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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... language of the religious sciences as well, irrespective of the geographic area where those sciences were written or ... language of that discipline. The manner in which this term is used here simply means that Arabic was clearly the ...
... languages, its ultimate message may resonate differently with readers who feel a sense of kinship with the Islamic civilization, whatever their racial, national, linguistic, or religious affiliation. It is to these readers that the ...
... languages. In the later Abbasid times, most of the books that were sought for translation were on the whole theoretical in nature and were much more sophisticated in content. In contrast, one finds in the later period such translations ...
... language of the text is impeccably good Arabic, technical terms and all; and the Arabic translation even corrects the “mistakes” of the original Greek Almagest. Who taught al- Hajja ̄j the technical terms, and who taught him how to ...
... language that was developed by the Arabic-writing algebraists of Qusta ̄'s time, as is evident from Qusta ̄'s reference to the title of Diophantus's work as sina ̄at al-jabr (Art of Algebra), a term that does not exist in Greek, and as ...
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 |