his. Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science
{6-25-2016}
CD: 6/25/2016 Quick Paste New Anything
š›œš›œš›œš›œš›œš›œ
š›œš›œš›œš›œš›œš›œ
Why the Arabic World Turned Away from
Science
Contemporary Islam is not known for its engagement in the
modern scientific project. But it is heir to a legendary “Golden Age” of Arabic
science frequently invoked by commentators hoping to make Muslims and
Westerners more respectful and understanding of each other. President Obama,
for instance, in
his June 4, 2009 speech in Cairo, praised Muslims for their historical
scientific and intellectual contributions to civilization:
It was Islam that carried the light of learning through so
many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It
was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our
magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our
understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.
Such tributes to the Arab world’s era of scientific
achievement are generally made in service of a broader political point, as they
usually precede discussion of the region’s contemporary problems. They serve as
an implicit exhortation: the great age of Arab science demonstrates that there
is no categorical or congenital barrier to tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and
advancement in the Islamic Middle East.
To anyone familiar with this Golden Age, roughly spanning
the eighth through the thirteenth centuriesa.d., the disparity between the
intellectual achievements of the Middle East then and now — particularly
relative to the rest of the world — is staggering indeed. In his 2002
book What
Went Wrong?, historian Bernard Lewis notes that “for many centuries the
world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement.”
“Nothing in Europe,” notes
Jamil Ragep, a professor of the history of science at the University of
Oklahoma, “could hold a candle to what was going on in the Islamic world until
about 1600.” Algebra, algorithm, alchemy, alcohol, alkali, nadir, zenith,
coffee, and lemon: these words all derive from Arabic, reflecting Islam’s
contribution to the West.
Today, however, the spirit of science in the Muslim world is
as dry as the desert. Pakistani physicist Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy laid out the
grim statistics in a
2007 Physics Today article: Muslim countries have nine
scientists, engineers, and technicians per thousand people, compared with a
world average of forty-one. In these nations, there are approximately 1,800
universities, but only 312 of those universities have scholars who have
published journal articles. Of the fifty most-published of these universities,
twenty-six are in Turkey, nine are in Iran, three each are in Malaysia and
Egypt, Pakistan has two, and Uganda, the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait,
Jordan, and Azerbaijan each have one.
There are roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world,
but only two scientists from
Muslim countries have won Nobel Prizes in science (one for physics in 1979, the
other for chemistry in 1999). Forty-six Muslim countries combined contribute
just 1 percent of the world’s scientific literature; Spain and India
eachcontribute more of the world’s scientific literature than those countries
taken together. In fact, although Spain is hardly an intellectual
superpower, it
translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has
in the past thousand years. “Though there are talented scientists of Muslim
origin working productively in the West,” Nobel
laureate physicist Steven Weinberg has observed, “for forty years I have
not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim
country that was worth reading.”
Comparative metrics on the Arab world tell the same story.
Arabs comprise 5 percent of the world’s population, but publish just 1.1
percent of its books, according to the U.N.’s 2003 Arab
Human Development Report. Between 1980 and 2000, Korea granted 16,328
patents, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the
U.A.E., granted a combined total of only 370, many of them registered by
foreigners. A study in
1989 found that in one year, the United States published 10,481
scientific papers that were frequently cited, while the entire Arab world
published only four. This may sound like the punch line of a bad joke, but
when Nature magazine published a sketch of science in the Arab world
in 2002, its reporter identified just three scientific areas in which
Islamic countries excel: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. The
recent push to establish new research and science institutions in the Arab
world — described in these pages by Waleed Al-Shobakky (see “Petrodollar
Science,” Fall 2008) — clearly still has a long way to go.
Given that Arabic science was the most advanced in the world
up until about the thirteenth century, it is tempting to ask what went wrong —
why it is that modern science did not arise from Baghdad or Cairo or Córdoba.
We will turn to this question later, but it is important to keep in mind that
the decline of scientific activity is the rule, not the exception, of
civilizations. While it is commonplace to assume that the scientific revolution
and the progress of technology were inevitable, in fact the West is the single
sustained success story out of many civilizations with periods of scientific
flourishing. Like the Muslims, the ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations,
both of which were at one time far more advanced than the West, did not produce
the scientific revolution.
Nevertheless, while the decline of Arabic civilization is
not exceptional, the reasons for it offer insights into the history and nature
of Islam and its relationship with modernity. Islam’s decline as an
intellectual and political force was gradual but pronounced: while the Golden
Age was extraordinarily productive, with the contributions made by Arabic
thinkers often original and groundbreaking, the past seven hundred years tell a
very different story.
Original Contributions of Arabic Science
A preliminary caution must be noted about both parts
of the term “Arabic science.” This is, first, because the scientists discussed
here were not all Arab Muslims. Indeed, most of the greatest thinkers of the
era were not ethnically Arab. This is not surprising considering that, for
several centuries throughout the Middle East, Muslims were a minority (a trend
that only began to change at the end of the tenth century). The second caution
about “Arabic science” is that it was not science as we are familiar with it
today. Pre-modern science, while not blind to utility, sought knowledge
primarily in order to understand philosophical questions concerned with
meaning, being, the good, and so on. Modern science, by contrast, grew out of a
revolution in thought that reoriented politics around individual comfort through
the mastery of nature. Modern science dismisses ancient metaphysical questions
as (to borrow Francis Bacon’s words) the pursuit of pleasure and vanity.
Whatever modern science owes to Arabic science, the intellectual activity of
the medieval Islamic world was not of the same kind as the European scientific
revolution, which came after a radical break from ancient natural philosophy.
Indeed, even though we use the term “science” for convenience, it is important
to remember that this word was not coined until the nineteenth century; the
closest word in Arabic —ilm — means “knowledge,” and not
necessarily that of the natural world.
Still, there are two reasons why it makes sense to refer to
scientific activity of the Golden Age as Arabic. The first is that most of the
philosophical and scientific work at the time was eventually translated into
Arabic, which became the language of most scholars in the region, regardless of
ethnicity or religious background. And second, the alternatives — “Middle
Eastern science” or “Islamic science” — are even less accurate. This is in part
because very little is known about the personal backgrounds of these thinkers.
But it is also because of another caution we must keep in mind about this
subject, which ought to be footnoted to every broad assertion made about the
Golden Age: surprisingly little is known for certain even about the social and
historical context of this era. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, a now-retired professor of
the history of Arabic science who taught at Harvard,described
his field to the New York Times in 2001 as one that
“hasn’t even begun yet.”
That said, the field has advanced far enough to convincingly
demonstrate that Arabic civilization contributed much more to the development
of science than the passive transmission to the West of ancient thought and of
inventions originating elsewhere (such as the numeral system from India and
papermaking from China). For one thing, the scholarly revival in Abbasid
Baghdad (751-1258) that resulted in the translation of almost all the
scientific works of the classical Greeks into Arabic is nothing to scoff at.
But beyond their translations of (and commentaries upon) the ancients, Arabic
thinkers made original contributions, both through writing and methodical
experimentation, in such fields as philosophy, astronomy, medicine, chemistry,
geography, physics, optics, and mathematics.
Perhaps the most oft-repeated claim about the Golden Age is
that Muslims invented algebra. This claim is largely true: initially inspired
by Greek and Indian works, the Persian al-Khwarizmi (died 850) wrote a book
from whose title we get the term algebra. The book starts out with a
mathematical introduction, and proceeds to explain how to solve
then-commonplace issues involving trade, inheritance, marriage, and slave
emancipations. (Its methods involve no equations or algebraic symbols, instead
using geometrical figures to solve problems that today would be solved using
algebra.) Despite its grounding in practical affairs, this book is the primary
source that contributed to the development of the algebraic system that we know
today.
The Golden Age also saw advances in medicine. One of the
most famous thinkers in the history of Arabic science, and considered among the
greatest of all medieval physicians, was Rhazes (also known as al-Razi). Born
in present-day Tehran, Rhazes (died 925) was trained in Baghdad and became the
director of two hospitals. He identified smallpox and measles, writing a
treatise on them that became influential beyond the Middle East and into
nineteenth-century Europe. Rhazes was the first to discover that fever is a
defense mechanism. And he was the author of an encyclopedia of medicine that
spanned twenty-three volumes. What is most striking about his career, as Ehsan
Masood points out in Science
and Islam, is that Rhazes was the first to seriously challenge the
seeming infallibility of the classical physician Galen. For example, he
disputed Galen’s theory of humors, and he conducted a controlled experiment to
see if bloodletting, which was the most common medical procedure up until the
nineteenth century, actually worked as a medical treatment. (He found that it
did.) Rhazes provides a clear instance of a thinker explicitly questioning, and
empirically testing, the widely-accepted theories of an ancient giant, while
making original contributions to a field.
Breakthroughs in medicine continued with the physician and
philosopher Avicenna (also known as Ibn-Sina; died 1037), whom some consider
the most important physician since Hippocrates. He authored the Canon
of Medicine, a multi-volume medical survey that became the
authoritative reference book for doctors in the region, and — once translated
into Latin — a staple in the West for six centuries. TheCanon is a
compilation of medical knowledge and a manual for drug testing, but it also
includes Avicenna’s own discoveries, including the infectiousness of tuberculosis.
Like the later European Renaissance, the Arabic Golden Age
also had many polymaths who excelled in and advanced numerous fields. One of
the earliest such polymaths was al-Farabi (also known as Alpharabius, died ca.
950), a Baghdadi thinker who, in addition to his prolific writing on many
aspects of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, also wrote on physics,
psychology, alchemy, cosmology, music, and much else. So esteemed was he that
he came to be known as the “Second Teacher” — second greatest, that is, after
Aristotle. Another great polymath was al-Biruni (died 1048), who wrote 146
treatises totaling 13,000 pages in virtually every scientific field. His major
work, The
Description of India, was an anthropological work on Hindus. One of
al-Biruni’s most notable accomplishments was the near-accurate measurement of
the Earth’s circumference using his own trigonometric method; he missed the
correct measurement of 24,900 miles by only 200 miles. (However, unlike Rhazes,
Avicenna, and al-Farabi, al-Biruni’s works were never translated into Latin and
thus did not have much influence beyond the Arabic world.) Another of the most
brilliant minds of the Golden Age was the physicist and geometrician Alhazen
(also known as Ibn al-Haytham; died 1040). Although his greatest legacy is in
optics — he showed the flaws in the theory of extramission, which held that our
eyes emit energy that makes it possible for us to see — he also did work in
astronomy, mathematics, and engineering. And perhaps the most renowned scholar
of the late Golden Age was Averroës (also known as Ibn Rushd; died 1198), a
philosopher, theologian, physician, and jurist best known for his commentaries
on Aristotle. The 20,000 pages he wrote over his lifetime included works in
philosophy, medicine, biology, physics, and astronomy.
Why Arabic Science Thrived
What prompted scientific scholarship to flourish
where and when it did? What were the conditions that incubated these important
Arabic-speaking scientific thinkers? There is, of course, no single explanation
for the development of Arabic science, no single ruler who inaugurated it, no
single culture that fueled it. As historian David C. Lindberg puts it in The
Beginnings of Western Science(1992), Arabic science thrived for as long
as it did thanks to “an incredibly complex concatenation of contingent
circumstances.”
Scientific activity was reaching a peak when Islam was the
dominant civilization in the world. So one important factor in the rise of the
scholarly culture of the Golden Age was its material backdrop, provided by the
rise of a powerful and prosperous empire. By the year 750, the Arabs had
conquered Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and much of North
Africa, Central Asia, Spain, and the fringes of China and India. Newly opened
routes connecting India and the Eastern Mediterranean spurred an explosion of
wealth through trade, as well as an agricultural revolution.
For the first time since the reign of Alexander the Great,
the vast region was united politically and economically. The result was, first,
an Arab kingdom under the Umayyad caliphs (ruling in Damascus from 661 to 750)
and then an Islamic empire under the Abbasid caliphs (ruling in Baghdad from
751 to 1258), which saw the most intellectually productive age in Arab history. The
rise of the first centralized Islamic state under the Abbasids profoundly
shaped life in the Islamic world, transforming it from a tribal culture with
little literacy to a dynamic empire. To be sure, the vast empire was theologically
and ethnically diverse; but the removal of political barriers that previously
divided the region meant that scholars from different religious and ethnic
backgrounds could travel and interact with each other. Linguistic barriers,
too, were decreasingly an issue as Arabic became the common idiom of all
scholars across the vast realm.
The spread of empire brought urbanization, commerce, and
wealth that helped spur intellectual collaboration. Maarten Bosker
of Utrecht University and his colleagues explain that in the year 800,
while the Latin West (with the exception of Italy) was “relatively backward,”
the Arab world was highly urbanized, with twice the urban population of the
West. Several large metropolises — including Baghdad, Basra, Wasit, and Kufa —
were unified under the Abbasids; they shared a single spoken language and brisk
trade via a network of caravan roads. Baghdad in particular, the Abbasid
capital, was home to palaces, mosques, joint-stock companies, banks, schools,
and hospitals; by the tenth century, it was the largest city in the world.
As the Abbasid empire grew, it also expanded eastward,
bringing it into contact with the ancient Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Chinese, and
Persian civilizations, the fruits of which it readily enjoyed. (In this era,
Muslims found little of interest in the West, and for good reason.) One of the
most important discoveries by Muslims was paper, which was probably invented in
China around a.d. 105 and brought into the Islamic world starting in
the mid-eighth century. The effect of paper on the scholarly culture of Arabic
society was enormous: it made the reproduction of books cheap and efficient,
and it encouraged scholarship, correspondence, poetry, recordkeeping, and
banking.
The arrival of paper also helped improve literacy, which had
been encouraged since the dawn of Islam due to the religion’s literary
foundation, the Koran. Medieval Muslims took religious scholarship very
seriously, and some scientists in the region grew up studying it. Avicenna, for
example, is said to have known the entire Koran by heart before he arrived at
Baghdad. Might it be fair, then, to say that Islam itself encouraged scientific
enterprise? This question provokes wildly divergent answers. Some scholars
argue that there are many parts of the Koran and the hadith (the
sayings of Muhammad) that exhort believers to think about and try to understand
Allah’s creations in a scientific spirit. As one hadithurges,
“Seek knowledge, even in China.” But there are other scholars who
argue that “knowledge” in the Koranic sense is not scientific knowledge
but religious knowledge, and that to conflate such knowledge with modern
science is inaccurate and even naïve.
The Gift of Baghdad
But the single most significant reason that Arabic
science thrived was the absorption and assimilation of the Greek heritage — a
development fueled by the translation movement in Abbasid Baghdad. The
translation movement, according to Yale historian and classicist Dimitri Gutas,
is “equal in significance to, and belongs to the same narrative as ... that of
Pericles’ Athens, the Italian Renaissance, or the scientific revolution of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Whether or not one is willing to grant
Gutas the comparison, there is no question that the translation movement in
Baghdad — which by the year 1000 saw nearly the entire Greek corpus in
medicine, mathematics, and natural philosophy translated into Arabic — provided
the foundation for inquiry in the sciences. While most of the great thinkers in
the Golden Age were not themselves in Baghdad, the Arabic world’s other
cultural centers likely would not have thrived without Baghdad’s translation
movement. For this reason, even if it is said that the Golden Age of Arabic
science encompasses a large region, as a historical event it especially demands
an explanation of the success of Abbasid Baghdad.
The rise to power of the Abbasid caliphate in the year 750
was, as Bernard Lewis put it in The
Arabs in History (1950), “a revolution in the history of Islam, as
important a turning point as the French and Russian revolutions in the history
of the West.” Instead of tribe and ethnicity, the Abbasids made religion and
language the defining characteristics of state identity. This allowed for a
relatively cosmopolitan society in which all Muslims could participate in
cultural and political life. Their empire lasted until 1258, when the Mongols
sacked Baghdad and executed the last Abbasid caliph (along with a large part of
the Abbasid population). During the years that the Abbasid empire thrived, it
deeply influenced politics and society from Tunisia to India.
The Greek-Arabic translation movement in Abbasid Baghdad,
like other scholarly efforts elsewhere in the Islamic world, was centered less
in educational institutions than in the households of great patrons seeking
social prestige. But Baghdad was distinctive: its philosophical and scientific
activity enjoyed a high level of cultural support. As Gutas explains in Greek
Thought, Arabic Culture (1998), the translation movement, which
mostly flourished from the middle of the eighth century to the end of the
tenth, was a self-perpetuating enterprise supported by “the entire elite of
Abbasid society: caliphs and princes, civil servants and military leaders,
merchants and bankers, and scholars and scientists; it was not the pet project
of any particular group in the furtherance of their restricted agenda.” This
was an anomaly in the Islamic world, where for the most part, as
Ehsan Masood argues, science was “supported by individual patrons, and when
these patrons changed their priorities, or when they died, any institutions
that they might have built often died with them.”
There seem to have been three salient factors inspiring the
translation movement. First, the Abbasids found scientific Greek texts
immensely useful for a sort of technological progress — solving common problems
to make daily life easier. The Abbasids did not bother translating works in
subjects such as poetry, history, or drama, which they regarded as useless or
inferior. Indeed, science under Islam, although in part an extension of Greek
science, was much less theoretical than that of the ancients. Translated works
in mathematics, for example, were eventually used for engineering and
irrigation, as well as in calculation for intricate inheritance laws. And
translating Greek works on medicine had obvious practical use.
Astrology was another Greek subject adapted for use in
Baghdad: the Abbasids turned to it for proof that the caliphate was the
divinely ordained successor to the ancient Mesopotamian empires — although such
claims were sometimes eyed warily, because the idea that celestial information
can predict the future clashed with Islamic teaching that only God has such
knowledge.
There were also practical religious reasons to study Greek
science. Mosque timekeepers found it useful to study astronomy and trigonometry
to determine the direction to Mecca (qibla), the times for prayer, and
the beginning of Ramadan. For example, the Arabic astronomer Ibn al-Shatir
(died 1375) also served as a religious official, a timekeeper (muwaqqit),
for the Great Mosque of Damascus. Another religious motivation for translating
Greek works was their value for the purposes of rhetoric and what we would
today call ideological warfare: Aristotle’s Topics, a treatise on
logic, was used to aid in religious disputation with non-Muslims and in the
conversion of nonbelievers to Islam (which was state policy under the
Abbasids).
The second factor central to the rise of the translation
movement was that Greek thought had already been diffused in the region, slowly
and over a long period, before the Abbasids and indeed before the advent of
Islam. Partly for this reason, the Abbasid Baghdad translation movement was not
like the West’s subsequent rediscovery of ancient Athens, in that it was in
some respects a continuation of Middle Eastern Hellenism. Greek thought spread
as early as Alexander the Great’s conquests of Asia and North Africa in the
300s b.c., and Greek centers, such as in Alexandria and the Greco-Bactrian
Kingdom (238-140 b.c., in what is now Afghanistan), were productive
centers of learning even amid Roman conquest. By the time of the Arab
conquests, the Greek tongue was known throughout the vast region, and it was
the administrative language of Syria and Egypt. After the arrival of
Christianity, Greek thought was spread further by missionary activity,
especially by Nestorian Christians. Centuries later, well into the rule of the
Abbasids in Baghdad, many of these Nestorians — some of them Arabs and Arabized
Persians who eventually converted to Islam — contributed technical skill for
the Greek-Arabic translation movement, and even filled many
translation-oriented administrative posts in the Abbasid government.
While practical utility and the influence of Hellenism help
explain why science could develop, both were true of most of
the Arabic world during the Golden Age and so cannot account for the Abbasid
translation movement in particular. As Gutas argues, the distinguishing factor
that led to that movement was the attempt by the Abbasid rulers to legitimize
their rule by co-opting Persian culture, which at the time deeply revered Greek
thought. The Baghdad region in which the Abbasids established themselves
included a major Persian population, which played an instrumental role in the
revolution that ended the previous dynasty; thus, the Abbasids made many
symbolic and political gestures to ingratiate themselves with the Persians. In
an effort to enfold this constituency into a reliable ruling base, the Abbasids
incorporated Zoroastrianism and the imperial ideology of the defunct Persian
Sasanian Empire, more than a century gone, into their political platform. The
Abbasid rulers sought to establish the idea that they were the successors not
to the defeated Arab Umayyads who had been overthrown in 650 but to the
region’s previous imperial dynasty, the Sasanians.
This incorporation of Sasanian ideology led to the
translation of Greek texts into Arabic because doing so was seen as recovering
not just Greek, but Persian knowledge. The Persians believed that sacred
ancient Zoroastrian texts were scattered by Alexander the Great’s destruction
of Persepolis in 330 b.c., and were subsequently appropriated by the
Greeks. By translating ancient Greek texts into Arabic, Persian wisdom could be
recovered.
Initially, Arab Muslims themselves did not seem to care much
about the translation movement and the study of science, feeling that they had
“no ethnic or historical stake in it,” as Gutas explains. This began to change
during the reign of al-Mamun (died 833), the seventh Abbasid caliph. For the
purposes of opposing the Byzantine Empire, al-Mamun reoriented the translation
movement as a means to recovering Greek, rather than Persian, learning. In the
eyes of Abbasid Muslims of this era, the ancient Greeks did not have a pristine
reputation — they were not Muslims, after all — but at least they were not
tainted with Christianity. The fact that the hated Christian Byzantines did not
embrace the ancient Greeks, though, led the Abbasids to warm to them. This
philhellenism in the centuries after al-Mamun marked a prideful distinction
between the Arabs — who considered themselves “champions of the truth,” as
Gutas puts it — and their benighted Christian contemporaries. One Arab
philosopher, al-Kindi (died 870), even devised a genealogy that presented
Yunan, the ancestor of the ancient Greeks, as the brother of Qahtan, the
ancestor of the Arabs.
Until its collapse in the Mongol invasion of 1258, the
Abbasid caliphate was the greatest power in the Islamic world and oversaw the
most intellectually productive movement in Arab history. The Abbasids read,
commented on, translated, and preserved Greek and Persian works that may have
been otherwise lost. By making Greek thought accessible, they also formed the foundation
of the Arabic Golden Age. Major works of philosophy and science far from
Baghdad — in Spain, Egypt, and Central Asia — were influenced by Greek-Arabic
translations, both during and after the Abbasids. Indeed, even if it is a
matter of conjecture to what extent the rise of science in the West depended on
Arabic science, there is no question that the West benefited from both the
preservation of Greek works and from original Arabic scholarship that commented
on them.
Why the Golden Age Faded
As the Middle Ages progressed, Arabic civilization
began to run out of steam. After the twelfth century, Europe had more
significant scientific scholars than the Arabic world, as Harvard historian
George Sarton noted in his Introduction
to the History of Science (1927-48). After the fourteenth century,
the Arab world saw very few innovations in fields that it had previously dominated,
such as optics and medicine; henceforth, its innovations were for the most part
not in the realm of metaphysics or science, but were more narrowly practical
inventions like vaccines. “The Renaissance, the Reformation, even the
scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, passed unnoticed in the Muslim
world,” Bernard Lewis remarks in Islam
and the West (1993).
There was a modest rebirth of science in the Arabic world in
the nineteenth century due largely to Napoleon’s 1798 expedition to Egypt, but
it was soon followed by decline. Lewis notes in What Went Wrong? that
“The relationship between Christendom and Islam in the sciences was now
reversed. Those who had been disciples now became teachers; those who had been
masters became pupils, often reluctant and resentful pupils.” The civilization
that had produced cities, libraries, and observatories and opened itself to the
world had now regressed and become closed, resentful, violent, and hostile to
discourse and innovation.
What happened? To repeat an important point, scientific
decline is hardly peculiar to Arabic-Islamic civilization. Such decline is the
norm of history; only in the West did something very different happen. Still,
it may be possible to discern some specific causes of decline — and attempting
to do so can deepen our understanding of Arabic-Islamic civilization and its
tensions with modernity. As Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, an influential
figure in contemporary pan-Islamism, said
in the late nineteenth century, “It is permissible ... to ask oneself why
Arab civilization, after having thrown such a live light on the world, suddenly
became extinguished; why this torch has not been relit since; and why the Arab
world still remains buried in profound darkness.”
Just as there is no simple explanation for the success of
Arabic science, there is no simple explanation for its gradual — not sudden, as
al-Afghani claims — demise. The most significant factor was physical and
geopolitical. As early as the tenth or eleventh century, the Abbasid empire
began to factionalize and fragment due to increased provincial autonomy and
frequent uprisings. By 1258, the little that was left of the Abbasid state was
swept away by the Mongol invasion. And in Spain, Christians reconquered Córdoba
in 1236 and Seville in 1248. But the Islamic turn away from scholarship
actually preceded the civilization’s geopolitical decline — it can be traced
back to the rise of the anti-philosophical Ash’arism school among Sunni
Muslims, who comprise the vast majority of the Muslim world.
To understand this anti-rationalist movement, we once again
turn our gaze back to the time of the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun. Al-Mamun picked
up the pro-science torch lit by the second caliph, al-Mansur, and ran with it.
He responded to a crisis of legitimacy by attempting to undermine
traditionalist religious scholars while actively sponsoring a
doctrine called Mu’tazilism that was deeply influenced by Greek rationalism,
particularly Aristotelianism. To this end, he imposed an inquisition, under
which those who refused to profess their allegiance to Mu’tazilism were
punished by flogging, imprisonment, or beheading. But the caliphs who followed
al-Mamun upheld the doctrine with less fervor, and within a few decades,
adherence to it became a punishable offense. The backlash against Mu’tazilism
was tremendously successful: by 885, a half century after al-Mamun’s death, it
even became a crime to copy books of philosophy. The beginning of the
de-Hellenization of Arabic high culture was underway. By the twelfth or
thirteenth century, the influence of Mu’tazilism was nearly completely
marginalized.
In its place arose the anti-rationalist Ash’ari school whose
increasing dominance is linked to the decline of Arabic science. With the rise
of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to
original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in
religious regulation of private and public life. While the Mu’tazilites had
contended that the Koran was created and so God’s purpose for man
must be interpreted through reason, the Ash’arites believed the Koran to be
coeval with God — and therefore unchallengeable. At the heart of Ash’ari
metaphysics is the idea of occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural
causality. Put simply, it suggests natural necessity cannot exist because God’s
will is completely free. Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, so
that the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God.
As Maimonides described it in The
Guide for the Perplexed, this view sees natural things that appear to
be permanent as merely following habit. Heat follows fire and hunger follows
lack of food as a matter of habit, not necessity, “just as the king generally
rides on horseback through the streets of the city, and is never found
departing from this habit; but reason does not find it impossible that he should
walk on foot through the place.” According to the occasionalist view, tomorrow
coldness might follow fire, and satiety might follow lack of food. God wills
every single atomic event and God’s will is not bound up with reason. This
amounts to a denial of the coherence and comprehensibility of the natural
world. In his controversial 2006 University
of Regensburg address, Pope Benedict XVI described this idea by
quoting the philosopher Ibn Hazm (died 1064) as saying, “Were it God’s will, we
would even have to practice idolatry.” It is not difficult to see how this
doctrine could lead to dogma and eventually to the end of free inquiry in
science and philosophy.
The greatest and most influential voice of the Ash’arites
was the medieval theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (also known as Algazel; died
1111). In his book The
Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali vigorously attacked
philosophy and philosophers — both the Greek philosophers themselves and their
followers in the Muslim world (such as al-Farabi and Avicenna). Al-Ghazali was
worried that when people become favorably influenced by philosophical
arguments, they will also come to trust the philosophers on matters of
religion, thus making Muslims less pious. Reason, because it teaches us to
discover, question, and innovate, was the enemy; al-Ghazali argued that in
assuming necessity in nature, philosophy was incompatible with Islamic
teaching, which recognizes that nature is entirely subject to God’s will:
“Nothing in nature,” he wrote, “can act spontaneously and apart from God.”
While al-Ghazali did defend logic, he did so only to the extent that it could
be used to ask theological questions and wielded as a tool to undermine
philosophy. Sunnis embraced al-Ghazali as the winner of the debate with the
Hellenistic rationalists, and opposition to philosophy gradually ossified, even
to the extent that independent inquiry became a tainted enterprise, sometimes
to the point of criminality. It is an exaggeration to say, as Steven Weinberg claimed
in the Times of London, that after al-Ghazali “there was
no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries”; in some places,
especially Central Asia, Arabic work in science continued for some time, and
philosophy was still studied somewhat under Shi’ite rule. (In the Sunni world,
philosophy turned into mysticism.) But the fact is, Arab contributions to
science became increasingly sporadic as the anti-rationalism sank in.
The Ash’ari view has endured to this day. Its most extreme
form can be seen in some sects of Islamists. For example, Mohammed Yusuf, the
late leader of a group called the Nigerian Taliban, explained why “Western
education is a sin” by explaining its view on
rain: “We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused
by the sun that condenses and becomes rain.” The Ash’ari view is also evident
when Islamic leaders attribute natural disasters to God’s vengeance, as they
didwhen they said that the
2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano was the result of God’s
anger at immodestly dressed women in Europe. Such inferences sound crazy to
Western ears, but given their frequency in the Muslim world, they must sound at
least a little less crazy to Muslims. As Robert R. Reilly argues in The
Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010), “the fatal disconnect between
the creator and the mind of his creature is the source of Sunni Islam’s most profound
woes.”
A similar ossification occurred in the realm of law. The
first four centuries of Islam saw vigorous discussion and flexibility regarding
legal issues; this was the tradition of ijtihad, or independent
judgment and critical thinking. But by the end of the eleventh century,
discordant ideas were increasingly seen as a problem, and autocratic rulers
worried about dissent — so the “gates of ijtihad” were closed for
Sunni Muslims: ijtihad was seen as no longer necessary, since
all important legal questions were regarded as already answered. New readings
of Islamic revelation became a crime. All that was left to do was to submit to
the instructions of religious authorities; to understand morality, one needed
only to read legal decrees. Thinkers who resisted the closing came to be seen
as nefarious dissidents. (Averroës, for example, was banished for heresy and
his books were burned.)
Why Inquiry Failed in the Islamic World
But is Ash’arism the deepest root of Arabic science’s
demise? That the Ash’arites won and the Mu’tazilites lost suggests that for
whatever reason, Muslims already found Ash’ari thought more convincing or more
palatable; it suited prevailing sentiments and political ideas. Indeed, Muslim
theologians appeared receptive to the occasionalist view as early as the ninth
century, before the founder of Ash’arism was even born. Thus the Ash’ari
victory raises thorny questions about the theological-political predispositions
of Islam.
As a way of articulating questions that lie deeper than the
Ash’arism-Mu’tazilism debate, it is helpful to briefly compare Islam with
Christianity. Christianity acknowledges a private-public distinction and
(theoretically, at least) allows adherents the liberty to decide much about
their social and political lives. Islam, on the other hand, denies any
private-public distinction and includes laws regulating the most minute details
of private life. Put another way, Islam does not acknowledge any difference
between religious and political ends: it is a religion that specifies political
rules for the community.
Such differences between the two faiths can be traced to the
differences between their prophets. While Christ was an outsider of the state
who ruled no one, and while Christianity did not become a state religion until
centuries after Christ’s birth, Mohammed was not only a prophet but also a
chief magistrate, a political leader who conquered and governed a religious
community he founded. Because Islam was born outside of the Roman Empire, it
was never subordinate to politics. As Bernard Lewis puts it, Mohammed was his
own Constantine. This means that, for Islam, religion and politics were
interdependent from the beginning; Islam needs a state to enforce its laws, and
the state needs a basis in Islam to be legitimate. To what extent, then, do
Islam’s political proclivities make free inquiry — which is inherently
subversive to established rules and customs — possible at a deep and enduring
institutional level?
Some clues can be found by comparing institutions in the medieval
period. Far from accepting anything close to the occasionalism and legal
positivism of the Sunnis, European scholars argued explicitly that when the
Bible contradicts the natural world, the holy book should not be taken
literally. Influential philosophers like Augustine held that knowledge and
reason precede Christianity; he approached the subject of scientific inquiry
with cautious encouragement, exhorting Christians to use the classical sciences
as a handmaiden of Christian thought. Galileo’s house arrest notwithstanding,
his famous remark that “the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one
goes to heaven, not how heaven goes” underscores the durability of the
scientific spirit among pious Western societies. Indeed, as David C. Lindberg
argues in an essay collected in Galileo
Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009),
“No institution or cultural force of the patristic period offered more
encouragement for the investigation of nature than did the Christian church.”
And, as Baylor University sociologist Rodney Stark notes in his book For
the Glory of God (2003), many of the greatest scientists of the
scientific revolution were also Christian priests or ministers.
The Church’s acceptance and even encouragement of philosophy
and science was evident from the High Middle Ages to modern times. As the late
Ernest L. Fortin of Boston College noted in an essay collected in Classical
Christianity and the Political Order (1996), unlike al-Farabi and
his successors, “Aquinas was rarely forced to contend with an anti-philosophic
bias on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities. As a Christian, he could
simply assume philosophy without becoming publicly involved in any argument for
or against it.” And when someone like Galileo got in trouble, his work moved
forward and his inquiry was carried on by others; in other words, institutional
dedication to scientific inquiry was too entrenched in Europe for any authority
to control. After about the middle of the thirteenth century in the Latin West,
we know of no instance of persecution of anyone who advocated philosophy as an
aid in interpreting revelation. In this period, “attacks on reason would have
been regarded as bizarre and unacceptable,” explains historian Edward Grant
in Science
and Religion, 400 b.c. to a.d.1550.
The success of the West is a topic that could fill — indeed,
has filled — many large books. But some general comparisons are helpful in
understanding why Islam was so institutionally different from the West. The
most striking difference is articulated by Bassam Tibi in The
Challenge of Fundamentalism(1998): “because rational disciplines had
not been institutionalized in classical Islam, the adoption of the Greek legacy
had no lasting effect on Islamic civilization.” In The
Rise of Early Modern Science, Toby E. Huff makes a persuasive argument
for why modern science emerged in the West and not in Islamic (or Chinese)
civilization:
The rise of modern science is the result of the development
of a civilizationally based culture that was uniquely humanistic in the sense
that it tolerated, indeed, protected and promoted those heretical and
innovative ideas that ran counter to accepted religious and theological
teaching. Conversely, one might say that critical elements of the scientific
worldview were surreptitiously encoded in the religious and legal
presuppositions of the European West.
In other words, Islamic civilization did not have a culture
hospitable to the advancement of science, while medieval Europe did.
The contrast is most obvious in the realm of formal
education. As Huff argues, the lack of a scientific curriculum in medieval
madrassas reflects a deeper absence of a capacity or willingness to build
legally autonomous institutions. Madrassas were established under the law
of waqf, or pious endowments, which meant they were legally
obligated to follow the religious commitments of their founders. Islamic law
did not recognize any corporate groups or entities, and so prevented any hope
of recognizing institutions such as universities within which scholarly norms
could develop. (Medieval China, too, had no independent institutions dedicated
to learning; all were dependent on the official bureaucracy and the state.)
Legally autonomous institutions were utterly absent in the Islamic world until
the late nineteenth century. And madrassas nearly always excluded study of
anything besides the subjects that aid in understanding Islam: Arabic grammar,
the Koran, the hadith, and the principles of sharia. These were often referred
to as the “Islamic sciences,” in contrast to Greek sciences, which were widely
referred to as the “foreign” or “alien” sciences (indeed, the term
“philosopher” in Arabic — faylasuf — was often used
pejoratively). Furthermore, the rigidity of the religious curriculum in
madrassas contributed to the educational method of learning by rote; even
today, repetition, drill, and imitation — with chastisement for questioning or
innovating — are habituated at an early age in many parts of the Arab world.
The exclusion of science and mathematics from the madrassas
suggests that these subjects “were institutionally marginal in medieval Islamic
life,” writes Huff. Such inquiry was tolerated, and sometimes promoted by
individuals, but it was never “officially institutionalized and sanctioned by
the intellectual elite of Islam.” This meant that when intellectual discoveries
were made, they were not picked up and carried by students, and did not
influence later thinkers in Muslim communities. No one paid much attention to
the work of Averroës after he was driven out of Spain to Morocco, for instance
— that is, until Europeans rediscovered his work. Perhaps the lack of
institutional support for science allowed Arabic thinkers (such as al-Farabi)
to be bolder than their European counterparts. But it also meant that many
Arabic thinkers relied on the patronage of friendly rulers and ephemeral
conditions.
By way of contrast, the legal system that developed in
twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe — which saw the absorption of Greek
philosophy, Roman law, and Christian theology — was instrumental in forming a
philosophically and theologically open culture that respected scientific
development. As Huff argues, because European universities were legally
autonomous, they could develop their own rules, scholarly norms, and curricula.
The norms they incorporated were those of curiosity and skepticism, and the
curricula they chose were steeped in ancient Greek philosophy. In the medieval
Western world, a spirit of skepticism and inquisitiveness moved theologians and
philosophers. It was a spirit of “probing and poking around,” as Edward Grant
writes in God
and Reason in the Middle Ages(2001).
It was this attitude of inquiry that helped lay the
foundation for modern science. Beginning in the early Middle Ages, this
attitude was evident in technological innovations among even unlearned artisans
and merchants. These obscure people contributed to the development of practical
technologies, such as the mechanical clock (circa 1272) and spectacles (circa
1284). Even as early as the sixth century, Europeans strove to invent
labor-saving technology, such as the heavy-wheeled plow and, later, the padded
horse collar. According to research
by the late Charles Issawi of Princeton University, eleventh-century
England had more mills per capita than even the Ottoman lands at the height of
the empire’s power. And although it was in use since 1460 in the West, the
printing press was not introduced in the Islamic world until 1727. The Arabic
world appears to have been even slower in finding uses for academic
technological devices. For instance, the telescope appeared in the Middle East
soon after its invention in 1608, but it failed to attract excitement or
interest until centuries later.
As science in the Arabic world declined and retrogressed,
Europe hungrily absorbed and translated classical and scientific works, mainly
through cultural centers in Spain. By 1200, Oxford and Paris had curricula that
included works of Arabic science. Works by Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, and
Galen, along with commentaries by Avicenna and Averroës, were all translated
into Latin. Not only were these works taught openly, but they were formally
incorporated into the program of study of universities. Meanwhile, in the
Islamic world, the dissolution of the Golden Age was well underway.
A Gold Standard?
In trying to explain the Islamic world’s intellectual
laggardness, it is tempting to point to the obvious factors: authoritarianism,
bad education, and underfunding (Muslim states spend significantly less than
developed states on research and development as a percentage of GDP). But these
reasons are all broad and somewhat crude, and raise more questions than
answers. At a deeper level, Islam lags because it failed to offer a way to
institutionalize free inquiry. That, in turn, is attributable to its failure to
reconcile faith and reason. In this respect, Islamic societies have fared worse
not just than the West but also than many societies of Asia. With a couple of
exceptions, every country in the Middle Eastern parts of the Muslim world has
been ruled by an autocrat, a radical Islamic sect, or a tribal chieftain. Islam
has no tradition of separating politics and religion.
The decline of Islam and the rise of Christianity was a
development that was and remains deeply humiliating for Muslims. Since Islam
tended to ascribe its political power to its theological superiority over other
faiths, its fading as a worldly power raised profound questions about where a
wrong turn was made. Over at least the past century, Muslim reformers have been
debating how best to reacquire the lost honor. In the same period, the Muslim
world tried, and failed, to reverse its decline by borrowing Western technology
and sociopolitical ideas, including secularization and nationalism. But these
tastes of “modernization” turned many Muslims away from modernity. This raises
a question: Can and should Islam’s past achievements serve as a standard for
Islam’s future? After all, it is quite common to imply, as President Obama did,
that knowledge of the Golden Age of Arabic science will somehow exhort the
Islamic world to improve itself and to hate the West less.
The story of Arabic science offers a window into the
relationship between Islam and modernity; perhaps, too, it holds out the
prospect of Islam coming to benefit from principles it badly needs in order to
prosper, such as sexual equality, the rule of law, and free civil life. But the
predominant posture among many Muslims today is that the good life is best
approximated by returning to a pristine and pious past — and this posture has
proven poisonous to coping with modernity. Islamism, the cause of violence that
the world is now agonizingly familiar with, arises from doctrines characterized
by a deep nostalgia for the Islamic classical period. Even today, suggesting
that the Koran isn’t coeternal with God can make one an infidel.
And yet intellectual progress and cultural openness were
once encouraged among many Arabic societies. So to the extent that appeals to
the salutary classical attitude can be found in the Islamic tradition, the
fanatical false nostalgia might be tamed. Some reformers already point out that
many medieval Muslims embraced reason and other ideas that presaged modernity,
and that doing so is not impious and does not mean simply giving up eternal
rewards for materialistic ones. On an intellectual level, this effort could be
deepened by challenging the Ash’ari orthodoxy that has dominated Sunni Islam
for a thousand years — that is, by asking whether al-Ghazali and his Ash’arite
followers really understood nature, theology, and philosophy better than the
Mu’tazilites.
But there are reasons why exhortation to emulate Muslim
ancestors may also be misguided. One is that medieval Islam does not offer a
decent political standard. When compared to modern Western standards, the
Golden Age of Arabic science was decidedly not a Golden Age of equality. While
Islam was comparatively tolerant at the time of members of other religions, the
kind of tolerance we think of today was never a virtue for early Muslims (or
early Christians, for that matter). As Bernard Lewis puts it in The
Jews of Islam (1984), giving equal treatment to followers and
rejecters of the true faith would have been seen not only as an absurdity but
also an outright “dereliction of duty.” Jews and Christians were subjected to
official second-class sociopolitical status beginning in Mohammed’s time, and
Abbasid-era oppressions also included religious persecution and the eradication
of churches and synagogues. The Golden Age was also an era of widespread
slavery of persons deemed to be of even lower class. For all the estimable achievements of the
medieval Arabic world, it is quite clear that its political and social history
should not be made into a celebrated standard.
There is a more fundamental reason, however, why it may not
make much sense to urge the Muslim world to restore those parts of its past
that valued rational and open inquiry: namely, a return to the Mu’tazilites may
not be enough. Even the most rationalist schools in Islam did not categorically
argue for the primacy of reason. As Ali A. Allawi argues in The
Crisis of Islamic Civilization (2009), “None of the free-thinking
schools in classical Islam — such as the Mu’tazila — could ever entertain the
idea of breaking the God-Man relationship and the validity of revelation, in
spite of their espousal of a rationalist philosophy.” Indeed, in 1889 the
Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher noted in his essay “The
Attitude of Orthodox Islam Toward the ‘Ancient Sciences’” that it was not
only Ash’arite but Mu’tazilite circles that “produced numerous polemical
treatises against Aristotelian philosophy in general and against logic in
particular.” Even before al-Ghazali’s attack on the Mu’tazilites, engaging in
Greek philosophy was not exactly a safe task outside of auspicious but rather
ephemeral conditions.
But more importantly, merely popularizing previous
rationalist schools would not go very far in persuading Muslims to reflect on
the theological-political problem of Islam. For all the great help that the
rediscovery of the influential Arabic philosophers (especially al-Farabi,
Averroës, and Maimonides) would provide, no science-friendly Islamic tradition
goes nearly far enough, to the point that it offers a theological renovation in
the vein of Luther and Calvin — a reinterpretation of Islam that challenges the
faith’s comprehensive ruling principles in a way that simultaneously convinces
Muslims that they are in fact returning to the fundamentals of their faith.
There is a final reason why it makes little sense to exhort
Muslims to their own past: while there are many things that the Islamic world
lacks, pride in heritage is not one of them. What is needed in Islam is less
self-pride and more self-criticism. Today, self-criticism in Islam is valued
only insofar as it is made as an appeal to be more pious and less spiritually
corrupt. And yet most criticism in the Muslim world is directed outward, at the
West. This prejudice — what Fouad Ajami has called (referring to the Arab
world) “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity” — is undoubtedly one of
Islam’s biggest obstacles. It makes information that contradicts orthodox
belief irrelevant, and it closes off debate about the nature and history of
Islam.
In this respect, inquiry into the history of Arabic science,
and the recovery and research of manuscripts of the era, may have a beneficial
effect — so long as it is pursued in an analytical spirit. That would mean that
Muslims would use it as a resource within their own tradition to critically engage
with their philosophical, political, and founding flaws. If that occurs, it
will not arise from any Western outreach efforts, but will be a consequence of
Muslims’ own determination, creativity, and wisdom — in short, those very
traits that Westerners rightly ascribe to the Muslims of the Golden Age.
Hillel Ofek is a writer living in
Austin, Texas.
No comments:
Post a Comment