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
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... activities continued to take place in Byzantine4 or Sasanian civilization that could have put those texts in circulation and thus made them readily available to the translators who worked in the extensive translation movement of early ...
... activities that were patronized by al-Mamu ̄n, some apparently verifiably real such as the mission he sent to the desert of Sinja ̄r to measure the length of one degree along the Earth's meridian,31 and to conduct some astronomical ...
... activities that took place during his reign, but I know of a great number of books that were translated for three brothers, known collectively as Banu ̄ Mu ̄sa ̄, who worked at his court, and sometimes at great risk. I shall have reason ...
... activities could not have been accomplished by people who were just learning how to translate under the earliest Abbasids, as the classical narrative claims. The situation gets more complicated, again on the level of details, when we ...
... only does the classical narrative fail to solve the problems I have been discussing so far, which are connected with the beginnings of scientific activities in Islamic civilization; it also fails to account for the 20 Chapter 1.
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 |