Between 1550 and 1700 in Western Europe, something extraordinary hap- pened to science, a process known as the Scientific Revolution. Prior to this, science had not greatly changed from what it had been among the Greeks: a system of thought based mostly on theory rather than on experiment and developing slowly and without much regard for prac- tical application. After this period, science was recognizably what it is today: a constantly developing system of thought based on experiment and mathematics and generating a rapidly developing technology. This scientific and technical prowess is certainly a major factor in the conquest of the world undertaken by Europeans between 1492 and 1936. Unfortu- nately, it has not turned out to be easy to understand what caused this event or even what it was. It was certainly not just that Galileo dropped objects of differing weights from the Tower of Pisa, saw that they fell at the same rate, realized that Aristotle must have been wrong, and thereby broke with the inherited authority of Aristotle and the church. The pro- cess was considerably more complicated than that, involving at least two more or less distinct histories: one involving the mathematization of sci- ence, especially physics, running from Galileo’s experiments to Newton’s
physics and including also the development of heliocentric astronomy, and the other making experimental methods central to chemistry and biology, a process with embarrassing roots in alchemy and magic.
But however the nature of the Scientific Revolution is understood, there is also the problem of understanding its causes. There have been many theories offered in the last century and a half since the emergence of the history of science as an academic discipline. These have varied in a number of ways – in what sciences are taken as central to the Scientific Revolution, for example – but they can be grouped into two broad families, depending on whether they understand the Scientific Revolution as a break with earlier scientific history or as a continuation of something that started earlier. The latter group of theories see the Scientific Revolution as the culmination of developments in medieval European science: early experiments with using mathematics in physical problems, thought experiments and philosophical speculation about the natural world, and the like. Scholars offering such theories can point, for example, to continuities between late medieval natural philosophy and Galileo’s terminology.13
However, any theory that bases the rise of modern science on medieval developments must then explain why the Scientific Revolution did not take place in the Islamic world, a problem also faced by historians of Islamic science. After all, Islamic scientists read the same Greek scientific texts as medieval Europeans, and they were sometimes even the channel by which these texts passed to the Europeans. In a number of cases, scientific texts originally composed in Arabic were important influences on medieval European science. Science was a systematic enterprise in the Islamic world several centuries before it began in Western Europe. The Islamic world in the Middle Ages and early modern periods was richer and generally more stable than Western Europe, and there is good reason to think that Islamic science remained more advanced than European science to at least 1500. The influence of Islamic mathematical astronomy on Copernicus, for example, is now well established.14
Why, then, did
13
In what follows, I have been most influenced by Grant, Foundations of Modern Science, and Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), though I disagree with their treatment of Islam. My taxonomy of theories of the origins of modern science is mainly based on Cohen, Scientific Revolution; see p. 22, n. 6 above.
14
Islamic scientists not go on to create a scientific revolution of their own? “What went wrong?” (One might also ask, “What went right in Europe?” but that points to the theories arguing that the Scientific Revolution represented a break, not a continuity.)
Various theories have been offered. Perhaps successive barbarian inva- sions of the Middle East by Turkic and Mongol hordes exhausted the eco- nomic and cultural resources of the Islamic world, thus draining Islamic science of the resources that it needed to flourish. Other theories posit an Islamic hostility toward the rational sciences, leading to their exclusion from the madrasas and the persecution of Islamic scientists. Finally, it has been suggested that science generally failed to capture the imagination of Muslim intellectuals. None of these theories is particularly convincing. The problem with most of the discussions of Islam and the Scientific Revolution is that they have been conducted by historians of medieval European science dependent on a very narrow range of Islamic sources. In this they have not been much aided by historians of Islamic science, who have been overwhelmed by the number of unread and unedited medieval Islamic scientific texts and have understandably been reluctant to generalize about the larger questions of the role of science in Islamic civilization and the causes of its ultimate failure.
The barbarian invasion theory is undermined by the fact that one of the greatest efflorescences of Islamic science took place precisely under the barbarians who had inflicted the greatest damage on Islamic civ- ilization: the Mongol ¯Il-Kh¯anid state, which supported the Mar¯agha observatory in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. Nas.¯ır al-D¯ın T.¯us¯ı, the great Shi‘ite philosopher and scientist, was able to convince the ¯Il-Kh¯an H¨uleg¨u to underwrite the compilation of a new set of astro- nomical tables to allow more accurate astrological predictions. These funds allowed T.¯us¯ı to bring together the finest team of scientists ever assembled in the Islamic world. These astronomers and mathematicians revolutionized Islamic mathematical astronomy, creating a tradition of mathematical astronomy that lasted for at least two hundred and fifty years in the Islamic world and were the source for Copernicus’s math- ematical methods. Finally, although Western Europe was largely free of barbarian invasions, at least after the Vikings had become rulers rather than plunderers, the Middle Ages saw constant feudal warfare, and the
Scientific Revolution itself took place amidst the religious warfare of the Reformation.
The second theory, positing an innate Islamic hostility toward science, has similar problems. Those advocating it tend to contrast European scholastic rationalism with a supposed antirationalism in Islam. As evi- dence, they cite a small set of well-known texts, especially Ghaz¯al¯ı’s
Deliverer from Error, in which Muslim theologians condemn science and
philosophy. Because of this hostility, they claim, natural science and mathematics were excluded from the madrasa curriculum. But it is dif- ficult to argue that Ghaz¯al¯ı’s book was either typical or decisive, and the pinnacle of Islamic astronomy came after, not before, Ghaz¯al¯ı. Few other such texts exist, and in contrast to the situation in Europe, prosecutions for heresy were rare. The Islamic world produced no martyrs for sci- ence like Bruno and Galileo. Muslims, by and large, cared more about whether people practiced the laws of Islam than about the nuances of their beliefs. Moreover, as later recorded curricula show, science actu- ally was taught in the madrasas along with logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics. Mathematics, astronomy, and medicine were all widely taught – on a basic level at least. Mathematics was needed to divide inher- itances, which religious lawyers were required to do, and astronomy was needed for mosque timekeeping. Manuscripts on geometry, arithmetic, algebra, basic astronomy, advanced mathematical astronomy, and the construction and use of astrolabes are common. Manuscript anthologies of madrasa textbooks routinely contain works on astronomy and math- ematics. Medical manuscripts are everywhere. As we will see in Chapter 9, Islamic reformers, Islamic revivalists, and colonial administrators of the nineteenth century were united in their complaints that madrasa education was too rationalistic and scholastic.
The question of the appeal of science can be settled by examining vernacular-language literature. Iranian and Turkish scientists commonly wrote more popular – though still sometimes quite technical – versions of their scientific works in Persian or Turkish. The patrons of scientific works were often highly placed court officials, and the biographies of Islamic scientists demonstrate the importance of the court as a locus of scientific patronage and interest. Recent bibliographical studies show that as late as the Ottoman period, there were large numbers of scientists
writing and practicing.15
Royal libraries in Istanbul included elegant new copies of classic scientific works like those of Galen. Works such as bestiaries were popular. Encyclopedias composed for the education and use of officials included chapters on scientific topics that an educated man was clearly expected to be conversant with.
What, then, accounts for the absence of a scientific revolution in Islam? Without a well-established explanation of the causes, or even of the nature, of the Scientific Revolution in Europe, there can be no definite answer. Some observations can be made, however, and I will make a suggestion for a partial explanation.
First, it seems likely that the explanation of the Scientific Revolution involves something extraordinary that happened in Europe rather than something that failed to happen in the Islamic world – or in India or China, for that matter. This has something in common with another great historiographical puzzle: Why was Western Europe, a small and politically divided peninsula of Eurasia, able in the course of four centuries to move from relative insignificance to almost total dominance of the world? While older explanations invoked “decline” or “decadence” in traditional states like China and the Ottoman Empire, it has become increasingly clear that these traditional states continued to function much as they always had but that the statesmen in charge of these regimes, some of them very able men indeed, struggled to cope with the accelerating and indeed unprecedented growth of European innovation and power, power whose sources they attempted, usually more or less unsuccessfully, to duplicate and employ on their own behalf. We have to feel sorry for them, as we still do not clearly understand what, for example, allowed a small island state like Britain to become the world’s strongest power and maintain its position for a century.
There have been a number of suggestions proposed to account for the Scientific Revolution in terms of European exceptionalism: the printing
15
Ekmeleddin ˙Ihsanoˇglu et al., Osmanlı Astronomi Literat¨ur¨u Tarihi [History of Ottoman Astronomical Literature], 2 vols. (Istanbul: IRCICA, 1997), lists works by 582 Ottoman authors as well as more than two hundred anonymous works. Similar bibliographies have been published on Ottoman medicine, mathematics, geography, and military science. See Cemil Aydın, “Beyond Culturalism? An Overview of the Historiography on Ottoman Science in Turkey,” in Ekmeleddin ˙Ihsano˘glu, Kostas Chatis, and Efthymios Nicola¨ıdis, Multicultural Science in the Ottoman Empire (De Diversis Artibus 69, n.s., 32; Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), pp. 201–15.
press, the nature of the medieval European university curriculum, the Protestant Reformation with its rejection of inherited authority, or simply the accumulation of a critical mass of scientific knowledge and exper- tise, enabling the scientific enterprise to snowball and produce technical innovations that encouraged more scientific research. The explanations for the absence of an Islamic scientific revolution would be the converse of these: the Islamic failure, for reasons that also require explanation, to adopt the printing press until the nineteenth century, the absence of an institution that made scientific research a central activity, the compar- ative continuity of Islamic religious life, or a more scattered scientific community.
I suggest that mysticism played a role in directing the attention of Islamic scholars and philosophers away from physical science. It should not be forgotten that for the most part, science in both the Islamic world and medieval Europe was an outgrowth of philosophy. It has, in fact, been remarked that fields make the transition from being philosophy to being science when they are able to produce solid and agreed-upon results. From Aristotle through Ibn S¯ın¯a up to the early modern scien- tists, areas like biology, astronomy, mineralogy, and so forth were seen as branches of philosophy, and the term “natural philosophy” was used for science in general as late as the nineteenth century.16
In the Islamic world, for at least five hundred years philosophers were typically also sci- entists, either physicians or astronomers or both, typically with broader interests including other branches of science. This was less the case in medieval Europe, where philosophers typically were theologians by pro- fession. Nevertheless, philosophers in Europe and the Islamic world had moved in quite different directions by the seventeenth century. In Europe, philosopher-scientists had turned away from their theological heritage and had begun to make the study of the natural world central to their intellectual investigation. It is not obvious why they should have done this. To be sure, the astronomers obviously were doing something with great implications for metaphysics and theology, but it is not clear why
16
Edward Grant analyzes the relationships among natural philosophy, which is the por- tion of philosophy giving philosophical explanations of natural phenomena; early mathematical sciences like astronomy and statics; and modern science, which merges mathematical description and causal explanation, in his A History of Natural Philosophy from the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Galileo’s attempt to describe the motion of falling bodies mathematically should have been seen in its time as anything other than an eccentric project showing the cleverness of a single scientist in solving a problem that was in itself trivial, not unlike Islamic mathematicians’ delight in creating ever-larger magic squares. Yet Galileo’s project did have enor- mous implications both in practical terms – the excellence of European artillery had much to do with their conquest of the world – and in the philosophical understanding of the universe.
Muslim philosophers had turned in another direction, pursuing the philosophical understanding of the experience of the soul in the direct presence of the Godhead. On the face of it, this must have seemed a promising project. Suhraward¯ı had shown how to use mysticism sys- tematically as a philosophical tool, and Ibn ‘Arab¯ı had shown how to understand the inner and outer life of man as the experience of God in every aspect of the world. This approach to philosophy reached its peak in the School of Isfahan, the philosophers of Iran in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They pursued a subtle scholastic investigation of the depths of the human spirit, developing intricate systems combin- ing the phenomenological experience of reality with the exposition of the teachings and scriptures of Islam. The traditional forms of Islamic science continued to be practiced, but, so far as anyone knows, Muslim scholars produced nothing to compete with the productions of European scientists after about the year 1550.
Not everyone thinks that Muslims were wrong to prefer mystical con- templation to mathematical physics and the resultant superior artillery. There are many in both the Islamic and Christian worlds who see the turn away from the spirit towards the intensive study of the material world as a catastrophe for the inner life of Western man. But that is not a question for a historian to answer. What can be said is that the cen- trality of mysticism in Islamic society set Islam on a very different path intellectually from that of the West.
while islamic philosophers were turning away from the
natural world as a central concern of philosophy, philosophical rational- ism was becoming central to the curriculum of the madrasas, particularly in the form of a semantically oriented logic, and rationalistic methods
were transforming both Islamic legal thought and Kal¯am theology. This philosophical turn in the religious sciences is the subject of Chapters 6 and 7. At this point, we turn from examining science and mysticism in a very general way to looking closely at logic, the discipline central to scholastic rationalism in Islamic civilization.