[cookiemonsieur]

> He stood on the shoulders of Persian, Greek, Indian, and Chinese precursors, while Renaissance inventors, in turn, stood on his.

This is the first time in my life where a western outlet doesn't try and obfuscate the fact that many of the "discoveries" made by europeans in the the renaissance period have taken inspiration from the close to 800 years of Islamic scientific research (who themselves never failed to credit their predecessors).

Typically, when you study the history of science in the west, it starts at ancient greece (who have no contemporaries) then there's a massive blackout of 800 years and poof ! The "light" is magically turned on.

Fair play to the author for not being biased.

[everdrive]

I thought you were going to go the other direction. All I ever read is that the west relied on Islamic science and math, but "no one" will acknowledge this. Except of course it's the only perspective I ever hear about, so I'm not sure who this mythical "no one" is. On the other hard, vanishingly few sources do seem to acknowledge that the Islamic sources "stood on the shoulders" of Greeks and others. Ibn Khaldun states this directly in the Muqaddimah: "The sciences of only one nation, the Greek, have come down to us, because they were translated through al-Ma'mun's efforts."

The full quote:

"The subject here is different from that of these two disciplines which, however, are often similar to it. In a way, it is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines by anyone. I do not know if this is because people have been unaware of it, but there is no reason to suspect them (of having been unaware of it). Perhaps they have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us. There are many sciences. There have been numerous sages among the nations of mankind. The knowledge that has not come down to us is larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians that 'Umar ordered wiped out at the time of the conquest! Where are the sciences of the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, and the Babylonians, and the scholarly products and results that were theirs! Where are the sciences of the Copts, their predecessors! The sciences of only one nation, the Greek, have come down to us, because they were translated through al-Ma'mun's efforts. (His efforts in this direction) were successful, because he had many translators at his disposal and spent much money in this connection. Of the sciences of others, nothing has come to our attention."

[h2zizzle]

>Except of course it's the only perspective I ever hear about, so I'm not sure who this mythical "no one" is.

Most American primary/secondary textbooks (in a country where the majority of people still don't go to college). Ask the average person to name an Islamic analogue to Newton, Copernicus, or da Vinci, you're going to get blank stares. I couldn't do it, and I watched Family Guy Cosmos and everything.

[Mainan_Tagonist]

Are these same average person able to tell what Newton, Copernicus or da Vinci discovered/invented?

[Mainan_Tagonist]

ps: just want to point out that i'm not being snarky, just asking a question in good faith. I heard more than once on TV (incidentally by critics of the catholic church), that Copernicus or Galileo had been burnt at the stake for proving that "the earth wasn't flat".

Knowing that TV and social media do play as large a role as history books or formal education in knowledge acquisition these days, is it really wrong to question whether "the average person" is a valid point of reference when discussing inter-civilisational exchanges of discoveries.

[LegionMammal978]

It's odd how far people have run with simplified versions of Galileo's story. The version I've seen everywhere is "The dastardly anti-science Church hated heliocentrism so much that it persecuted Galileo for it." The Church's support of geocentrism did play a role, but if you look at the details, it seems far closer to "The Roman Church of Galileo's day was filled with scheming politicians, and he (perhaps unwittingly) offended people who he couldn't afford to, so his enemies latched onto his support for heliocentrism as an excuse to get rid of him."

These days, I've come to treat every clean-cut historical anecdote as suspect; there's too much of a game of telephone between people who want history to prove their point.

[elmomle]

I can't speak to any very recent changes (I'm doubtful anything's changed massively, I could be wrong), but I was educated in the US and went to highly selective schools--and it was only in an obscure, elective history of science class fairly late in my college career that I learned about al-Haytham (who was called Alhazen in the class). Meanwhile, I (and many of my HS classmates) could have told you that Copernicus pioneered a heliocentric model of the solar system, or about Newton's laws of motion, etc., when we were 15.

The Renaissance really was taught as "Europeans rediscovered the great classical thinkers", and it was only through my own curiosity that I learned that Islamic science played a key role.

[Mainan_Tagonist]

Here in France, we were taught from fairly early on about Averroes and Avicenne (Ibn Sinna) for instance. There may geographical and societal reasons for these differences, but all in all that's besides the point i was trying to make, which is : The average person may have heard of Newton, Darwin and others, but how many could really explain the theory of gravity or that of evolution without getting at least some of it wrong?

("Gravity... ha yes, the guy with the apple","evolution... sure, we all are descended from apes, right?")

...Therefore, relying on what the average person may know to discuss whether something is publicly acknowledged and understood is perhaps the wrong way to go about this.

[zyklu5]

Indeed. In fact, it is one of the most amusing aspect of the anglophone west (at least for the last few decades). Despite public perception (by public I mean those who have been to university since the 90s), Western historians of science and mathematics in general have never not acknowledged the previous works of the Persianate civilizations commensurate to their knowledge of them in their time. But somehow in the last few decades professional historians have had to waste time figuratively looking over their shoulders lest they be percieved as being Eurocentric. And, if they were to somehow find a way to show -- requiring whatever hermeneutical gymnastics -- that a prominent scientist was influenced (or even better, had stolen) from some other "cultures" than nothing better! (ex: Copernicus from the Maragha school as an example of interpretive gymnastics)

But, of course, this is one of the symptoms of the degeneration that now afflicts your particular civilization and is bringing about it's inevitable transformation to something else -- but better this than the fate of the Abassids or the Sung.

[spwa4]

I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion for this. But it's still the truth: just wait until you try to get muslims to confirm what exactly about islam "safeguarded" science in the middle ages.

The answer is slavery, and patronage by very, very rich people (who outright owned the scientists, and these in turn kept libraries of the great scientific works of the past, as trophies for the sultan, with zero public access). Oh and the fact that they recreated the Roman habit of kidnapping slaves and then selling them, sometimes an enormous distance from where they were captured. That is how Hindu numerals spread.

One very famous example is the "Blue Mosque", the greatest piece of islamic architecture for over 500 years, the tallest building in the world for a very long time (only overshadowed by the Church it was copied from: the Aya Sofia) which is a copy of a Church building by a Jewish architect (who was a slave to the sultan). Yes, minarets are a Christian idea.

Perhaps this is the reason the Blue Mosque doesn't have one of the defining features of islamic architecture of mosques: it doesn't have a catwalk, a podium for selling slaves, which most ottoman mosques have.

Then, usually during periods of economic stress, muslims destroyed their science, usually for religious reasons. Of course, this happened in the Christian west too. In the west science (specifically the copying of books by the Catholic church, then giving public access to them. No public access existed in any caliphate) recovered faster than these religious attacks could destroy it. In islamic nations it didn't. Islam was more scientifically advanced in 800 than in 1800 (or 1900). Or, to put it another way: the more actual muslims a society had (in 800 that was almost none), the less science existed.

[adhamsalama]

Do you have any credible sources for your claims?

[spwa4]

Why? The only disagreement with these claims comes from islamic supremacists. Even in islamic sources directly you can verify most of the claims (slavery, Blue Mosque - Aya Sofia + architect, slavery in mosques, barely any muslims in early muslim society ...)

Look up on Wikipedia, look up in history books. These are not small details.

[graemep]

> This is the first time in my life where a western outlet doesn't try and obfuscate the fact

I do not know what you have been reading, but most western outlets go out of their way to acknowledge this. If anything people tend to idealise the "Islamic golden age" in the same way they do ancient Greece and Rome.

> Typically, when you study the history of science in the west, it starts at ancient greece (who have no contemporaries) then there's a massive blackout of 800 years and poof

They ignore the significant advances made in medieval Europe, and the Byzantine Empire.

[contingencies]

And China... almost everything, including probably the paper it came on and the printing used to produce it.

And India ... from which we derive our concept of mathematical zero which underpins everything.

[graemep]

You would have to be pretty badly informed not to know those two examples though.

Maybe a lot of people are, but they really do have to not want to learn.

[contingencies]

I don't pretend to understand the world and especially other people but this quote seems apt when trying.

To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant. - Amos Bronson Alcott, 1871

[gostsamo]

I'd agree with the gp. An amazing example for such an attitude was some french edition like "History of the World in Ten Chapters and a Half" which said in the introduction that it will talk about greek and roman history and then the modern times because the Byzantine empire just kept the torch burning. I stopped reading right there. Maybe it is different in the more academic literature, but the pop culture narrative is that the eastern roman empire, the islam world, the chinese, and the mongols were some autocratic religious barberians who worshiped things that they do not understand. If western Europe wasn't leading the way, some people reason, then everyone else shouldn't be allowed to stand above. Politics has the habit of using history to justify its own ends and it is true everywhere and in every century.

[Mainan_Tagonist]

What book are you referring to exactly? "History of the world in 10 1/2 chapters" is a fiction, by Julian Barnes.

Is this the book you base your argument on?

[gostsamo]

I don't remember the exact book name, but it is not the argument, it is an example. The argument is multiple instances of pop culture statements and opinions where people believe that the world was on a pause between 476 and 1452 and even if someone else has created something, it was given meaning only when the europeans discovered and improved it. Don't feel obliged to believe me, I know what I've witnessed and shared a data point.

[graemep]

> it was given meaning only when the europeans discovered and improved it.

They also ignored what Europeans discovered in that period.

At the pop culture level a lot of people believe Medieval Europe was in a barbaric dark age and achieved nothing.

[the_third_wave]

You must have read different sources from the ones I read. There is no shortage of mentioning the "Islamic golden age" and the role it played in bringing knowledge from "the east" to "the west" as well as preserving knowledge from and of classical Greece by means of translations to Arabic. There seems to be doubt about the veracity of the latter though as this claim may have been a strategical device to promote 'anti-Byzantinism':

The claim that philosophy and the sciences died out in Christian Byzantium and were transferred to the Islamic world can be found in a number of ninth- and tenth-century Arabic sources, edited and translated from the 19th century onwards and mostly taken at face value since then. However, Dimitri Gutas has explained that, during this time of bitter military struggle with Byzantium in which the Arabs were losing ground, emphasizing the Muslim appropriation of the pagan Greek heritage and claiming that Byzantium destroyed it because of the ideological and political break represented by Christianity was a form of anti-Byzantinism expressed as philhellenism. Gutas has also clarified that Abbasid society appropriated Greek philosophy and science in order to address its own needs: negotiating a canonical version of Islam [1].

Wherever the truth lies I do not see any dearth of mentionings of the role played by Islamic scholars.

[1] https://brill.com/previewpdf/display/book/edcoll/97890043490...

[Mainan_Tagonist]

I wonder if GP is trying to be witty or simply has an axe to grind.

The transmission of knowledge between civilizational blocks is fairly well documented (I recently read Jacques Le Goff on this particular topic), and what is owed to the Islamic civilization is no secret.

For those interested in comparable technical developments in Europe around the same time, for the middle ages were not as dark as usually portrayed, I recommend reading Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine (whom Ken Follett relied on extensively for "The Pillars of the Earth") and David Landes' A Revolution in Time.

[hasmanean]

I think there was a bbc documentary where they showed a manuscript of Newton or Kepler with a geometric proof and compared it to one by Al Jazari. They were identical.

In fact even the vertices were labelled the same, and followed the order of Arabic letters.

Shoulders of giants indeed. Shoulders of jazari.

[mangodrunk]

It’s good the author mentions Persian specifically, given most of the influential mathematicians and scientists who comprised the Islamic Golden Age were Persian.

[julienchastang]

Disagree. If you spend any time studying the history of science, you know that many stars have Arabic names, we use Arabic numbers, and the word Algorithm is Arabic in origin.