In the same breath I also thank all those who abandoned the most beautiful Parisian spring evenings and flocked faithfully to the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, every Tuesday night, for six weeks in May and June of 2004, to participate in the formal presentation of the lectures upon which this book is based. Of those people, I specially thank those who raised the various challenging questions that forced me to reconsider a great number of issues and to rearticulate them much more precisely. But those questions could not have been raised had it not been for the most diligent team of simultaneous translators who rendered my unwritten English lectures into coherent French, a feat that continues to amaze me.
All those people are in no way responsible for the inevitable ambiguities that may still persist in the proposed formulation of this new Arabic scientific historiography. For the very nature of this proposal leaves it vulnerable to the experimental hazards incurred by its novelty.
I am also indebted to my friends and colleagues, both in the United States and in France, whose areas of expertise bordered very closely on the history of Arabic science, and who paid me the utmost complement by attending the lectures at IMA and by pointing out, to my benefit, the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments I made there. It is those subtle correctives that can no longer be separated from my main train of thought, nor can they be footnoted separately, that have now become part and parcel of my own convictions and, of course, inform my latest thinking on the subject. In this global sense, I thank them for those correctives. But I must single out my dear friends and colleagues: Professor Muhsin Mahdī of Harvard, who graced me with his presence at some of the lectures even when he was not feeling well, and M. Maroun Aouad, of the CNRS in Paris, for having given me the pleasure of good arguments over the years, and who has never failed to point out my follies with utmost politeness. He can obviously notice now that he has not been all that successful in curing me completely. The follies that still persist in this book can easily attest to that. But if any of the arguments I make here can make a small dent in changing peoples' thoughts about the nature of Arabic and Islamic science then all those arguments would not have been in vain, and I gladly accept the responsibility of their failure when they did.
The manuscript editor at The MIT Press was kind to listen to me and follow my instructions to "go lightly."
Last but not least, I should also thank all those wonderful people at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress who made the production of this book possible by offering me, during my sabbatical year, a working space that I have described as the closest portal to heaven as I will ever see.
1. The Islamic Scientific Tradition: Question of Beginnings I
This chapter and the next address one of the most interesting aspects of Islamic civilization: the rise of a scientific tradition that was crucial to the development of universal science in pre-modern times. These chapters are connected by a common title, to indicate their interdependence. This first chapter surveys the various theories that have confronted the question of why and when this scientific tradition came into existence. It begins with a detailed account of the theories. The critique that follows addresses their failure to account for the facts as we know them from the primary scientific and historical sources of early Islamic times; it also lays the foundation for an alternative explanation of those facts in the next chapter. Because of this structure, the reader may encounter many unanswered questions in the first chapter, and will be repeatedly asked to await the answers that will come in the second.
There is hardly a book on Islamic civilization, or on the general history of science, that does not at least pretend to recognize the importance of the Islamic scientific tradition and the role this tradition played in the development of human civilization in general. Authors differ in how much space they allocate to this role, but they all seem to agree on a basic narrative, to which I will refer as the classical narrative. The main outline of this narrative goes back to medieval and Renaissance times and has been repeated over and over again.
The narrative seems to start with the assumption that Islamic civilization was a desert civilization, far removed from urban life, that had little chance to develop on its own any science that could be of interest to other cultures. This civilization began to develop scientific thought only when it came into contact with other more ancient civilizations, which are assumed to have been more advanced, but with a particular nuance to "advanced." The ancient civilizations in question are the Greco-Hellenistic civilization on the western edge of, and overlapping with, the geographical domain of the Islamic civilization, and the Sasanian (and by extension the Indian) civilization to the east and the southeast. These surrounding civilizations are usually endowed with considerable antiquity, with high degrees of scientific production (at least at some time in their history), and with a degree of intellectual vitality that could not have existed in the Islamic desert civilization.
This same narrative never fails to recount an enterprise that was indeed carried out during Islamic times: the active appropriation of the sciences of those ancient civilizations through the willful process of translation. And this translation movement is said to have encompassed nearly all the scientific and philosophical texts that those ancient civilizations had ever produced.
The classical narrative then goes on to recount how those translations took place during the early period of the Abbāsid times (circa 750-900 A.D.) and how they quickly generated a veritable golden age of Islamic science and philosophy.
In this context, very few authors would go beyond the characterization of this Islamic golden age as anything more than a re-enactment of the glories of ancient Greece, and less so the glories of ancient India or Sasanian Iran. Some would at times venture to say that Islamic scientific production did indeed add to the accumulated body of Greek science a few features, but this addition is usually not depicted as anything the Greeks could not have done on their own had they been given enough time. Nobody would, for example, dare to suggest that the scientists who worked in Islamic times could have produced a new kind of science (in contrast with the science that was practiced in classical Greek times), or to imply that those scientists may have come to realize, from their later Islamic vantage point, that the very same Greek science, which became available to them through the long process of translation, was in itself deficient and fraught with contradictions.
The classical narrative, however, persists in imagining that the Islamic science that was spurred by these extensive translations was short-lived as an enterprise because it soon came into conflict with the more traditional forces within Islamic society, usually designated as religious orthodoxies of one type or another. The anti-scientific attacks that those very orthodoxies generated are supposed to have culminated in the famous work of the eleventh-twelfth-century theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111). The major work of Ghazālī that is widely cited in this regard is his Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers), which is sometimes also mistakenly referred to as tahāfut al-falsafa (incoherence of philosophy).