Still in the field of astronomy, and to detail further the amount of damage done by the hegemony of the classical narrative in intellectual history, take the remarkable work of another orientalist, François Nau, who edited and translated the work of Bar Hebraeus (1286), Livre de I'ascension de I'esprit sur la forme du ciel et de la terre.[72] Without doubt, this is the most innovative work in Syriac. Composed around 1279, it was heavily influenced by the Arabic astronomical revolution that was taking place during the thirteenth century. While editing and translating that work, Nau could not understand the "strange things" (sharbe noukroyoye, choses étrangères) that were relevant to the "nature of the spheres of the moon"[73] when these things were in fact lists of objections to Ptolemaic astronomy of which even Bar Hebraeus was aware, although he was not a practicing astronomer. Similar terminology was used by Bar Hebraeus to describe the problem of the equant, which was more associated with the "upper" planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus) in Ptolemy's astronomy.[74] These "strange" things that Bar Hebraeus was pointing to were in fact in the same tradition of objections against Ptolemaic astronomy and had already been listed and codified in Arabic sources from the ninth century on. They were most elaborately codified in the famous extant work of Ibn al-Haitham (d. 1049) called al-Shukūk 'alā Baṭlamyūs (Dubitationes in Ptolemaeum).[75]
Furthermore, Nau could not have been aware of the interdependence between the text of Bar Hebraeus and the texts of his contemporaries Mu'ayyad al-Dīn al-'Urḍī and Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī as well as others. The works of those Arabic-writing astronomers had not yet been studied by the time when Nau was writing, except for the one chapter of Ṭūsī's work which was translated by De Vaux and which had no parallel in the work of Bar Hebraeus. But most probably, those post-Ghazālī works were not studied because the proponents of the classical narrative did not deem them important enough since they came from the period during which no important works were supposed to have been written. This is a typical example of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Similar things happened in the field of medicine. To name only one more instance of the damage the classical narrative has inflicted upon the post- Ghazālī texts, I draw attention to the work of the famous Ibn al-Nafīs of Damascus and Cairo, who dared check the work of the great Greek physician Galen and dared say that there was a medical problem in that work. Galen had stipulated that the blood was purified in the heart by being passed from the right ventricle to the left one through a passage between the two ventricles. Ibn al-Nafīs protested loudly, around the year 1241, that there was no such a passage between the two ventricles of the heart. He went on to say that the body of the heart at that point was solid and does not allow a visible passage as "most people had said", nor an invisible one, as was stated by Galen. After rejecting the authority of Galen, by only using the evidence that he must have seen with his own eyes, he went on to articulate the need for the blood to pass through the lungs before it could be cleaned and passed on to the left ventricle so that it could be pumped through the body again. Of course this finding appears later in the works of Michael Servetus (ca. 1553) and Realdo Colombo (ca. 1559),[76] to be further refined and re-articulated by Harvey in 1627 and become the famous pulmonary or lesser circulation of the blood. The important point I wish to make here is that Ibn al-Nafīs's objections went unnoticed by proponents of the classical narrative, because those proponents did not expect to find such original thought at such a late date in the post Ghazālī period. As a result those objections were deprived of being contextualized in their normal Islamic habitat where such similar medical and philosophical objections against Galen had already been raised before by such people as Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 925) in his famous book al-Shukūk 'alā Jālīnūs (Doubts contra Galen),[77] or against the astronomical works of Ptolemy as was done in the just-cited work of Ibn al-Haitham.
Arguments are still raging about the importance of Ibn al-Nafīs's findings and their relevance to the European scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all because the classical narrative had simply exercised such a hold on people's minds, and for so long, that it now seems to make it almost impossible to think outside its boundaries. This is the kind of damage that this classical narrative has already caused to our understanding of the post-Ghazālī texts, as well as the texts of the European Renaissance itself.
2. The Islamic Scientific Tradition: Question of Beginnings II
The detailed critique of the classical narrative, in the preceding chapter, was undertaken for the sole purpose of liberating the historical and scientific sources from the stronghold of presupposed ideas. And now that we have seen the inadequacy of this classical narrative, I think it is time to abandon it altogether in favor of an alternative narrative that can explain the texts and the facts of history slightly better. In this, as throughout this book, I will rely more heavily on the discipline of astronomy to illustrate its progress in light of another narrative that could explain its various phases more appropriately. I choose astronomy, not only because this discipline was invariably held as the queen of the sciences in almost every culture, but because this field continued to witness a steady progress from its very beginnings in early Islamic times till the sixteenth century and thereafter. I presume that the narrative that could account for the history of astronomy could ultimately have its effectiveness tested when it is also used to account for the history of other disciplines. One may continue to re-examine the alternative narrative in light of the evidence that the other disciplines may bring forth, and repeat the process until we reach the day when we can hopefully construct a narrative that can truly help us understand the fundamental role of science in Islamic civilization. Only then could we securely and more confidently relate the role of Islamic science to the role played by other sciences in other cultures.
I am aware that what we now know of individual Islamic scientific disciplines still represents the very tip of the iceberg, and thus this tip may yield a defective picture when taken to represent the whole iceberg. But I do believe that we know enough, at least in the discipline of astronomy, so that we can use it as a template through which we can build a more accurate narrative regarding the place of science in Islamic culture. I invite colleagues who work in other disciplines of the same culture, especially those disciplines that experienced a sustained growth over the centuries, to test this new narrative against the facts that they can gather in their own disciplines and to commence a dialogue on how best to explain the role of the various aspects of Islamic science. I firmly believe that it will be very difficult to speak of one Islamic science that had this or that characteristic, but much more feasibly speak of various disciplines experiencing different trajectories throughout the long history of Islamic civilization. And it is the latter story that we should attempt to detail.