The problem of Arabic science

The problem of Arabic science has at least two dimensions. One concerns the failure of Arabic science to give birth to modern science; the other concerns the apparent decline and retrogression of scientific thought and practice in Arabic-Islamic civilization after the thirteenth century. Although the question of why intellectual thought retrogressed after the golden era is a matter of considerable interest to the inhabitants of the contemporary Muslim world, it is a problem that lies outside the bounds of the present inquiry.

Our concern is with the fact that from the eighth century to the end of the fourteenth, Arabic science was probably the most advanced science in the world, greatly surpassing the West and China. In virtually every field of endeavor – in astronomy, alchemy, mathematics, medicine, optics, and so forth – Arabic scientists (that is, Middle Eastern individuals primarily using the Arabic language but including Arabs, Iranians, Christians, Jews, and others) were in the forefront of scientific advance. The facts, theories, and scientific speculations contained in their treatises were the most advanced to be had anywhere in the world, including China. This is illustrated by the following considerations.

While the Greek scientific heritage was lost to the Western world for the centuries between the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the great translation movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Arabs4 had virtually full access to that heritage from the eighth century onward. This occurred because of a momentous translation effort whereby the great works of Greece and other cultures were translated into Arabic. While the transmission of these ancient sciences into Arabic-Islamic civilization was selective, it was thoroughly representative of Greek scientific and philosophic thought as a whole. Moreover, the Arabic borrowing of the Hindu numeral system must be accorded high recognition.

For the past five hundred years in the West, the pursuit of science has been more or less unfettered. If, in the light of more recent assessments of the freedom of thought and inquiry that existed in the universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we add another three hundred years, then we may say that the pursuit of science in the West has been carried on undiminished for nearly nine hundred years. This flight of the imagination, if you will, was both sponsored by and motivated by the idea that the natural world is a rational and ordered universe and that man is a rational creature who is able to understand and accurately describe that universe. Whether or not men and women can solve the riddles of existence, so this view goes, they are able to advance human understanding mightily by applying reason and the instruments of rationality to the world we inhabit.

The breakthrough that allowed freedom of scientific inquiry is undoubtedly one of the most powerful intellectual (and social) revolutions in the history of humankind. As the paradigmatic form of free inquiry, science has been given a roving commission to set all the domains of thought aright. Science is thus the natural enemy of all vested interests – social, political, and religious – including those of the scientific establishment itself. For the scientific mind refuses to let things stand as they are. The organized skepticism of the scientific ethos is ever present and always doubtful of the latest (and even the long-standing) intellectual consensus.

Given this intellectual commission to investigate all forms and manner of existence, science is especially the natural enemy of authoritarian regimes. Indeed, such regimes can exist only if they repress or otherwise subvert those forms of scientific inquiry that reveal the true nature of the social – economic, political, and medical – consequences of their rule. We must be careful here not to confuse journalism and the press with science.

When this study first went to press in the early 1990s, there was a lingering suspicion in some quarters that modern science was a peculiar preference of the Western world, that in the history of global science the Arabs and Muslims as well as the Chinese (with their more otherworldly values) had other preferences and never intended to contribute to modern science. And who needs it anyhow?

Today that sense has dissipated. It now seems evident that modern science and technology are intimately connected to economic development and to the amelioration of the human condition. Moreover, historians of what is now identified as “colonial science” have begun to suggest that at least early and tentative steps toward modern science were made long ago in many countries around the world by indigenous individuals who were drawn to the study of the natural world before the encroachment of the West. Although some of these studies have gone a little too far in extolling ethnically based cognitive systems that purport to be self-contained and complete, others have found more open-ended endeavors that can be seen as contributions to “universal” science.

In the field of medicine, surgeons in many Muslim countries today, such as Iran, Saudia Arabia, Pakistan, and Tunisia, have the skills to perform and have been performing organ transplants (heart, liver, cornea) for some time. Tunisia has had this capacity since the early 1970s. Now Tunisia has an organ donor program and even a very low-profile genetic counseling program to avert the genetic consequences of cousin marriages in Arab populations. Likewise, some Chinese scientists are currently at the cutting edge of stem cell research.

The major question facing developing countries today is not whether they will accept the results of natural science but whether their governing elites will grant autonomy to all of their aspiring scientists – social and natural. Will they allow their scientists to objectively describe the social and natural worlds and publicly report their results, above all, when those results cast political authorities in a poor light? That is the challenge of the twenty-first century.

The problem of Chinese science

Due to the publication of Joseph Needham's profound and monumental study, Science and Civilisation in China, the question of why modern science arose in the West but not in the East has focused on a comparison of Europe and China. The implicit suggestion has been that Chinese science came closest to paralleling Western scientific achievement, and therefore China probably came closer than any other civilization to giving birth to modern science. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 5, however, the path leading to the scientific revolution in Europe was paved most significantly by Arabic-Islamic scholars. Not only had the Arabs developed, discussed, and deployed several aspects of the experimental method, but they had also developed the mathematical tools necessary to reach the highest levels of mathematical astronomy. Furthermore, the work undertaken by those associated with the Marâgha observatory in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, culminating in the work of Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375), resulted in the development of new planetary models of the universe. These have often been described as the first non-Ptolemaic models along the path to modern science. It was these planetary innovations that were to be adopted (or independently invented) by Copernicus. The missing ingredient was the heliocentric anchoring, not mathematical or other scientific devices. It was the failure to make this metaphysical leap from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe that prevented the Arabs from making the move “from the closed world to the infinite universe.”

In the case of China, however, the disparity between the state of Chinese science and that of the West – but also the disparity with Arabic science – was far greater in regard to the theoretical foundations upon which the scientific revolution was ultimately launched in Europe. The superiority of China to the West, to which Needham refers, was primarily a technological advantage, conveyed in Needham's claim that from the first century B.C. until the fifteenth century, “Chinese civilization was much more efficient than occidental [civilization] in applying human natural knowledge to practical human needs.”

We are now in a position to develop a more detailed comparative view of the institutional arrangements and cultural climates of the civilizations of the West and Islam insofar as they inhibited or supported the development of modern science. We have seen that, despite the inhibitions surrounding the study of the ancient or foreign sciences in Islam, considerable progress was made. During a period of nearly five hundred years the natural sciences reached their highest state of development in the world among those who used the Arabic language in the Middle East. Given the high state of scientific development – mathematical, computational, theoretical, and experimental – in a language clearly foreign to Europe, it is evident that the cultural advantages of the Middle East exceeded those of Europe until after the thirteenth century. For that reason one would have anticipated the Arab world to have made the great leap to modern science long before the Europeans. Such an expectation would also follow from a long-standing theorem in the sociology of science. That is, given any aggregate of cultural objects with a specifiable number of separate units that can be combined and recombined in different configurations, the number of new combinations and permutations (inventions and discoveries) is a mathematical function of the existing base. The larger the existing base, the more new scientific and technological innovations that should be expected. This idea was developed by the American sociologist William F. Ogburn into the thesis of the inevitability of simultaneous, independent, and multiple discovery. In the 1920s he and Dorothy Thomas culled the history of science and technology and found 148 such simultaneous, independent, and multiple discoveries, including the calculus, non-Euclidean geometries, and the law of the conservation of energy.

In 1961 this thesis was extended by Robert Merton and Elinor Barber when their study of significant scientific discoveries yielded 264 cases of multiple and independent discovery.

The civilizations of Islam, China, and the West over the course of their histories have been inspired by contrasting images of reason, rationality, and the man of knowledge. Those images and their attendant worldviews continue to inform the present shaping the language of discourse and appearing to set limits on possibilities. From the outset, devout Muslims were inclined to think that all wisdom was contained in the Quran and that therefore all true sciences must be found therein. Such was the origin of the idea of Prophetic medicine, that is, medical knowledge derived from the sacred teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. But alongside that tradition there was another, that of Greek philosophy.

For a time the scientists and natural philosophers of Islam, and especially Arab astronomers, managed to carry on their work, reaching notable heights of broad knowledge and even preparing the way for the scientific revolution in the West. While the Greek modes of reason and logic were well known to the enlightened men of medicine, philosophy, and science, these modes were held at bay by the religious authorities, so that in the long run, no social institutions were founded that could protect and support freethinking, a term commonly denoting heresy in Islam. Down through the centuries those foundational beliefs and their institutional grounding created barriers preventing the development of modern science and democractic institutions. I shall return to this in a moment.

In China the image of the man of knowledge was first and foremost that of an enlightened individual who was also morally committed to the traditional ways. The epitome of the learned man was someone who had mastered the Confucian classics and who, through long and arduous study, understood the place of man in a harmonious cosmos. It was he who could advise the emperor on statecraft and moral affairs and, being thus enlightened, could follow a course that would avert natural catastrophes and social unrest. It was toward the goal of understanding the ebbs and flows of man and nature – the organic harmony of man and nature – that the man of learning directed his being.

Viewed from a comparative and civilizational point of view, the rise of modern science appears quite different than it does when seen exclusively as an intra-European movement. In the first instance, we realize that dedicated investigators of the processes of nature existed in other societies and civilizations around the globe. Over the course of time learned scholars exerted their utmost to fashion the technical tools and the explanatory devices needed to accomplish the task of mapping out and explaining all the realms of nature. What is perhaps most surprising is the fact that Arabic-Islamic culture and civilization had the most advanced science to be found in the world prior to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In optics, astronomy, the mathematical disciplines of geometry and trigonometry, and medicine, its accomplishments outshone those of the West as well as China. We also know that men of science in the Islamic world wrote treatises on experimental science (in optics, medicine, and astronomy) and that they applied these techniques to specific areas of inquiry, especially optics. Here one thinks of the research program designed to explain the rainbow and the controlled experiments performed to achieve that end. In addition, in the realm of experiment, one thinks also of efforts in medicine and pharmacology.

It must be said, however, that these scientific activities were often scattered geographically, isolated in their influence, and conducted in semi-secrecy. The transmission of important correspondence and scientific treatises between investigators in distant places was often long delayed, incomplete, or even completely interrupted by local events and political upheavals. Still, the work went forward, and, over the course of time, indispensable elements of scientific practice accumulated and became a unique heritage of human endeavor.

If one takes the view of historians of science such as Edward Rosen, Herbert Butterfield, and notable others, the Copernican revolution was a major transformation in the Western conception of the universe and the individual's place in it. So viewed, the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a profound metaphysical revolution.

A major access point for understanding the problem of the rise of modern science can be found in the multiple institutional arrangements that create and sustain the role of the scientist. In directing our attention to that problem, we should consider the broader institutional arrangements that entail the scientific role-set. From one point of view, those values and commitments that constitute the scientist's role-set can be called the ethos of science, as I noted in Chapter 1. As Robert Merton originally expressed the idea, the norms of the ethos of science “are expressed in the form of prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences, and permissions.” And these are centered on the values of universalism, communalism, organized skepticism, and disinterestedness.

Although sociologists of science in the past have attempted to view the role of the scientist as that of a narrowly defined cultural actor, I have suggested just the opposite: the scientist is and always has been a purveyor of knowledge affecting the widest reaches of thought and even metaphysics – though scientists today would deny involvement in any such thing. In part this disclaimer is a defensive self-effacement that may derive from the narrowness of contemporary scientific specialization and problem solving. On the other hand, it comes from a neglect of the overall role of science in society and the ways in which the scientific vision shapes all of our perceptions of physical, cultural, and psychological reality. Given all of the twentieth-century breakthroughs in modern biology and biochemistry that have made possible various forms of cloning and genetic engineering, it is apparent that scientific inquiry does indeed raise ethical and moral issues. These issues concern not only how scientific knowledge should be used but also what forms of inquiry are ethically permissible.

The breakthrough to modern science centered on the freedom of nonecclesiastical elites to describe (and explain) the known world – freely, publicly, and completely – in terms radically at variance with the received religious wisdom. Although Copernicus and other astronomers, especially Galileo and Kepler, were intent to establish the science of astronomy, there is no denying the fact that their scientific claims radically altered the Judeo-Christian worldview.

Ever since the appearance of Charles Homer Haskins's classic study, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, scholars have known that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries experienced an extraordinary efflorescence of creativity and new cultural forms. Charles Haskins, Hastings Rashdall, F. W. Maitland, and other scholars were certainly aware of the revival of the study of law and its impact on the development of the university, and even the impact of legal studies on the church and canon law. But with the publication of Harold J. Berman's book, Law and Revolution, we were reminded as perhaps never before of the extraordinary revolutionary nature of the legal and institutional reforms that erupted and swept across Europe during this period. Professor Berman's fresh account, based on the harvest of legal scholarship since the 1930s, brings to light the centrality of the sweeping legal reforms, indeed, the revolutionary reconstruction, of all the realms and divisions of law – feudal, manorial, urban, commercial, and royal – and therewith the reconstitution of medieval European society. It is this great legal transformation that laid the foundations for the rise and autonomous development of modern science.

At the center of this development one finds the legal and political principle of treating collective actors as a single entity – a corporation. Some social theorists have recognized that the existence of these “new corporate actors” changes the nature of social action, creating new social and economic dynamics that must be accounted for by revised social, economic, and political theories. The emergence of corporate actors was unquestionably revolutionary in that the legal theory which made them possible created a variety of new forms and powers of association that were in fact unique to the West, since they were wholly absent in Islamic as well as Chinese law. Furthermore, the legal theory of corporations brings in its train constitutional principles establishing such political ideas as constitutional government, consent in political decision making, the right to political and legal representation, the powers of adjudication and jurisdiction, and even the power of autonomous legislation.

This book is about the rise of modern science and how the world got to be the way it is. The twentieth century has witnessed extraordinary collisions of societies, cultures, and civilizations. As a by-product of the newly intensified global economy, the last quarter of this century has experienced unprecedented fusions of cultures. What has not been sufficiently recognized, however, is the degree to which the cultural and legal forms forged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the West laid the foundations for the present world order. Among these early modern cultural forms are those that created forums of free and open discourse that have led to universal forms of participation – in the world of thought, in government, and in commerce. Modern science is one striking example of a universalizing form of social discourse and participation. The continuing globalization of the practice of modern science represents a prime test of the proposition that universal forms of dialogue and participation exist and that they appeal to peoples of diverse cultures of origin. The possible shift of the center of modern science from the West to the East further dramatizes the universality of this mode of dialogue.

Nevertheless, alongside these universalizing forms of discourse and participation are equally strong forces asserting the priority of ethnic and local particularities. There are also those who fear more sinister uses of the fruits of scientific understanding. Likewise, the battle over the ascendancies of the various forms of reason and rationality will continue unabated. The present moment is filled with anticipation and apprehension as to whether the forces of equality and inclusiveness will prevail, or whether the forces of ethnic exclusivity and indigenous identities will further divide the communities of the world.

The modernity of science

In the present world, science and its offshoots appear to be the epitome of modernity. The scientific method of treating every conceivable natural, human, or social malady is everywhere in evidence. If the scientific approach has not been applied to the problem at hand, the treatment and analysis are thought to be either defective or suspect. This state of affairs is not bereft of moral critics who think that science itself has too much power or that the strictly scientific point of view, especially in medicine, claims too much, is overly confident, arrogant, and even capable of reaching false diagnoses. In the Western world there are those who think that science itself is a “social problem.” To them the technological products of science – excessive levels of radiation released into the atmosphere of local communities, the inadequately monitored use of pesticides, the general degradation of the natural environment caused by the dumping of toxic substances, and even global warming – are all to be laid at the door of modern science and technology. Nevertheless, alternative forms of knowledge – those derived from religion, mysticism, or occult sciences such as astrology – must offer their own defenses against the prevailing scientific posture. If they are to be accredited, these alternatives must be shown to produce their results and achieve their effects in ways that are consistent with either scientific ignorance (“about this we have no knowledge”) or scientific wisdom (“this outcome is perfectly conceivable within expanded parameters of our present scientific knowledge”).Indeed, it is common to refer to the privileged status of scientific knowledge in the modern world. This phrase means several things. First, it implies that the knowledge claims of scientific experts are given pride of place in public discussion and, above all, in matters of health, public and private. Second, expert witnesses, who are reputed to be scientific experts, are permitted to testify in courts of law regarding arcane and abstruse topics that laymen are hard-pressed to understand. In such circumstances these experts are permitted to use their scientific knowledge to establish possible facts as well as the probable causes of events.

In a broad sense one may say that the sources of reason and rationality in any civilization are to be found in its religion, philosophy, and law. These spheres of discourse and inquiry, before the emergence of autonomous science, interact to produce various amalgams of rational discourse based on the idioms, metaphors, and vocabulary of their domains. In some civilizations, such as classical Greece, philosophy was undoubtedly the queen of intellectual life. This has prompted many observers to note that wherever Greek thought prevailed it shaped images of man and his capacities in the most rational of directions, and this influence has been felt even down to the present day.

The strictly religious sources of rationality, however, as Max Weber so acutely saw, are scarcely to be overlooked. For once images of the proper aims of the religious life have been conjured up, they establish, to use Clifford Geertz's formulation, “powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” In the Western world these religious images created an unprecedented faith in reason and the rational ordering of the natural world. This rationalist metaphysic has continued to undergird the scientific worldview ever since the Greeks.

In addition to the strictly religious order of things, one needs to consider the legal conceptions that in many ways have become the operative mechanisms whereby the more narrowly religious moods and motivations have become ensconced in an institutional order. For it would be unduly restrictive to overlook the independent influence that legal canons and methods of procedures, indeed, the legal mind, have had on the construction of authoritative modes of reason and rationality in the daily practice of dispute resolution.

Historians of science, on the other hand, have sought more narrowly to find the sources of scientific rationality in the arts and crafts, that is, in the prevailing technology of artisanry. Even Max Weber took this path at various points in his thinking. Weber insisted that it was from the Renaissance arts that “the method of experiment” arose.

We saw in the preceding chapter and earlier that from about the eighth to the fourteenth century, the Arabs had the most advanced science in the world. Consequently, in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, optics, and physical experimentation – which led directly to modern science – Chinese science was second to that of the Arab-Islamic world. Present scholarship regarding Chinese science suggests, moreover, that China developed along lines quite independent of the West and the Arabic Middle East. The Chinese knew nothing of Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, or Galen. Nevertheless, there were areas in which the Chinese did accomplish great things, though in almost no case was there continuous and progressive development.

As we saw in Chapter 2, discussions can be found in the writings of Chinese mathematicians on arithmetic fractions, the statement of formulas for the computation of areas and volumes, the solution to systems of simultaneous equations, and procedures for square and cube extraction. These are to be found in The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Procedures (from about the first century). During the Sung dynasty (ca. 960–1279) Chinese mathematics underwent another period of creative growth, especially in algebraic computation. It is said that “a general technique was found for the solution of numerical equations containing any power of a single unknown.” However, it has also been claimed that the Chinese system of representation and positional notation, as well as its techniques of computation (with counting rods), were cumbersome and not nearly as generalizable and easy to use as the Arabic-Hindu numeral system. These Arabic-Hindu numerals, located in a decimal place value system had been available in al-Khwarizmi's work since about 825. In contrast, the course of development of mathematics in China required a move from computation with counting rods to the use of the abacus (generally in about the sixteenth century) and the incorporation and use of the zero (in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). Only in the seventeenth century was the method of paper-and-pen calculation (and hence recorded arithmetic operations) introduced into mathematics with the arrival of the Jesuits.