PRESENTACION DE RESULTADOS OBTENIDOS POR MUESTRA ANALIZADA

The architectonics of much of the Western academic writings dictate a framework in which most new works are based on previous works. When new ideas arise, they arise due to a quantum leap in someone’s understanding of the subject, or as refutations of existing ideas. In the case of Islam in general, and Islam and science discourse in particular, such quantum leaps have been almost nonexistent. Thus, what we have is an intolerable repetition, always going back to Goldziher’s 1916 formulation. Here is an example.

“During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Islamic science went into decline; by the fifteenth century, little was left. How did this come about?” asks David Lindberg in his 1992 book, The Beginnings of Western

Science. While he admits “not enough research has been done to permit

us to trace these developments with confidence. . . several causal factors can be identified” (Lindberg 1992, 180). The first factor is none other than what Goldziher identified in 1916: “conservative religious forces.” The second is the “debilitating warfare, economic failure, and the resulting loss of patronage” without which “the sciences were unable to sustain themselves” and the third is, once again, a repeat of Goldziher’s basic thesis: “In assessing this collapse, we must remember that at an advanced level the foreign sciences had never found a stable institutional home in Islam, that they continued to be viewed with suspicion in conservative religious quarters, and that their utility (especially as advanced disciplines) may not have seemed overpowering” (Lindberg 1992, 181).

Cohen in his The Scientific Revolution: A Historical Inquiry first tells us, “the upshot of all this is that, in 1300, the world of Islam looked quite different from three centuries previously” (Cohen 1994, 408). His proofs

come from an essay by J. J. Saunders, which in turns leads us back to Goldziher:

The free, tolerant, inquiring and ‘open’ society of Omayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid days had given place, under the impact of the devastating barbarian invasions and economic decline, to a narrow, rigid and ‘closed’ society in which the progress of secular knowledge was slowly stifled. (Saunders 1963, 701–20)

Saunders adds further that “no more borrowings took place from the world outside Islam; Hellenistic philosophy now came to be seen as a danger to the faith. All this was codified in writing by al-Ghazali, and Ibn Rushd’s defence of the awˆail sciences, one century later, failed to carry conviction” (Saunders 1963, 408). Even ignoring the unmistakable Goldz- iherism (awˆail sciences versus Islam as well as al-Ghazali against science), there are conceptual problems as well. For example, Saunders’s prognosis above would have Islamic civilization keep on borrowing from the world outside Islam even after the three hundred years old translation movement had exhausted available outside sources!

There is a long history of such texts, almost all of which were written in the twentieth century. Some of these works have become segues to other works merely because they are more exhaustive and have a smattering of Arabic words spread throughout the text, giving the impression of being the work of Arabists. One such is The Rise of Early Modern Science:

Islam, China and the West, the 1993 book of American sociologist Toby

Huff.

Huff constructed a more comprehensive framework for his thesis, which however ultimately makes the familiar claim that there is something inher- ently flawed in Islam as far as science is concerned; science therefore could not flourish in Islam, and Muslims did not produce a Scientific Revolution. To construct his arguments, Huff identified four factors from within the framework of sociology of science used in the West and applied them both to Islamic scientific tradition and European civilization, to show why the Scientific Revolution took place in Europe and not in the Muslim world. These four factors are as follows: the role of the scientist; the social norms of science; the common elements of scientific communities; and the com- parative, historical, and civilizational study of science. The first factor is identified with the work of Joseph Ben-David; the second is an extension of Max Weber’s 1949 book The Methodology of the Social Sciences; the third builds on the work of Thomas Kuhn, resulting in the idea of paradigms; the fourth proposes a comprehensive approach that calls “for going be- yond Max Weber” and that takes into consideration such works as Joseph Needham’s monumental study Science and Civilization in China (Huff 1993, 14–16).

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Armed with this framework, Huff sets off to study “The problem of Arabic science” in the second chapter of his book. Here is his initial casting: The problem of Arabic science has at least two dimensions. One concerns the failure of Arabic science to give birth to modern science; the other concerns the apparent decline and retrogression of scientific thought and practice in Arabic- Islamic civilization after the thirteenth century. (Huff 1993, 45)

Judgment is already passed before any arguments and proofs are ad- vanced; thereafter, Huff attempts to show the inherent flaws of Islam by a backwards construction of all the factors needed for the growth of science—all based on the conditions prevailing in Europe during and af- ter the Scientific Revolution. The foregone conclusion is that science can flourish only and only if these conditions are present in a civilization; these conditions were not present in the Islamic civilization; therefore science did not flourish. After this the only remaining task for the sociologist is to prove that these conditions did not prevail in the Islamic civilization because Islam did not allow them.

Evidence for this is culled from sources already in use by Orientalists, including the customary reliance on Goldziher. On the question of the dat- ing of decline, Huff first identifies the thirteenth century, then advances this date by a whole century (Huff 1993, 48). Later he eulogizes “achieve- ments of the Arabic science” in various fields, only to return to revisit Goldziher’s views: Arabic science came very close to a modern scientific revolution, but did not go “the last mile” because that “metaphysical tran- sition would have, of course, forced an intellectual break with traditional Islamic cosmology as understood by the religious scholars, the ‘ulema’” (Huff 1993, 60).

The reasons advanced for the failure of “Arabic science” to make the final leap are then postulated in the context of philosophical, religious, and legal social roles in the medieval period. Finally we are given the answer in Goldziherian terms: “In general, the structure of thought and sentiment in medieval Islam was such that the pursuit of the rational or ancient sciences was widely considered to be a tainted enterprise” (Huff 1993, 68).

One can keep citing text after such text ad nauseam but this adds nothing to our understanding. A major problem with all such works is their inabil- ity to explain why science flourished for so long in Islamic civilization in the presence of the so-called Islamic orthodoxy and all the “internal factors” identified by Huff and others. These “internal factors” were of course al- ready present when the Islamic civilization gave birth to and nourished its scientific tradition. It is unreasonable to think that the Islamic legal system, which came into existence in the seventh century (before the emergence

of the scientific tradition), would first allow a scientific tradition to flour- ish for eight centuries and then suddenly become an impediment to the emergence of a “neutral zone of scientific inquiry in which a singular set of universal standards” could be applied.

Recently there has appeared a new kind of response to such works within the broad field of the history of science. This more reflective re- sponse has delivered a final blow to Goldziherism and has the potential to provide us more fruitful tools for understanding the nature of scientific enterprise in Islam. One such work is the 1996 paper on mathematical sciences in Islam from a cultural perspective by the Canadian historian of mathematics, J. L. Berggren. Berggren has expanded the customary ap- proach of a historian of science to examine some of the arguments that Goldziher and his followers have advanced. He states that when we look at cultural factors in the growth of a scientific tradition, a problem arises because “there are cultural factors that condition our thought, not the least of which is the fact that we do so as members of a civilization whose mathematical development depended importantly on the contributions of the medieval Islamic civilization” (Berggren 1996, 266). In such studies, judgments passed on the scientific achievements of a previous civilization are invariably based on the developments in modern science. This creates historiographic problems and entails the danger of unconsciously slipping from the historical fact into a Whiggish view of history, as if the final pur- pose of the cultivation of science in the other civilization was merely to create modern science. “This approach has had two quite opposite, but equally regrettable, results,” says Berggren:

The first is a treatment of medieval Islam as a civilization deserving of attention only for its role as a channel through which the great works of the Greeks were carried safely to the eager minds of the European Renaissance. The emphasis falls on the two great periods of translations, that into Arabic in the ninth century and that into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the developments of the intervening centuries provide little more than a series of anecdotes about one curious result or another that was proved by an occasional great figure.

The second result of this Whiggish attitude is a selective and tendentious reading of medieval Arabic texts to show how Islamic science prefigured that of modern times. . . it would be invidious to cite contemporary examples of either of these approaches—and of little interest to cite earlier examples—and I shall only observe that both of these results, which on the surface seem to place such different values on Islamic civilization, should concur in valuing it only insofar as it served ends not its own; this is hardly surprising, since both are motivated by a fundamental interest not in the past but in the present. (Berggren 1996, 266–67)

There is yet another perspective on the question of decline, again from within the history of science. Here the approach is to examine the

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nature of science in Islamic civilization from within its own framework and see where it could have gone. What possibilities were there for dif- ferent branches of science within the framework of their fields? Aydin Sayili appended a 24-page appendix to his The Observatory in Islam with the title “The Causes of Decline of Scientific Work in Islam” in which he has questioned the basic assumption—implied in most works dealing with the cause of decline of science—that “left to itself, science would progress more or less automatically and that its decline would have to be brought about by definite forces, would have to be imposed by outside factors” (Sayili 1960, 408).

We are left with a puzzle. The enterprise of science in Islamic civilization did decline and eventually disappeared. So far, historians, sociologists, and orientalists have not produced any satisfactory answer to the question that naturally comes to mind—why? This is a compelling question; everyone writing on the subject is obliged to respond. What has been said, however, remains a regurgitation of what has already been said, save a few genuine insights that have yielded only partial answers. This is not a book that can undertake a more detailed inquiry on this question. It is, however, useful to point out that the question of decline of science in Islamic civilization cannot be separated from the overall intellectual, economic, social, and political condition of the Muslim world at the time of decline. As such, this inquiry is actually a subset of a much broader inquiry pertaining to the internal dynamics of Islamic civilization during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.

For our purpose, we can mark the seventeenth century as the dividing line between two very different kinds of Islam and science discourses. The “old discourse” was based on an understanding of science that had emerged from within the Islamic worldview, and even the tensions, heated exchanges, and long-standing debates were reflective of this fact. The “new” Islam and science debates that emerged in the eighteenth century totally transformed the basic terms of discourse. This new discourse is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 6

Islam and Modern Science: