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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... period of the Abbasid times (circa 750–900 A.D.) and how they quickly generated a veritable golden age of Islamic science and philosophy. In this context, very few authors would go beyond the characterization of this Islamic golden age ...
... period that has come to be 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 ...
... period of the Abba- sid times, mainly during the latter part of the eighth century and the early part of the ninth, as a result of one or more of the following processes of transformation: (1) Contact between the nascent Islamic ...
... period of Greek civilization, and most of them were indeed produced before the third or the fourth century A.D. As far as we can tell, and as far as the sources demonstrate, no similar activities continued to take place in Byzantine4 or ...
... period—for example, Cosmas Indicopleustes (c. 550 A.D.) proposed a flat Earth about 800 years after Eratosthenes measured Earth's circumference.9 Knowing of the treatment of the mathematician Hypatia, who fell in between two competing ...
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 |