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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... earlier in al-Fikr are supported here by fuller evidence. Furthermore, the new literature that has appeared since the publication of al-Fikr, especially that which bears on that book's main thesis, is critiqued in this volume. This can ...
... earlier Greek and Sanskrit texts into Arabic. I am thinking in particular of such major Greek works as the Almagest of Ptolemy (d. ca. 150 A.D.) and the Elements of Euclid (d. ca. 265 B.C.), which had been translated into Arabic more ...
... earlier civilizations or to share great geographic spans with them.2 This “contact theory” had the distinct advantage of explaining the birth of Islamic science as a result of outside forces, a disposition already signaled by a ...
... earlier classical Greek times. In that light it becomes unimaginable that any Byzantine scholar of that period could have produced anything of the sophistication of Ptolemy, Euclid, or Galen, or even fully understood what those giants ...
... earlier 100-year rule of the the Umayyads? What was so special about the Abbasids? Here the classical narrative offers three plausible explanations for that starting point, two of them corollaries of one another: (1) It is very well ...
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 |