MYTH 4

T H AT M E D I E VA L I S L A M I C C U LT U R E

W A S I N H O S P I TA B L E T O S C I E N C E

Syed Nomanul Haq

The pious Muslim . . . was expected to avoid . . . [rational]

sciences with great care because they were considered dangerous
to his faith. . . . The ‘ulum al-awa’il [sciences of the (non-
Muslim) ancients] are pointedly described as “wisdom mixed
with unbelief.” . . . They can only lead in the end to unbelief
and, in particular, to . . . the stripping away of all positive
content from God.
—Ignaz Goldziher, “Stellung der alten islamischen
Orthodoxie zu den antiken Wissenschaften” (1916)

. . . possession of all of this [Greek] “enlightenment” did not

prompt much intellectual progress within Islam, let alone
eventuate in Islamic science. . . . The result was to freeze
Islamic learning and stifle all possibility of the rise of an Islamic
science, and for the same reasons that Greek learning stagnated
of itself: fundamental assumptions antithetical to science.
—Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God (2003)

Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The

most influential was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali
who argued . . . against the very idea of laws of nature, on the
ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains. . . .
The consequences are hideous.
—Steven Weinberg, “A Deadly Certitude” (2007)
36 MYTH 4

Between the eighth and fifteenth centuries Islamic culture saw its
heyday. At the beginning the followers of the Prophet Muham-
mad (ca. 570–632), born in the Arabian Peninsula, pushed rapidly
across North Africa and up through the Iberian peninsula to the
west and eastward to Persia. In 762 the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur
began construction of a new capital, Baghdad, along the banks
of the Tigris River in present-day Iraq. By the early tenth century
it had become the largest city in the world, with a population
of over one million; Cordoba, in Muslim Spain, ranked second.1
Among the cultural institutions of Baghdad was the House of
Wisdom, established as an administrative bureau and library in
early Abbasid times. Over the centuries it served as an enduring
imperial center for the promotion of scientific activity that ful-
filled the consciously forged Abbasid ambition of rivaling the
glory of the conquered Persian empire. In this milieu began a mas-
sive translation movement to render into Arabic first Sanskrit and
Persian texts and then more extensively Greek texts. This devel-
opment, claims the historian Dimitri Gutas, “demonstrated for
the first time in history that scientific and philosophical thought
are international, not bound to a specific language or culture.”2
By the twelfth century grateful scholars in Christian Europe
were eagerly translating Arabic scientific texts into Latin—and
acknowledging Islamic leadership in natural philosophy.3 In-
deed, even after the original Greek sources became available,
some Latin translators preferred using Arabic versions because
of the numerous commentaries added by the Muslim sages, who
often challenged and corrected the ancient authorities. Never-
theless, denigrators of the Islamic achievement have tended to
credit the ancient Greeks with all that was noteworthy in Arabic
science, to insist that the Islamic contributors to science were
marginal to mainstream Muslim society, and to argue that all
scientific creativity had ended by the twelfth century, a fate al-
legedly caused by opposition from “orthodox” religious leaders
such as the philosopher and theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali
(1058–1111). I will address each of these claims in turn.
MEDIEVAL ISLAM'S INHOSPITALITY TO SCIENCE 37

The movement to translate Greek texts into Arabic began in

earnest in the ninth century, during the Abbasid dynasty. In terms
of “intensity, scope, concentration, and concertedness,” claims
the historian A. I. Sabra, “it had no precedent in the history of the
Middle East or of the world.”4 The entire Abbasid elite—soldiers
and rulers, merchants and scholars, civil servants and scientists,
caliphs and princes—actively supported it with funds and bless-
ings, with patronage cutting “across all lines of religious, sectar-
ian, ethnic, tribal and linguistic demarcation,” and including
“Arabs and non-Arabs, Muslims and non-Muslims, Sunnis and
Shi‘ites.” It was, in the words of Dimitri Gutas, an “astounding
achievement” with profound consequences for world civilization:
“It is equal in significance to, and belongs to the same narrative
as, that of Pericles’ Athens, the Italian Renaissance, or the scien-
tific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it
deserves to be so recognized and embedded in our historical con-
sciousness.”5
Nearly a century ago the influential French scholar Pierre
Duhem argued that the Muslim translators “were always the
more or less faithful disciples of the Greeks, but were themselves
destitute of all originality.”6 But this claim utterly overlooks the
historical complexity of transmitting knowledge between cul-
tures. The process of translation involved selection, interpreta-
tion, reconfiguration, and transformation; it was a creative act.
For example, when Qusta ibn Luqa (820–912) translated Dio-
phantus’s Greek Arithmetica into Arabic as The Art of Algebra,
he recast the mathematical operations of the Greek text in terms
of a new discipline whose foundations had been laid a little ear-
lier by Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (ca. 780–ca. 850);
and this marks a fundamental conceptual shift. Similarly, when
Abbasid scholars translated Aristotle’s Prior Analytics as the
Book of Qiyas, they adopted the Arabic word (taken from the
religious sciences) meaning “analogy,” which subsequently be-
came the philosopher’s term for syllogism. The point is that one
cannot in general recover the Greek text by means of reverse
38 MYTH 4

translation. To reconstruct a Greek source from an Arabic text,

one must move beyond the text and enter into the specific cul-
tural and intellectual setting in which it was created. Clearly, the
translation movement, which lasted for over two hundred years,
did not just passively preserve the Greek legacy.7
According to one recent assessment, “Islamic civilization re-
mained the world leader in virtually every field of science from at
least A.D. 800–1300.” During this period, writes Sabra, “astron-
omy tended to be favored as the pursuit most worthy of the atten-
tion of both the patron rulers and the patronized mathematicians
who were keen on mastering and exploiting the Greek legacy.”
The Muslims prized astronomy not only for helping to improve
astrological predictions and the determination of prayer times,
and for demonstrating God’s wisdom and perfection, but also for
its promise of providing a naturalistic explanation of cosmic phe-
nomena. Spurred largely by a desire to improve their knowledge
of the heavens, Muslim astronomers established observatories
throughout the region, beginning with one in Baghdad in 828.8
The most impressive of these observatories was established
in 1259 at Maraghah in a fertile region near the Caspian Sea.
Equipped with precision instruments, it flourished under the di-
rection of the Persian Shi‘ite astronomer and theologian Nasir
al-Din al-Tusi, who proposed non-Ptolemaic models for the ap-
parent motions of the moon, Venus, and the three superior plan-
ets. Adhering to an uncompromising principle of Aristotelian
natural philosophy, he succeeded (where the ancient Alexan-
drian astronomer Ptolemy had failed) in explaining the motions
of the planets exclusively in terms of uniform circular motions.
During the next century Ibn al-Shatir, a Syrian astronomer who
worked as a timekeeper (muwaqqit) for ritual prayers in a Dam-
ascus mosque, proposed a lunar model that the Polish as-
tronomer Nicolaus Copernicus utilized in De Revolutionibus
(1543). Indeed, both the Arab timekeeper and the revolutionary
Pole used many of al-Tusi’s original and highly sophisticated
mathematical techniques.9
MEDIEVAL ISLAM'S INHOSPITALITY TO SCIENCE 39

Medieval Muslims also excelled in medicine. The best-known

practitioner was the prolific Persian physician-philosopher Ibn
Sina, who was active in the early eleventh century and known in
the Latin West as Avicenna. His most famous medical work, The
Canon, sought to bring all medical knowledge, ancient and con-
temporary, together into one encyclopedic whole. Translated
into Latin, it became a staple of medical education in Europe
for centuries. Less celebrated but equally important was the
thirteenth-century jurist, theologian, and physician Ibn al-Nafis,
who effectively discovered the pulmonary circulation of blood—
three centuries before its rediscovery by Europeans. A Syrian
by birth, Ibn al-Nafis studied medicine in Damascus but spent
much of his adult life in Cairo, where, like Ibn Sina, he assem-
bled a massive encyclopedia of medicine. Not surprisingly, some
contemporaries referred to him as “the second Ibn Sina” while
others ranked him first.10
One of the—if not the—leading Islamic men of science was the
great tenth-century polymath Ibn al-Haytham, or Alhazen, as Eu-
ropeans called him. According to the historian David C. Lind-
berg, he was “the most significant figure in the history of optics
between antiquity and the seventeenth century.” A highly skilled
geometrician, al-Haytham also made important contributions to
the development of scientific methodology, especially his linking
of mathematics and physics, which the ancient Greeks had pur-
sued separately. He also helped to establish experiment as a cat-
egory of scientific proof, along with logical demonstration. For
this, a writer in the New York Times, perhaps indulging in a little
myth-making, credited him with conceiving “the greatest idea of
the last 1,000 years.”11
These few examples alone, selected from scores of possibilities,
give the lie to assertions that medieval Islam contributed nothing
original to science. But what happened in the twelfth century
when, as Steven Weinberg has phrased it, “Islam turned against
science”? As Weinberg explains it, Muslims fell under the retro-
gressive influence of “the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali
40 MYTH 4

who argued . . . against the very idea of laws of nature, on the

ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains.” The
fountainhead of this myth, it seems, is an erudite Arabist of an
earlier generation, Ignaz Goldziher, also quoted at the beginning
of this essay. Goldziher, whose historically awkward but ideolog-
ically satisfying ideas seem to have reached Weinberg directly or
indirectly, emphasized what he considered the negative role of
al-Ghazali, who, we are simplistically told, opposed Hellenistic
science—and the very notion of laws of nature—in a book called
the Incoherence of the Philosophers. Goldziher created the im-
pression that Ghazali, instead of seeking natural explanations in
the manner of the ancient Greeks and their Islamic followers,
stressed the unpredictable role played by God and angels. Accord-
ing to Goldziher, his influence helped to bring Islamic science to a
screeching halt.
There are several glaring problems with this explanation, not
least of which are the examples given above of impressive activ-
ity continuing past the twelfth century in astronomy and medi-
cine. Even Goldziher conceded that Ghazali supported the study
of logic and mathematics, but he failed to point out that the
allegedly antiscientific Sufi mystic encouraged the pursuit of
anatomy and medicine, lamented that Muslims were not doing
enough in these sciences, and wrote on anatomy himself. Indeed,
the Oxford historian Emily Savage-Smith tells us that Ghazali’s
writings served as a powerful spur to the medical sciences.12
Goldziher assumed the existence of a dominant Islamic ortho-
doxy, but what is this thing called “Islamic orthodoxy”? Unlike,
say, the Vatican in the Roman Catholic Church, which might
promulgate an “official” truth and legislate it by virtue of the in-
stitution’s coercive powers, Islam has never had a centralized au-
thority. In the Muslim world there are no ordained clergy; no
institutionalized religious orders; no synods; and no pontifical
truth, a deviation from which would constitute heresy. “At most
what one could claim is the prevalence of a certain religious ap-
proach at a specific time and specific locality,” explains Dimitri
MEDIEVAL ISLAM'S INHOSPITALITY TO SCIENCE 41

Gutas. “But even this has to be qualified by stating to whom,

among the different strata of society, this approach belonged,
because an assumption of ‘prevalence’ as meaning ‘majority
view’ is not necessarily always true.”13 Thus it makes no sense to
say that Islamic “orthodoxy” turned its back on science. In me-
dieval Islamic society there was an “open marketplace” of ideas,
in which some individuals severely criticized natural philosophy
in the Greek tradition while others did not.14
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, political Islam
suffered several severe reversals. In the West, Christians recon-
quered Spain, taking Cordoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. From
the East, the Mongol Hulagu Khan, a grandson of the notorious
Genghis Khan, invaded the heartland of the Islamic world, sav-
agely destroying Baghdad in 1258 and capturing Damascus two
years later. The loss of two of its leading intellectual centers,
coming on the heels of Ghazali’s critique, might have brought Is-
lamic scientific activity to an end. But, as George Saliba, profes-
sor of Arabic and Islamic science at Columbia University, has
recently shown, this did not happen. “If we only look at the sur-
viving scientific documents, we can clearly delineate a very flour-
ishing activity in almost every scientific discipline in the centuries
following Ghazali,” he writes. “Whether it was in mechanics . . .
or in logic, mathematics, and astronomy . . . or in optics . . . or
in pharmacology . . . or in medicine . . . every one of those fields
witnessed a genuine original and revolutionary production that
took place well after the death of Ghazali and his attack on the
philosophers, and at times well inside the religious institutions.”
Even “Hulagu’s devastating blow” did not prevent Islamic as-
tronomy from experiencing a subsequent “golden age.”15
By the time of the so-called scientific revolution in western
Europe, Islam’s scientific star had set in the Middle East, though
it continued to shine from a different region of the world within
the constellation of Europe. But for centuries, while science in
the Latin West had lain in the doldrums, no culture in the world
provided a more hospitable home to science than Islam. And no
42 MYTH 4

group of Muslims cultivated science more than the religious—

and not just in the sense of practicing Islam. As Saliba has
pointed out, almost to a man the leading Islamic men of science
in the post-Ghazali centuries “also held official religious posi-
tions such as judges, time keepers, and free jurists who delivered
their own juridical opinions. Some of them wrote extensively on
religious subjects as well, and were more famous for their religious
writings than their scientific ones.”16 In other words, they were not
inhospitable to science.