the blood from the right chamber of the heart must arrive at the left chamber, but there is no direct pathway between them. The thick septum of the heart is not perforated and does not have visible pores as some people thought or invisible pores as Galen thought. The blood from the right chamber must flow through the vena arteriosa (pulmonary artery) to the lungs, spread through its substance, be mingled with air, pass through the arteria venosa (pulmonary vein) to reach the left chamber of the heart …
Impressive though this advance in medical understanding is, the concept of ‘pulmonary transit’ is not the same as pulmonary circulation; there is no explanation in Ibn al-Nafīs’s work of the circular return of the blood from the left ventricle to the right, and we should be careful therefore not to credit him with the complete discovery of blood circulation.8 However, there is evidence that his work, translated into Latin, may have been known to sixteenth-century European physicians such as Michael Servetus, Andreas Vesalius and Renaldus Colombo, all of whom would in turn influence Harvey. And it was Harvey who finally, correctly, described blood circulation through the beating of the heart. (Even Harvey did not understand the physiology of the lungs, though, whereby carbon dioxide is dissipated from the blood and replaced by oxygen – something that had to await the work of the chemist Antoine Lavoisier in the eighteenth century.) All this just goes to show, once again, the gradual and cumulative process of scientific progress.
Ibn al-Nafīs was born in Damascus, but spent most of his career in Cairo. He is another example of a polymath who made a number of contributions in many fields long after Baghdad’s golden age. He was a notable historian, linguist, astronomer, philosopher, logician and author of fiction. In medicine, he was also the first to develop the concept of the body’s metabolism and is regarded by many historians of science as the greatest physiologist of the Middle Ages and one of the greatest anatomists in history.
Of all the great thinkers of the Islamic world, the only one I regard as the equal of my triumvirate of eleventh-century geniuses, Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sīna and al-Bīrūni, is the Tunisian polymath Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406). The reason I have not discussed him earlier is partly because he lived so much later than what is commonly regarded as the golden age, and because his greatest work was in history and the social sciences, rather than the natural sciences. However, he is in every way a match for al-Bīrūni in terms of the sheer number of disciplines he excelled in.
The twentieth-century economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter has carefully studied the history of economic theory as far back as Aristotle and argues that Ibn Khaldūn is without doubt the true father of economic science. In fact, it is worth comparing him with the man whom many economists might regard as the father of modern economic theory, Adam Smith. For when one considers the sheer number of original ideas and contributions across so many areas of economic thought that Ibn Khaldūn invented we are left in absolutely no doubt that he is more worthy of the title.9 Ibn Khaldūn discovered a number of key economic notions several hundred years before their ‘official’ births, such as the virtues and necessity of a division of labour (before Smith), the principle of labour value (before David Ricardo), a theory of population (before Thomas Malthus) and the role of the state in the economy (before John Maynard Keynes). He then used these concepts to build a coherent dynamic system of economic theory.10
Not only was he the forerunner of European economists, such was his intellect that he is also considered to be the undisputed founder and father of the field of sociology. His best-known work is the Muqaddima, which literally means ‘Introduction’ or ‘Prologue’. But neither word really does it justice, and it is more correctly translated as The Prolegomenon. The book is a treatise on human civilization in which Ibn Khaldūn discusses at length the nature of the state and society. It is essentially the first volume of a larger treatise dedicated to the history of the Arabs and those states and peoples that had played, in Ibn Khaldūn’s view, a historically significant role. The historian Arnold Toynbee said of the Muqaddima that it is ‘undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place’.11
My final character is a fifteenth-century mathematician who worked at a flourishing scientific centre, which belies the notion that all vestiges of the golden age had disappeared for good. His name is Jamshīd al-Kāshi (c. 1380–1429) and he is far and away the greatest mathematician of the fifteenth century. He worked in the city of Samarkand under the great Ulugh Beg, grandson of Tamerlane, the Mongol who founded the Timurid dynasty that ruled over Central Asia (and which would later create the Moghal Empire in India that lasted until the nineteenth century). Ulugh Beg was himself no slouch as a mathematician and astronomer, and was able to attract many great thinkers to the city of Samarkand, at that time one of the few real powerhouses of world scholarship and learning. He built an impressive observatory that became the natural successor to Marāgha, and his astronomers produced a zīj, completed in 1437 and known as Zij-i-Sultani, that is regarded by many to be even greater than al-Tūsi’s Ilkhānī Tables. It contains almost a thousand stars and was the most comprehensive star catalogue to be produced in the period between Ptolemy and Tycho Brahe.
As for al-Kāshi, he arrived in Samarkand around 1417. I have already mentioned in Chapter 7 how his treatise The Calculators’ Key was the definitive work on decimal fractions. He would also use decimal fractions to write down a value for pi, which he had calculated, accurate to sixteen decimal places. What is impressive about this achievement is that he carefully states in advance how accurate he requires his result to be and therefore the precision to which he has to work at each stage of his lengthy calculation in order to achieve the desired final result. Indeed, he states that he wishes the value to be so precise that, when it is used to calculate the circumference of the universe (according to the then estimated dimensions) the result would agree with the true value to within the thickness of a horse’s hair.12
Al-Kāshi’s best-known contribution to mathematics, however, is the very first derivation of the cosine rule in trigonometry, which allows the calculation of the length of a side of any triangle provided an angle and the other two sides are known. In fact, it is still known in French as the théorème d’al-Kashi.
A few years ago, I took part in a light-hearted debate at the Royal Society in London as to whether Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein deserves the accolade of the greatest scientist who ever lived. I was asked to put the case for Einstein. My argument rested on the premise that Einstein had shown how the Newtonian picture of the universe was wrong and needed to be replaced by a grander, more accurate, description of physical reality. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity of 1905 concerned far more than his well-known equation, E = mc2. He showed that the three dimensions of space must be treated in a unified picture together with the dimension of time, and that there is no such thing as absolute space or absolute time. Ten years later, his General Theory of Relativity showed that Newton’s picture of the force of gravity as the invisible glue pulling all bodies in the universe together was also inaccurate. Einstein produced what is still regarded as the most beautiful scientific theory ever developed, which stated that the force of gravity is the result of the curvature of space-time around a body: a geometrical picture of reality. Where Newton went, Einstein went further, and deeper. In this sense, he clearly eclipsed the accomplishments of Newton.
But is this fair? Surely we must judge each man’s achievements in the context of what was known at the time? For neither Einstein nor Newton lived in a vacuum, and each of them stood on the shoulders of past giants, allowing them to see further than others had before. Thus, given the circumstances and knowledge available, we cannot deny Newton’s remarkable achievements and greatness.
I have already described, in considering the achievements of Copernicus, how Einstein’s papers on the Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 heralded a revolution in physics. It was his breakthrough that brought about the
paradigm shift in our understanding of reality, and not the preparatory work of those who came before him. But it is also true that there would not have been a theory of relativity without the work of Jules Henri Poincaré and Lorentz, a few years earlier.
Similarly, much is made of the conflict between Newton and his contemporary, the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, over who most deserves credit for the invention of calculus. The truth is that they arrived at their discoveries independently. But neither man started from scratch; and indeed much of the groundwork had been laid down half a century earlier by the great French mathematician Fermat, not forgetting the contributions of such men as Thābit ibn Qurra, Ibn al-Haytham and al-Bīrūni, or indeed Greeks such as Archimedes, and Chinese and Indian mathematicians (notably Āryabhata in the sixth century CE). The point is that it is natural and right when apportioning credit for scientific discoveries to probe issues relating to historical contingency, as well as political and social factors. We tend almost always to be too generous to those who made the most recent steps in a scientific discipline, who inevitably reap the rewards of all antecedent discoveries, while not giving enough credit to those who made the first, and least profitable steps, even though those are often the most important ones.
Those who argue that modern science began with the European Renaissance while at the same time claiming that Newton was a greater scientist than Einstein by virtue of what was known at the time cannot have it both ways. For if Newton’s contributions to the field of optics, say, in the seventeenth century were remarkable, then what of those of Ibn al-Haytham six hundred years earlier? Ibn al-Haytham may not have placed optics on the same firm mathematical footing as Newton did, but his contribution was no less important, just as Newton’s contribution to the understanding of gravity was no less momentous than Einstein’s.
16
Science and Islam Today
With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge? … Common sense and the principles of logic and reason [are] our only reasonable choice for governance and progress. Being scientists, we understand this easily. The task is to persuade those who do not.
Pervez Hoodbhoy
Having come to the end of our journey, it is appropriate in this final chapter to take a closer look at the state of science and the spirit of rational enquiry in the Islamic world today. Has it recovered from recent centuries of decline, neglect, religious conservatism, stagnation, colonial rule and every other impediment to progress one cares to think of?
Many commentators argue that to look back continually to the past glories of the scientific achievements of the Islamic world can actually impede the progress of Muslim countries today; that such reminiscing neglects the crucial difference between modern science, defined as that which began with the scientific revolution of Renaissance Europe, and the medieval thinking of the Islamic world, which, they claim, was no more than a kind of ‘proto-science’, crude attempts to make sense of the world blurred with theology and the occult. Surely it would be far more sensible for the Muslim world to adopt a modern, secular rationalism based on twenty-first-century scientific knowledge and modern attitudes to scientific research? So, as a practising scientist and unapologetic atheist myself, why would I be advocating that Muslims can advance scientifically in the modern world only by adopting ways of thinking from a thousand years ago?
I hope I have convinced you by now that the boundary between the medieval science of the Islamic world and modern science is based on outdated notions in which the achievements of Islamic scholars across a range of scientific disciplines are either downplayed or not fully appreciated. While it is true that advances in science throughout history often take place only in fits and starts, with long periods of stagnation in between, this impression is exaggerated when we focus on just one part of the world. The progress and development of scientific ideas show a more continuous process as ideas evolve and spread, with scholars from different cultures and civilizations exchanging ideas and translating and commenting on texts. Often new ideas and breakthroughs remain undiscovered and so are hit upon independently more than once, sometimes simultaneously.
Of course, it is certainly true that the most important scientific advances tend to be down to individual geniuses: men such as Newton and Einstein brought about what are known as paradigm shifts in our understanding of the world. But these were possible only because of the accumulation of many earlier, smaller advances in understanding until a sort of bottleneck was reached, such that existing ideas and theories could no longer be sustained, allowing for a revolutionary way of thinking. But my point is not about the scientific achievements themselves but about the culture that makes such achievements possible, a culture that thirsts for and respects knowledge and learning.
Throughout this book, I have tried hard not to preach but to tell the story of a forgotten part of history, or at least one that is not widely enough known. I recall as a boy in Iraq hearing about al-Kindi, al-Khwārizmi, ibn Sīna and ibn al-Haytham only in history lessons at school rather than science lessons. I also hope, in reminding those in the Muslim world today of their rich scientific and scholarly heritage and how our current understanding of the natural world has been due in no small part to the contributions of Arabic science, that a sense of pride can be instilled and propel the importance of scientific enquiry back to where it belongs: at the very heart of what defines a civilized and enlightened society.
There are well over a billion Muslims in the world today, around a quarter of the world’s population, spread over many more than the fifty-seven member states of the OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference) in which Islam is the official religion. They include some of the world’s wealthiest nations, such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, as well as some of the poorest, like Somalia and Sudan. The economies of Muslim countries like the Gulf States, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Malaysia, Indonesia and Pakistan have been growing steadily for a number of years. And yet, in comparison with the West, the Islamic world still seems somewhat disengaged from modern science.
The leaders of many of these countries understand very well that their economic growth, military power and national security all rely heavily on technological advances. The rhetoric is therefore often heard that they require a concerted effort in scientific research and rapid scientific development in order to catch up with the rest of the world’s knowledge-based societies. Indeed, government funding for science and education has risen sharply in recent years in many of these countries and several have been overhauling and modernizing their national scientific infrastructures. So what do I mean when I say that most are still disengaged from science?
Here are a few statistics that make the point. In a study in the late 1990s1 it was found that, on average, the Muslim world spent less than half of 1 per cent of their GDP on research and development, compared with five times that percentage in the developed world. Even more emphatically, data from Unesco and the World Bank showed that a group of twenty representative OIC countries spent 0.34 per cent of their overall GDP on scientific research between 1996 and 2003 – just one-seventh of the global average of 2.36 per cent. These studies were backed up by a third report in 2005 by COMSTECH, an OIC ministerial committee established in 1981 to study possible means of strengthening cooperation among the OIC member states. Muslim countries have fewer than 10 scientists, engineers and technicians per 1,000 of the population compared to the world average of 40, and 140 for the developed world. Between them, they contribute only around 1 per cent of the world’s published scientific papers. Indeed, the Royal Society’s Atlas of Islamic-World Science and Innovation reveals that scientists in the Arab world (comprising 17 of the OIC countries) produced a total of 13,444 scientific publications in 2005 – some 2,000 fewer than the 15,455 achieved by Harvard University alone.2
But it is the quality of basic scientific research that is of more concern. One way of
measuring the international prominence of a nation’s published scientific literature is via its relative citation index (RCI): this is the number of cited papers by a nation’s scientists as a fraction of all cited papers, divided by its own share of total papers published, with all citations of its own literature excluded to prevent bias. Thus, if a country produced 10 per cent of the world’s scientific literature, but received only 5 per cent of all citations in the rest of the world, its index would be 0.5. In a league table compiled in 2006 by the US National Science Board of the world’s top forty-five nations ranked by their RCI in physics, only two OIC countries even register – Turkey with 0.344 and Iran with 0.484 – and only the latter shows a marked improvement over the period between 1995 and 2003. Switzerland topped the table with a RCI of 1.304.
A renowned Pakistani physicist, Pervez Hoodbhoy, recently highlighted the current dire problem.3 He argues that at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, where he works, the constraints he encounters are typical of those in many Pakistani public-sector institutions. Quaid-i-Azam University, he tells us, has several mosques on its campus, but no bookshop. And yet this is one of the leading research universities in the Muslim world.4 Contrast this with al-Ma’mūn’s obsession with books and the many wonderful libraries in medieval Baghdad, Cairo and Córdoba.
Is this no more than the complaint of one disgruntled individual? Well, far more telling is the story of another Pakistani physicist, indeed the greatest Muslim scientist of the twentieth century. His name is Abdus Salam (1926–96), and in 1979 he shared the Nobel Prize for physics with two Americans (Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg) for his part in developing what is called the electroweak theory, one of the most powerful and beautiful theories in science, which describes how two of the four fundamental forces of nature (the electromagnetic force and the force of radioactive nuclear decay) are connected. There is no doubt in my mind that his work places him as the greatest physicist of the Islamic world for a thousand years. Not since Ibn al-Haytham and al-Bīrūni has there been a more influential figure in the field.
Pathfinders Page 30
