In the final analysis, I do not think that we can understand the building blocks of Copernican astronomy, without paying close attention to the results that were already achieved in the Islamic world. Not only because those results preceded the works of Copernicus and hence it is legitimate to ask if there has been any transmission of ideas from east to west, but because in the Arabic tradition we understand better the accumulative process of scientific production, and can witness the slow growth of those ideas over the centuries, a feat that we cannot follow in the works of Copernicus, with the same rigor, if we assume that all those similarities were just coincidences. And when people think of the spirit of the Renaissance as characterized by that change in the scientific thought that shunned the ancient authority, now one can find the roots of that thought already documented in the works of generations of astronomers and scientists working in the Islamic world and writing their objections to Greek thought. And they did not only object, we now know that they were developing real alternatives to that thought. One can even go as far as to say that by the time Renaissance Europe came to know of Islamic science, especially as documented in the astronomical discipline, that science was by then a mature science on its own, confident of its ability to invest in the creation of new mathematical theorems to solve new astronomical problems, or even to deploy mathematics in more abstract ways in order to divest it of the physical truth it once laid claim to and return it to the realm of the descriptive language that could be applied to the physical phenomena.
By the time of the Renaissance, and if the words of Vesalius are any guide when he says "those Arabs who are now rightly as familiar to us as are the Greeks",[366] we can conclude that Arabic science was by then a competitive science that stood at least on equal footing as the science of the Greeks, as far as Vesalius could see. But in matters of observational science, it looks like Arabic science was by then thought of as being definitely far superior to Greek science once all the mistakes of the latter had been laid bare.
7. Age of Decline: The Fecundity of Astronomical Thought
The previous chapter demonstrated very clearly the kind of results that were produced in the Islamic world and the impact those results had had on Renaissance Europe. In the chapters before that, where I talked about the encounter with the Greek scientific legacy and the innovations that encounter produced, I also noted that although the critiques of Greek thought began early on, the more mature criticism and the confidence with which the Greek scientific edifice began to be dismantled and replaced by more consistent alternatives, and far more sophisticated deployment of mathematics, did not really take place until the later centuries of the Islamic civilization, and mostly after the thirteenth century. Thus, based on what we have seen so far, one is justified in saying that those later centuries of Islamic civilization seem to have been centuries of great creativity, at least as far as the discipline of astronomy was concerned. In addition, one could also say that, that creativity was not apparently restricted to revamping all of the Greek astronomical theory but it seems to have had a seminal impact on Renaissance science as well.
But these are precisely the centuries that the classical narrative had earmarked as representing the total death of science, not to say the total death of rationality in Islam, which is more often used in connection with this period. Without paying any attention to the kind of evidence we have been reviewing, which was mainly produced during the latter centuries of Islamic civilization, or even indicating that such evidence existed, the classical narrative formulated its theory of decline by basing itself on two main assumptions. Those assumptions were held by two different groups of people. And although each group had its own analysis of the intellectual history of Islam, they converged, almost independently, on considering the the age of decline to have begun in the thirteenth century.
For those who looked, from the very beginning, at Islamic civilization as a continuous unfolding of religious thought only, and at the same time held the European paradigm of the conflict between religion and science, they attributed this death of rationality in the Islamic civilization, and in this later period, to an upsurge in religious thought, which they claim came about at the expense of scientific and philosophical thought. For those people, "progress" was defined by the very victory of science over the church, just as European progress was defined. Thus every civilization had to demonstrate that it had participated in this struggle before it could participate in this "universal" linear and constant search for "progress." Those civilizations had to have their science overcome their church, even if one had to redefine "church" in the particular terms of the said civilization. In the case of Islamic civilization, the struggle of the Mu'tazilites against the people of tradition (ḥadīth) exemplified, to a great extent, the conflict paradigm between "science" and "religion", without ever bothering to define the "science" of the Mu'tazilites, or the "church" of the people of ḥadīth. In that regard Ghazālī's (d. 1111) book The Incoherence of the Philosophers (tahāfut al-falāsifah) constituted a real milestone. Not only because this group of people saw in it the direct connection between philosophy and science in that period, and hence an attack on one is an attack on the other, but because they also rightly considered Ghazālī as the initiator of an Islamic Orthodoxy of sorts, and thus his book symbolized the triumph of religious thought. The conclusion that is usually drawn from the success of Ghazālī's religious thought is that this triumph must have caused the death of its counterpart, the rational scientific thought. Thus in a simple fashion, Ghazālī was single-handedly held responsible for the decline of rational, read scientific, thought in Islamic civilization in these later centuries.[367]
Thus, pinning the cause of the decline of Islamic science either on the conflict paradigm between religion and science, a paradigm that was first and foremost imported from the European example, or on the fatal blow that was single-handedly delivered by Ghazālī against the philosophers, has become so widespread[368] that those approaches continue to have their deleterious effects on the very reading of the scientific texts that were written both before and after the Ghazālī period.
Focusing on the conflict between science and religion before the Ghazālī period may have contributed to the lack of awareness that there were scientists working during that period and whose main concern was to combat the imported Greek scientific tradition, because of the errors and blemishes it harbored, and not because of the religious thought of their time. Muḥammad b. Mūsā's critique of Ptolemy, or Rāzī's shukūk against Galen, or even Ibn al-Haitham's Doubts against Ptolemy, among many others discussed above, have gained some importance only recently as texts rebelling against the Greek scientific tradition, rather than texts rebelling against the religious authorities of their time. None of those texts made any significant impact on the group of people who saw Islamic history as an unfolding of religious thought, and in that sense those text were badly read if they were read at all. It is not accidental that both of Rāzī's book as well as that of Ibn al-Haitham's were edited in the latter part of the twentieth century, and not during the nineteenth century when most Islamic religious and juridical works were studied with great care by famous European orientalists.
366
See Andreas Vesalius,
368
An example of the appeal of the conflict paradigm can be seen in the work of the distinguished physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy,