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Islam, Knowledge, and Science
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[Master Table of Contents]
Contents
"He has
taught you that which [heretofore] you knew not." (Quran, Surah [2:
239])
Islam is a religion based upon knowledge for it is ultimately knowledge of the
Oneness of God combined with faith and total commitment to Him that
saves man. The text of the Quran is replete with verses inviting man
to use his intellect, to ponder, to think and to know, for the goal of
human life is to discover the Truth which is none other than
worshipping God in His Oneness. The Hadith literature is also full of
references to the importance of knowledge. Such sayings of the Prophet
as
"Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave", (Hadith)
and
"Verily the men of knowledge are the inheritors of the prophets", (Hadith)
have echoed throughout the history of Islam and incited
Muslims to seek knowledge wherever it might be found. During most of
its history, Islamic civilization has been witness to a veritable
celebration of knowledge. That is why every traditional Islamic city
possessed public and private libraries and some cities like Cordoba
and Baghdad boasted of libraries with over 400,000 books. Such cities
also had bookstores, some of which sold a large number of titles. That
is also why the scholar has always been held in the highest esteem in
Islamic society.
As Islam spread northward into Syria, Egypt, and the Persian
empire, it came face to face with the sciences of antiquity whose
heritage had been preserved in centers which now became a part of the
Islamic world. Alexandria had been a major center of sciences and
learning for centuries. The Greek learning cultivated in Alexandria was
opposed by the Byzantines who had burned its library long before the
advent of Islam. The tradition of Alexandrian learning did not die,
however. It was transferred to Antioch and from there farther east to
such cities as Edessa by eastern Christians who stood in sharp
opposition to Byzantium and wished to have their own independent
centers of learning. Moreover, the Persian king, Shapur I, had
established Jundishapur in Persia as a second great center of learning
matching Antioch. He even invited Indian physicians and mathematicians
to teach in this major seat of learning, in addition to the Christian
scholars who taught in Syriac as well as the Persians whose medium of
instruction was Pahlavi. Once Muslims established the new Islamic
order during the Umayyad period, they turned their attention to these
centers of learning which had been preserved and sought to acquaint
themselves with the knowledge taught and cultivated in them. They
therefore set about with a concerted effort to translate the
philosophical and scientific works which were available to them from
not only Greek and Syriac (which was the language of eastern Christian
scholars) but also from Pahlavi, the scholarly language of pre-Islamic
Persia, and even from Sanskrit. Many of the accomplished translators
were Christian Arabs such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq, who was also an
outstanding physician, and others Persians such as Ibn Muqaffa', who
played a major role in the creation of the new Arabic prose style
conducive to the expression of philosophical and scientific writings.
The great movement of translation lasted from the beginning of the 8th
to the end of the 9th century, reaching its peak with the
establishment of the House of Wisdom (Bayt alhikmah) by the caliph
al-Ma'mun at the beginning of the 9th century. The result of this
extensive effort of the Islamic community to confront the challenge of
the presence of the various philosophies and sciences of antiquity and
to understand and digest them in its own terms and according to its
own world view was the translation of a vast corpus of writings into
Arabic. Most of the important philosophical and scientific works of
Aristotle and his school, much of Plato and the Pythagorean school,
and the major works of Greek astronomy, mathematics and medicine such
as the Almagest of Ptolemy, the Elements of Euclid, and the works of
Hippocrates and Galen, were all rendered into Arabic. Furthermore,
important works of astronomy, mathematics and medicine were translated
from Pahlavi and Sanskrit. As a result, Arabic became the most
important scientific language of the world for many centuries and the
depository of much of the wisdom and the sciences of antiquity. The
Muslims did not translate the scientific and philosophical works of
other civilizations out of fear of political or economic domination
but because the structure of Islam itself is based upon the primacy of
knowledge. Nor did they consider these forms of knowing as
"un-lslamic" as long as they confirmed the doctrine of God's Oneness
which Islam considers to have been at the heart of every authentic
revelation from God. Once these sciences and philosophies confirmed
the principle of Oneness, the Muslims considered them as their own.
They made them part of their world view and began to cultivate the
Islamic sciences based on what they had translated, analyzed,
criticized, and assimilated, rejecting what was not in conformity with
the Islamic perspective.
The Muslim mind has always been attracted to the mathematical
sciences in accordance with the "abstract" character of the doctrine
of Oneness which lies at the heart of Islam. The mathematical sciences
have traditionally included astronomy, mathematics itself and much of
what is called physics today.
In astronomy the Muslims integrated the astronomical
traditions of the Indians, Persians, the ancient Near East and
especially the Greeks into a synthesis which began to chart a new
chapter in the history of astronomy from the 8th century onward. The
Almagest of Ptolemy, whose very name in English reveals the Arabic
origin of its Latin translation, was thoroughly studied and its
planetary theory criticized by several astronomers of both the eastern
and western lands of Islam leading to the major critique of the theory
by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and his students, especially Qutb alDin
al-Shirazi, in the 13th century. The Muslims also observed the
heavens carefully and discovered many new stars. The book on stars of
'Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi was in fact translated into Spanish by Alfonso
X el Sabio and had a deep influence upon stellar toponymy in European
languages. Many star names in English such as Aldabaran still recall
their Arabic origin. The Muslims carried out many fresh observations
which were contained in astronomical tables called zij. One of the
acutest of these observers was al-Battani whose work was followed by
numerous others. The zij of al-Ma'mun observed in Baghdad, the
Hakimite zij of Cairo, the Toledan Tables of alZarqali and his
associates, the ll-Khanid zij of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi observed in
Maraghah, and the zij of Ulugh-Beg from Samarqand are among the most
famous Islamic astronomical tables. They wielded a great deal of
influence upon Western astronomy up to the time of Tycho Brahe. The
Muslims were in fact the first to create an astronomical observatory
as a scientific institution, this being the observatory of Maraghah in
Persia established by al-Tusi. This was indirectly the model for the
later European observatories. Many astronomical instruments were
developed by Muslims to carry out observation, the most famous being
the astrolabe. There existed even mechanical astrolabes perfected by
Ibn Samh which must be considered as the ancestor of the mechanical
clock. Astronomical observations also had practical applications
including not only finding the direction of Makkah for prayers, but
also devising almanacs (the word itself being of Arabic origin). The
Muslims also applied their astronomical knowledge to questions of
time-keeping and the calendar. The most exact solar calendar existing
to this day is the Jalali calendar devised under the direction of
'Umar Khayyam in the 12th century and still in use in Persia and
Afghanistan.
As for mathematics proper, like astronomy, it received its
direct impetus from the Quran not only because of the mathematical
structure related to the text of the Sacred Book, but also because the
laws of inheritance delineated in the Quran require rather complicated
mathematical solutions. Here again Muslims began by integrating Greek
and Indian mathematics. The first great Muslim mathematician,
al-Khwarazmi, who lived in the 9th century, wrote a treatise on
arithmetic whose Latin translation brought what is known as Arabic
numerals to the West. To this day guarismo, derived from his name,
means figure or digit in Spanish while algorithm is still used in
English. Al-Khwarazmi is also the author of the first book on algebra.
This science was developed by Muslims on the basis of earlier Greek
and Indian works of a rudimentary nature. The very name algebra comes
from the first part of the name of the book of al-Khwarazmi, entitled
Kirah al-jahr wa'l-muqabalah. Abu Kamil al-Shuja' discussed algebraic
equations with five unknowns. The science was further developed by
such figures as al-Karaji until it reached its peak with Khayyam who
classified by kind and class algebraic equations up to the third
degree.
The Muslims also
excelled in geometry as reflected in their art. The brothers Banu Musa
who lived in the 9th century may be said to be the first outstanding
Muslim geometers while their contemporary Thabit ibn Qurrah used the
method of exhaustion, giving a glimpse of what was to become integral
calculus. Many Muslim mathematicians such as Khayyam and al-Tusi also
dealt with the fifth postulate of Euclid and the problems which follow
if one tries to prove this postulate within the confines of Eucledian
geometry.
Another branch of mathematics developed by Muslims is trigonometry which was
established as a distinct branch of mathematics by al-Biruni. The
Muslim mathematicians, especially al-Battani, Abu'l-Wafa', Ibn Yunus
and Ibn al-Haytham, also developed spherical astronomy and applied it
to the solution of astronomical problems.
The love for the study of magic
squares and amicable numbers led Muslims to develop the theory of
numbers. Al-Khujandi discovered a particular case of Fermat's theorem
that "the sum of two cubes cannot be another cube", while alKaraji
analyzed arithmetic and geometric progressions such as:
1^3+2^3+3^3+...+n^3=( 1+2+3+...+n)^2. Al-Biruni also dealt with
progressions while Ghiyath al-Din Jamshid al-Kashani brought the study
of number theory among Muslims to its peak.
In the field
of physics the Muslims made contributions in especially three domains.
The first was the measurement of specific weights of objects and the
study of the balance following upon the work of Archimedes. In this
domain the writings of al-Biruni and al-Khazini stand out. Secondly
they criticized the Aristotelian theory of projectile motion and tried
to quantify this type of motion. The critique of Ibn Sina,
Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdadi, Ibn Bajjah and others led to the
development of the idea of impetus and momentum and played an
important role in the criticism of Aristotelian physics in the West up
to the early writings of Galileo. Thirdly there is the field of optics
in which the Islamic sciences produced in Ibn al-Haytham (the Latin
Alhazen) who lived in the 11th century, the greatest student of optics
between Ptolemy and Witelo. Ibn al-Haytham's main work on optics, the
Kitah al-manazir, was also well known in the West as Thesaurus
opticus. Ibn al-Haytham solved many optical problems, one of which is
named after him, studied the property of lenses, discovered the camera
obscura, explained correctly the process of vision, studied the
structure of the eye, and explained for the first time why the sun and
the moon appear larger on the horizon. His interest in optics was
carried out two centuries later by Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi and Kamal
al-Din al-Farisi. It was Qutb al-Din who gave the first correct
explanation of the formation of the rainbow.
It is important to recall
that in physics as in many other fields of science the Muslims
observed, measured and carried out experiments. They must be credited
with having developed what came to be known later as the experimental
method.
The hadiths of the Prophet contain many instructions concerning health
including dietary habits; these sayings became the foundation of what
came to be known later as "Prophetic medicine" (al-tibb al-nabawi).
Because of the great attention paid in Islam to the need to take care
of the body and to hygiene, early in Islamic history Muslims began to
cultivate the field of medicine turning once again to all the
knowledge that was available to them from Greek, Persian and Indian
sources. At first the great physicians among Muslims were mostly
Christian but by the 9th century Islamic medicine, properly speaking,
was born with the appearance of the major compendium, @Rhazes Anatomy
Smallpox Antiseptic Psychosomatic Medicine The Paradise of Wisdom
(Firdaws al-hikmah ) by 'Ali ibn Rabban al-Tabari, who synthesized the
Hippocratic and Galenic traditions of medicine with those of India and
Persia. His student, Muhammad ibn Zakariyya' al-Razi (the Latin
Rhazes), was one of the greatest of physicians who emphasized clinical
medicine and observation. He was a master of prognosis and
psychosomatic medicine and also of anatomy. He was the first to
identify and treat smallpox, to use alcohol as an antiseptic and make
medical use of mercury as a purgative. His Kitab al-hawi (Continens)
is the longest work ever written in Islamic medicine and he was
recognized as a medical authority in the West up to the 18th century.
The Canon of Medicine and Meningitis
The greatest of all Muslim
physicians, however, was Ibn Sina who was called "the prince of
physicians" in the West. He synthesized Islamic medicine in his major
masterpiece, al-Qanun fi'l tibb (The Canon of Medicine), which is the
most famous of all medical books in history. It was the final
authority in medical matters in Europe for nearly six centuries and is
still taught wherever Islamic medicine has survived to this day in
such lands as Pakistan and India. Ibn Sina discovered many drugs and
identified and treated several ailments such as meningitis but his
greatest contribution was in the philosophy of medicine. He created a
system of medicine within which medical practice could be carried out
and in which physical and psychological factors, drugs and diet are
combined.
Pulmonary Circulation
After Ibn Sina, Islamic medicine
divided into several branches. In the Arab world Egypt remained a
major center for the study of medicine, especially ophthalmology which
reached its peak at the court of al-Hakim. Cairo possessed excellent
hospitals which also drew physicians from other lands including Ibn
Butlan, author of the famous Calendar of Health, and Ibn Nafis who
discovered the lesser or pulmonary circulation of the blood long
before Michael Servetus, who is usually credited with the discovery.
Gynecology
As for the western lands of Islam including Spain, this
area was likewise witness to the appearance of outstanding physicians
such as Sa'd al-Katib of Cordoba who composed a treatise on
gynecology, and the greatest Muslim figure in surgery, the 12th
century Abu'l-Qasim al-Zahrawi (the Latin Albucasis) whose medical
masterpiece Kitab al-tasrif was well known in the West as Concessio.
One must also mention the Ibn Zuhr family which produced several
outstanding physicians and Abu Marwan 'Abd al-Malik who was the
Maghrib's most outstanding clinical physician. The well known Spanish
philosophers, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd, were also outstanding
physicians. Islamic medicine continued in Persia and the other
eastern lands of the Islamic world under the influence of Ibn Sina
with the appearance of major Persian medical compendia such as the
Treasury of Sharaf al-Din al-Jurjani and the commentaries upon the
Canon by Fakhr al-Din al-Razi and Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi. Even after
the Mongol invasion, medical studies continued as can be seen in the
work of Rashid al-Din Fadlallah, and for the first time there appeared
translations of Chinese medicine and interest in acupuncture among
Muslims. The Islamic medical tradition was revived in the Safavid
period when several diseases such as whooping cough were diagnosed and
treated for the first time and much attention was paid to
pharmacology. Many Persian doctors such as 'Ayn al-Mulk of Shiraz also
travelled to India at this time to usher in the golden age of Islamic
medicine in the subcontinent and to plant the seed of the Islamic
medical tradition which continues to flourish to this day in the soil
of that land.
Major Hospitals
The Ottoman world was also an arena of
great medical activity derived from the heritage of Ibn Sina. The
Ottoman Turks were especially known for the creation of major
hospitals and medical centers. These included not only units for the
care of the physically ill, but also wards for patients with
psychological ailments. The Ottomans were also the first to receive
the influence of modem European medicine in both medicine and
pharmacology. In mentioning Islamic hospitals it is necessary to
mention that all major Islamic cities had hospitals; some like those
of Baghdad were teaching hospitals while some like the Nasiri hospital
of Cairo had thousands of beds for patients with almost any type of
illness. Hygiene in these hospitals was greatly emphasized and al-Razi
had even written a treatise on hygiene in hospitals. Some hospitals
also specialized in particular diseases including psychological ones.
Cairo even had a hospital which specialilzed in patients having
insomnia.
Islamic medical authorities were also always concerned with the significance of
pharmacology and many important works such as the Canon have whole
books devoted to the subject. The Muslims became heir not only to the
pharmacological knowledge of the Greeks as contained in the works of
Dioscorides, but also the vast herbal pharmacopias of the Persians and
Indians. They also studied the medical effects of many drugs,
especially herbs, themselves. The greatest contributions in this field
came from Maghribi scientists such as Ibn Juljul, Ibn al-Salt and the
most original of Muslim pharmacologists, the 12th century scientist,
al-Ghafiqi, whose Book of Simple Drugs provides the best descriptions
of the medical properties of plants known to Muslims. Islamic medicine
combined the use of drugs for medical purposes with dietary
considerations and a whole lifestyle derived from the teachings of
Islam to create a synthesis which has not died out to this day despite
the introduction of modern medicine into most of the Islamic world.
The vast expanse of the Islamic world enabled the Muslims
to develop natural history based not only on the Mediterranean world,
as was the case of the Greek natural historians, but also on most of
the Eurasian and even African land masses. Knowledge of minerals,
plants and animals was assembled from areas as far away as the Malay
world and synthesized for the first time by Ibn Sina in his Kitab
al-Shifa' (The Book of Healing). Such major natural historians as
al-Mas'udi intertwined natural and human history. Al-Biruni likewise
in his study of India turned to the natural history and even geology
of the region, describing correctly the sedimentary nature of the
Ganges basin. He also wrote the most outstanding Muslim work on
mineralogy.
As for botany, the most important treatises were composed in the 12th
century in Spain with the appearance of the work of al-Ghafiqi. This
is also the period when the best known Arabic work on agriculture, the
Kitab al-falahah, was written. The Muslims also showed much interest
in zoology especially in horses as witnessed by the classical text of
al-Jawaliqi, and in falcons and other hunting birds. The works of
al-Jahiz and al-Damiri are especially famous in the field of zoology
and deal with the literary, moral and even theological dimensions of
the study of animals as well as the purely zoological aspects of the
subject. This is also true of a whole class of writings on the
"wonders of creation" of which the book of Abu Yahya al-Qazwini, the
'Aja'ih al-makhluqat (The Wonders of Creation) is perhaps the most
famous.
Likewise in geography, Muslims were able to extend their horizons far beyond the
world of Ptolemy. As a result of travel over land and by sea and the
facile exchange of ideas made possible by the unified structure of the
Islamic world and the hajj which enables pilgrims from all over the
Islamic world to gather and exchange ideas in addition to visiting the
House of God, a vast amount of knowledge of areas from the Pacific to
the Atlantic was assembled. The Muslim geographers starting with
al-Khwarazmi, who laid the foundation of this science among Muslims in
the 9th century, began to study the geography of practically the whole
globe minus the Americas, dividing the earth into the traditional
seven climes each of which they studied carefully from both a
geographical and climactic point of view. They also began to draw maps
some of which reveal with remarkable accuracy many features such as
the origin of the Nile, not discovered in the West until much later.
The foremost among Muslim geographers was Abu 'Abdallah al-Idrisi, who
worked at the court of Roger II in Sicily and who dedicated his famous
book, Kitab al-rujari (The Book of Roger) to him. His maps are among
the great achievements of Islamic science. It was in fact with the
help of Muslim geographers and navigators that Magellan crossed the
Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean. Even Columbus made use of
their knowledge in his discovery of America.
The very name alchemy as well as its
derivative chemistry come from the Arabic al-kimiya'. The Muslims
mastered Alexandrian and even certain elements of Chinese alchemy and
very early in their history, produced their greatest alchemist, Jabir
ibn Hayyan (the Latin Geber) who lived in the 8th century. Putting the
cosmological and symbolic aspects of alchemy aside, one can assert
that this art led to much experimentation with various materials and
in the hands of Muhammad ibn Zakariyya' al-Razi was converted into the
science of chemistry. To this day certain chemical instruments such as
the alembic (al-'anbiq) still bear their original Arabic names and the
mercury-sulphur theory of Islamic alchemy remains as the foundation of
the acid-base theory of chemistry. Al-Razi's division of materials
into animal, vegetable and mineral is still prevalent and a vast body
of knowledge of materials accumulated by Islamic alchemists and
chemists has survived over the centuries in both East and West. For
example the use of dyes in objects of Islamic art ranging from carpets
to miniatures or the making of glass have much to do with this branch
of learning which the West learned completely from Islamic sources
since alchemy was not studied and practiced in the West before the
translation of Arabic texts into Latin in the 11th century .
Islam inherited the
millenial experience in various forms of technology from the peoples
who entered the fold of Islam and the nations which became part of Dar
al-Islam. A wide range of technological knowledge, from the building
of water wheels by the Romans to the underground water system by the
Persians, became part and parcel of the technology of the newly
founded order. Muslims also imported certain kinds of technology from
the Far East such as paper which they brought from China and whose
technology they later transmitted to the West. They also developed
many forms of technology on the basis of earlier existing knowledge
such as the metallurgical art of making the famous Damascene swords,
an art which goes back to the making of steel several thousand years
before on the Iranian plateau. Likewise Muslims developed new
architectural techniques of vaulting, methods of ventilation,
preparations of dyes, techniques of weaving, technologies related to
irrigation and numerous other forms of technology, some of which
survive to this day.
In general Islamic civilization emphasized the harmony between man and
nature as seen in the traditional design of Islamic cities. Maximum
use was made of natural elements and forces, and men built in harmony
with, not in opposition to nature. Some of the Muslim technological
feats such as dams which have survived for over a millenium, domes
which can withstand earthquakes, and steel which reveals incredible
metallurgical know-how, attest to the exceptional attainment of
Muslims in many fields of technology. In fact it was a vastly superior
technology that first impressed the Crusaders in their unsuccessful
attempt to capture the Holy Land and much of this technology was
brought back by the Crusaders to the rest of Europe.
One of the major achievements of Islamic
civilization is architecture which combines technology Treatises on
natural and art. The great masterpieces of Islamic architecture from
the Cordoba Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem to the Taj
Mahal in India, scientists were often display this perfect wedding
between the artistic illustrated with detailed principles of Islam and
remarkable technological know-how. Much of the outstanding medieval
facilitate teaching of the architecture of the West is in fact
indebted to the techniques of Islamic architecture. When one views the
Notre Dame in Paris or some other Gothic cathedral, one is reminded of
the building techniques which travelled from Muslim Cordoba northward.
Gothic arches as well as interior courtyards of so many medieval and
Renaissance European structures remind the viewer of the Islamic
architectural examples from which they originally drew. In fact the
great medieval European architectural tradition is one of the elements
of Western civilization most directly linked with the Islamic world,
while the presence of Islamic architecture can also be directly
experienced in the Moorish style found not only in Spain and Latin
America, but in the southwestern United States as well.
The oldest university in the world which is still
functioning is the eleven hundred-year-old Islamic university of Fez,
Morocco, known as the Qarawiyyin. This old tradition of Islamic
learning influenced the West greatly through Spain. In this land where
Muslims, Christians and Jews lived for the most part peacefully for
many centuries, translations began to be made in the 11th century
mostly in Toledo of Islamic works into Latin often through the
intermediary of Jewish scholars most of whom knew Arabic and often
wrote in Arabic. As a result of these translations, Islamic thought
and through it much of Greek thought became known to the West and
Western schools of learning began to flourish. Even the Islamic
educational system was emulated in Europe and to this day the term
chair in a university reflects the Arabic kursi (literally seat) upon
which a teacher would sit to teach his students in the madrasah
(school of higher learning). As European civillization grew and
reached the high Middle Ages, there was hardly a field of learning or
form of art, whether it was literature or architecture, where there
was not some influence of Islam present. Islamic learning became in
this way part and parcel of Western civilization even if with the
advent of the Renaissance, the West not only turned against its own
medieval past but also sought to forget the long relation it had had
with the Islamic world, one which was based on intellectual respect
despite religious opposition.
from: http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/MSA/introduction/woi_knowledge.html