The Rise of Science in Islam and the West

From Shared Heritage to Parting of The Ways, 8th to 19th Centuries

John W. Livingston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351589253
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This is a study of science in Muslim society from its rise in the 8th century to the efforts of 19th-century Muslim thinkers and reformers to regain the lost ethos that had given birth to the rich scientific heritage of earlier Muslim civilization. The volume is organized in four parts; the rise of science in Muslim society in its historical setting of political and intellectual expansion; the Muslim creative achievement and original discoveries; proponents and opponents of science in a religiously oriented society; and finally the complex factors that account for the end of the 500-year Muslim renaissance.

The book brings together and treats in depth, using primary and secondary sources in Arabic, Turkish and European languages, subjects that are lightly and uncritically brushed over in non-specialized literature, such as the question of what can be considered to be purely original scientific advancement in Muslim civilization over and above what was inherited from the Greco–Syriac and Indian traditions; what was the place of science in a religious society; and the question of the curious demise of the Muslim scientific renaissance after centuries of creativity. The book also interprets the history of the rise, achievement and decline of scientific study in light of the religious temper and of the political and socio-economic vicissitudes across Islamdom for over a millennium and integrates the Muslim legacy with the history of Latin/European accomplishments. It sets the stage for the next momentous transmission of science: from the West back to the Arabic-speaking world of Islam, from the last half of the 19th century to the early 21st century, the subject of a second volume.

Part I
Islam in ascendance

1
The historical setting of the great age

For a thousand years Muslim arms triumphed over Christendom. Palestine, Syria and Egypt were torn from Byzantine Christian rule within a decade of the first earnest Arab raid in 634. In the east, the Zoroastrian Empire of the Sassanids was conquered. The Byzantine capital was besieged several times, but Constantinople’s strong walls withstood the Arab army and navy. A civil war over the caliphate a quarter century after the death of the Prophet Muhammad halted conquests for a few years, in addition to sowing the seeds of the Sunni–Shi’i split in the Community of Believers. In North Africa the mountain Berbers had, for a period, checked the resumed Arab advance but were eventually subdued. Many Berber tribes converted and were enlisted as contingents in the Arab military, making the conquest of western North Africa and Spain a joint Arab–Berber venture.

To later generations of Muslims it would appear that even tribal strife among the Arabs could not stop the banner of Islam from advancing. The triumph of God’s soldiers fighting for the true religion was the Divine Plan unfolding in history.

The downside of conquest was the social problems that came with the land. Indigenous converts to Islam were denied equality to Arab Muslims, as if the factious tribes were not problems enough for the rulers of the expanding empire. An Arab family ruling a vast empire in which non-Arab Muslims came to outnumber the favored Arab elite created a condition too fragile to last. The Arab dynasty of Umayyad caliph-kings succumbed in less than a century. The upside of the conquest was the gift of high civilization that came with the territory and that would transform the primitive traditions of the conquerors and their new religion. The era of conquest came to a halt with the fall of the Arab kingdom. The revolution that overthrew it began in Iran.

The new ruling dynasty, named Abbasid after a descendant of an undistinguished uncle of the Prophet, Abbas, who never accepted Islam, was a bitter disappointment to those non-Arab Muslims and anti-Umayyad Arab tribesmen who had joined the revolution. Arab tribal pretension was submerged in a religious universalism of Muslim equality, but the Abbasid promise of revolutionary egalitarianism suffered much in the daily practice of absolutist government. In effect, the Arab aristocracy had simply been replaced by an Irano–Arab despotism. The Abbasid caliphate encountered a long series of major and minor revolts, many deriving from the unresolved social problems that existed before the Arab conquests but in their Muslim setting expressing discontent through Shi’i opposition to Sunni rule. Beyond the issue of political legitimacy, there was not a great deal of religious difference between Shi’i and Sunni; the Sunni community would have been equally happy with a leader from the Prophet’s family, if one with the proper qualifications were to gain power.¹

As for the Abbasid caliphs, rather than setting off to win new conquests for the greater glory of Islam and the dynasty, they were kept busy fending off the endemic uprisings of rebels from every quarter. For glory of a gentler kind, when not exerted to containing revolt, the new dynasty focused on internal development and the peaceful pursuits that went into making a flourishing civilization. A new Abbasid capital was built at Baghdad, where the Tigris comes closest to the Euphrates, a stone’s throw from the former Iranian imperial capital Ctesiphon. It was in Iran that the revolution against the Arab Umayyads had begun, and it was in large part Iranians who organized, supported and fought to overthrow them, though it should be emphasized that there were Arab tribes settled in Iran who were as hostile to the dynasty as were Iranian and other non-Arab Muslims and who fought against it just as fiercely.

The Arab caliphate had, to a large extent, modeled its imperial rule along the lines of Byzantine monarchy and administration. The Umayyad capital Damascus had been a Byzantine provincial capital, and Syrian locals who had served in the Byzantine bureaucracy were in turn employed by the new rulers to administer civil affairs for the Arabs, most of whom were off fighting and who, in any case, had little experience in statecraft. The Abbasids, on the other hand, took the Sassanid structure as their model for imperial autocracy and administration.²

Baghdad was deliberately chosen for its geographical location. The rich soil between the rivers offered abundant agriculture; the waters around it promised a lucrative long distance trade. Served by rivers and seas: Tigris, Euphrates, Persian Gulf, Black Sea, Caspian, Aral, Mediterranean, Red Sea, the new capital became the hub of international commerce from China to Spain.³ Baghdad had two names, both symbolic: The Abode of Peace (Dar al-Salam) for the peace and stability the new dynasty would restore to the Muslim community; and The Round City (al-Madina al-Mudawwara) for the geographical and cosmic importance of the new capital. The city’s circular shape represented in two dimensions the spherical embrace of the universe. As the universe was ruled by God, its center, the earth, was presided over by the caliph, who was now styled as God’s shadow on earth and caliph of God, instead of caliph of the Prophet of God, which was used by the earlier caliphs. Baghdad was the center of the caliph’s empire, the center of the earth, the center of God’s universe and the most powerful and prestigious city on earth.⁴

Mansur, the founding caliph of Baghdad, made a wise choice, and Baghdad prospered. The caliphs had riches to patronize the arts and sciences, and what came to be known as Classic Islamic Civilization evolved and flourished, giving new life and modes of expression to art, architecture, literature, poetry, music, theology, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, optics, mechanics, medicine and mysticism. Within a generation of its founding Baghdad had come to embody the collective intellectual spirit of Athens, Alexandria and Persepolis. Gifted Jews, Christians, Harranian star worshippers and Muslims, wherever they existed in the vast lands of Islamdom and whatever their ethnic origins, were drawn to the new capital, bringing with them the inherited intellectual traditions of Greek, Syriac, Iranian and Indian civilizations. By the middle of the 10th century, these traditions, articulated in Arabic, had been elaborated, advanced and redressed in accordance with the spiritual essentials of Islam, in which form they were transmitted from Baghdad to a constellation of provincial capitals, many of them by then having become autonomous capitals in themselves: Bukhara, Tus, Shiraz, Samarqand, Nishapur, Cairo, Palermo, Cordova, Seville and Toledo, all in their unique way striving to emulate the mother city whose style and magnificence became legendary in its own time of greatness, where in Islamic garb, Greek philosophy thrived alongside Alex-andrian and Indian astronomy, mathematics, medicine and the other natural sciences (see Plate 1).

Andalusian Spain became home to a renaissance in the sciences, medicine, philosophy, poetry, music, and architecture. From its center in the Guadalquivir basin, Cordova radiated its brilliance to the cities of the Iberian provinces, as had Baghdad to the Asian provincial cities a century earlier. Toledo, situated at the geographical center of the Iberian Peninsula, would be the rich source from which western scholars traveling over the Pyrenees slaked their thirst for Muslim knowledge in the 12th century.

In the east, the Abbasid caliphs began losing control of their outer provinces in North Africa and central Asia within the first half century of the dynasty’s founding, not because of conquest from without but rather because of the lack of principled institutions that could curb the caliph’s will when personal whim overtook sound political sense. The empire that was won by revolution from the Umayyads of Damascus, and centralized by the first four of the Abbasid caliphs and their Iranian ministers and bureaucrats, suffered from self-inflicted wounds by some of those rulers who followed. First, the slackening of the caliph’s firm hand over his governors frayed the power of central government and its ability to collect provincial taxes. The most famous of the caliphs, Harun al-Rashid (786–809), allowed a favorite general to administer Tunisia as a personal fief, and toward the end of his life arbitrarily divided the empire between two of his sons, a personal act that led to years of destructive civil war, until the victorious son, Ma’mun, at last reunified the empire.⁵

Ma’mun realized that the caliphate, the one and only institution that held the empire together politically, had become unstable, and he searched for a supporting pillar, initially in Shi’ism, then in rationalist theology. Neither came to fruition. His youngest son and successor, Mu’tasim, found it in soldiers, Turkish slaves and a royal bodyguard of thousands. This proved to be almost fatal to caliphal power. Within less than a decade (861–869), the Turkish commanders had seated and unseated four caliphs, murdering two.

The political power of Abbasid Baghdad dimmed precipitously as agriculture and trade suffered under the internecine warfare of the rival chieftains. Shops were looted by soldiers, while the dams, ditches, sluices and canals that irrigated the rich land between the Tigris and Euphrates fell into disrepair. Agricultural output declined drastically, trade was interrupted, taxes stopped coming in from the provinces, and as fiscal shortfall contracted the reach of central government, provinces were lost to governors, generals, Turkish favorites and powerful local families who established their own dynastic rule. Taking advantage of the troubles at the center, provincial revolts of protest by lower levels of society threatened the very existence of the imploding caliphate. At times, the caliph and his Turkish masters ruled no more than Baghdad, Samarra and their environs. A resurgence of caliphal power lasted little more than a generation (869–908) before falling back into the hands of exogenous military chieftains.

This was the price of not building political institutions that could have curbed both the frivolous whims of absolutist rulers and the voracious appetites of military commanders turned politicians. Turkish military domination of what was left of the Abbasid empire became official in 935 when the enfeebled caliph, putting the best face he could on his impotence, conferred upon the leading Turkish chieftain the title amir al-umara or commander of commanders, whose office was to “protect” the caliph and the truncated empire. Ten years later, Baghdad fell to a northern Iranian dynasty of Shi’i orientation that took the place of the Turkish chieftains as protectors of the caliph. Caliphal power had been squandered. The Sunni political rulers of the Islamic community had failed in their mission of social and religious cohesion.

The fragmentation of the empire had its upside in the provinces. Weakening at the center allowed taxes previously sent to Baghdad to be locally invested. The affluence that had been Baghdad’s for a century was now diffused throughout the provinces. With affluence came the intellectual and artistic creativity of high civilization as new dynasts emulated the courtly life and patronage that had been established by the early Abbasid caliphs. The new cities that were built and the older ones that were expanded became centers of civilization from which learning and cultural refinement radiated outwards. As an example, Tunis under the Aghlabid dynasty, begun by a governor appointed by Harun al-Rashid, was the starting point for the expansion of Muslim arms and civilization into Sicily and southern Italy, with Palermo and Salerno in turn becoming important centers of high civilization. To the west, in Morocco, Fez was built by the breakaway Idrisid dynasty; to the east, in central Asia, the Samanid dynasty of aristocratic Iranian origins arose with its capital in Bukhara, north of the Oxus basin, where the lush valleys of Oxus and Jaxartes made for rich agriculture, the revenues of which were supplemented by the lucrative trade carried over the silk route that traversed Transoxiana.

It was in Bukhara and the lands of the Samanids that the remembered traditions of the old civilization of Iran were revived. Situated between Iran and the lands of the Turks, the Samanids, recalling with pride the civilized traditions of Sassanid times, initiated a Persian literary revival, which, during the course of the 10th and 11th centuries, evolved into a rich strain of Islamic literature in Persian, alongside Arabic. In the Samanid court of Bukhara, the poet Firdawsi began composing Iran’s great national epic, The Book of Kings, or Shahname. It is not the kind of poem devout Muslims would like. Though written in Arabic script and three times as long as The Iliad, Firdawsi’s epic contains no Arabic loan words that had worked their way into the spoken Persian of the time, nor is Islam ever mentioned. Greatness, glory and heroism belong to the Sassanid kings fighting to save Iranian civilization from the barbarous Turks of the plains. Cast in the drama of the light of Iran, land of the Aryans, battling the darkness of Turan, land of the Turks, Firdawsi’s classic epic renders the Turko–Iranian struggle in the dualistic hues of Iranian Zoroastrianism.

Owing to courtly patronage of the Samanids and their successor dynasties in Iran and central Asia, Persian became the second Islamic language of literature and learning. Concomitant with the literary revival, a Persianate form of Muslim civilization evolved, apparent in the style of script, architecture, dress and cuisine as quite distinct from the Arabic form to the west.

In 1055, the Iranian Shi’i “protectors” of the shadow caliph in Baghdad were replaced by a powerful Sunni Turkish tribal ruler who restored the political dignity of Sunni Islam and was given the high sounding title of “sultan,” protector and military commander of the caliph and the Sunni community. The caliphate remained Abbasid in name and religious in function, while the ruling dynastic sultanate of Turks, called Seljuk, took military and administrative command of the empire that they created by conquest, extending from Central Asia to Syria. From then on, military and political power east of the Nile would rest in the hands of various Turkish dynasts, who played the part in the central and eastern lands of Islam that the Berbers played in Morocco and Andalusia.

While at the western end of the Muslim world Toledo, Seville, Saragossa and Cordova were falling to the conquistadors during the 13th century, in the east, the brilliant cities of Shiraz, Nishapur, Bukhara, Khiva, Samarqand and Baghdad were being leveled and depopulated by an incursion of pastoral tribal armies from the central Asian steppes, the Mongols. In 1258, Hulagu Khan brought an end to the once-glorious Abbasid caliphate by having the last of the line trampled under the hooves of his cavalry.

The destruction of Baghdad has been taken to mark the end of the great period of scientific study in Muslim civilization: the Golden Age. In terms of number of scientists, originality, productivity and breadth of interest, this putative age in fact ended a century and a half before the destruction of Baghdad; during the centuries following the Mongol incursion, a considerable number of highly creative men produced brilliant original science, limited primarily but not exclusively to astronomy and mathematics. Great astronomer–mathematicians appeared sporadically in Islamdom right up to the 16th century. It could be argued that the astronomy and mathematics produced after the Mongol destruction of Baghdad amounted to somewhat of a renaissance, an after-glow silver age of the earlier golden one.

Across this broad historical tapestry the Muslim experience in scientific originality is written. The period 770 to 1100 was one of the great scientific and philosophical renaissances prior to modern times. Mongol and post-Mongol rule in Iran and Central Asia gave Muslim civilization other moments of high scientific creativity. There is strong evidence that the influences of the innovative astronomy and mathematics patronized by those post-Mongol rulers reached right to Copernicus and the Scientific Revolution in the West.

Assimilating the scientific traditions

The question is, how did high science come into this society whose ethos originated in a cultural fusion of primitive tribal desert warriors and semi-urbanized merchants bound in the expansive energy of religion and conquest? Why would science be so attractive to a community of tribal merchants and warriors suddenly turned caliphs, conquerors and tax collectors that they would actively appropriate, naturalize and expand the science, medicine and mathematics of their classical Greek, Hellenistic and Byzantine predecessors?⁶

It would seem obvious that the most immediate reason was the practical benefits the knowledge could offer. Indications are that medicine, astrology and alchemy were indeed the earliest sciences to be explored: the first to attend to the health of the ruler and his family, the second to establish a propitious r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Islam in ascendance
• PART II The Latin connection: from Greco–Arab classical to European modern
• PART III From Muslim empires in rise and fall to Western ascendance
• PART IV Catching up to the West: science assimilation in Cairo and Istanbul under autocratic reformers
• Index