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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... ideas discussed herein have already been articulated, in a preliminary manner, in my book al-Fikr al-Ilmı ̄ al-Arabı ̄ (Balamand University Press, Lebanon, 1998). Now they are available—more extensively developed in some major respects ...
... ideas, which were not yet fully formulated, and are now further developed in this book. Those people patiently listened to what must have sounded to them like half-baked thoughts, and always pushed me to develop those ideas further in ...
... ideas from one culture could easily find a home in the other. (2) Those who were conscious of the downside of the contact theory, and of its failing to document contemporary scientists of Byzantium or Sasanian Iran who could have ...
... ideas usually flourish through open discussions. And it would be highly unlikely that enough such discussions were taking place between the fourth and the eighth century to affect another incoming culture. After all, there were some ...
... ideas from the lands of Islam to the Byzantine territories through the translations that went back from Arabic into Greek (Byzantine Greek at this time), starting at least as early as the tenth century and continuing till the fall of ...
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 |