12. Willy Hartner, ‘Copernicus, the Man, the Work, and its History’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 117 (1973), pp. 413–22.
13. Swerdlow, ‘The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus’ Planetary Theory’, p. 423.
14. Stahl, ‘The Greek Heliocentric Theory and its Abandonment’, p. 322.
15. George Saliba, A History of Arabic Astronomy (New York University Press, 1994), p. 26.
CHAPTER 15. DECLINE AND RENAISSANCE
1. Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 1977), p. 35.
2. George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1927), vol. 2, p. 126.
3. A. Gonzalez Palencia, ‘Islam and the Occident’, Hispania, 18 (1935), pp. 245–76.
4. George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (MIT Press, 2007), p. 234.
5. While this book is not usually named as the first book to be printed in England (one or two others may have beaten it by a year), it is certainly the first that can be reliably confirmed, since it contains not only the date, but a printer’s colophon showing for the first time in England the name of the printer, William Caxton (c. 1422–92), and the place of publication, Westminster. Caxton had set up the first printing press in England in 1476. Among the many books he printed was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
6. The book was written by a little-known scholar from Egypt called Mubāshir ibn Fātik. See Bernard Lewis, ‘Translation from Arabic’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 124 (1980), pp. 41–7.
7. See Angela Nuovo, ‘A Lost Arabic Koran Rediscovered’, The Library, 6th series, 12 (1990), p. 17.
8. Peter E. Pormann and Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 47.
9. Ibrahim M. Oweiss, Arab Civilization: Challenges and Responses (SUNY Press, 1988), p. 123.
10. Jean David C. Boulakia, ‘Ibn Khaldūn: A Fourteenth-Century Economist’, Journal of Political Economy, 79 (1971), pp. 1105–18.
11. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London, 1935), vol. 3, p. 322.
12. J. L. Berggren, Episodes in the Mathematics of the Medieval World (Springer, 1986), p. 21.
CHAPTER 16. SCIENCE AND ISLAM TODAY
1. M. A. Anwar and A. B. Abū Bakar, ‘Current State of Science and Technology in the Muslim World’, Scientometrics, 40 (1997), pp. 23–44.
2. The Atlas of Islamic-World Science and Innovation project, Royal Society Science Policy Centre: http://royalsociety.org/aiwsi/.
3. Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, ‘Science and the Islamic World – The Quest for Rapprochement’, Physics Today, 49 (2007), pp. 49–55.
4. See also Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries, Academic Rankings of Universities in the OIC Countries (April 2007): http://www.sesrtcic.org/files/article/232.pdf/.
5. Paper by Abdus Salam entitled ‘The Future of Science in Islam’, delivered to the Islamic Summit Conference held in Kuwait in January 1987.
6. See, for example, Osman Bakar, ‘The History and Philosophy of Islamic Science’, Islamic Texts Society (1999), p. 232.
7. Nader Fergany, ‘Steps Towards Reform’, Nature, 444 (2006), pp. 33–4.
8. Professor Choon Fong Shih and KAUST President: Opening Remarks at the Discover KAUST Global Gathering, 5 January 2009, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
9. He was voted the seventh most influential popular intellectual in the world, according to a poll carried out by Prospect Magazine in 2008. One needs to be careful, however, with such statistics, for all top ten on the list were from Muslim countries or Muslim backgrounds, pushing Noam Chomsky (who was ranked at number 1 in the previous poll in 2005) into eleventh place. This result clearly has more to do with the connectivity of the Muslim world through the Internet and the power of organized campaigns by followers of particular personalities, particularly in countries such as Turkey, Egypt and Iran, than with true global influence.
Glossary of Scientists
This list of scholars of the Islamic Empire is by no means exhaustive and includes, in addition to those who appear in the main text, several not mentioned but important enough to be listed. The only Christian Europeans included are those prominent in the translation movement from Arabic to Latin.
Note on alphabetical arrangement: If a scholar has a laqab (nickname or family name) then that is used to place him. If not – if he is just X son of Y – then it is his first name that is used, unless he is better known by his father’s name. Sometimes, it is simply a case of tradition; thus, both Ibn al-Haytham and al-Hajjāj ibn Yūsuf are found under ‘H’.
Adelard of Bath English philosopher, mathematician and scientist (1080–1152) known both for his original works and for translating many important Arabic works on astrology, astronomy, philosophy and mathematics into Latin, as well as an Arabic version of Euclid’s Elements, which for centuries served as the chief geometry textbook in the West. He studied and taught in France and travelled widely before returning to England, and becoming a teacher of the future King Henry II. His writings on human nature, meteorology, astronomy, botany and zoology are based on Arabic science. He also wrote on the abacus and the astrolabe. He was the greatest English scholar before Roger Bacon.
Ali ibn Īsa Flourished in Baghdad in first half of eleventh century; Christian scholar and the most famous Arab oculist. His Tathkirat al-Kahhālīn is the oldest Arabic work on ophthalmology and deals with the anatomy, physiology and diseases of the eye, and characterizes more than a hundred different drugs.
Ali ibn Sahl (c. 838–70) Son of Sahl al-Tabari; physician and Jewish convert to Islam who flourished in Baghdad under the caliphate of al-Mutawakkil (847–61); tutor to the great al-Rāzi. His most famous work, completed in 850, is The Paradise of Wisdom (Firdaws al-Hikma), which was primarily on medicine but also covered philosophy, astronomy, meteorology, zoology and psychology. It was predominantly based on Greek and Hindu sources rather than an original work.
al-Ash’ari Abū al-Hassan Ali ibn Isma’īl al-Ash’ari (873–935); Arab theologian who flourished in Baghdad. He is included here, not because of any achievements in science, but because of the widely perceived negative influence of his theological teachings (he was a Mu’tazilite who converted to Sunni orthodoxy) on the spirit of free scientific enquiry. He is regarded as the founder of Muslim scholasticism and the greatest theologian of Islam before al-Ghazāli.
Ibn Bājja Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahya, generally known as Ibn Bājja, Latin, Avempace; Andalusian Muslim philosopher, scientist and physician; born in Saragossa before 1106, lived in Granada and died in Fez in 1139 (possibly poisoned). He was critical of the Ptolemaic model and yet attacked Ibn al-Haytham’s criticism of Ptolemy for being too simplistic. He was widely criticized himself because of his ‘atheism’. He was a big influence on the work of other Andalusian scholars such as Ibn Tufayl, al-Bitrūji and Ibn Rushd.
Abū Ma’shar al-Balkhi Abū Ma’shar Ja’far ibn Muhammad ibn Umar al-Balkhi (c. 787–886), Latin, Albumasar; Persian astrologer who had great influence on twelfth-century Europeans. He studied the texts of Ptolemy and Aristotle. Many of his works were translated into Latin in the first half of the twelfth century and so he was many European scholars’ first encounter with Aristotle’s philosophy.
Ibn Sahl al-Balkhi Abū Zaid Ahmed ibn Sahl al-Balkhi (850–934), born in the Persian city of Balkh, now in northern Afghanistan; geographer and mathematician. His Figures of the Climates (Suwar al-Aqālīm) consisted chiefly of maps and led to him founding the ‘Balkhi school’ of terrestrial mapping style. He also wrote on medicine and psychology.
Banū Mūsa The three sons of Mūsa ibn Shākir: Muhammad, Ahmed and Hassan, all born in the first decade of the ninth century; mathematicians, engineers, astronomers and wealthy patrons of the translation movement. Among the famous translators they employed were Hunayn ibn Ishāq and Thābit ibn Qurra. It is difficult to disentan
gle the many contributions each brother made to science, but Muhammad (d. 872/3) seems to have been the most important.
al-Battāni Abū Abdallah Muhammad ibn Jābir ibn Sinān al-Battāni (c. 858–929), Latin, Albatenius or Albategnius. The origin of his name, al-Battāni, is not known. He was a Sabian who converted to Islam; born in Harrān and flourished in Raqqah in Syria; died in Sāmarra. He was one of the world’s greatest medieval astronomers, who made astronomical observations and measurements of remarkable range and accuracy. He improved on many of the measurements of the Greeks and was quoted extensively by Europeans, including Copernicus. He also made many original advances in trigonometry.
al-Bīrūni Abū Rayhān Muhammad ibn Ahmed al-Bīrūni, born in Khwārizm (Khiva) in 973, died in 1048, probably in Ghazna, Sijistān (Afghanistan); Persian Muslim (but probably agnostic) and one of the greatest scientists and polymaths in history; philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, geographer, anthropologist and encyclopedist. He travelled widely throughout Central Asia; he wrote in Arabic and Persian but was strongly anti-Arab in his sentiments. His most important works were The Chronology of Ancient Nations, The Mas’ūdi Canon and The History of India. He made many original contributions in astronomy and mathematics and was famous for measuring the size of the earth to greater accuracy than anyone had done before.
al-Bitrūji Abū Ishāq Nūr al-Dīn al-Bitrūji (died c. 1204), Latin, Alpetragius; Arab astronomer and philosopher, from the town of Pedroche, north of Córdoba; flourished in Seville; disciple of Ibn Tufayl and contemporary of Ibn Rushd. He advanced a theory on planetary motion that avoided both epicycles and eccentrics by compounding rotations of homocentric spheres. Although still a geocentric model, it was regarded at the time as having revolutionized Ptolemaic cosmology.
al-Fadl ibn Nawbakht Abū Sahl al-Fadl ibn Nawbakht (died c. 815); Persian Muslim astronomer/astrologer and Harūn al-Rashīd’s chief librarian; son of al-Mansūr’s astrologer Nawbakht. He made a number of translations of astrological texts from Persian into Arabic.
al-Farābi Abū Nasr Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Tarkhān ibn Uzlagh al-Farābi, Latin, Alpharabius; born near Fārāb, Turkestan, of a Turkish family; studied in Baghdad, flourished in Aleppo; died in Damascus in 950 aged about 80; Muslim encyclopedist and one of the great philosophers of medieval times. He continued the work of al-Kindi, developed further by later scholars such as Ibn Sīna and Ibn Rushd, in reconciling and harmonizing Greek philosophy with Islamic theology. He was known as ‘the Second Teacher’, Aristotle being the first.
al-Farghāni Abū al-Abbās Ahmed ibn Muhammad ibn Kathīr al-Farghāni, Latin, Alfraganus, born in Farghānā in Transoxiana; died after 861; Muslim astronomer who flourished under al-Ma’mūn. His most famous text was Kitab fi Harakāt Samāwiyya wa Jawwāmi’ ’ilm al-Nujūm (Book of Motion of Heavenly Bodies and Elements of Astronomy), which was translated into Latin in the twelfth century and was very influential in Europe. In 861 he oversaw the building of the Nilometer in Cairo.
al-Fārisi Kamal al-Dīn al-Hassan ibn Ali ibn al-Hassan al-Fārisi (1267–1318); Persian Muslim physicist and mathematician, born in Tabriz; pupil of al-Shirāzi. He revised and extended Ibn al-Haytham’s Optics in his Kitab Tanqīh al-Manāthir (The Revision of the Optics). He gave the first mathematically satisfactory explanation of the rainbow by experimenting with a glass sphere filled with water to model a raindrop, and made a number of important contributions to number theory.
al-Fazāri Muhammad ibn Ibrahīm al-Fazāri; Arab (some sources say Persian) astronomer/astrologer and mathematician and one of the earliest in Islam; flourished in Baghdad in the second half of the eighth century; not to be confused with his father, Ibrahīm al-Fazāri, who was also an astronomer/astrologer and translator. He helped al-Mansūr with the foundation of the Round City of Baghdad in 762 and was the first Muslim to build an astrolabe. He translated a number of texts into Arabic, including Brahmagupta’s Siddhanta (Sindhind), possibly in collaboration with his father.
Abbās ibn Firnās Abū al-Qāsim Abbās Ibn Firnas; Berber polymath, born in Ronda, Spain, flourished in Córdoba in the second half of the ninth century; inventor, engineer, physician, poet and musician. He was famous for a supposedly early attempt at aviation with a set of wings he built and strapped to his back, and he devised a means of manufacturing colourless glass, and made corrective lenses (‘reading stones’).
Gerard of Cremona Italian scholar (1114–87) and the greatest of all the Arabic–Latin translators. Motivated by a desire to read the Almagest, which did not yet exist in Latin, he studied Arabic in Toledo, then stayed on there to translate the work of most of the great Muslim scholars as well as the Arabic versions of many Greek texts. While some translators are known for one or two books, Gerard’s list runs to almost a hundred, making him possibly the most prolific translator of all time.
Gerbert d’Aurillac Born c. 945 near Aurillac, Auvergne; died in Rome in 1003; the first French pope, under the name of Sylvester II; spent several years in Barcelona, where he studied and translated texts from Arabic. He wrote on the abacus and astrolabe and was one of the very first to introduce Christian Europe to Hindu-Arabic numerals (but not the zero).
al-Ghazāli Abū Hāmid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Tūsi al-Shāfi’i al-Ghazāli, Latin, Algazel; born in Tūs in 1058, flourished in Nishapūr and Baghdad, travelled to Alexandria before returning to Tūs, where he died in 1111. He was the greatest and most famous theologian in Islamic history; an original thinker who made contributions to science, but is best known for his attack on Aristotelian philosophy and its proponents, such as Ibn Sīna, in his book Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers). He was blamed (unfairly) for the decline of the golden age of Arabic science.
al-Hajjāj ibn Yūsuf Al-Hajjāj ibn Yūsuf ibn Matar, flourished between 786 and 833, probably in Baghdad; early Muslim translator. He was important because he was the first translator of both Euclid’s Elements and Ptolemy’s Almagest into Arabic. He translated the Elements twice, once for al-Rashīd and then again for al-Ma’mūn. His Almagest translation, from a Syriac version, was completed around 830.
Ibn al-Haytham Abū Ali al-Hassan ibn al-Hassan (or al-Hussein) ibn al-Haytham, Latin, Alhazen; born c. 965 in Basra, flourished in Egypt under al-Hākim and died (probably) in Cairo in 1039; the greatest physicist of medieval times and probably the greatest during the two-thousand-year span between Archimedes and Newton. He made many contributions in optics and astronomy. His Kitab al-Manāthir (Book of Optics) had a huge influence on the development of Western science. He is regarded as one of the earliest advocates of the scientific method and as such is often referred to as the ‘first true scientist’. He was the first to explain correctly how vision works in terms of geometric optics. He made advances in ‘mathematizing’ astronomy and wrote on celestial mechanics. He was one of the three greatest scientists of Islam (along with his contemporaries, al-Bīrūni and Ibn Sīna).
Ibn Hazm Abū Muhammad Ali ibn Ahmed ibn Hazm (994–1064); Muslim philosopher, theologian, historian and statesman; born in Córdoba; one of the most important and original scholars in Muslim Spain. He wrote an accurate account of the different sects in Islam, in which he also discussed Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, called the Book of Religions and Sects.
Hunayn ibn Ishāq Abū Zaid Hunayn ibn Ishāq al-Ībādi (809–77), Latin, Joannitius, born in Hīra, flourished in Gondēshāpūr then Baghdad; Nestorian Christian physician and the greatest of the Baghdad translators. He was employed by the Banū Mūsa brothers to translate Greek works into Arabic, in particular the medical texts of Galen. It is unclear if he was employed in the House of Wisdom itself but it is recorded that the Caliph al-Mutawakkil endowed a translation school under his supervision. He translated a prodigious number of books over a period of half a century.
al-Idrīsi Abū Abdallah Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Idrīsi; Muslim geographer and one of the greatest cartographers of the Middle Ages; born in Ceuta c. 1100, studied in Córdoba and later flour
ished in Palermo; died in 1166. He described the then known world in his al-Kitab al-Rujāri (The Book of Roger).
Ishāq ibn Hunayn Abū Ya’qūb Ishāq ibn Hunayn ibn Ishāq al-Ibādi, died in Baghdad in 910; Christian translator and son of the more famous Hunayn ibn Ishāq. He was a physician and mathematician who is credited with the translation (into Arabic and Syriac) of the texts of some of the greatest of the Greeks, such as Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes and Ptolemy.
Jābir ibn Hayyān Abū Mūsa Jābir ibn Hayyān al-Azdī (c. 721–c. 815); Arab chemist and one of the first great scientists of Islam; flourished mostly in Kūfa c. 776. He was known as Geber the Alchemist in Europe (although he had remarkably sound views on the methods of chemical research and processes). He was an advocate of the so-called sulphur-mercury theory of metals (that all metals are composed of differing proportions of sulphur and mercury).
al-Jāhith Abū Uthmān Amr ibn Bahr al-Jāhith (‘the Goggle-Eyed’) (c. 776–c. 869), flourished in Basra and Baghdad; man of letters with an interest in the biological sciences and one of the leaders of the Mu’tazilite movement. His most famous scientific work is his Kitab al-Haywān (Book of Animals), which was more theological and folkloric than scientific, although based on the work of Aristotle. However, it contained the germs of important ideas such as evolution, adaptation and animal psychology.
al-Jawhari Al-Abbās ibn Sa’īd al-Jawhari; astronomer who flourished under al-Ma’mūn. He was one of the group of astronomers known as the Asshāb al-Mumtahan (‘Companions of the Verified Tables’) who carried out important astronomical measurements at the observatories in Baghdad (829–30) and Damascus (832–3).
Ibn Isma’il al-Jazari Abū al-’Iz ibn Ismā’īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazari (1136–1206); prominent Arab engineer, craftsman, artist and inventor from Al-Jazīra, a region in northern Mesopotamia between the Tigris and the Euphrates. He is best known for writing the Kitab fi Ma’rifat al-Hiyāl al-Handasiyya (Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices), which described fifty mechanical devices and gave instructions on how to construct them, in the style of a modern ‘do-it-yourself’ manual.
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