The Story of Islamic Science

62:58

20 Oct 2013

History of Science

George Saliba

Charles M. Falco

This video presents two lectures.  The first, by Dr. George Saliba, “Unravelling the Mystery of the Decline of Islamic Science” which addresses the relationship between Muslim and European astronomers.  The second (starting about minute 36 of the video) lecture presents Dr. Charles M. Falco speaking on “Ibn al-Haytham and his influence on European civilization”.

Saliba’s lecture asserts that there is no question that there was a decline in the sciences of the Arab world.  The problem with the discussions is one of timing.  Some assert that al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) killed the study of sciences, and other assert the Mongol sack of Baghdad (1258 CE) was the cause.  But these do not explain the historical facts we have.  Rather Saliba notes that there was a continuous scientific tradition through the sixteenth century.  The 16th century is when Europeans caught up scientifically, with Copernicus adopting ideas seen in Ibn al-Shāṭir (d. 1375) and al-Ṭūṣī (d. 1274).  Saliba suggests that what happened in the sixteenth century was less about science and more about the (re)distribution of wealth as trade routes shifted from routes that crossed through lands of the Middle East to sea-based routes that skirted the Middle East, in addition to the opening (from Europe and the Middle East’s perspective) of colonization of the Americas.  The pursuits of science and commerce were aligned.  Prizes were award for inventing tools to aid navigation at sea, for instance.  Patenting ideas created monopolies which “crystalized modern science to compete over monopolies”.  Patenting’s moral down side is that it prevents knowledge from being distributed across society.  Saliba closes by noting that science needs money and commitment.

Falco’s lecture discusses the history of optics and the relationships between Islamic and European studies on optics, and their connection to the broader European culture in the late fourteenth-early fifteenth centuries.  He notes that optical ideas that are often attributed to Galileo were in use 200 years before Galileo.  Ibn al-Haytham, or Alhazen as he’s called in the West, was born in Basra (now Iraq), and moved to Cairo, where in roughly 1030 CE he wrote his work on optics or vision.  It was translated into Latin approximately 1230 CE.  The work was studied at universities across Europe, often by priests who wanted to understand theological vision through human vision.  Falco presents John Wyclif’s efforts (d. 1384) to understand the body of Christ through optics, which the Pope eventually ruled to be heretical.  The debate spread, and “started a revolution”, that touched on culture widely, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Joan of Arc and so on.

The lectures were given in Doha, Qatar at the annual meeting of the Islamic World Academy of Sciences, 22-24 October, 2011.

Charles M. Falco is the Chair of Condensed Matter Physics, professor of Optical Sciences, and professor of Physics in The College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona.

Evaluation:

There is relatively little here which touches on Islam, but that which does is within the range of what Muslims have historically understood as acceptable.

The science presented is within the consensus of modern scholars.

The historical material is factually accurate and presents historical ideas in within consensus views of contemporary historiography.