Science & Islam by Ehsan Masood
Icon Books, £14.99
THE accepted role for the Dar al Islam is that it served as a living left luggage locker where Greek science was conveniently stored during the Dark Ages before being reclaimed with the Renaissance. Here Masood tries to do in this small book what Joseph Needham did for Chinese science in 24 volumes and show that Muslims – and non-Muslims – in the Caliphate built on what they borrowed and returned it with massive interest to the West.
Islamic science had its economic and philosophical roots. The litter of Arab names that spill across the history of science shows the people, the sciences, the product. Algebra was driven by the complexities of Muslim inheritance laws. Medicine was encouraged by Mohammad’s dictum “all diseases, save old age, have remedies”. Astronomy had the twin engines of liturgy and astrology. Establishing prayer times, the start of the lunar month and the direction of Mecca drove astronomers to improve their observations while no ruler went to war or married without a reading of the stars. As a result Ptolemaic astronomy was elaborately refined.
Science & Islam conclusively makes its case yet Masood skirts the questions of why science flourished and when. Understandable, since the answers are uncomfortable. In truth the golden age of Islamic science was limited, bracketed as it was between Haroun al-Rashid – the counterpoint to Scherezade in A Thousand and One Nights – ruler of late 8th Century Baghdad and Salah al-Din, nemesis of the Crusaders, at the end of the 12th century. It flowered in the centuries of religious tolerance and rationalism even if Haroun al-Rashid’s son, the Caliph al-Mamun, overstepped the mark by persecuting intellectuals who refused to accept rationalism. In contrast, in 10th century Cairo, Hassan ibn al-Haitham anticipated Roger Bacon and “put nature to the question”.
In the 12th century the fundamentalists struck back with al-Ghazali’s The Incoherence of the Philosophers claiming science was denying space to God and needed to stand aside. Despite Ibn-Rushd’s refutation, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, science withered and died. Experimental medicine was judged uncertain and replaced by prophet’s medicine based on medical references in the Qur’an and the Hadith – the collected sayings of the Prophet – the activities of evil spirits and the notion of apostasy as disease thus beating Soviet communism to the psychiatric wards by a millennium. Its folk medicine was redolent of the today’s “bad science” fads of Prince Charles, Cherie Blair and the Daily Mail.
The Door of Ijtihad – innovation – was firmly closed for theology in the 10th century. Two centuries later it was firmly slammed for science and science regressed to craft and quacks. A lesson that should not be lost as today’s new dogmas such as “Creation Science” threaten the integrity and rationalism of science education.
Glyn Ford
