Like work in optics and medicine, the work of the astronomers was cast in the form of commentaries on each other's works, or at times on the Greek works themselves. They only used those commentaries as vehicles to produce their own alternative theories and to record their own scientific insight, much as was done by Jazarī, Ibn al-Nafīs, and al-Fārisī.
For people who had pre-judged this period as a period of decline in Islamic science, they saw in these commentaries a sign of decadence, without ever bothering to read them or appreciate the novel ideas that were contained therein. Even the most learned of the modern Arab intellectuals, once president of the Academy of the Arabic Language of Cairo, Professor Ibrahim Madkour, had this to say about this period, and the commentaries it produced: "Speculative thought was confined to increasingly narrow areas, scientific inquiry stagnated, and matters that had previously been studied and understood became obscure. Creative thinking and the spirit of discovery were replaced by sterile repetition and imitation, expressed in commentaries and studies of texts and stressing words rather than meaning."[382] How much more wrong could one be?
Professor Madkour, however, was not alone in that assessment. In fact, in the vast modern literature, one reads one such author after another all bemoaning the low state of Islamic science just because this period witnessed the production of commentaries instead of original works. Had these authors only read those commentaries, they would have realized that they could not have been much farther from the truth, for they would have also found one commentator after another saying: Ptolemy, or some other astronomer or Greek scientist, said this or that, but I say, and then insert their own novel ideas at the right context.
The problem with these kinds of judgments is that they clearly indicate that a true appreciation of the role of those commentaries has not been fully developed yet. In an earlier publication I had hinted to the fact that there is much to be found in those commentaries, and in that context gave only the example of the Ṭūsī Couple itself which I have demonstrated was first conceived in 1247, but in the context of a commentary on Ptolemy's Almagest.[383]Since then, and after reading many of the astronomical commentaries that followed Ṭūsī's, I have come to realize that those commentaries acted in a manner quite similar to our modern periodical literature. For when a modern author conceives of a bright novel idea, which was not conceived before, s/he would go ahead and compose an article that s/he would send to a specialized periodical announcing his/her own new idea. From then on, the new idea would enter the literature. And when enough of those ideas that deal with kindred subjects accumulate, they are then digested into a secondary book that popularizes them and finally allows them to enter the domain of public knowledge.
In regard to the popularization of new ideas, the medieval author has a greater advantage over the modern author, although his advantage has yet to be appreciated. For the medieval author, who had no access to specialized periodicals, as they did not exist at his/her time, the most efficient way of propagating his/her ideas would be to introduce them in the context of a commentary. For in such commentaries the new idea would in fact be properly contextualized and thus would gain a much greater significance than a lonely article in a journal that would need a lot of supplementary contextualizing information, not to say long years of waiting, before it could be fully appreciated, if at all. Needless to say, that on that ground alone, I now take the medium of commentaries to be a much healthier sign than even our own modern periodical scholarship.
Commentaries continued to be written throughout the post-Ghazālī period, and of course they continued to produce new ideas all the way till the sixteenth century, the last century, which has received a cursory study so far. This does not mean that they stopped then, for the later centuries have not even been investigated. Nor does it mean that there were no banal commentaries that were written during this period, for there were a lot, and many were indeed composed by mediocre minds that one finds in every age and place. But one can still document a series of commentaries, written by each and every one of the astronomers just mentioned, all building on each other's works, and all continuously taking up the challenge of perfecting the discipline of astronomy. By the sixteenth century, and with Shams al-Dīn al-Khafrī the commentaries reached such a sophistication that Khafrī could finally write two huge ones before he would eventually write an independent book, which he titled Ḥall mā lā yanḥall (Resolving that which could not be resolved). In the last, rather short text, he managed to produce a series of the most sophisticated solutions for all the problems that had plagued Greek astronomy and had become notoriously difficult to solve before his time.[384] In that instance, where most of the novel ideas were originally expressed in his commentaries before they were finally grouped together in his last independent original work, one can say that it was the commentaries that gave rise to originality rather than the other way around.
All this evidence points to one inescapable conclusion. Any one who takes the time to read the scientific production in the post-Ghazālī period would have to characterize this period as the most fecund, and in the field of astronomy in particular completely unparalleled. The disciplines that I have cited here, and the astronomers I have mentioned by name, all speak to a continuously ascending tradition all the way till the sixteenth century, being the last century that has been investigated although to a very modest degree.
As for those who still harbor the notion of the deadly struggle between science and religion, I only need to mention that with the exception of 'Urḍī, whose religious credentials are yet to be determined, every one of the other astronomers mentioned, as well as Ibn al-Nafīs himself, were all religious men in the first place. Not in the sense that they were religiously practicing men only, but that they also held official religious positions such as judges, time keepers, and free jurists who delivered their own juridical opinions. Some of them wrote extensively on religious subjects as well, and were more famous for their religious writings than their scientific ones. This evidence leads me to conclude that the model of conflict between science and religion, which may have worked in Europe somehow, and I am not sure it did for it sounds too simplistic to contain the truth, this model does not seem to apply at least as far as the Islamic civilization is concerned. Nor does it particularly seem to apply in the post-Ghazālī period, when we witness more of the men of science being men of religion. Nor did it ever seem to be analytically useful as far as the discipline of astronomy is concerned for most astronomical works seem to have been produced by men of religion, and most of them were in fact employed in religious institutions.
As for those who think of history as a series of political events only, and a sequence of dynasties and wars, without paying much attention to intellectual history, they too can take little solace by relying so heavily on the Mongol invasion in order to justify their theory of decline. For although it was true that Baghdad was indeed destroyed at the hands of Hulagu Khan, it so happened that his vizier at the time was Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, the astronomer he had captured in the conquest of the Ismā'īlī fortress of Alamūt. It was this same Ṭūsī who had enough wisdom to save about 400,000 manuscripts before the sack of Baghdad. In addition, he even saved a young man by the name of Ibn al-Fuwaṭī, and took him along to what later became the Ilkhānid stronghold near Tabriz. There, on a hill at the edge of the nearby city of Marāgha, Ṭūsī convinced the son of the same destroyer of Baghdad to grant him enough support in order to establish one of the most elaborate observatories the Islamic world had ever known.[385]
382
John Hayes, ed.,
385
For a detailed account of this observatory and the stories surrounding its founding and its functioning, see Aydīn Sayīlī,