http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/30/science/social/30ISLA.html?searcoday
October 30, 2001
SCIENCE TIMES
How Islam Won, and Lost, the Lead in Science
By DENNIS OVERBYE]
]
Muslims created a society that in the Middle Ages was the scientific center of the world.
Astronomers measured star positions at the Samarkand observatory, which was founded in Central Asia about 1420 by the ruler Ulugh Beg.
]asir al-Din al-Tusi was still a young man when the Assassins made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
His hometown had been devastated by Mongol armies, and so, early in the 13th century, al-Tusi, a promising astronomer and philosopher, came to dwell in the legendary fortress city of Alamut in the mountains of northern Persia.
He lived among a heretical and secretive sect of Shiite Muslims, whose members practiced political murder as a tactic and were dubbed hashishinn, legend has it, because of their use of hashish.
Although al-Tusi later said he had been held in Alamut against his will, the library there was renowned for its excellence, and al-Tusi thrived there, publishing works on astronomy, ethics, mathematics and philosophy that marked him as one of the great intellectuals of his age.
But when the armies of Halagu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, massed outside the city in 1256, al-Tusi had little trouble deciding where his loyalties lay. He joined Halagu and accompanied him to Baghdad, which fell in 1258. The grateful Halagu built him an observatory at Maragha, in what is now northwestern Iran.
Al-Tusi’s deftness and ideological flexibility in pursuit of the resources to do science paid off. The road to modern astronomy, scholars say, leads through the work that he and his followers performed at Maragha and Alamut in the 13th and 14th centuries. It is a road that winds from Athens to Alexandria, Baghdad, Damascus and Córdoba, through the palaces of caliphs and the basement laboratories of alchemists, and it was traveled not just by astronomy but by all science.
Commanded by the Koran to seek knowledge and read nature for signs of the Creator, and inspired by a treasure trove of ancient Greek learning, Muslims created a society that in the Middle Ages was the scientific center of the world. The Arabic language was synonymous with learning and science for 500 hundred years, a golden age that can count among its credits the precursors to modern universities, algebra, the names of the stars and even the notion of science as an empirical inquiry.
“Nothing in Europe could hold a candle to what was going on in the Islamic world until about 1600,” said Dr. Jamil Ragep, a professor of the history of science at the University of Oklahoma.
It was the infusion of this knowledge into Western Europe, historians say, that fueled the Renaissance and the scientific revolution.
“Civilizations don’t just clash,” said Dr. Abdelhamid Sabra, a retired professor of the history of Arabic science who taught at Harvard. “They can learn from each other. Islam is a good example of that.” The intellectual meeting of Arabia and Greece was one of the greatest events in history, he said. “Its scale and consequences are enormous, not just for Islam but for Europe and the world.”
But historians say they still know very little about this golden age. Few of the major scientific works from that era have been translated from Arabic, and thousands of manuscripts have never even been read by modern scholars. Dr. Sabra characterizes the history of Islamic science as a field that “hasn’t even begun yet.”
Islam’s rich intellectual history, scholars are at pains and seem saddened and embarrassed to point out, belies the image cast by recent world events. Traditionally, Islam has encouraged science and learning. “There is no conflict between Islam and science,” said Dr. Osman Bakar of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown.
“Knowledge is part of the creed,” added Dr. Farouk El-Baz, a geologist at Boston University, who was science adviser to President Anwar el- Sadat of Egypt. “When you know more, you see more evidence of God.”
So the notion that modern Islamic science is now considered “abysmal,” as Abdus Salam, the first Muslim to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, once put it, haunts Eastern scholars. “Muslims have a kind of nostalgia for the past, when they could contend that they were the dominant cultivators of science,” Dr. Bakar said. The relation between science and religion has generated much debate in the Islamic world, he and other scholars said. Some scientists and historians call for an “Islamic science” informed by spiritual values they say Western science ignores, but others argue that a religious conservatism in the East has dampened the skeptical spirit necessary for good science. The Golden Age
When Muhammad’s armies swept out from the Arabian peninsula in the seventh and eighth centuries, annexing territory from Spain to Persia, they also annexed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Hippocrates and other Greek thinkers.
Hellenistic culture had been spread eastward by the armies of Alexander the Great and by religious minorities, including various Christian sects, according to Dr. David Lindberg, a medieval science historian at the University of Wisconsin.
The largely illiterate Muslim conquerors turned to the local intelligentsia to help them govern, Dr. Lindberg said. In the process, he said, they absorbed Greek learning that had yet to be transmitted to the West in a serious way, or even translated into Latin. “The West had a thin version of Greek knowledge,” Dr. Lindberg said. “The East had it all.”
In ninth-century Baghdad the Caliph Abu al-Abbas al-Mamun set up an institute, the House of Wisdom, to translate manuscripts. Among the first works rendered into Arabic was the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy’s “Great Work,” which described a universe in which the Sun, Moon, planets and stars revolved around Earth; Al-Magest, as the work was known to Arabic scholars, became the basis for cosmology for the next 500 years.
Jews, Christians and Muslims all participated in this flowering of science, art, medicine and philosophy, which endured for at least 500 years and spread from Spain to Persia. Its height, historians say, was in the 10th and 11th centuries when three great thinkers strode the East: Abu Ali al- Hasan ibn al-Haytham, also known as Alhazen; Abu Rayham Muhammad al-Biruni; and Abu Ali al-Hussein Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna.
Al-Haytham, born in Iraq in 965, experimented with light and vision, laying the foundation for modern optics and for the notion that science should be based on experiment as well as on philosophical arguments. “He ranks with Archimedes, Kepler and Newton as a great mathematical scientist,” said Dr. Lindberg. Continued
1 | 2 | 3 | Next>>
for 2 more pages go to the url link
http://www3.pak.org/gupshup/smilies/ahaa.gif
http://www3.pak.org/gupshup/smilies/rolleyes.gif
door ke dhol suhawan
Familiarity breeds Contempt