48. Howard R. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam, Op. cit., page 133.
49. Ibid., page 139.
50. Hitti, Op. cit., pages 364–365.
51. His book on this subject went through forty editions between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Turner, Op. cit., page 135.
52. He was born in the ninth century in the central Asian region of Bukhara and, early on in his career – to great acclaim – cured the local ruler of an illness. This gave him access to that ruler’s formidable library which, combined with Ibn Sina’s phenomenal memory, turned him into one of the most impressive synthesisers of all time.
53. Turner, Op. cit., page 136. See: Wightman, Op. cit., pages 165 and 335–336 for a chronology of translation. Ibn Sina’s grave, at Hamadan, in Iran, is now an impressive monument. These two were the greatest doctors but far from being the only ones: Hunayn Ibn Ishaq’s ninth-century treatise on the eye opened the way for modern optics; al-Majusi discovered the capillary system of the blood in the tenth century; and in the twelfth Ibn al-Nafis described the circulation of the blood between the heart and lungs, some centuries before William Harvey discovered the greater, or complete circulation (see Chapter 23). Turner, Op. cit., page 137.
54. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, Op. cit., page 227. See also: Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, pages 275ff.
55. Boyer, Op. cit., page 227.
56. Ibid., page 229.
57. Ibid., page 237.
58. Boyer, Op. cit., page 234.
59. Turner, Op. cit., page 190.
60. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 777. See: Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, page 278 for optics and the beginnings of scientific chemistry.
61. Philip K. Hitti, Makers of Arab History, London: Macmillan, 1969, page 197.
62. Ibid., page 205.
63. Ibid., page 218. And see: Hourani, Op. cit., page 173, for further discussion of Ibn Sina’s idea of the soul. For other Islamic ideas about the soul, and its relation to the body, see: Smith and Haddad, Op. cit., pages 40ff.
64. Hitti, Op. cit., pages 393–394. The current phrase ‘suicide bomber’, as applied to the many outrages perpetrated in particular in the Middle East, is strictly speaking inaccurate. Suicide is a mortal sin in Islam, as it is in Catholic Christianity. But a martyr’s death guarantees the faithful a place in paradise. See Smith and Haddad, Op. cit., page ix.
65. Hitti, Op. cit., page 408.
66. Ibid., page 410.
67. Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, page 98.
68. Hitti, Op. cit., page 414.
69. Hourani, Op. cit., pages 63–64.
70. Hitti, Op. cit., page 429.
71. Hourani, Op. cit., page 65.
72. Hitti, Op. cit., page 434. See also: Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, page 275.
73. Hourani, Op. cit., pages 167–171.
74. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 527. See also: Ivan van Sertina, The Golden Age of the Moor (a special issue of the Journal of African Civilisations, volume 11, Fall 1991), New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Transaction Publishers 1992.
75. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 531. And see Hourani, Op. cit., page 193 for new forms of poetry developed in Cordova.
76. Hitti, Op. cit., page 252, quoting Franz Rosenthal, Ibn Khaldun, The Maqaddimah: An Introduction to History, volume 1, New York: Pantheon Books, 1958, page 6.
77. Cordova was the biggest university but it wasn’t the only one. Similar institutions were set up at Seville, Malaga and Granada. The core departments were astronomy, mathematics, medicine, theology and law, though at Granada philosophy and chemistry were offered as well. Books were plentiful owing to the spread of papermaking, imported into Spain from Morocco in the middle of the twelfth century. (The English word ‘ream’ derives from the Arabic rizmah, meaning ‘bundle’.)
78. Boyer, Op. cit., pages 254–271.
79. Ibid., page 254.
80. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 579.
81. Ibid., page 583.
82. Philip K. Hitti, Islam: A Way of Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, page 134.
83. Hourani, Op. cit., page 175. See also: Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, page 275 on ‘the two truths’. For Islamic ideas on paradise see: Smith and Haddad, Op. cit., pages 87–89.
84. Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, Op. cit., pages 110 and 120.
85. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 854.
86. Ibid., page 855.
87. Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, pages 303f. It was this translation which produced the English word ‘sine’. The Hindus had originally given the name jiva to the half-chord in trigonometry. The Arabs had taken this over, as jiba. However, in Arabic there is also a word jaib, meaning ‘bay’ or ‘inlet’. When Robert of Chester came to translate the technical term, jiba, he seems to have confused it with jaib, possibly because in Arabic vowels were omitted. He therefore used the Latin word for bay or inlet – sinus.
Adelard of Bath was also one of those who introduced Latin readers to Arab-Hindu numerals. These caught on surprisingly slowly, with many people still using the nine Greek alphabetical letters, plus a special zero symbol. One reason for the slow adoption of the Hindu system was that its advantages were not so apparent while people still used the abacus. There was in fact keen competition between the ‘abacists’ and the ‘al-gorists’ for several centuries. It was only with the wider spread of literacy that the advantages of Arabic-Hindu numerals became clear (in pen-and-paper calculations, rather than with an abacus). The algorists didn’t finally triumph until the sixteenth century. Boyer, Op. cit., pages 252–253.
CHAPTER 13: HINDU NUMERALS, SANSKRIT, VEDANTA
1. Basham (editor), A Cultural History of India, Op. cit., page 48.
2. John Keay, India: A History, London: HarperCollins, 2001, page 138. Romila Thapar, A History of India, London: Penguin Books, 1966, volume 1, pages 136ff.
3. Keay, Op. cit., pages 156–157. See Thapar, Op. cit., page 146, who says that Chinese Buddhist pilgrims mentioned them.