ethnic identities”(Huff, 7). All this when
Huff knows very well that the most primordial ethnic and religious
atrocities happened in the very bosom of Europe, under the gaze of the
most advanced modern science based on principles such as experimentation,
the mathematization of nature and “rationality,” and in the most
developed scientific society of its time. Until one disentangles the web
of relationships between such social, political, and economic forces in
Europe itself, where modern science is supposed to have been born, and
demonstrates the relationship of such forces to modern science and
development, it is foolhardy to urge underdeveloped countries to adopt the
imagined benefits of such slogans as “freedom of thought and
expression” in order to obtain the golden key to modernity assumed to be
so intrinsically embedded in the processes of modern science.
The danger in this kind of thinking is that it overburdens
scientific activity itself by making it solely responsible for modern
development when one knows very well that scientific processes are very
limited in scope and application, and cannot solve all the problems of
modern life, even though we have become so accustomed to falsely believing
science to be the ethos and symbol of modernity. In fact, the problem is
much more complex than that and, although development can benefit from
scientific production, science, whether modern or not, cannot be made
responsible for its failure.
Furthermore, Huff misrepresents the facts, particularly with regard
to Islamic culture―being unfamiliar with Chinese culture, I will not
offer any criticisms of his presentation of it here―when he claims,
for example, that “law and the secrets of God were carefully guarded”
(Huff, 12) in Islamic and Judaic cultures, a claim probably based on
reiterations, by both Maimonides and Averroes, of the old Greek dictum
that the study of philosophy must not be open to the common man, but
restricted to the chosen few. The proliferation of legal/theological
schools of thought in both Judaism and Islam, and the lack of a
centrally-guarded clergy entrusted with such secrets, contradicts Huff’s
contention―despite the wishful thinking of Huff, Maimonides,
Averroes and their Greek predecessors. In any event, even if those
restrictions did exist, what do the secrets of God and law have to do with
the development of science? The existence of any relationship between them
still awaits a convincing argument. Moreover, how does revealing God’s
secrets allow us to understand the development of science and then to
write a better history of science, when the purpose of such an enterprise
is to formulate a framework within which individual scientists and their
work may be understood―in the context of the cultural domain in
which the work was produced―thus changing our understanding of each
domain as well as its relationship to the rest of the grand narrative of
the history of science? Finally, when one speaks of science in such
general cultural terms and the cultural “imperatives” that produce
science, then one loses the ability to make distinctions among the
scientific activities themselves and thereby reach any conclusion as to
why, for instance, in certain periods of a cultural science, astronomy
advanced while medicine declined.
On another level, a word should be said about the causes for the
decline of Arabic science. Huff places the beginning of that decline at
around the thirteenth century, or by the beginning of the fourteenth at
the latest. He says quite explicitly that he “would draw the line in
terms of significant cultural and scientific growth at the end of the
thirteenth century” (Huff, 47, n.1). He then goes on to argue, as do
many, that the decline was caused by the dominant role played by religious
thought in later centuries, thus making religious thought responsible for
stifling scientific thought. This widely-accepted argument goes back to
the nineteenth century, when Ghazali (d. 1111) was blamed for the decline
of Arabic/Islamic science and his book,
The Incoherence of the Philosophers, came to be taken as the harbinger
of that decline. Needless to say, this argument rested on the usual
antagonistic opposition between religion and science which was already
operative in the study of the history of Western science. One of its later
manifestations was articulated by Armand Abel in the 1950s and is
unfortunately quoted here, with credence, by Huff (Huff, 53).
Consequently, the argument of opposition between religion and science was
simply applied to Islamic civilization without any consideration being
given to the cultural differences between Islamic and Western
civilizations.
Huff adds to the old thesis of religio-scientific conflict a new
interpretation of findings recently established on the subject of
religious conversions. He uses these results to assert that, since
conversion to Islam increased after the tenth century, free thinking was
subsequently restricted (Huff, 47, n. 2), as if to imply that the
proponents of free thinking were the non-Muslims of earlier centuries,
without even attempting to tell the reader what he means by free thinking,
or even mentioning the dynamic debates that went on in every conceivable
intellectual field within Islamic religious thought in earlier centuries.
At the same time, however, he diverges from the argument of
conflict between religion and science because of his acquaintance with
some new facts. He had already learned from another area of recent
research, namely, the area of Arabic astronomy and, especially, from
ongoing investigations regarding its vital relationship to Copernican
astronomy, that the most interesting and revolutionary planetary theories
produced by Islamic civilization were not only produced in opposition to
Greek astronomical theory, but also well after the time of Ghazali, when
Islamic religious thought was supposed to have reigned supreme. He also
knows of the relationship between the Damascene astronomer Ibn al-Shatir
(d. 1375) and his counterpart, Copernicus, who came much later. He
obviously knows, as well, of Ibn al-Shatir’s reformed model for the
movement of the moon, which was, together with many other theories which
he proposed, contrary to Greek theory, but identical to the corresponding
theories of Copernicus. It is only in the last forty years that historians
have discovered these facts and Huff is to be congratulated for his
awareness of them and for now making them accessible to a much wider
audience, which this book will surely attract.
Unfortunately, however, Huff did not keep up with the latest
research and the last few years have seen revolutionary findings push
forward the date for the beginning of a decline in Arabic science well
into the sixteenth century. Moreover, it is becoming more and more
apparent that the scientists who were responsible for the production of
this radical astronomy were mostly religious men at the same time. Ibn al-Shatir
was a timekeeper at the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. Other contemporary and
subsequent astronomers like Sadr al-Shari`a al-Bukhari (d. 1347), al-Sharif
al-Jurjani (d. 1413), al-Khafri (d. 1550) and several others were
religious scholars in their own right. Even the most elementary study of
the works of these men permits one to begin characterizing their age as a
golden age of astronomy, rather than an age of decline as many, including
Huff, have argued.
This does not mean that there was no age of decline, but it can be
documented that it primarily occurred in legal and religious thought,
rather than in astronomical thought, during the period in question, a
result almost exactly opposite to what the Eurocentric model would
predict. Accordingly, works exploring the relationship between science and
religion, and between Arabic science and Western science, as well as
assumptions made concerning the extent of free thinking under religious
Islam, have to be rewritten in light of these new findings, and everything
said by Huff on these subjects has to be reassessed.
On the technical level, much could be said about Huff’s
understanding of the role of Arabic astronomy and of Arabic planetary
theories in particular. In one place (Huff, 55), he seems to imply that
these theories were developed in order to account for “discrepancies
between theory and observation,” when it has, in fact, already been
established that planetary predictions according to the Ptolemaic models,
as well as according to models developed in opposition to them, could
yield the positions of the planets with reasonable accuracy, considering
the instruments of the time. The same myth is often repeated about
Copernican astronomy―that it fitted better with observations, or
that it was simpler than Ptolemaic astronomy―myths dismissed more
than fifty years ago by Neugebauer and others.7
The main purpose of all of the theorists whose work is now being
pursued in Arabic astronomy―and whose work had a direct bearing on
the theories of Copernicus―was to try to harmonize the cosmological
requirements of Ptolemaic astronomy with the mathematical models that were
supposed to represent the workings of that cosmology. In very few cases
were objections to Greek astronomy made on the basis of its failure to
account for observed facts. The only instance we know of, so far, is the
solitary remark made by Ibn al-Shatir on the contradiction between
predictions for the size of the apparent solar disk, as derived from the
Ptolemaic model for the sun, and its actual measurements.8 Other
discrepancies between observed facts and the predictive elements of
Ptolemaic astronomy had already been noted as early as the first half of
the ninth century and not in later centuries when the planetary theories
were being developed.
On the same technical level, Huff’s understanding of what
Copernican astronomy was supposed to do needs some correction as well. In
one instance, Huff states that “Copernicus and Galileo were committed to
a realist interpretation of the world” (Huff, 41). Although this
judgement may be arguably true for Galileo, one may legitimately ask just
what reality Copernicus was appealing to, or committing himself to, in
order to propose a heliocentric universe, when he had no universal
gravitation theory to hold that universe together cosmologically? The same
Arabic-writing astronomers whose mathematical theorems we now know were
employed by Copernicus developed their theorems specifically because of
their objections to the lack of realism in the cosmological Greek universe
as expressed by Ptolemaic astronomy. They aimed at harmonizing that
universe to become more scientifically coherent in order to make sense of
the ‘reality’ of the geocentric universe that Greek astronomy was
supposed to espouse. In that cosmological universe, heliocentrism was
already dismissed as unreal. Therefore, going back to it without a
developed universal gravitation theory is equally unreal, whether the
commitment to it was made by Copernicus, or by anyone else in his time.
Huff repeats the same claim elsewhere (Huff, 44), agreeing with
Benjamin Nelson that the early modern revolution in science was conducted
by men who were “committed spokesmen of the new truths clearly
proclaimed by the Book of Nature. . . .” Here, one must ask which
chapters of the Book of Nature could proclaim heliocentrism before coining
a universal gravitation concept? If anything, that book spoke to the
contrary.
Without any further elucidation, Huff makes a very similar
assertion regarding heliocentrism (Huff, 57-58), when he asserts that it
was the “great metaphysical core of the modern European scientific
revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” without telling
the reader about the real history of heliocentrism and the benefit which
Copernicus accrued from it―only in hindsight and for reasons that
have nothing to do with the kind of ‘realist’ he is proclaimed to be.
According to those familiar with his mathematical astronomy, it may be
claimed that Copernicus was a throw-back to the time of the ancient
Greeks, when the coherence of mathematics and the cosmology that
mathematics was supposed to represent did not receive much
consideration―as opposed to the persistent and long-standing
attempts by astronomers working in the context of Islamic civilization,
all of whom insisted on the need to match mathematics with the ‘real’
world surrounding them, as expressed within the cosmology of the time. For
Copernicus to be a realist he would have had to abandon the ancient Greek
geocentric cosmology and offer a new cosmology of his own that would make
of heliocentrism more than just elegant mathematics. Without a theory of
universal gravitation, this new cosmology could not be developed, as it
indeed was about a century after Copernicus―and not by Copernicus.
Several other claims made by Huff, such as those concerning the
failure of Arabic science to break away from geocentrism (Huff, 87) on
account of opposition from religious scholars (Huff, 60 and passim), or
the need to cling to lunar cycles, are obviously ill-informed and need not
be taken seriously. Similarly, his claim that the “naturalization” of
the Greek sciences is what led to their decline under Islam (Huff, 65) is
highly questionable and not well supported, neither by Huff, nor by Sabra,
from whom he borrowed the concept.
Furthermore, Huff’s claim that “Copernicus borrowed heavily
from the Almagest of Ptolemy,” a borrowing supposedly “made easier by
the advent of the printing press” (Huff, 322), is really a non
sequitur. Almost all of the astronomers who worked under Islam not
only borrowed heavily from the Almagest, but corrected it, objected to it,
reformulated it and wrote commentaries on it, without the benefit of the
printing press.
Racist remarks such as “even allowing for Arab exaggeration . . .
” (Huff, 74) should no longer have a place in modern-day books,
especially those that have a great potential for becoming textbooks for
the instruction of young students. Nor should contradictory statements
attributing the rise of modern science to factors such as “free
thinking” and “neutral space”―if understood to mean fewer
constraints on the individual scientist―be used to explain why
modern science developed in the West, where such concepts existed, but did
not develop under Islam, when Huff himself describes how the relationship
between the student scientist and his teacher was free of all constraints
in Islamic civilization and depended solely upon their willingness to
indulge in whatever scientific activity they wished. In the present day,
research institutes for advanced study and apprenticeships in laboratories
under individual scientists are considered the main sources of creative
science. So why are similar relationships in medieval Islamic civilization
considered contrary to the spirit of modern science?
Finally, Huff erroneously follows David King (Huff, 89), who wrote
the biographical entry on Ibn al-Shatir for the Dictionary
of Scientific Biography, where he says: “There is no indication in
the known sources that any Muslim astronomers after Ibn al-Shatir
concerned themselves with non-Ptolemaic astronomy.”9 On the basis
of King’s statement, Huff concludes that “an achievement as great as
that of Ibn al-Shatir simply fell on deaf ears because it was not part of
an ongoing educational system.” Neither statement is true and the
published facts now demonstrate the presence of not only those scholars
mentioned above, but also Qushji (d. 1474),10 Birjandi (d. 1525)
and Khafri (d. 1550)11, all of whom produced equally ‘great’
works along the lines of those by Ibn al-Shatir. In the case of Khafri, he
easily surpassed Ibn al-Shatir in sophistication and output. More to the
point, and contrary to Huff’s contention, those astronomers who
commented on each other’s works and, at times, even incorporated them
into their own studies (as Khafri did when he twice included works by
Jurjani and Shirazi) represented a continuity of the creative astronomical
tradition well into the sixteenth century as far as we can now tell. Later
sources have not yet been scrutinized for such theories simply because
scholars in the field are still in thrall to the old periodization scheme
which Huff, unfortunately, largely follows in his book. According to that
scheme, the decline of Islamic science dates back to the beginning of the
fourteenth century, thus allowing no room for later developments that we
now know took place.
But, to his credit, Huff also notes that modern discussions on the
history of science tend to bypass the role of other, non-Western sciences,
especially Arabic science (Huff, 61-62), and his book may generally be
considered a desirable corrective to that omission. This is important
because it has become increasingly apparent that a true understanding of
Western science is impossible to achieve without a proper understanding of
the role of Arabic science, the tradition with which Western science has
had the longest and most seminal engagement.
Notes
1
A. C. Graham, “China, Europe, and the Origins of Modern Science:
Needham’s The Grand Titration,”
in Chinese Science: Explorations of
an Ancient Tradition, ed. Shigeru Nakayama and Nathan Sivin
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), 67.
2
Joseph Needham, Grand
Titration (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969).
3
Joseph Needham, Science and
Civilization in China, 7 vols., (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1954-).
4
Graham, “China, Europe, and the Origins of Modern Science,” 48.
5
Ibid., 61.
6
There is no need to list the significant number of books that adopt
this approach. It suffices to look at any of the modern textbooks on
astronomy paying lip service to the history of the discipline to be
convinced. See, for example, Sune Engelbrektson, Astronomy Through Space and Time (Dubuque, IA: WCB Publishers,
1994).
7
The most elegant and brief statement of Neugebauer’s assessment
of Copernican planetary theory and the myths surrounding it can be found
in Otto Neugebauer, “On the Planetary Theory of Copernicus,” Vistas
in Astronomy 10 (1968) : 89-103; reprinted in Otto Neugebauer, Astronomy
and History: Selected Essays (New York: Springer Verlag, 1983),
491-505.
8
See George Saliba, “Theory and Observation in Islamic Astronomy:
The Work of Ibn al-Shatir of Damascus (d.1375),” Journal
for the History of Astronomy 18 (1987) : 35-43.
9
David King, “Ibn al-Shatir,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 12 (New York: Scribner’s
Sons, 1979), pp. 357-363, especially p. 362.
10
See George Saliba, “Al-Qushji’s Reform of the Ptolemaic Model
for Mercury,” Arabic Sciences and
Philosophy 3 (1993) : 161-203.
11
See George Saliba, “A Sixteenth-Century Arabic Critique of
Ptolemaic Astronomy: The Work of Shams al-Din al-Khafri,” Journal
for the History of Astronomy 25 (1994) : 15-38; George Saliba, “A
Redeployment of Mathematics in a Sixteenth-Century Arabic Critique of
Ptolemaic Astronomy,” in Perspectives
arabes et médiévales sur la tradition scientifique et philosophique
grecque: Actes du colloque de la S.I.H.S.P.A.I. (Société internationale
d’histoire des sciences et de la philosophie arabe et islamique). Paris,
31 mars-3 avril 1993,
eds. A. Hasnawi, A. Elamrani-Jamal, and M. Aouad (Leuven/Paris:
Peeters, 1997) : 105-122.
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