Science in the context of Islamic civilization
• Islam has its own world view system including beliefs about "ultimate reality, epistemology, ontology, ethics, purpose, etc."
• Muslims believe that the Qur'an is the final
revelation of Allah for the guidance of humankind.
• The belief that the Qur'an had prophesied
scientific theories and discoveries has become a strong and widespread belief in the Islamic world;
these prophecies are often offered as evidence of the divine origin of the Qur'an; see scientific
foreknowledge in sacred texts for further discussion of this issue.
Islamic Golden Age
• This period traditionally rfers the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration of the House of
Wisdom in Baghdad, where scholars from various parts of the world sought to translate and gather all the known world's knowledge into Arabic.
• It is said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate with the Mongol invasions and the Sack of Baghdad in 1258.
• Several contemporary scholars, however, place the end of the Islamic Golden Age to be around the 15th to 16th centuries.
• The metaphor of a golden age began to be applied in 19th- century by Orientalism. In 1868 Josias Leslie Porter, the author of a
Handbook for Travelers in Syria and Palestine, observed that the most beautiful mosques of Damascus were "like Mohammedanism itself, now rapidly decaying" and relics of "the golden age of Islam".
Notable fields of Sciences
• The roots of Islamic science drew primarily upon Arab, Persian, Indian and Greek learning.
• The extent of Islamic scientific achievement is not as yet fully understood, but it is extremely vast.
• a wide range of subject areas; most notably
– Mathematics Astronomy Medicine
• Other notable areas, and specialized subjects, of scientific inquiry include
– Physics, Alchemy and chemistry Cosmology Ophthalmology
– Geography and cartography Sociology, Psychology
Innovations
• Muslim engineers made a number of innovative industrial uses of
• hydropower, tidal power, wind power, and petroleum.
• watermills in the Islamic world date back to the 7th century,
• By the time of the Crusades, every province throughout the Islamic world had mills in operation. These mills performed a variety of agricultural and industrial tasks.
• It has been argued that the industrial use of waterpower had spread from
Islamic to Christian Spain, where fulling mills, paper mills, and forge mills were recorded for the first time in Catalonia.
• A number of industries were generated during the
Muslim Agricultural Revolution, including early industries for textiles, sugar, rope-making, matting, silk, and paper.
• Latin translations of the 12th century passed on knowledge of chemistry and instrument making in particular.
Literature
• The best known fiction from the Islamic world was
The Book of One Thousand and One Nights /Kitāb alf laylah wa-laylah.
• This epic has been influential in the West since it was
translated in the 18th century. Many imitations were written, various characters from this epic have themselves become cultural icons in Western culture, such as Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba.
• A famous example of Arabic poetry on romance was
Layla and Majnun, which further developed mainly poets in Persian, Turkish dating back to the Umayyad era in the 7th century.
• It is a tragic story of undying love much like the later Romeo and Juliet.
The views of on the impact of medieval Islamic science
• There are several different views on Islamic science among historians of science.
• The traditionalist view, by Bertrand Russell: Islamic science, while admirable in many technical ways, lacked the intellectual energy required for innovation and was chiefly important as a preserver of ancient knowledge and transmitter to medieval Europe.
• The revisionist view, as exemplified by Abdus Salam, George Saliba and John M.
Hobson: a Muslim scientific revolution occurred during the Middle Ages.
• Scholars such as Donald Routledge Hill and Ahmad Y Hassan: Islam was the driving force behind the Muslim achievements.
• Dallal: science in medieval Islam was "practiced on a scale unprecedented in earlier human history or even contemporary human history".
• Toby E. Huff: although Islamic science did produce a number of innovations, it did not lead to the Scientific Revolution.
• Will Durant, Fielding H. Garrison, Hossein Nasr and Bernard Lewis: Muslim scientists helped in laying the foundations for an experimental science with their contributions to the scientific method and their empirical, experimental and quantitative approach to scientific inquiry.
Causes of the Decline
• 1. Invasions
• a. The Crusade: put the Islamic world under pressure with invasions in the 11th and 12th centuries.
• b. The Mongols: A far greater threat emerged from the East during the 13th century.The destruction of Baghdad and the House of Wisdom by Hulagu Khan in 1258.
• c. The Christian Reconquista: In the Iberian Peninsula, the Catholic Monarchs completed themissions in 1492, which also marks, for some historians, the end of the Islamic Golden Age
Causes of the Decline
• 2. Politics, reasoning and economics
• political mismanagement
• the stifling of ijtihad (independent reasoning) in the 12th century in favor of institutionalised taqleed (imitation) thinking played a part.
• Some Muslims rejected the thesis, arguing that science was always kept separate from religious argument;
• they instead analysed the decline in terms of economic and
political factors. Economically the Ottoman conquest of the Arabic- speaking Middle East in 1516-17 placed the traditional heart of the Islamic world under Ottoman Turkish control. Starting in the 16th century, the opening by the European powers of new sea trade routes to East Asia and the Americas bypassed the Islamic
economies, greatly reducing prosperity.
