Science and Islam
a History
By Ehsan Masood, Icon Books, 240pp
Reviewed:2 May 2009
When most Westerners associate Islam with faith-based politics and socio-religious dogmatism, it is valuable to be reminded that the Quran, and the words of the Prophet Mohammed, have also provided inspiration for regimes of strenuously rational and empirical scientific enquiry.
In 833AD, Caliph al-Mamun of Baghdad conducted a stern inquisition throughout his Islamic realm. Scholars and officials were required, on pain of punishment or even death, to attest that the Quran was not the dictated word of God, but rather the work of men inspired by their understanding of God.
Perhaps lacking in subtle people skills, the Caliph was a passionate believer in scientific enquiry, and a student of the Greek, Persian and Indian philosophers. He represented a consistent strand of Islamic thinking: that curiosity about the world is the greatest sign of respect to the Creator.
Among many scientific projects, he had his researchers confirm from astronomical observations that the circumference of the Earth was 24,000 miles – six centuries before our European savants could accept that the world was round.
The great surge of Islamic knowledge-seeking began in the Persian Abbassid Caliphate period from 750AD, with a sustained and systematic program to collect and translate all the wisdom of the world. In four centuries of Islamic enlightenment, scholarship proceeded in conditions of religious tolerance. Many of the scholars were Christians, Jews or other non-Muslims, but were supported by powerful patrons. Islamic religious purists were not allowed to stand in the way of the quest for understanding of the world.
There is much here to challenge Eurocentric assumptions. In 2009, as we celebrate Charles Darwin’s 19th Century studies, it is salutary to read the 9th Century Baghdad naturalist al-Jahiz describing the evolution of species by natural selection – a full millennium earlier than Darwin.
The “algorithm” (the foundation of computer programming) is named for al-Khwarizmi, another 9th Century scholar, of Central Asian origins, who not only introduced the Indian base-10 number system to the West (what we now call Arabic numerals), but also established the foundations of “algebra” (another Arabic word) to radically extended the possibilities of calculation in every field of science.
Ibn-Firnas, of Moorish Cordoba, is reported making a successful hang-glider flight that lasted several minutes and also built a functioning projection planetarium using glass lenses in the floor, centuries before Leonardo or Galileo.
Masood notes that science can flourish under authoritarian rule, ancient or modern, but suggests a fundamental link between cultural self-confidence and the liberation of rational enquiry. Modern Islamic societies, Masood suggests, are still defined by their state of reaction to Western colonialism. Conservatism is a political artifact, and no more intrinsic to Islam than it is to Christianity.
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