Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance

By sheer luck and proverbial serendipity, the Latin West was beginning to awaken around the same time. And this awakening set in motion a translation movement that identified and translated major Arabic philosophical and scientific texts into Latin during a period that has come to be known at times as the Renaissance of the twelfth century. Some of the texts that were translated into Latin during this period had already been translated from much earlier Greek and Sanskrit texts into Arabic. I am thinking in particular of such major Greek works as the Almagest of Ptolemy (d. ca. 150 A.D.) and the Elements of Euclid (d. ca. 265 B.C.), which had been translated into Arabic more than once during the ninth century, and of the passage of the Indian numerals via Arabic to Europe, where they came to be known as "Arabic" numerals.

The classical narrative goes on to postulate that from then on Europe had no need for Arabic scientific material, and that the Islamic scientific tradition was beginning to decline under the onslaught of the works of Ghazālī and thus was no longer deemed important by other cultures. In the grand scheme of things, the European Renaissance was then characterized as a deliberate attempt to bypass the Islamic scientific material, in another act of "appropriation" so to speak, and to reconnect directly with the Greco-Roman legacy, where almost all science and philosophy began, and where the European Renaissance could find its wellsprings.

Critique of the Classical Narrative

In what follows, I would like to subject this classical narrative to some criticism and to point to some of the problems that it fails to solve, before I propose, in the next chapter, an alternative narrative that, I believe, accounts for the historical facts in a much more comprehensive fashion. I do so because the classical narrative leaves us with some unresolved problems that we cannot afford to leave unsettled if we ever wish to understand the actual process by which Islamic science came into being when it did, and in a more general fashion the process by which science, in general, is born and nourished in any society. But in order to do that, first I have to deconstruct some of the basic tenets of this classical narrative.

That Islamic civilization was isolated in a desert environment is an oversimplification. As is well known, Islamic civilization came into being around the cities of Mecca and Medina and around northern Arabian tribal areas and cities that were not exactly desert steppes. Within that environment the pre-Islamic Arabian civilization had already developed some basic astronomical and medical sciences that survived well into Islamic times. In a chapter that was written about 15 years ago but not published until 2001, I tried to summarize the scientific knowledge of pre-Islamic Arabia, and came to the conclusion that the sciences that could be documented there were not much different in quality from the sciences of the surrounding regions of Byzantium, Sasanian Iran, or even India.[1]

But most importantly, the classical narrative leaves us with yet more serious and inexplicable problems, both with regard to the beginnings of Islamic science and with regard to its decline and eventual demise. In the case of beginnings, the classical narrative creates the impression that the birth of Islamic science took place during the early period of the Abbāsid times, mainly during the latter part of the eighth century and the early part of the ninth, as a result of one or more of the following processes of transformation:

(1) Contact between the nascent Islamic civilization and the more ancient civilizations of Byzantium and Sasanian Iran is supposed to have taken place when the domain of Islamic civilization expanded outside the Arabian Peninsula and came to inherit the domains of those earlier civilizations or to share great geographic spans with them.[2] This "contact theory" had the distinct advantage of explaining the birth of Islamic science as a result of outside forces, a disposition already signaled by a particular reading of the classical Arabic sources. Those sources speak, for example, of the "ancient sciences" when they wished to describe the sciences that were brought into Islamic civilization from outside, or when they wished to contrast those sciences with the "Islamic sciences" (usually understood as the religious sciences that grew within the civilization). At times the two sciences are posited as being in direct opposition.

The downside of this theory is that it cannot furnish an explanation for the high quality of Greek scientific and philosophical texts that were translated into Arabic during this contact period of early Abbāsid times when the contemporary surrounding cultures of the time had not been participating in the production of such texts for centuries before the advent of Islam.[3] In other words, the scientific and philosophical texts, usually designated by the term "ancient sciences" in the classical Arabic sources, contained material that was already written in the classical period of Greek civilization, and most of them were indeed produced before the third or the fourth century A.D. As far as we can tell, and as far as the sources demonstrate, no similar activities continued to take place in Byzantine[4] or Sasanian civilization that could have put those texts in circulation and thus made them readily available to the translators who worked in the extensive translation movement of early Abbāsid times. When we examine that translation movement, we find translators such as Ḥunain b. Isḥāq (d. 873) searching for classical Greek scientific texts all over the old Byzantine domain, and sometimes failing to find what was needed.[5] Under such conditions, when books were not taught or used in wide circulation, how could contact have produced any positive and effective transfer of knowledge? The classical narrative has no convincing answer to such a straightforward question.

Besides, for scientific contacts to be successful it is only natural to assume that both cultures had to have been at similar levels of development so that ideas from one culture could easily find a home in the other.

(2) Those who were conscious of the downside of the contact theory, and of its failing to document contemporary scientists of Byzantium or Sasanian Iran who could have produced texts similar to the ones that were being sought by the translators of Abbāsid times (that is, texts of the quality of ancient more classical Greek scientific and philosophical texts), thought they could avoid that pitfall by proposing another form of transfer that I shall call the pocket transmission theory.[6]

In this new theory, assumptions were made about the survival of ancient scientific and philosophical texts in a few cities in Byzantium or in the then- defunct Sasanian Empire. In those cities, classical Greek scientific texts were supposed to have been preserved. Antioch (the cradle of early Christianity), Ḥarrān (the site of many legends recorded in later Islamic sources), and Jundīshāpūr (where academies, hospitals, and observatories were supposed to have flourished) were all mentioned at one time or another as major repositories of ancient classical Greek texts.

But preserving second-century texts for hundreds of years, or even making new copies of them when there was need for them in Baghdad (as was done during the ninth century[7]), could not guarantee that there would be people who could understand these texts when they were being sought for translation,[8] during Abbāsid times, about 700 years after they were written. Moreover, scientific and philosophical ideas usually flourish through open discussions. And it would be highly unlikely that enough such discussions were taking place between the fourth and the eighth century to affect another incoming culture. After all, there were some major reversals in scientific knowledge during that intervening period — for example, Cosmas Indicopleustes (c. 550 A.D.) proposed a flat Earth about 800 years after Eratosthenes measured Earth's circumference.[9] Knowing of the treatment of the mathematician Hypatia, who fell in between two competing powers of her time (the church and the state), and of her violent death at the hands of a mob of church followers who used her learning against her in the form of rumors in their political struggle, makes the kind of folk and popular science that was propagated by Cosmas more characteristic of Byzantine science than of the more sophisticated science of earlier classical Greek times. In that light it becomes unimaginable that any Byzantine scholar of that period could have produced anything of the sophistication of Ptolemy, Euclid, or Galen, or even fully understood what those giants had written.

1

See G. Saliba, "Science before Islam" in The Different Aspects of Islamic Culture, vol. 4: Science and Technology in Islam, ed. A. Al-Hassan, M. Ahmad, and A. Iskandar, part 1, The Exact and Natural Sciences (UNESCO, 2001), pp. 27-49.

2

A brief formulation of this contact theory, as expressed by G. E. von Grunebaum, goes as follows: "The tendencies inherent in the origins of Islam were to mature under the influence of those, in a sense, accidental contacts which grew out of the historical setting of the period and, more specifically, the conquest by the Muslims of the high-civilization areas in Persia, Syria, and Egypt." (Islam: Essays in the Nature and Growth of a Cultural Tradition, Greenwood, 1981, p. 12f., emphasis added) For other formulations of these contacts, see Christopher Toll, "Arabische Wissenschaft und Hellenistisches Erbe", ed. A. Mercier (Herbert Lang, 1976), pp. 31-57. Even modern Arabic writings reflect this understanding. See, for example, 'Abd al-Ghanī, Musṭafā Labīb, Dirāsāt fī tārīkh al-'ulūm 'inda al-Arab, vol. 1 (Dār al-Thaqāfa, 2000), p. 43.

3

In fact the cultural conditions in Byzantium during a century and a half (641-780) accompanying and immediately following the rise of Islam in the early part of the seventh century are usually designated by Byzantinists themselves in expressions ranging from centuries of "negligible traces" to centuries of "Dark Age." See, for example, Alexander Jones, "Later Greek and Byzantine Astronomy" in Astronomy before the Telescope", ed. C. Walker (St. Martin's Press, 1996), p. 104: "The century and half between the reign of Heraclius and the beginning of the ninth century has left us negligible traces of astronomical writings." See also Warren Treadgold, "The Struggle for Survival (641-780)" in The Oxford History of Byzantium, ed. C. Mango (Oxford University Press, 2002). Some would even go back another century or two to include the sixth and seventh centuries as Dark Ages, as was done most recently by Timothy Gregory in A History of Byzantium (Blackwell, 2005). Later more "enlightened" centuries like the ninth century still formed the subject of symposia such as Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive? ed. L. Brubaker (Ashgate, 1998). See also Irfan Shahid, "Islam and Byzantium in the IX century: The Baghdad, Constantinople Dialogue" in Cultural Contacts in Building a Universal Civilization: Islamic Contributions, ed. E. İhsanoğlu (Istanbul, 2005). As for Sasanian Iran not much is known of its intellectual production for the same period, and whatever sciences were cultivated there were only translated into Arabic during the latter part of the eighth and early part of the ninth centuries only to be discarded very quickly in favor of the classical Greek sciences that came to replace them. The few books that stand out from the pre-Islamic period, like the zīj-i shāh-i, or zīj-i Shāhriyār, of which we only have reports from later astronomers who worked in Islamic times, and the Kalila wa Dimna which was translated by Ibn al-Muqaffa' in the eighth century were indeed similar to the much more elementary astronomical and literary texts that one encounters during the dark ages of Byzantium, or the contemporary Syriac texts, which were very well known at the time.

4

Sure one could point to such works as those of Proclus (mid fifth century), especially his Hypotyposis, or the slightly later Ammonius (fifth century - mid sixth century), or Philoponus (early sixth century), or even Olympiodorus (mid sixth century), but those were either elementary works, or dealt with astrology rather than astronomy. Even Leo the Mathematician's work itself when looked at closely by Alexander Jones ("Later Greek and Byzantine Astronomy" in Astronomy before the Telescope", ed. C. Walker, St. Martin's Press, 1996, p. 104), was deemed "questionable [in terms of] Leo's ability to interpret highly technical works, for his own surviving writings are meager and unimpressive."

5

For the treatise of Ḥunain in which he recounts his searches for Galenic texts, see Gotthelf Bergstrasser, Ḥunain b. Isḥāq, Über die Syrischen und Arabischen Galenübersetzungen (Leipzig, 1925).

6

Examples illustrating this pocket theory abound. Any source that mentions the survival of Hellinism in such major centers as Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, Ḥarrān, Jundishāpūr, etc. would be a good candidate for that purpose. A very recent version of that theory is embedded in L. E. Goodman's essay "The Translation of the Greek materials into Arabic" in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Religion Learning and Science in the Abbasid Period (Cambridge University Press, 1990). In modern Arabic writings those pockets were at times given more significance by referring to them as schools. See, for example, Rashīd al-Jumaylī, Ḥarakat ai-tarjama fī al-mashriq al-islāmī fī al-qarnain al-thālith wa-l-rābi' li-l-hijra, al-kitāb (Tripoli, 1982), p. 178f. Despite the shortcomings of this theory one should, nevertheless, give it more credit but insist on adding the caveat that allows for a distinction between the survival of such cultural aspects as religion, art, and music, aspects that may have survived in those centers, and the more rigorous aspects of science and philosophy that require much debate and apprenticeship in an open society that would encourage such studies. The conditions of the Byzantine empire, even in its better (?) days during the ninth century, when it was already in contact with the more advanced Islamic world at the time, are best illustrated by the life of the famous Leon the Philosopher/Mathematician that is excellently related by Paul Lemerle in Le Premier Humanisme Byzantin (Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), where we are told (p. 148f.) that Leon could only study grammar and poetics in the capital city of Constantinople. For more rudimentary instruction in the other sciences he had to travel to other less important places where he would obtain the basics of these sciences from one individual at a time. The story goes on to tell of the great efforts Leon had to exert in order to get instructed in the other sciences, only to be severely attacked for that endeavor by his own student Constantine the Sicilian who says of him that he "enseigné toute cette science profane dont les anciens se sont enorgueillis, et qui a perdu son âme dans cette mer d'impiété" (Lemerle, p. 173).

7

For a brilliant chapter on the first "Byzantine Humanism", which witnessed the revival of interest in Greek scientific manuscripts and their transfer to minuscule hand at an extensive scale during the ninth century for the translation market of Baghdad, see Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (Routledge, 1998), pp. 175-186.

8

In fact Alexander Jones ("Later Greek and Byzantine Astronomy", p. 105) says the following about those manuscripts: "But this paucity of corrections by scribe or owner also suggest that, for all their splendor, these manuscripts were more for display than for study. Original writings from the ninth and tenth centuries, whether in the margins of those extant contemporary codices or in later copies, are pitiful and scarce. One concludes that practical understanding of astronomy was sustained by few besides astrologers, whose working copies of the old texts were presumably more perishable than the bibliophile's treasures that have come down to us, but whose existence is revealed by the odd horoscope or anecdote."

9

See "Cosmology" in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 537, where the views of this Cosmas are claimed to have been characteristic of those of the "school" of Antioch, one of the major alleged pockets for the transfer of Hellenistic knowledge to Islam.