[2Gkashmiri]

in my family there has been a simple question being raised for as many years i can remember but there has never been a satisfactory answer yet. "if early muslims had all the science, mathematics, geography, philosophy and all fields of science including hundreds of scientists who laid down the foundations of modern science with their works, what happened 800 years ago that all that science just vanished?"

Then years ago i read "origin" by "Dan brown" where an interesting line caught my attention

“By the end of the eleventh century,” Edmond said, “the greatest intellectual exploration and discovery on earth was taking place in and around Baghdad. Then, almost overnight, that changed. A brilliant scholar named Hamid al-Ghazali—now considered one of the most influential Muslims in history—wrote a series of persuasive texts questioning the logic of Plato and Aristotle and declaring mathematics to be ‘the philosophy of the devil.’ This began a confluence of events that undermined scientific thinking. The study of theology was made compulsory, and eventually the entire Islamic scientific movement collapsed.”

Since reading this, i've been trying to understand 2 things. 1, is this just fiction on the part of author and in that case, isnt it slander, spreading false information about a scholar who many hold to high regards and 2, if this is true, then this fucking asshole is responsible for causing immeasurable harm to "science" as a human idea on the whole.

While i think just one person "might not" be responsible for single-handedly causing such a travesty on his own, there is no doubt "something" happened that caused this change. This author says it was this ghazali guy, maybe there were others also. I don't know but i surely would want to know

[noufalibrahim]

This is an oft repeated piece of idle scholarship that atheists and orientalists use to "explain" the decline of the so called "Islamic Golden Age". I've seen Steven Weinberg mention this as well as Neil Tyson.

The factors were complex. There were economic and socio-political events that affected the stability and life in these societies. Several other reasons contributed to this downfall and it finally happened. To pin all the blame on a single scholar is disingenuous. Al Ghazzali's "Incoherence of the philosophers" was a warning against some of the techniques philosophers used especially in the context of interpreting the primary texts of Islam to come up with religious rulings. There were also philosophical arguments against scientific (read material) explanations precluding the hand of God in material affairs but this wasn't one killing blow against centuries of scientific scholarship.

Here are a few articles that discuss this from a traditional Muslim point of view if you're interested. https://mohamedghilan.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/an-illusion-o... https://traversingtradition.com/2020/11/19/science-history-a.... I had something that addressed it more directly but can't find it right now.

[2Gkashmiri]

no. You are not answering my question. you are simply saying dont blame ghazali. My question is, what caused the death of "desire for scientific temper" and economic conditions do not change someones quest for knowledge or for that matter, influence an entire population away from science who took to avoid it like the plague. I had this talk with a guy last week and when i mentioned ghazali, he said something on the lines of "are you talking about his first phase or second phase?" then when i showed him this quote, this person goes "yes. obviously his first phase. in his second phase he rejected his earlier texts and even started learning the same thing he rejected earlier but the damage was done".

You cant just tell a population to reject a way of thinking but apparently someone did manage to do that

[artem247]

>> economic conditions do not change someones quest for knowledge

In my country science almost ceased to exist after the fall of Soviet Union. So economic conditions do play a role. The western Age of Reason in XVIII also has relationship to complex changes in the society - rise of merchant class, acceptance of usury, etc. And I would say that "whole population avoids science like a plague" would be a strong overstatement more echoing the modern view on Islamic countries with strong Salafi influence.

[heavenlyblue]

I would like to see what the OP would do if they were suddenly forced to live in the Stone Age. Would they spend time doing philosophising or restoring the civilisation and actually feeding themselves?

[2Gkashmiri]

imagine living in the stone age and finding yourself in ancient greece meeting a madman named plato and socrates

[heavenlyblue]

We're speaking of the degradation of our living conditions to the Stone Age, not an actual time travel into the past.

[andrepd]

> economic conditions do not change someones quest for knowledge

Come on... are you for real? You're telling me that subsistence farmers should have the same "thirst for knowledge" as scholars in a rich economic and cultural centre of an empire? Of course economic conditions matter! Some people are even of the opinion that they're the only things that matter.

[selimthegrim]

Mongol invasions, Hulagu and Ibn Taymiyyah probably had as big a role. Albiruni in Punjab and Ibn Shatir in Damascus made fine contributions which are just not studied in Islamiyat classes because everyone thinks of glory in terms of Alauddin Khliji/Ziauddin Barni or Aurangzeb Alamgir/Shah Waliullah instead of building universities, observatories etc

[qersist3nce]

The sudden "thing" that happened was Mongol Invasion[0].

Imagine Germany in 1945 losing the war, only having one major library, and the allies burn it down, decimate the population to 10% of the prior count[1], and throw the books down to Rhine River "...in such quantities that the river ran black with the ink from the books"[2].

The Mongols just invaded, pillaged and killed in a mind-less fashion. Middle-east was unlucky cause it was just geographically near them. They also wreaked havoc on China, Korea and Russia. Japan was lucky that storm sank their ships (which were forcibly built by conquered Chinese)

I have not studied al-Ghazali but I think the good'ol war had the major role in this decline and the current state of the middle east.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_E...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom#Destruction_by...

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> what happened 800 years ago that all that science just vanished?

A big part of the answer is the Sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongol armies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)#Destru...

>Contemporary accounts state Mongol soldiers looted and then destroyed mosques, palaces, libraries, and hospitals. Priceless books from Baghdad's thirty-six public libraries were torn apart, the looters using their leather covers as sandals.[36] Grand buildings that had been the work of generations were burned to the ground. The House of Wisdom (the Grand Library of Baghdad), containing countless precious historical documents and books on subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy, was destroyed. Claims have been made that the Tigris ran red from the blood of the scientists and philosophers killed.[37][38] Tales of the destruction of books - tossed into the Tigris such that the water turned black from the ink - seem to originate from the 14th century.[39][40]

Baghdad at the time was the religious, political, and intellectual center of Islam. You could think of it as the combined New York, Washington DC, and Silicon Valley of the Islamic world. Think what would happen to American culture if all of a sudden, those 3 were suddenly destroyed. How would that shift the balance of culture? Something very similar happened to Islam in 1258, and I would say, we are probably still seeing the fallout of that to this day.

[christkv]

This happened to China as well yet it recovered better.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

China was different. Kublia Khan actually preserved a lot of the Chinese institutions but put himself on top. There was not the wholesale destruction of books and scholars. This would have been like Hulagu going to Baghdad, converting to Islam and making himself Caliph and reigning from Baghdad. That is not what happened to Baghdad.

[2Gkashmiri]

yes. I had read this one some time ago. My question still stands, what made muslims go from inquisitive science seekers like the one in the article, father of robotics, to "science=bad". This sentiment is continuing to this day with almost all the religious preachers who find it "incomprehensible" that science can exist in the same plane as religion. To explain my point, the "talk of the town" is usually whenever the weatherman comes on the news and says something like "we forecast heavy rains for 2 days then sunny day for a week". As a person who "gets science" i know what this guy just said so i'm like "ok. fine so prepare for a jacket to work" while the religious folk say "this is heresy. do you know if god wants, god can change night into day, rain into sun in the blink of an eye. saying what will happen tomorrow is saying you are not a believer in god because god can end the world today and there be no tomorrow or god can make tomorrow a sunny day when this guy is saying it will rain".

You know in india and pakistan, in present times, 2020 and coming 2021, there is "always" a fight between science people and religious people on the "appearance of crescent" on religious days. the science folk say the motion of moon is calculated and we can precisely know for next hundreds of years if on a particular day the crescent will be visible from a location but the religious folk refuse to accept.

what i am saying is what made these religious folk distrust and hate science ? did someone tell them don't promote science or it will eat their lunch? or something else?

[abdulhaq]

Religious muslims don't say that the weather forecast is heresy, that would be nonsense. Perhaps someone said to you that God can change the weather to be other-than-what-was-forecast, which from the Islamic POV is simple plain sense.

Religious folk don't deny that the course of the moon can be calculated, some say that for establishing the start of the lunar month a sighting must be obtained, this is a complex issue that has nothing to do with believing or not in the predictable motions of astronomical objects.

[nethunters]

In the Islamic empire it was mostly due to the economic and political conditions that caused the decline of scientific study. However in the modern world, people of science generally view religious folks with distrust and they have the mindset that you can't be religious and a person of science yet historically most scientists were religious as well. Take Isaac Newton as an example who was a scientist and a theologian and had even written multiple literary works on the Bible.

With the moon sighting issue you presented this is similar in other countries too. However it isn't predominantly due to a distrust of science; sometimes certain scholars and groups will not adapt their rulings due to the fact that their parents and previous generations did this and they won't change not because they hate science.

The view in the UK on the moon-sighting debacle is that viewing the moon is necessary to commence the month as it was mentioned to the nearest meaning by the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w) himself that we do not rely on calculations and the month is sometimes 29 and sometimes 30 (not 29 and a fraction of day as is the scientific view). The most correct and accepted view is that this isn't prohibiting or belittling astronomical calculations in deciding the month, rather it is a lessening of the burden to calculate and act upon exact calculations.

However the consensus is that astronomical calculations can be used to negate impossible viewings of the moon.

[andrepd]

Why did Germans go from having a functioning liberal democratic society, to becoming some of the most cruel barbarians in human history, to becoming a peace-loving nation, all over the course of a few decades?

Things are complicated and the forces of history move in unpredictable and difficult to explain ways. We can identify broad trends which change cultures and societies: catastrophic events, economic changes, political changes, etc. But there's often no single explanation.

[idlewords]

Baghdad was not the intellectual center of Islam at the time of the Mongol invasion, that was Central Asia. Neither was the Mongol invasion dispositive, though it is significant that the Mongols razed cities whose irrigation systems were one of the ingredients for the high degree of technical and theoretical knowledge supporting the enlightenment.

As I commented elsewhere in the thread, there's a terrific recent history of all of this: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691165851/lo...

[abdulhaq]

Lots of big mistakes here. His name was Abu Hamid alGhazali. If you read his "almunqidh min aD-Dalaal" (Deliverance From Error) which was an autobiography and summary of his thought, he states that e.g.

"MATHEMATICS. This embraces arithmetic, plane geometry and solid geometry. None of its results are connected with religious matters, either to deny or to affirm them. They are matters of demonstration which it is impossible to deny once they have been understood and apprehended."

"LOGIC. Nothing in logic is relevant to religion by way of denial or affirmation.",

"Just as it is not a condition of religion to reject medical science, so likewise the rejection of natural science is not one of its conditions, except with regard to particular points".

You can find the text at https://ghazali.org/books/md/gz101.htm, for me this was a very influential book.

[keiferski]

History is really not that simple and you should always be wary of anyone trying to ascribe blame to a single person or event.

There were many events that led to the “end of the Islamic Golden Age,” but a closer analysis reveals that nothing really ended, but simply was moved around.

Consider that the Ottomans were technologically superior to Europeans until about the 17th century, or that Al-Andalus was around until the 15th century.

But, overall, the single biggest event to impact the era was probably the Mongol sacking of Baghdad. That ended a lot of intellectual culture in rather violent fashion.

[jbay808]

> But, overall, the single biggest event to impact the era was probably the Mongol sacking of Baghdad.

Just goes to show how Eurocentric my history education was; I never heard about this. Fascinating.

[andrepd]

I never learned that my country used forced labour in its colonies until the 60s, or that we dropped napalm on civilian villages as a reprisal. I'm very skeptical about the quality of history lessons in school, no matter the country.

[bitdizzy]

Anyone who tells you history is shaped by the opinions of scholars is ill informed on the mechanisms of the world. What is true is that political forces will rationalize the actions they take for their material interests by finding a convenient fig leaf.

The people who spread this theory about the decline of the Islamic golden age likely also believe that the Iconoclasm was really about graven images or that the ascendancy of the West was due to the people with all the power accepting the arguments of bookish nerds during the enlightenment.

There were emperors of China who used Laozi to justify the burning of books. Do you think they were just being principled in their hyperliteralist reading?

[selimthegrim]

If you believe Joseph Needham (who according to George Steiner was not above telling a white lie or two) one would think they were getting rid of rival Mohist siege engineers

[rramadass]

First off, don't rely on History lessons from "Dan Brown" :-) The topic of decline of "Scientific Temper" in the Islamic World is a complex and nuanced subject with contributing various factors. Here are some major points;

* Much of the "Golden Age of Islam" is actually attributable to cultures which were originally not Islamic at all eg: Persia, The Levant, Mediterranean, Central Asia, Indian subcontinent. The decline started with the "Islamization" of these cultures by the Arabs who were far more "primitive". This is the worst of brawn over brain.

* The rise of "fundamental" Islam; most notably the Ash'ari within Sunni sect (al-Ghazali was just one of the most well known of this group) to the detriment of all the other "forward looking" sects in Islam.

* The Mongol invasion which wiped out a unified Islamic empire leading to more internecine strife within Islam.

* The Christian Crusades.

* The general ossification and fossilization of beliefs in Islamic cultures causing them to turn away from the "Modern Scientific Enlightenment" movement which started in Europe.

Note that similar decline of cultures have happened before due to similar (but not same) reasons; most notably with Ancient China and India though not to the same degree.

[kbk]

> in my family there has been a simple question being raised for as many years i can remember but there has never been a satisfactory answer yet

if that is the case you should read to Malek Bannabi[1]: The Conditions of Renaissance, Question of Ideas in Muslim World, The Ideological Struggle in Third World Countries ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malek_Bennabi

[yumraj]

> what happened 800 years ago that all that science just vanished?"

To me it has always seemed like this was simply a side effect of Islam taking deep root.

Before this the older, pre-Islamic culture was still there, but as time passed Islam, as evidenced by the conservative Islam we see today, took hold leading the Islamic territories away from math and science.

[idlewords]

There is a book you should read, Lost Enlightenment: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691165851/lo...

The flourishing of Islamic science took place not in Baghdad, but in Central Asia, and it was already in steep decline when al-Ghazali wrote his polemics. The reasons for both the rise and decline of the Central Asian enlightenment are fascinating and complex.

The tl;dr is that these cities (most now ruins) relied on very complicated irrigation systems that required a high degree of technical skill to maintain, and were also quite cosmopolitan places culturally, since they were never Arabized and lay on major trade routes, guaranteeing them exposure to ideas and scholarly texts from India (although interestingly, not so much from China).

Anyway, it's a great book and will put the rise and decline of this period in context for you.

[2Gkashmiri]

thank you. I will be going through this book as early as possible.

[selimthegrim]

Nitpick: “...as soon as possible” sounds more natural to native speakers

Ulugh Beg’s observatory was what Ottomans’ short lived one was built to compete with

[2Gkashmiri]

urrghh... i was "thinking" of writing "i will be devouring this book as fast as possible" because wink wink torrents but changed the wording because i didn't want to write the "t" word but yeah

[idlewords]

What sounds most natural to native speakers is not correcting people's language unasked.

[BeetleB]

A lot of people hate being corrected on language, but many welcome it. In my life, I've certainly had my fair share of people come to me upset saying "I've been saying it wrong all this time and you never told me!"

Best not to jump to conclusions about the speaker's wishes.

[selimthegrim]

Fair enough, but he and I share a native non-English language, so I thought I was being helpful.

[2Gkashmiri]

i often try to keep my language as close to british english but very sometimes there is a slip up. I try to avoid this though

[gerash]

Disclaimer: I'm no historian. But my guess is it's often not a simple cause. This is a lot like how, say, tech companies evolve.

For example is there a simple answer to why, say, HP isn't considered the most successful tech companies right now while it was at some point in time?

My guess is other groups of people learn from them and surpass them overtime. This can also be true even within a single company where one org used to be the most important one but over time another org brings in more money and becomes more important

[Cyph0n]

As others have already mentioned, blaming the decline solely on al-Ghazali is the simplistic, orientalist view. Neil deGrasse Tyson recently helped propagate this argument as well.

The reality was much more complex.

If you’re interested, I’d suggest checking out Dr. George Saliba’s writings on this topic. A good start is “Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance”. For a shorter intro, check out this lecture [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/66bV1rdMois

[O_H_E]

I agree with many of the sibling replies but I would like to address different point.

> "including hundreds of scientists who laid down the foundations of modern science with their works, what happened 800 years ago that all that science just vanished?"

That science didn't "just vanish". If it did, how would it have "laid down the foundations of modern science"? Yes, definitely the "Siege of Baghdad" [1] had a major impact but lot (no claims about how much) of knowledge later influenced the western "awakening". [2]

The awesome thing is: non of this is new. Humanity always worked that way. For example wikipedia also have articles on the Greek and Indian influences to that "enlightenment" era in the islamic world. [3][4]

DISCLAIMER: I don't actually know much about the history in detail, I am sure there is much more that can be said, due to some past cursory knowledge I was just able to look things up.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258) 2.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_world_contributions_... 3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_contributions_to_the_I... 4. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_influence_on_Islamic_...

[spoonjim]

Modern Islamic governments are, on average, profoundly anti-liberal, anti-progress, and anti-rights, and that cannot coexist with a thriving culture of scientific inquiry. It’s possible that all of this traces back to al-Ghazali but I suspect that there is quite a bit more to it than him alone.

[Zariff]

Neil deGrasse Tyson also mentioned this. User noufalibrahim already gave a good response to that. But if you're interested, Mohammed Hijab also replied to that claim in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRnYNig9jU&t=36s&ab_channel...

[you_know_the_]

I would say the crusade to blame for the decline of Muslims golden age. When the crusade started around 12 century, it brought devision among Muslims and Christians in places such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. For centuries, Muslims, Christians and Jews lived next to each other and collaborated with each other but the crusade killed that friendship.

[N1H1L]

You are forgetting the Mongols. They said the Euphrates ran black for a month due to the books dumped into the river. The Siege of Baghdad killed all of what you described

[andrepd]

I really feel like I shouldn't have to say this, but perhaps it is not a good idea to take history lessons from a DAN BROWN NOVEL!

Funnily enough: searching for 30secs on AskHistorians leads to an answer debunking the precise theory that you expound on your post! [0] TL;DR: The major cause of the end of the Islamic Golden Age was the catastrophic destruction of Bagdhad in 1258, and of surrounding Mesopotamia.

It's a bit irresponsible to propagate misconceptions like this, especially when the source is Dan f*cking Brown. :)

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/97rd7e/

[mavelikara]

> , if this is true, then this fucking asshole is responsible for causing immeasurable harm to "science" as a human idea on the whole.

Irrespective of what you think of the theory, it will help us all if we could identify and prevent the people among us now who could cause such harm to humanity.