Seeking the Origins of Modern Science?

REVIEW ARTICLE by George Saliba, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science, Department of Middle East and
Asian Languages and Cultures,  Columbia University.

Toby E. Huff. THE RISE OF EARLY MODERN SCIENCE: ISLAM, CHINA AND THE WEST. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993. Pb. ed., 1995. xiv, 409 pp. Hb. ISBN 0 521 43496 3. Pb. £14.95 (US$19.95), ISBN 0
521 49833 3.

“It is not altogether easy to break the habit of thinking of history as blindly groping toward a goal that the
West alone was clever enough to reach. . . .”
A. C. Graham1

THE QUESTION OF THE ORIGINS OF modern science has been debated for years and
will continue to be debated as long as the history of science is still written as the
history of various scientific traditions modified by cultural labels such as
Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Indian and Arabic/ Islamic. And I am sure
it is obvious to all that such terminology simply masks a clear ideological, political
and, at times, even hegemonic language. For all pre-modern scientific traditions,
the classificatory principle of a particular tradition seems to be linguistic in
nature, contrary to what is usually done in the case of modern science itself. Yet,
while it is easy to understand why a scientific book written in the pre-modern
period, whether in Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic,
Persian or Turkish, may be readily classified as belonging to a particular culture
and tradition, it is not quite clear in which language a modern scientific text must
be written to allow its affiliation with modern science.

                As historians of science survey the various scientific traditions, they

seem to be constantly prepared to shift the criteria that they use to classify the
scientific works which they encounter. No one would dispute the classification of a
scientific text written in Chinese or Greek as belonging to the Chinese or Greek
cultural spheres respectively. But when it comes to other scientific works, say
texts written in Arabic, Persian, Turkish or Urdu, for example, the problem
becomes slightly more complicated and those same historians of science drop
linguistic classificatory terminology to resort instead to a cultural/religious
terminology which designates such works as Islamic. In the case of modern
science, both linguistic and cultural/religious designators seem to be dropped and
French, English, Italian, German and even Japanese scientific works may be
described as modern, with the underlying assumption that all these works must
have something in common that is neither linguistic, nor cultural, nor religious,
with the vague term ‘Western’, as in ‘Western science’, used to describe them.

                A corollary of this methodological chaos is the notion that there is a

definable cultural entity out there that can be called ‘the West’, with its own
independent characteristics, and an equally clearly definable scientific tradition
that can be called ‘modern science’. In addition, no one seems to question the
proposition that the ‘modern’ scientific tradition made its first appearance in this
very ambiguous ‘West’ and research is ongoing to determine why this
phenomenon took place there and nowhere else. Toby E. Huff’s The Rise of Early
Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West is one more work which follows this
line of enquiry.
                Huff is by no means the first person to attempt to explain why modern
science arose in the West and not in the context of another culture. People like
Joseph Needham, in his famous Grand Titration,2 or Max Weber, in several of his
works, have made similar attempts in the past. In the case of Needham, the
question gained much more urgency when he managed to demonstrate that, at
the time when modern science was supposed to have been born in the
West―namely, during the European Renaissance of the sixteenth century―both
the Chinese and Islamic civilizations had attained a level of scientific knowledge,
especially in natural science, which was superior to that in the West. And yet,
modern science was born in the West and not in those other civilizations.
Needham’s attempt to understand why this happened had the unintended result
of making the criteria for ‘modern’ science, and the vague definitions of it,
identical to the criteria and definitions which would be applied to ‘Western’
science. During that process, another unspoken and rather ill-considered principle
also emerged, namely, that one should assess the value and contribution of the
sciences of other cultures in terms of the specific aspects of those sciences that
were incorporated within the accumulative body of modern science, while passing
over other features of those same sciences in total silence. Thus, in the case of
Chinese science, the discovery of the geographically-orienting magnet became an
acceptable Chinese scientific achievement because it could be translated, through
intermediary steps, into the navigational compass, while the whole body of
Chinese medicine would be discarded―until very modern times, that is―because
it did not have the same impact in the West.

                The least that can be said about this methodology is that it does not
yield the kind of history of science that allows a specific science to be spoken of
and studied as just another facet of the culture that produced it to meet its own
needs. Instead, the works of one cultural science are always evaluated in terms
of the criteria of modern science. As a result, the history of science is studied for
the sake of discovering the cumulative connecting links that led to the creation of
modern science and not as an attempt to understand one more feature of the
originating culture in order to comprehend it in its totality.

                Although superficially quite reasonable and legitimate, this manner of

formulating the question of why modern science arose in the West, rather than in
culture ‘X’ or ‘Y’, hides further theoretical pitfalls. Chief among them is the
circularity embedded in this kind of argumentation. For, in order to answer the
question, one must exhibit yet another culture, ‘Z’, that followed the same route
as the West―whatever that route may have been―and managed to produce
modern science in the same way that the West did. Otherwise, the argument
quickly collapses into a circular argument in the following manner. Most
proponents of this view, whether consciously or not, look at science in our day
and assign the term ‘modern’ to that science without defining modernity, relying
only on the sheer fact that it is contemporaneous with us. They then ask which
leading centres produced this ‘modern’ science and find them in Europe and, by
extension, the United States, or what is ambiguously called the West. From there,
it becomes easy to jump to the conclusion that modern science is Western
science. Thus, all other cultures, no matter where they are located and at what
point in their history they are ‘captured’, if they may be ‘captured’ at all, could
not possibly contain the roots of modern science, nor allow modern science to
develop, by the mere fact that they are not Western cultures.
                Moreover, this argument, and the many variations upon it that range
widely in sophistication and acuity, has been put forth now for more than a
hundred years without ever an attempt being made first to define what is meant
by science, in a culturally neutral fashion, or modernity itself, as it applies to
science, or the relationship between science and culture, or, more potently, to
determine what aspects of a culture, especially Western culture, are responsible
for the rise of a modern science that is implicitly called Western science.
Throughout this century and part of the previous one, attempts have been made
to define the singularity of modern Western science by isolating factors
responsible for its development. Such factors as the emphasis on
“experimentation,” the “mathematization of nature” and “freedom from religion,”
have been advanced at one point or another as being the key elements in the
development of modern science. In the case of Huff, one may add to this list the
emphasis on the “institutionalization” or “legal context” of science, or the more
general “philosophical world view,” or even his ambiguous “neutral space and free
inquiry, concepts integral to modern science,” (Huff, i) as also being pivotal. But
as knowledge of non-Western cultural sciences began to increase, especially in
the latter half of this century―and here the work of Needham on Science and
Civilization in China3 and the many new works on Islamic/Arabic science are
crucial―the foundations of the argument for the singularity of modern science
have been eroded. For it was found, for example, that both the Islamic and
Chinese civilizations derived scientific results from experimentation at a time
much earlier than the Renaissance, that they criticized other authoritative
scientific theories on the basis of their own observations, and that they expressed
the results of their findings in mathematical language; and yet, they did not
manage to develop modern science in the manner in which this latter concept is
so poorly articulated.

                In order to avoid the pitfalls of this simplistic line of argumentation,

one must appeal to the more rigorous grounds upon which such arguments ought
to be based. As intimated above, these grounds require that one demonstrate the
independence of Western science from other cultural sciences in order to be able
to say that whatever factors led to the formulation of modern science in Western
culture were, in fact, the product of Western culture itself, while simultaneously
determining that any other culture which embodies the same factors would
indeed produce the same modern science under discussion. In addition, one must
demonstrate the real existence of such a culture.

                When we learn, for example, that the most innovative mathematical
and astronomical ideas that were employed during the European Renaissance
were themselves borrowed from Islamic/Arabic or Chinese civilizations through
many circuitous routes that are now being investigated, then one is forced to ask
about the very roots of modern science and whether they should be placed within
the parameters of Western culture or the other cultures where those innovative
ideas originated.

                This kind of predicament was easier to overcome in the last century,
when many of the findings of the Islamic/Arabic or Chinese sciences were not
really known in the West. During that time of ignorance, people could speak
freely of the so-called modern science and its roots in the genius of Greek
civilization―sometimes referred to as the Greek miracle―and thus conceive of
that science as a purely Western enterprise, thereby making a direct connection
between classical Greek civilization and the modernity of Europe and bypassing
the intervening Roman, Islamic and medieval civilizations with impunity. But now,
at the end of the twentieth century, we know that the most dynamic
revolutionary ideas in astronomy, for example, were developed in the
Islamic/Arabic domain―and were developed explicitly to rebut the authority of
the Greek astronomical tradition―and yet, they were the very same ideas that
made the astronomy of the European Renaissance possible, in the mathematical
technical sense, after having been incorporated into that astronomy. This view is
quite eloquently expressed by the sinologist A. C. Graham, in the same article
quoted at the beginning of this essay, where he says: “Indeed if we wish to find
the best historical perspective for looking forward toward the Scientific
Revolution, there is much to be said for choosing a viewpoint not in Greece but in
the Islamic culture that from A.D. 750 reached from Spain to Turkestan.”4

                With Graham’s words in mind, one can quite legitimately ask about the
roots of modern science, and whether those roots should continue to be placed in
the context of Western culture, with its far-reaching, a historical extension into
classical antiquity. More particularly, one should also ask whether it makes much
sense to speak of science, whether modern or not, in such cultural, linguistic, or
national terms, when the very processes of science themselves respect no such
boundaries and pay no heed to such sentiments. Moreover, since the terms
defining the essential characteristics of both ‘modern science’ and the ‘West’ are
so vaguely defined, is it not quite legitimate to examine as well the same
question that was asked by Graham when he said: “The question may also be
raised whether Ptolemy or even Copernicus and Kepler were in principle any
nearer to modern science than the Chinese and the Maya, or indeed than the first
astronomer, whoever he may have been, who allowed observations to outweigh
numerological considerations of symmetry in his calculations of the month and
the year.”5 Indeed, the empirical emphasis placed by that very first astronomer
on the value of his observations set the inescapable course to modern science. So
where would the origins of modern science then lie?

                In this context of trying to determine the building blocks of modern

science, Huff’s book is a refreshing and welcome contribution. This is not because
it applies a better methodology than previous works on the subject, or because it
answers the big question posed above more satisfactorily, but rather because it
benefits from the research into the history of Islamic and Chinese sciences that
has been going on for about half a century now. As a result, and by bringing to
light the complexity of the scientific production itself and the dangers implicit in
assigning national, linguistic or cultural tokens to that production, his work has
had the unintended consequence of poking holes into the old arguments
regarding the singularity of western modern science, or the autonomy of the
western culture that produced it. In this regard, the present reviewer is very
sympathetic to Huff’s plight. After all, how could he be critical of someone who
writes a book on the history of modern science, documenting in it a whole array
of the achievements of Islamic and Chinese sciences and acknowledging the
integral relationship between those sciences and modern science―a good part of
that relationship being based on research by the present reviewer on the history
of Islamic planetary astronomy―when others writing on the same subject find no
difficulty in jumping from Ptolemy (c. AD 150) to Copernicus (d. AD 1543)
without even blinking?6
                Yet, writing general books of this nature, when neither one of the
scientific traditions under scrutiny is well understood, has intrinsic difficulties.
When one cannot yet demonstrate the exact cultural relationship between
modern science and the West, and when we have, at best, truncated knowledge
of both Islamic and Chinese science―truncated because, as was stated above,
those sciences have been studied until now from the perspective of their
relevance to Western scientific tradition rather than for their own sake, as
features of their own cultures―how may one make claims to a comparative study
of the history of science, as Huff does, without falling into loose and banal
arguments and even, at times, contradictory statements? Concepts advanced by
Huff such as “neutral space and free inquiry,” concepts deemed integral to
modern science, may be argued and discussed, but by no means presumed to be
as established as Huff would like to assume. The whole school of the sociology of
science, or the more contemporary science studies movement, devotes much
space and energy specifically to proving that there is no “neutral space” or “free
inquiry” in the sense in which Huff uses the terms. Besides, if it teaches us
nothing else, our own experience at the end of the twentieth century should
teach us that “free inquiry” is essentially a fiction determined, for the most part,
by the exigencies of the market-place and reigning ideologies much more than by
cultural imperatives, if there are any such imperatives. We also learn by the end
of this century that the best scientific production―now difficult to separate from
technological production―does not always abide by the same rationality for which
Western culture is celebrated, but rather by the more mundane pressures of
economics and marketing which are always lurking behind every scientific
development.

                In the following, I will give only a few examples of the kind of
statements from which such general books ultimately suffer. When Huff says, for
instance, that “science is especially the natural enemy of authoritarian regimes,”
(Huff, 1) he must be either ignoring the tremendous achievements by the Nazi or
the Soviet regimes in the most technically sophisticated sciences, or suggesting
that the authoritarianism of these regimes fades in comparison to what one would
have to presume he sees in Islamic and Chinese cultures. The reviewer, who
knows Huff personally, is aware that he does not mean the latter, but such
statements are inherent in an enterprise which seeks to explain scientific
achievements as functions of “neutral space” and “free inquiry.” From that
prejudgement, he goes on to illustrate with a diagram (Huff, 4) how “Law and
Legal Thought” and the “Theology and Philosophy of Nature,” when channelled
through “Reason, Rationalism [and] Rationality,” whatever those terms may
mean in this context, lead to “Institutional Structures,” on the one hand―and
through those institutions to “Modern Science”―or directly to “Modern Science,”
on the other. From that perspective, Arabic science indeed becomes a “problem,”
and is perceived as such in the subtitle of chapter 2, since it is difficult to
document the same “neutral space,” “free inquiry,” “legal thought,” “theology and
philosophy of nature,” “reason, rationalism and rationality” and “institutional
structures” in Islamic civilization that would presumably give rise to modern
science. It is interesting that neither here, where it would be most relevant, nor
in any other place in the book, does Huff speak of the economic factors that may
be directly connected to the rise of modern science in the West, from the
“discovery” of the New World, to the Age of Discovery and all of its implications
and, finally, to “colonization” and the ongoing imperialism of Western culture
under the newly-emerging concept of “globalization.” In order to be fair,
however, Huff is conscious (Huff, 5-6) of the connection made by Weber between
modern science and capitalism―a connection also accepted by Needham―but
avoids delving into it for, in his own words, it “would entail another volume
altogether.” That indeed will be a very interesting volume if it is ever written.

                Because he has avoided all of the implications of the relationship

between economic factors and modern science―and modern society in
general―Huff treats contemporary underdevelopment as a problem of “barriers
to freedom of thought, expression, and action in the interests of primordial
religious and ethnic identities”(Huff, 7). All this when Huff knows very well that
the most primordial ethnic and religious atrocities happened in the very bosom of
Europe, under the gaze of the most advanced modern science based on principles
such as experimentation, the mathematization of nature and “rationality,” and in
the most developed scientific society of its time. Until one disentangles the web of
relationships between such social, political, and economic forces in Europe itself,
where modern science is supposed to have been born, and demonstrates the
relationship of such forces to modern science and development, it is foolhardy to
urge underdeveloped countries to adopt the imagined benefits of such slogans as
“freedom of thought and expression” in order to obtain the golden key to
modernity assumed to be so intrinsically embedded in the processes of modern
science.

                The danger in this kind of thinking is that it overburdens scientific

activity itself by making it solely responsible for modern development when one
knows very well that scientific processes are very limited in scope and
application, and cannot solve all the problems of modern life, even though we
have become so accustomed to falsely believing science to be the ethos and
symbol of modernity. In fact, the problem is much more complex than that and,
although development can benefit from scientific production, science, whether
modern or not, cannot be made responsible for its failure.

                Furthermore, Huff misrepresents the facts, particularly with regard to

Islamic culture―being unfamiliar with Chinese culture, I will not offer any
criticisms of his presentation of it here―when he claims, for example, that “law
and the secrets of God were carefully guarded” (Huff, 12) in Islamic and Judaic
cultures, a claim probably based on reiterations, by both Maimonides and
Averroes, of the old Greek dictum that the study of philosophy must not be open
to the common man, but restricted to the chosen few. The proliferation of
legal/theological schools of thought in both Judaism and Islam, and the lack of a
centrally-guarded clergy entrusted with such secrets, contradicts Huff’s
contention―despite the wishful thinking of Huff, Maimonides, Averroes and their
Greek predecessors. In any event, even if those restrictions did exist, what do the
secrets of God and law have to do with the development of science? The
existence of any relationship between them still awaits a convincing argument.
Moreover, how does revealing God’s secrets allow us to understand the
development of science and then to write a better history of science, when the
purpose of such an enterprise is to formulate a framework within which individual
scientists and their work may be understood―in the context of the cultural
domain in which the work was produced―thus changing our understanding of
each domain as well as its relationship to the rest of the grand narrative of the
history of science? Finally, when one speaks of science in such general cultural
terms and the cultural “imperatives” that produce science, then one loses the
ability to make distinctions among the scientific activities themselves and thereby
reach any conclusion as to why, for instance, in certain periods of a cultural
science, astronomy advanced while medicine declined.

                On another level, a word should be said about the causes for the
decline of Arabic science. Huff places the beginning of that decline at around the
thirteenth century, or by the beginning of the fourteenth at the latest. He says
quite explicitly that he “would draw the line in terms of significant cultural and
scientific growth at the end of the thirteenth century” (Huff, 47, n.1). He then
goes on to argue, as do many, that the decline was caused by the dominant role
played by religious thought in later centuries, thus making religious thought
responsible for stifling scientific thought. This widely-accepted argument goes
back to the nineteenth century, when Ghazali (d. 1111) was blamed for the
decline of Arabic/Islamic science and his book, The Incoherence of the
Philosophers, came to be taken as the harbinger of that decline. Needless to say,
this argument rested on the usual antagonistic opposition between religion and
science which was already operative in the study of the history of Western
science. One of its later manifestations was articulated by Armand Abel in the
1950s and is unfortunately quoted here, with credence, by Huff (Huff, 53).
Consequently, the argument of opposition between religion and science was
simply applied to Islamic civilization without any consideration being given to the
cultural differences between Islamic and Western civilizations.

                Huff adds to the old thesis of religio-scientific conflict a new

interpretation of findings recently established on the subject of religious
conversions. He uses these results to assert that, since conversion to Islam
increased after the tenth century, free thinking was subsequently restricted (Huff,
47, n. 2), as if to imply that the proponents of free thinking were the non-
Muslims of earlier centuries, without even attempting to tell the reader what he
means by free thinking, or even mentioning the dynamic debates that went on in
every conceivable intellectual field within Islamic religious thought in earlier
centuries.

                At the same time, however, he diverges from the argument of conflict
between religion and science because of his acquaintance with some new facts.
He had already learned from another area of recent research, namely, the area of
Arabic astronomy and, especially, from ongoing investigations regarding its vital
relationship to Copernican astronomy, that the most interesting and revolutionary
planetary theories produced by Islamic civilization were not only produced in
opposition to Greek astronomical theory, but also well after the time of Ghazali,
when Islamic religious thought was supposed to have reigned supreme. He also
knows of the relationship between the Damascene astronomer Ibn al-Shatir (d.
1375) and his counterpart, Copernicus, who came much later. He obviously
knows, as well, of Ibn al-Shatir’s reformed model for the movement of the moon,
which was, together with many other theories which he proposed, contrary to
Greek theory, but identical to the corresponding theories of Copernicus. It is only
in the last forty years that historians have discovered these facts and Huff is to be
congratulated for his awareness of them and for now making them accessible to a
much wider audience, which this book will surely attract.

                Unfortunately, however, Huff did not keep up with the latest research
and the last few years have seen revolutionary findings push forward the date for
the beginning of a decline in Arabic science well into the sixteenth century.
Moreover, it is becoming more and more apparent that the scientists who were
responsible for the production of this radical astronomy were mostly religious
men at the same time. Ibn al-Shatir was a timekeeper at the Umayyad mosque in
Damascus. Other contemporary and subsequent astronomers like Sadr al-Shari`a
al-Bukhari (d. 1347), al-Sharif al-Jurjani (d. 1413), al-Khafri (d. 1550) and
several others were religious scholars in their own right. Even the most
elementary study of the works of these men permits one to begin characterizing
their age as a golden age of astronomy, rather than an age of decline as many,
including Huff, have argued.

                This does not mean that there was no age of decline, but it can be
documented that it primarily occurred in legal and religious thought, rather than
in astronomical thought, during the period in question, a result almost exactly
opposite to what the Eurocentric model would predict. Accordingly, works
exploring the relationship between science and religion, and between Arabic
science and Western science, as well as assumptions made concerning the extent
of free thinking under religious Islam, have to be rewritten in light of these new
findings, and everything said by Huff on these subjects has to be reassessed.

                On the technical level, much could be said about Huff’s understanding
of the role of Arabic astronomy and of Arabic planetary theories in particular. In
one place (Huff, 55), he seems to imply that these theories were developed in
order to account for “discrepancies between theory and observation,” when it
has, in fact, already been established that planetary predictions according to the
Ptolemaic models, as well as according to models developed in opposition to
them, could yield the positions of the planets with reasonable accuracy,
considering the instruments of the time. The same myth is often repeated about
Copernican astronomy―that it fitted better with observations, or that it was
simpler than Ptolemaic astronomy―myths dismissed more than fifty years ago by
Neugebauer and others.7

                The main purpose of all of the theorists whose work is now being
pursued in Arabic astronomy―and whose work had a direct bearing on the
theories of Copernicus―was to try to harmonize the cosmological requirements of
Ptolemaic astronomy with the mathematical models that were supposed to
represent the workings of that cosmology. In very few cases were objections to
Greek astronomy made on the basis of its failure to account for observed facts.
The only instance we know of, so far, is the solitary remark made by Ibn al-Shatir
on the contradiction between predictions for the size of the apparent solar disk,
as derived from the Ptolemaic model for the sun, and its actual measurements.8
Other discrepancies between observed facts and the predictive elements of
Ptolemaic astronomy had already been noted as early as the first half of the ninth
century and not in later centuries when the planetary theories were being
developed.

                On the same technical level, Huff’s understanding of what Copernican

astronomy was supposed to do needs some correction as well. In one instance,
Huff states that “Copernicus and Galileo were committed to a realist
interpretation of the world” (Huff, 41). Although this judgement may be arguably
true for Galileo, one may legitimately ask just what reality Copernicus was
appealing to, or committing himself to, in order to propose a heliocentric
universe, when he had no universal gravitation theory to hold that universe
together cosmologically? The same Arabic-writing astronomers whose
mathematical theorems we now know were employed by Copernicus developed
their theorems specifically because of their objections to the lack of realism in the
cosmological Greek universe as expressed by Ptolemaic astronomy. They aimed
at harmonizing that universe to become more scientifically coherent in order to
make sense of the ‘reality’ of the geocentric universe that Greek astronomy was
supposed to espouse. In that cosmological universe, heliocentrism was already
dismissed as unreal. Therefore, going back to it without a developed universal
gravitation theory is equally unreal, whether the commitment to it was made by
Copernicus, or by anyone else in his time.

                Huff repeats the same claim elsewhere (Huff, 44), agreeing with
Benjamin Nelson that the early modern revolution in science was conducted by
men who were “committed spokesmen of the new truths clearly proclaimed by
the Book of Nature. . . .” Here, one must ask which chapters of the Book of
Nature could proclaim heliocentrism before coining a universal gravitation
concept? If anything, that book spoke to the contrary.

                Without any further elucidation, Huff makes a very similar assertion
regarding heliocentrism (Huff, 57-58), when he asserts that it was the “great
metaphysical core of the modern European scientific revolution of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries” without telling the reader about the real history of
heliocentrism and the benefit which Copernicus accrued from it―only in hindsight
and for reasons that have nothing to do with the kind of ‘realist’ he is proclaimed
to be. According to those familiar with his mathematical astronomy, it may be
claimed that Copernicus was a throw-back to the time of the ancient Greeks,
when the coherence of mathematics and the cosmology that mathematics was
supposed to represent did not receive much consideration―as opposed to the
persistent and long-standing attempts by astronomers working in the context of
Islamic civilization, all of whom insisted on the need to match mathematics with
the ‘real’ world surrounding them, as expressed within the cosmology of the time.
For Copernicus to be a realist he would have had to abandon the ancient Greek
geocentric cosmology and offer a new cosmology of his own that would make of
heliocentrism more than just elegant mathematics. Without a theory of universal
gravitation, this new cosmology could not be developed, as it indeed was about a
century after Copernicus―and not by Copernicus.

                Several other claims made by Huff, such as those concerning the
failure of Arabic science to break away from geocentrism (Huff, 87) on account of
opposition from religious scholars (Huff, 60 and passim), or the need to cling to
lunar cycles, are obviously ill-informed and need not be taken seriously. Similarly,
his claim that the “naturalization” of the Greek sciences is what led to their
decline under Islam (Huff, 65) is highly questionable and not well supported,
neither by Huff, nor by Sabra, from whom he borrowed the concept.

                Furthermore, Huff’s claim that “Copernicus borrowed heavily from the
Almagest of Ptolemy,” a borrowing supposedly “made easier by the advent of the
printing press” (Huff, 322), is really a non sequitur. Almost all of the astronomers
who worked under Islam not only borrowed heavily from the Almagest, but
corrected it, objected to it, reformulated it and wrote commentaries on it, without
the benefit of the printing press.
                Racist remarks such as “even allowing for Arab exaggeration . . . ”
(Huff, 74) should no longer have a place in modern-day books, especially those
that have a great potential for becoming textbooks for the instruction of young
students. Nor should contradictory statements attributing the rise of modern
science to factors such as “free thinking” and “neutral space”―if understood to
mean fewer constraints on the individual scientist―be used to explain why
modern science developed in the West, where such concepts existed, but did not
develop under Islam, when Huff himself describes how the relationship between
the student scientist and his teacher was free of all constraints in Islamic
civilization and depended solely upon their willingness to indulge in whatever
scientific activity they wished. In the present day, research institutes for
advanced study and apprenticeships in laboratories under individual scientists are
considered the main sources of creative science. So why are similar relationships
in medieval Islamic civilization considered contrary to the spirit of modern
science?

                Finally, Huff erroneously follows David King (Huff, 89), who wrote the
biographical entry on Ibn al-Shatir for the Dictionary of Scientific Biography,
where he says: “There is no indication in the known sources that any Muslim
astronomers after Ibn al-Shatir concerned themselves with non-Ptolemaic
astronomy.”9 On the basis of King’s statement, Huff concludes that “an
achievement as great as that of Ibn al-Shatir simply fell on deaf ears because it
was not part of an ongoing educational system.” Neither statement is true and
the published facts now demonstrate the presence of not only those scholars
mentioned above, but also Qushji (d. 1474),10 Birjandi (d. 1525) and Khafri (d.
1550)11, all of whom produced equally ‘great’ works along the lines of those by
Ibn al-Shatir. In the case of Khafri, he easily surpassed Ibn al-Shatir in
sophistication and output. More to the point, and contrary to Huff’s contention,
those astronomers who commented on each other’s works and, at times, even
incorporated them into their own studies (as Khafri did when he twice included
works by Jurjani and Shirazi) represented a continuity of the creative
astronomical tradition well into the sixteenth century as far as we can now tell.
Later sources have not yet been scrutinized for such theories simply because
scholars in the field are still in thrall to the old periodization scheme which Huff,
unfortunately, largely follows in his book. According to that scheme, the decline
of Islamic science dates back to the beginning of the fourteenth century, thus
allowing no room for later developments that we now know took place.

                But, to his credit, Huff also notes that modern discussions on the
history of science tend to bypass the role of other, non-Western sciences,
especially Arabic science (Huff, 61-62), and his book may generally be considered
a desirable corrective to that omission. This is important because it has become
increasingly apparent that a true understanding of Western science is impossible
to achieve without a proper understanding of the role of Arabic science, the
tradition with which Western science has had the longest and most seminal
engagement.

 Notes  
                1                A. C. Graham, “China, Europe, and the Origins of Modern Science: Needham’s The Grand Titration,” in
Chinese Science: Explorations of an Ancient Tradition, ed. Shigeru Nakayama and Nathan Sivin (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1973), 67.
                2                Joseph Needham, Grand Titration (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969).
                3                Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 7 vols., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1954-).
                4                Graham, “China, Europe, and the Origins of Modern Science,” 48.
                5                Ibid., 61.
                6                There is no need to list the significant number of books that adopt this approach. It suffices to look at
any of the modern textbooks on astronomy paying lip service to the history of the discipline to be convinced. See, for
example, Sune Engelbrektson, Astronomy Through Space and Time (Dubuque, IA: WCB Publishers, 1994).
                7                The most elegant and brief statement of Neugebauer’s assessment of Copernican planetary theory and
the myths surrounding it can be found in Otto Neugebauer, “On the Planetary Theory of Copernicus,” Vistas in Astronomy 10
(1968) : 89-103; reprinted in Otto Neugebauer, Astronomy and History: Selected Essays (New York: Springer Verlag, 1983),
491-505.
                8                See George Saliba, “Theory and Observation in Islamic Astronomy: The Work of Ibn al-Shatir of
Damascus (d.1375),” Journal for the History of Astronomy 18 (1987) : 35-43.
                9                David King, “Ibn al-Shatir,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 12 (New York: Scribner’s Sons,
1979), pp. 357-363, especially p. 362.
                10                See George Saliba, “Al-Qushji’s Reform of the Ptolemaic Model for Mercury,” Arabic Sciences and
Philosophy 3 (1993) : 161-203.
                11                See George Saliba, “A Sixteenth-Century Arabic Critique of Ptolemaic Astronomy: The Work of Shams
al-Din al-Khafri,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 25 (1994) : 15-38; George Saliba, “A Redeployment of Mathematics in
a Sixteenth-Century Arabic Critique of Ptolemaic Astronomy,” in Perspectives arabes et médiévales sur la tradition
scientifique et philosophique grecque: Actes du colloque de la S.I.H.S.P.A.I. (Société internationale d’histoire des sciences et
de la philosophie arabe et islamique). Paris, 31 mars-3 avril 1993, eds. A. Hasnawi, A. Elamrani-Jamal, and M. Aouad
(Leuven/Paris: Peeters, 1997) : 105-12