As the bowl fills, it gradually submerges into the tank and pulls on a string attached to a pulley above the elephant that cause the scribe to slowly rotate, marking out the minutes. Once full, the bowl sinks more rapidly, triggering several mechanisms: a separate compartment within the float forces air through a flute, which gives off a sound suggesting the phoenix at the top of the clock is singing. It also pulls on a channel at the top of the clock that contains a number of metal balls. This channel tilts and releases a ball that rolls down, first onto fan blades that force the phoenix to rotate, then into the mouth of one of the dragons, causing it to tip forward. As it does so, its tail rises and pulls on the float in the belly of the elephant. This action raises the float to the surface while tipping and emptying it to allow the whole half-hour process to be repeated. Meanwhile, the ball falls out of the dragon’s mouth onto a plate that moves the elephant driver’s arms as well as striking a cymbal hidden inside the elephant. Once the ball is released from the dragon it pivots back up again ready to receive another ball one hour later (since the two dragons alternate their actions with each ball). Of course the ball channel would have to be constantly replenished with balls for the clock to continue working.
If you were to measure scientific output by plotting the number of practising scientists in both Europe and the Islamic Empire along a thousand-year timeline, you would see the curve rising slowly in the Islamic world around 700 CE, more rapidly during the time of al-Ma’mūn’s House of Wisdom in the first half of the ninth century and peaking around 1000 CE, then beginning its long, slow decline over the next five hundred years. In contrast, European scientific activity was negligible until the early fifteenth century, when it suddenly burst into life. It overtook the Islamic world around the mid-fifteenth century and kept on rising – and is still doing so today. So, before I address the issue of the decline of science in the Islamic world, I shall briefly explore how and why it took off so spectacularly in Europe.
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Beginning in Florence in Italy and later spreading to the rest of Europe, it saw developments in all intellectual pursuits: in literature, philosophy, art, politics, science and religion. But its beginnings are perhaps best known through the contributions of such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
While nineteenth-century historians were keen to emphasize that the Renaissance represented a clear ‘break’ from medieval thought and practice – in particular, that the ‘scientific revolution’ which began in the mid-sixteenth century heralded the beginning of the modern age – it is now more correctly seen as an acceleration of a continuous process stretching back to antiquity. It is certainly wrong – as I have gone to some lengths to argue – to think of the Renaissance as marking the birth of science or the scientific method. Rather, one can consider it as a ‘rebirth’ of European scholarship that had long been lost, and this was due in no small part to the discovery of Greek and Arabic texts and their translation into Latin, just as Islamic scholars had earlier discovered the Greek works of antiquity that had fallen into obscurity. Most notably, of course, the conquest of Spain meant that Renaissance scientists had access to such riches as the libraries of Toledo, Córdoba and Granada.
It is interesting to consider why the Renaissance began in Florence, and not elsewhere in Europe, or indeed elsewhere in Italy. Some historians have postulated that Florence was the birthplace of the Renaissance simply as a result of luck, because great men like Leonardo, Sandro Botticelli and Michelangelo happened to have been born in Tuscany at around the same time. But these great men were able to rise to prominence only because of the prevailing cultural conditions, just as ninth-century Baghdad allowed the emergence of a scientific movement led by men such as al-Kindi and al-Khwārizmi. Many historians have emphasized the role played by the Medici family in patronizing and stimulating the arts in a way not too dissimilar to the role of early Abbāsid caliphs.
If we recall the influence of al-Ma’mūn in turning the House of Wisdom from a palace library into possibly one of the greatest centres of learning the world has ever seen, we appreciate the crucial role played by the caliph as a patron of scholarship as well as the importance of a sustained period of peace and prosperity that encouraged the best minds to come together with their infectious enthusiasm, passion and drive. Even in ninth-century Baghdad we see that later, weaker, caliphs were less inclined to encourage and finance scientific scholarship, and that this was inevitably accompanied by a drop-off in the rate of scientific advances.
In more recent times, another period of rapid scientific advances took place, in the early decades of the twentieth century. Again, I do not believe it was luck that saw the coming together in Copenhagen, at the newly created Niels Bohr Institute, of such geniuses as Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli, who all contributed to the development of the new atomic theory. At any point in history, if the opportunities are available and the sociopolitical conditions favourable, there will be those who take on the challenge.
Another parallel to draw between the golden age of Islam and the European Renaissance is that between the rationalist Mu’tazilites in Baghdad and the Humanist movement in Italy, as exemplified by Niccolò de’ Niccoli (1364–1437) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459). Like the Mu’tazilites, the Humanists stressed the extraordinary ability of the human mind to rationalize and understand the world around it. There is also no doubt that the Renaissance saw significant changes in the way the universe was viewed and the methods with which scientists sought to explain natural phenomena. Whereas the Abbāsid period saw an intermingling of science and religion, the early Renaissance saw the overlap of science and art, with men such as Leonardo making observational drawings of anatomy and nature.
But the crucial thesis of this book all along has been that the most widely cited and significant development of the era, the birth of the modern scientific method, did not originate during this time at all. This revolutionary new way of learning about the world, as exemplified by the work of Copernicus and Galileo, focusing on empirical evidence rather than on the Aristotelian ‘final cause’, was, we now know, already well established in the tenth and eleventh centuries by al-Rāzi, Ibn al-Haytham and al-Bīrūni.
There were many factors in the European Renaissance that undoubtedly influenced the rate of scientific progress, such as the invention of the printing press, which allowed the transmission of new ideas far more rapidly than before, just as the paper mill had done for the Abbāsids. Other, later, inventions such as the telescope and microscope revolutionized astronomy, biology and medicine.
Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries we do indeed see a marked drop in the sheer volume of original scientific output across the Islamic world. In comparison with Renaissance Europe, awash with riches from the New World, confident in a new-found self-belief so reminiscent of al-Ma’mūn’s Baghdad, the many dynasties of the Islamic world were facing an uphill struggle against fragmentation and religious conservatism, even apathy, towards pure scientific research that was not in the service of religion, military might or economic wealth. Long after the sun had begun to set on Baghdad, new centres such as Fātimid Cairo, Umayyad Córdoba and Ma’mūnid Gurgānj had risen and fallen.
So, what went wrong? What were the reasons for this slow decline in scientific progress and output in the Islamic world? I shall first address the two most commonly cited reasons, both of which provide quite abrupt end-dates to the golden age of Arabic science.
Many in the Western world have argued that the conflict between the Islamic orthodoxy and the rationalist Mu’tazilite movement, which ultimately culminated in the work of the theologian al-Ghazāli (1058–1111), marked the beginning of the end of the scientific age there. Al-Ghazāli’s critique of the philosophy of Ibn Sīna and others in his Incoherence of the Philosophers attacked their fascination with Aristotle and the assimilation of his ideas into their philosophy. As such, al-Ghazā
li marks a clear move towards a more conservative, even mystical, interpretation of Islamic theology.
Al-Ghazāli remains one of the most respected thinkers in Islamic history, and the effect of his ideas upon orthodox mainstream Islam cannot be understated. He even influenced Thomas Aquinas and other Europeans two centuries later. But the innate religious conservatism of the school of thought that grew around his work inflicted lasting damage on the spirit of rationalism and marked a turning point in Islamic philosophy. In fact, many Muslims to this day see him as having won some sort of intellectual argument that has regrettably left a whole chain of wonderful thinkers, spanning al-Kindi, al-Farābi, al-Rāzi, Ibn Sīna and Ibn Rushd, labelled as heretics. This cheapens and debases the wonderfully rich ideas these men gave the world. What is more, this view is somewhat unfair on al-Ghazāli himself who was a highly competent scientist in his own right.
So why is this still held up as one of the main reasons for the decline of rational scientific enquiry? Al-Ghazāli was primarily attacking a theological and metaphysical viewpoint that relied upon Platonic and Aristotelian logic, arguing that such a reliance on Greek philosophical ideas was anti-Islamic. This dispute has been simplified to an out-and-out struggle between irrational religion and rational science, which is both naive and silly. In any case, other disciplines, such as mathematics, astronomy and medicine, should not have been affected by this purely philosophical dispute – and to a large extent, they were not.4
The other argument often held up to explain the cessation of original scientific thinking in the Islamic world is an even lazier argument. It is that the golden age came suddenly crashing to an end in 1258 with the Mongols’ destruction of Baghdad, during which most of the books in the House of Wisdom were destroyed by the Mongolian army of Hūlāgū. Although accounts differ, many historians estimate that a large fraction of the city’s population, which by then could have numbered close to a million people, were massacred by the Mongols within the space of a single week in February of that year. So fierce was the assault, in fact, that Baghdad never recovered, and, after five hundred years, Abbāsid rule was suddenly over.
This tragically abrupt end to the golden age of Islamic science was certainly the version that I dimly remember being taught during my own history lessons back at school in Iraq. Indeed, it is very much the view taken by Baghdadis, who cannot imagine anything of any note going on elsewhere in the empire. But Baghdad was far from being the only centre of scholarship in the Arabic-speaking world by the middle of the thirteenth century. By this stage there were dozens of flourishing centres in science, across North Africa and Spain, and to the east in Persia and Central Asia. After all, scholars like Ibn Sīna and al-Bīrūni probably never even set foot in Baghdad. Thus, while the destruction of the city in 1258 clearly dealt a terrible psychological blow to Islam as a whole, this single event cannot shoulder too much of the blame.
So if we cannot blame al-Ghazāli’s conservatism or the Mongols’ sacking of Baghdad, where do we turn? Some modern historians within the Muslim world have argued that the main reason for the decline was Western colonialism, while others claim there was hardly any decline at all. I can fully understand why the latter stance is often taken: it at least counters the view that nothing of note took place in that part of the world after the twelfth century – after all, we have seen that in astronomy major work was still going on in places like Marāgha and Damascus well into the fourteenth century. So, if nothing else, the decline was slower and later than usually suggested. As for political factors such as colonialism, the role they played was a subtle one. The colonial masters of many parts of the Islamic world from the eighteenth century onwards would have felt it necessary to belittle and downplay the achievements of the great centres of learning such as Abbāsid Baghdad and Umayyad Córdoba in order to rationalize and justify their imperialist superiority over large parts of Africa and Asia. But no one can claim that in doing so they were stifling any real spirit of rational enquiry or blocking the creative genius of an Ibn al-Haytham or an al-Bīrūni. For the plain truth is that those heady days were long gone.
One significant factor that played a role was the reluctance of the Muslim world, and the Ottoman Empire in particular, to embrace the printing press quickly enough. This is particularly poignant when one considers that the first ever book to be printed in England was the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, in 1477,5 which was an English translation of an Arabic text (via Latin, then French) originally written in the late eleventh or early twelfth century.6 So, why this lack of enthusiasm to accept the printing press in the Islamic Empire?
Printing in Arabic type presented the early typesetters with far greater problems than Latin because of the cursive nature of Arabic script and the added complication when joining up the letters, due to the different shapes they take according to their position in a word. Thus, the design and casting of the large amount of different type and the composition of the text were more complicated than for other alphabets. Early typesetters of Arabic even tried to mimic the calligraphers by including additional shorter-sounding vowels (not letters in their own right but dashes and squiggles appearing above or below consonants) along with other symbols such as the shadda, which changes the stress or emphasis of some letters. Nowadays, none of these appear in printed Arabic, as the pronunciation of the words is either obvious or grammatically implied.
Muslims showed an intense aversion towards printing well into the seventeenth century. In the Islamic world, calligraphy was, and still is, far more than just an art form or an aesthetic style; it was a means of cultural identity. Printing in moveable type meant that the flowing harmony of this beautiful tradition was being reduced to a mechanistic process, and it was strongly resisted.
But early European printers with an eye for business spotted the potential of an untapped market, and one of the very first books to be printed in Arabic, by the Paganinis of Venice in 1537, was the Qur’an itself. A few years ago I had the opportunity to study the sole surviving copy of this ambitious project. It was discovered in the 1980s by the Italian historian Angela Nuovo in the library of the Franciscan Friars of San Michele in Isola, Venice,7 and it would appear that very few, if any, native Arabic-speakers have had the opportunity to study it. I was very intrigued therefore to have a close look at it, particularly as it has long been surrounded by an aura of mystery.
On scanning through it, I quickly found several typographical errors. For instance, the Arabic word for ‘that’ is thālika. This appears in the text, incorrectly, with an ‘a’ sounding vowel instead of an ‘i’: a slanted dashed line above the ‘l’ rather than below it, changing the pronunciation to thālaka, which is meaningless. This seemingly trivial misspelling of a word in the Muslim holy book would have been regarded as sacrilegious, and it is no surprise that the Ottomans, who had been offered several hundred copies by the valiant Venetian printers, rejected them.
This failure of the trading Venetians to convince the Ottomans of the benefits of the printing press prevented it from spreading beyond Istanbul to other parts of the Islamic world. When Arabic printing was finally introduced in Turkey in 1727, only geography, history and language books were printed: all religious books were specifically excluded from this authorization.
But a drop in the volume of scientific output does not imply a drop in the quality of scholarship where it did continue. For this reason, I wish finally to discuss the achievements of three more great figures: a thirteenth-century physician, a fourteenth-century historian and social scientist and a fifteenth-century mathematician. Not only will this highlight that it was more than just Islamic astronomy that continued to flourish in the Middle Ages, I also feel I simply could not leave out any of these three men from my account of Arabic science.
A popular general knowledge quiz question is: ‘Who was the first scientist to explain blood circulation?’ The traditional, ‘correct’, answer is that it was the English physician William Harvey in 1616. But as is so often th
e case with science, the story is not so straightforward. Evidence uncovered in a Berlin library in 1924 showed conclusively that the groundwork for his discovery was laid by the Syrian physician (and, inevitably, polymath) Ibn al-Nafīs (1213–88), who was the first to describe correctly what is called the pulmonary transit, concerning how blood is carried from the right side of the heart to the left, via the lungs. Galen believed that blood passed from the right to the left ventricle in the heart via tiny passages through the thick wall separating the two sides. Ibn al-Nafīs, who was one of the medieval world’s most brilliant anatomists, was the first to challenge this notion and provide the correct explanation. In his manuscript Sharh Tashrīh al-Qānūn (Commentary on Anatomy in Ibn Sīna’s Canon), discovered in Berlin, he states:
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