[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.

[h2zizzle]

You're missing the point. There's value in even simply knowing the names. I may not know the details of a given historical scientist's accomplishments, but if their name floats around the cultural ether, I can pluck it from the air and type it into Wikipedia. Most Americans - likely most Westerners - cannot do that with even a dozen or so non-European historical scientists, because we don't even know their names.

This massive gap in the common understanding of the way the modern world came to be is concerning; undermines most people's model of the development of civilization is, for example, one of the things that makes it easy to drop bombs on historical sites (and the descendants of those who built them), or to ignore when other parties do the same. "Ignore what the peasants think, only elite thought matters," has never preceded an era of sustainable peace and prosperity.

[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.