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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... known at times as the Renaissance of the twelfth century. Some of the texts that were translated into Latin during this period had already been translated from much earlier Greek and Sanskrit texts into Arabic. I am thinking in ...
... known, Islamic civilization came into being around the cities of Mecca and Medina and around northern Arabian tribal areas and cities that were not exactly desert steppes. Within that environment the pre-Islamic Arabian civilization had ...
... known, as is repeatedly emphasized by the classical narrative, that the general character of the Abbasid dynasty allowed the ascendancy of the “Persian elements” of the Islamic empire. For, after all, the argument goes, the Abbasids ...
... known collectively as Banu ̄ Mu ̄sa ̄, who worked at his court, and sometimes at great risk. I shall have reason to return to this aspect of the translation movement in the following chapter when I explain the alternative narrative ...
... known from the Indian and the Greek sources, and they could not have been accomplished by someone who was only a beneficiary of an early stage of translation. Habash devised new ways of projecting planespheric astrolabes that preserved ...
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 |