Islamic Science and the West: A Case of Collective Amnesia

Pioneering figures such as Daniel and Adelard represented a new cohort of scholars that emerged from the social, economic, and political changes that began to take shape in the tenth century—in particular, the development of a money-based economy and the rise of towns and cities—which began to supplant the old feudal order.² Soon, a cottage industry coalesced around the collecting of Arabic texts from formerly Muslim territories in Spain, Sicily, and the Crusader lands of the Near East. These were rendered into Latin, then the lingua franca of European learning, by multiethnic teams and dispatched to the cathedral schools and universities of France, England, and Italy.

This treasure trove included the algebra of al-Khwārizmī (d. 850); the early chemistry of Jābir ibn Ĥayyān (d. 815); the medical teachings of the Persian polymath Ibn Sīnā, or Avicenna (d. 1037); the engineering wonders of al-Jazarī (d. 1206); and the theoretical innovations in mathematical astronomy of Naśīr al-Dīn al-Ţūsī (d. 1274) and others at the Maragha observatory in what is today western Iran.

Likewise, the great commentaries on classical philosophy by Ibn Rushd, the Andalusian Muslim scholar known in Latin as Averroës (d. 1198), ignited Western interest in the long-lost works of Aristotle, Plato, and other seminal thinkers. No less an authority than Roger Bacon (d. 1292), the medieval philosopher and educational reformer, freely acknowledged this Western debt: “Philosophy is drawn from the Muslims.”³

Most important of all, these itinerant Europeans returned with perhaps the single biggest prize: the Muslims’ realization, within the same monotheistic context as their Christian counterparts, that science can grant humanity insight into nature without infringing on the creative powers reserved for the Divine. “Of course, God rules the universe,” Adelard of Bath informed his readers after returning from the Near East, “but we may and should inquire into the natural world. The Arabs teach us that.”⁴

So why is the West so averse to the notion that Muslim science and philosophy—and culture in general—have contributed anything of value to our own worldviews?

The answer lies with what I call the anti-Islam discourse, whose roots lie in eleventh-century wartime propaganda surrounding the First Crusade.⁵ The initial framing of this discourse introduced Muslim culture to an unknowing public as the mirror image, or inverse, of Western ideals and values. Where Christians were by nature peaceful and loving, Muslims were violent and hateful. Christianity stood for Truth, while Islam preached Falsehood. Christians were chaste, but Muslims were sexually perverse. The Prophet Muhammad was presented variously as a renegade cardinal, a devious heresiarch, or even the Antichrist.

In a concise preview of what would become the established Western discourse, the Crusades chronicler Guibert de Nogent (d. 1124) assured his readers there was no need for actual knowledge of the Muslims in order to denigrate them: “It is safe to speak evil of one whose malignity exceeds whatever ill can be spoken.”⁶ Since then, this discourse has been adapted as needed by varying elites, each seeking its own political, social, or economic advantage. These range from the medieval guardians of Church orthodoxy to the early modern humanists and on to the Enlightenment philosophes.

Throughout its thousand-year history, this discourse has ebbed and flowed, subsiding in periods of uneasy coexistence only to emerge as powerful as ever during times—such as today—of renewed tensions or outright conflict with the Muslim world. Its echoes are clear among many “Islam experts” in Western media, politics, and academia, for whom Muslims are irrational and anti-science; authoritarian, undemocratic, and anti-modern; and uniquely prone to violence.

Science is not the sole arena subject to the anti-Islam discourse, which operates across the entire Western worldview. However, the struggle over science—and, ultimately, modernity itself—provides perhaps the clearest and most accessible example of the conceptual barrier that so far prevents anything like an accurate and fruitful understanding of Islam and Muslims. So let us turn to some specific instances when this discourse has distorted Western thinking about the history of science.

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In the late 1960s, the German historian of science Willy Hartner could be forgiven for thinking he had made a major—one might say “earth-shattering”—discovery: he identified textual evidence that Copernicus had direct access to centuries of Islamic astronomical research when he constructed his revolutionary theory that placed the sun, rather than our planetary home, at the center of the universe.

Taken at face value, Hartner’s finding would seem to demand a reexamination of the foundational Western myth of the scientific revolution; a rethinking of the limited timeline of Islam’s supposed golden age; and a reassessment of the notion that unbridged—and unbridgeable—intellectual and cultural boundaries separate European culture from Islamic tradition. Clearly, a Muslim backdrop to the Copernicus story would violate all three of these cherished notions, each deeply embedded in the standard history of ideas.

However, the intervening years have not been kind to Hartner’s discovery, for the very idea that generations of Muslim scholars played a central role in Copernicus’s work has largely been dismissed out of hand or, worse still, privately acknowledged yet publicly ignored. Despite the dogged sleuthing of Hartner and a small circle of like-minded specialists who steadily opened new windows on the interconnections between early modern Europe and the world of Islam, Western historiography has jealously guarded its claim to a monopoly on science and on modernity in general.

This notion of a purely European pedigree for modern science comprises the “classical narrative,” a term coined by historian George Saliba of Columbia University, who has studied the connections of Islamic astronomers to Renaissance Europe, especially Copernicus. Two key elements of this narrative are a near total reliance by Western scientists on borrowing from Greek, Sasanian, and Hindu traditions, with Muslim scholars largely serving as mere translators and caretakers rather than as innovators and contributors, and the assertion that whatever intellectual achievements were happening in the Muslim world got cut short by the forces of religious reaction by the early twelfth century, marking the abrupt end of a golden age of Islamic philosophy and science.⁷ Nothing beyond that date is deemed worthy of investigation or discussion.

Underpinning this narrative is one of the central tenets of the anti-Islam discourse: the presumption that Muslims are fundamentally hostile toward rational thought, in contrast to Westerners. And it is this discourse that determines what can and—more  importantly—what  cannot be said about an Islamic intellectual legacy.

As  French philosopher Michel Foucault argued, for a statement to be recognized as a fact within a given discipline, it first must be listed among possible truths and then validated by the shared rules within that field. “In short, a proposition must fulfill some onerous and complex conditions before it can be admitted within a discipline,” wrote Foucault. “Before it can be pronounced true or false it must be… ‘within the true.’”⁸

In the case of the history of science, Hartner’s findings simply did not fall “within the true”—that is, even to consider the proposition that Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) may have been built upon centuries of original Muslim scholarship was and has remained, for many, literally unthinkable.

The history of science is replete with cases in which Islamic intellectual achievements and their connection to Western knowledge have been downplayed, explained away, or erased outright from its pages. This practice first took hold among the early Renaissance humanists, who were eager to secure places in Europe’s universities, civil and church administrations, and arts by claiming a direct connection to an idealized classical Greek and Roman heritage that made no room for the “monkishness” of their Scholastic predecessors or for the “barbarity” of Muslim teachings. Later, the philosophes would invoke another element of the anti-Islam discourse, denouncing “Eastern despotism” and “fanaticism” as they advanced their own Enlightenment vision of a new social and political order.

Less than two hundred years after Adelard of Bath, Daniel of Morley, and their fellow travelers abandoned Europe’s cathedral schools and universities in pursuit of Arab knowledge, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), often called the Father of Humanism, marked the beginning of the rejectionist attitude toward both Muslim learning and its Western advocates. “I shall scarcely be persuaded,” he wrote, “that anything good can come from Arabia; but you learned men, through some strange mental illness, celebrate them with great, and unless I am mistaken, undeserved trumpeting.” It is perhaps one of history’s minor ironies that Petrarch lamented the intellectual “darkness and gloom” of his own times—he is credited with coining the term “Dark Ages”—even as Islamic science and philosophy flourished in not-too-distant lands.

The window of medieval assimilation of, and even unabashed admiration for, Arab science and philosophy soon slammed shut. By liquidating any debts to the Muslim world, the humanists established their privileged social, political, and economic status as the interpreters of ancient Greek and Roman wisdom. There could no longer be room for an Islamic intellectual tradition in a Europe that was fast reinventing itself under the banner of a renaissance of classical knowledge. The arrival of the so-called Age of Discovery, with its promise of economic, territorial, and geopolitical gains at the expense of non-Christian societies, only accelerated this tendency. What remained was the discursive notion that Muslims were wholly unsuited for rational scientific pursuits.

The story of algebra at the hands of humanist scholars, who in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries periodically wrote and rewrote histories of the discipline, provides a clear example of such liquidation at work—and how its architects sought to benefit as a result.

As philosopher of science Giovanna Cifoletti has shown, early attempts to establish a glorious history for algebra (and thus raise the professional status of its practitioners above that of lowly surveyors or bookkeepers) acknowledged the direct influence of Arab learning. These accounts generally ascribed the introduction of the field to al-Khwārizmī, the medieval Baghdad-based scholar whose al-Kitāb al-mukhtaśar fī ĥisāb al-jabr wa al-muqābalah (The book of restoring and balancing) gave the West the word algebra. (The term algorithm, so beloved of Silicon Valley and the budding AI industry, is a direct derivation from his name.)

Over the ensuing decades, the Muslim origin of algebra was steadily erased from the historical record. In its place, French humanists first introduced a classical Greek lineage for the art, attributing it to the third-century mathematician Diophantus before finally asserting a national—that is, French—genius in the discipline. In the process, any Muslim influence was dismissed as an unhelpful “defect” and a “barbaric” impediment to proper understanding. In 1559, French logician Jean Borrel even called for eradicating the word algebra, with its unwanted reminder of Arab influence, and replacing it with quadratura, Latin for “making square.” This same pattern can be seen in the history of medicine, in which Islamic texts were common in Western teaching and practice before vanishing from view.⁹

This drive to claim authenticity had important prejudicial effects, some of which plague our understanding to this day. One effect is that by erasing any significant Arab influence from the historical record and downplaying what little survived, the humanists helped crystallize the notion that generations of Muslim scholars were little more than placeholders, adding nothing of value to, or even grossly distorting, the wisdom of the ancients. This has made tracing and recovering the Muslim intellectual legacy that much more difficult.

A second effect is that the erasure of Arab influence allowed the reintroduction of scientific errors and philosophical challenges that had been already addressed over centuries in the Arabic scholarly corpus. The refusal to credit the ways in which the Muslims had advanced classical learning in, for example, astronomy and geography left the Europeans reliant on erroneous and out-of-date understandings of the physical world.

As early as the ninth century, Muslim scholars had begun to introduce major revisions to the accepted Greek body of geographic knowledge, eventually correcting the coordinates for eight thousand cities, towns, and geographical features. Many of these revised figures are remarkably close to modern values.¹⁰ Driving this process were twin demands from the Islamic tradition: specific ritual practices and the general prophetic imperative to pursue knowledge.

Arab geographers and mathematicians recognized the need to identify the Qiblah, the direction of Mecca in which to pray, bury the dead, and slaughter animals. This had been a relatively simple proposition in the early days of the ummah, then a small community centered in Arabia, but it became increasingly complex as Islam spread westward to Iberia and eastward to Central Asia and China. Cartography and navigation, meanwhile, served the ritual requirement of the pilgrimage, or hajj. What is striking here is that, in contrast to the experience of Christian Europe, the Muslim scholars, many of whom were deeply versed in the Islamic religious texts, faced no resistance from their own clerical establishment when solutions grounded in complex geometry and spherical trigonometry pushed aside older religious tradition and wayfinding practice.

In the case of the earth’s circumference, which was a pressing issue at a time when European navies were setting out for distant, uncharted waters in search of conquest, the accepted classical estimate was 20 percent shorter than the measurement made by the Muslims. Western astronomers did not correct this metric until the sixteenth century.¹¹ Even the advances made by Arab geographers that had found a foothold in the West were rolled back in the humanists’ purge. By the fourteenth century, Europe’s mapmakers had accepted Muslim revisions to the classical depiction of the Caspian Sea in the authoritative Alexandrian scholar Ptolemy’s Geographia, correctly establishing its primary north-south axis. But later, under the influence of the humanists’ demand for reliance only on “original” Greek texts, Western charts reverted to Ptolemy’s mistaken notion that it ran east-west, a mapping error only corrected in the eighteenth century, eight hundred years after the Arabs first established the Caspian’s true orientation.¹²

More profoundly, scholars across the Muslim lands had engaged critically with Ptolemy’s masterwork of cosmology—written  in Greek around 150 CE and known throughout the medieval world under the Arabic-influenced title Almagest. These scholars tirelessly revised Ptolemy’s calculations, including correcting the length of the solar year, introduced the efficient use of trigonometric functions in place of the more clumsy geometric chords, and criticized Ptolemy’s reliance on out-of-date astronomical observations.

They also proposed sophisticated solutions, some of which ended up in Copernicus’s masterwork, as they struggled to preserve the integrity of the orthodox classical model of the universe—an effort known since Plato’s day as “saving the appearances”— even as their own increasingly sophisticated observational data cast serious doubt on the validity of the entire enterprise. 

At issue was the central precept, laid down in antiquity, that all celestial bodies moved in perfect, uniform circles, with Earth at the center of the universe. Authorities including Plato and Aristotle asserted that the circle and the sphere are the most perfect of geometric forms, and so the divine plan could be based on no less a standard. And yet meticulous observations over the centuries appeared to violate this requirement. Ptolemy had already institutionalized several ingenious fixes to the classical model, including the introduction of an axis of rotation for some planets that did not pass through the center of the universe. This “saved the appearances” by reflecting the data, but only at the cost of the model’s theoretical integrity.

The Muslim specialists’ unease with Almagest began to appear as early as the eleventh century in what became known as the shukūk tradition—literally, “objections” to the accepted Ptolemaic model. Their unease later spilled over into the philosophical realm, where such leading Muslim lights as Avicenna and Averroës took aim at Ptolemy’s theoretical shortcomings and logical inconsistencies. The Muslim savants argued that the science of the stars had to be both predictive and consistent, central requirements of what we today recognize as the scientific method. Instead, it was badly out of step with what astronomers could see with their own eyes or measure with progressively finer techniques. “The astronomy of our time conforms only to computation and not to existence,” famously complained Averroës.¹³

Given the newfound insistence on a return to older, authentic Greek texts untouched by centuries of Arab scholarship, none of these developments were available to the humanist and early modern scholars or their patrons in government, the church, and the universities.

In modern institutional terms, Western discourse, with its severe limitations on acknowledging the scale and scope of Muslim learning, has effectively forestalled widespread academic research in the field. The small circle of specialists who have taken on the subject have labored in relative obscurity and isolation, their findings rarely finding purchase among mainstream colleagues. This has left us with only a partial picture of Islamic intellectual history. By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of extant scholarly manuscripts in the main languages used in Islamic scholarship are languishing in obscurity, ignored and unstudied by modern researchers.¹⁴

What might a systematic review of such material reveal? Surely, the history of Islamic science would look very different as a result. Instead, we are left with a patchwork of curious, orphaned examples of scientific genius, whose significance and connections to one another, and to the Western experience, remain frustratingly opaque.

Examples, plucked at random from my old notes, of such “homeless” facts—or, perhaps more accurately, factoids—include an understanding by Ibn al-Nafīs (d. 1288) of pulmonary circulation of the blood, four hundred years before the work of William Harvey (d. 1657), the English physician generally credited with this discovery; the creation of the teaching hospital and an early understanding of disease vectors; and advances in architecture, structural engineering, and construction later adopted by the builders of Europe’s great cathedrals.

And what of Ibn al-Haytham (d. 1040), the father of optics and, arguably, of the modern scientific method, whose works were cited by many, including Isaac Newton and Galileo? He combined experimentation with logical reasoning to develop a theory of vision whereby the eyes receive light reflected from objects. This stood at odds with the established view of Euclid and Ptolemy that it was the human eye itself that emitted light rays. Or the breakthroughs of al-Jazarī (d. 1206) in hydraulic and power systems, some featuring complex automated controls? While al-Jazarī was best known in his day for his fantastical water clocks and music-playing automata, his most significant contributions concern crankshafts and associated gearing to transform circular motion into linear force and the piston pump, a necessary precursor to the steam engine and many other technologies. His illustrated Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices appears to have influenced the Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci.

As impressive as the items on this admittedly partial list may be, they have never come together into a unifying theory of Arab and Muslim intellectual history and its rightful place in world culture. By remaining outside “the true”—that is, by not meeting the “onerous” requirements of the prevailing discourse—most of these curious factoids have so far failed to become historical facts.

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Is there a way through the epistemological impasse created by the power and persistence of the anti-Islam discourse? Or is the West doomed to maintain its view of Islamic science—and of Islam in general—as “through a glass, darkly”?

The challenge remains daunting, for the West to this day appears fundamentally unable to take Arab intellectual achievement seriously or to accept its very real innovations and discoveries. Thus, five hundred years after the Copernicus affair, two Ivy League researchers announced that they had found in fifteenth-century Islamic tile designs highly complex geometric patterns of a kind only recently understood in the West. Still, the pair were unprepared to credit Muslim mathematicians with such a startling discovery, suggesting instead that they had not actually understood the underlying principles at work in their own designs and patterns.¹⁵

The first step toward overcoming this self-induced myopia requires recognizing the ways in which the West’s discourse about Islam does not, or not necessarily, reflect the reality of Islam itself. Rather, the discourse is the result of a socially contingent process that has imprinted itself on the very tissue of Western thought across one thousand years. The second step is to set aside one of the discourse’s central claims: that Islam, in contrast to the West, is inherently irrational, anti-science, and anti-modern.

Taking these steps—even  temporarily, as just a thought experiment—frees  us to imagine new lines of inquiry. Instead of asking whether Copernicus borrowed directly from Muslim astronomy, we are now free to pose a different question: How might the Polish astronomer have engaged with centuries of Islamic scientific and philosophical critique of Ptolemy’s classical model of the universe? Instead of dismissing the idea that Arab mathematicians had any theoretical understanding of the highly complex geometric patterns found in Islamic designs, we might ask how they arrived at such a discovery in the first place.

This thought experiment also allows us to question the notion that the decentering of the earth, which forms a cherished part of the Western idea of the scientific revolution, was an exclusively European project, with no role for the Arab Other. And that, in turn, demands a radical rethinking of our entire relationship to the world of the Muslims, one that challenges the anti-Islam discourse and what sociologists Philip W. Sutton and Stephen Vertigans have called the prevailing “caricature of Islam.”¹⁶

On a broader scale, this thought experiment offers the potential to break down an imposed and artificial boundary between two spaces—Muslim East and Christian West—and to reframe the relationship as one of intra-cultural competition rather than inter-cultural struggle. The logical result would be a “new history” of Islamic intellectual achievement, one liberated from the discursive rules of engagement that tell us what can, and what cannot, be said about Islam and Muslims.