Islamic Science and the Making of the European RenaissanceThe rise and fall of the Islamic scientific tradition, and the relationship of Islamic science to European science during the Renaissance. The Islamic scientific tradition has been described many times in accounts of Islamic civilization and general histories of science, with most authors tracing its beginnings to the appropriation of ideas from other ancient civilizations—the Greeks in particular. In this thought-provoking and original book, George Saliba argues that, contrary to the generally accepted view, the foundations of Islamic scientific thought were laid well before Greek sources were formally translated into Arabic in the ninth century. Drawing on an account by the tenth-century intellectual historian Ibn al-Naidm that is ignored by most modern scholars, Saliba suggests that early translations from mainly Persian and Greek sources outlining elementary scientific ideas for the use of government departments were the impetus for the development of the Islamic scientific tradition. He argues further that there was an organic relationship between the Islamic scientific thought that developed in the later centuries and the science that came into being in Europe during the Renaissance. Saliba outlines the conventional accounts of Islamic science, then discusses their shortcomings and proposes an alternate narrative. Using astronomy as a template for tracing the progress of science in Islamic civilization, Saliba demonstrates the originality of Islamic scientific thought. He details the innovations (including new mathematical tools) made by the Islamic astronomers from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, and offers evidence that Copernicus could have known of and drawn on their work. Rather than viewing the rise and fall of Islamic science from the often-narrated perspectives of politics and religion, Saliba focuses on the scientific production itself and the complex social, economic, and intellectual conditions that made it possible. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 45
... Persian, Syriac, or even later Turkish and Urdu at home. And yet they mostly expressed their intellectual production, and especially the scientific part of it, in Arabic, much as Ibn Maymu ̄n (Maimonides) wrote most of his philosophical ...
... Persian (c. 550) and Sergius of Rasaina (d. 536), and the slightly later writers Severus Sebokht (c. 660) and George, Bishop of the Arabs (c. 724). The theory asserts that those people brought the Greek tradition into Syriac first, only ...
... Persian origins. It is also true that the men who occupied the high positions of government, at least in the early Abbasid times, and at the ranks of viziers and the like, such as the members of the Barmakid family, were themselves of ...
... Persian translations, simply because there were no more sciences left in Persian after their abandonment from the time of Alexander's plunder. This explanation fits well with the then-prevailing trend in the classical sources just ...
... Persian, and were later translated into Arabic during Abbasid times. But even those astrological texts can hardly be called a reclamation of the Greek sciences on the scale or sophistication in which they were reclaimed during Abbasid ...
Contents
1 | |
Question of Beginnings II | 27 |
3 Encounter with the Greek Scientific Tradition | 73 |
The Critical Innovations | 131 |
The Case of Astronomy | 171 |
The Copernican Connection | 193 |
The Fecundity of Astronomical Thought | 233 |
Notes and References | 257 |
Bibliography | 289 |
Index | 307 |