Is Science Western in Origin Preview - CK Raju

Preview page 2 of 16…Foreword to theDissenting Knowledges Pamphlet SeriesVinay Lal, Founding EditorIn his densely argued essay, Raju makes mincemeat of thereceived view of the Greek origins of science. He speaks ofthree different phases through which the received narrativewas constructed, though his argument is peppered with agreat many other critical observations. The story of theGreek origins of science, Raju argues, can nowhere be found‘from the beginning of the Christian Dark Age to thebeginning of the Crusades’. The Greeks had a primitivesystem of numeration; similarly, since much has been madeof the great library of Alexandria, it is imperative torecognize that people other than Greeks produced its books.Raju has elsewhere, in a forthcoming work on Euclid,detailed what exactly it is that we know about Euclid, andwhat might be the sources of our knowledge about Euclid;and he surprises us with the observation that the sum totalof any credible knowledge about someone called ‘Euclid’ iszero. This is the same ‘Euclid’ who had become such aglobalized and universal figure that even someone likeMohandas Gandhi could effortlessly allude to him in hisown quest for truth and precision: as he was to explain to thepassengers on board a ship on 25 December 1931, ‘It is a selfevidentaxiom, like the axioms of Euclid, that one cannothave peace unless there is in one an intense longing forpeace all round.’ Speaking of zero, however, it is well known

Preview page 3 of 16that the idea of zero (sunya) came to the West from India,mediated by the Arabs; but astronomy and trigonometryalso traveled in that direction, even if the West has longpersisted in the fiction that these sciences were transmittedto India from the West.Having established that the story of the transmission ofastronomy and geometry from the Greeks to, in effect, therest of the world during the Crusades cannot be given anycredence, Raju argues that, in the period of the Inquisition, aconcerted attempt was made to suggest that Europeansindependently rediscovered the scientific knowledge. Rajusees in the much-celebrated account of the supposedCopernican revolution, which takes us from a geocentricview of the universe to a heliocentric view, evidence only ofa sustained and pernicious hellenocentrism. ThoughCopernicus used Islamic sources to reach his conclusions, hefailed to acknowledge them. In the final phase of theWestern appropriation of scientific knowledge, whichcontinues down to the present day, the entire apparatus ofimperialist power was marshaled to press forth the case thataccurate scientific knowledge had always been themonopoly of the Europe. Indeed, though Raju does not go sofar, this view was bound to prevail in Europe consideringthat most ‘natives’ were held to be altogether devoid of thefaculty of reasoning. Raju’s intent here is also to question thesupposition that knowledge in the West has a secular cast.‘Note how theology has crept in’, he avers: ‘we are asked tobelieve that science is about deducing the consequences ofsome “laws” instituted by a god who created the cosmos, ashas been made out in the West since Newton.’

Preview page 4 of 16Raju’s pamphlet, then, takes its place along others in thisseries that have probed the assumptions underlying thedisciplines of economics and anthropology. This pamphletseries, as I noted at the outset, is one of many enterprises tohave emerged out of the desire of some scholars, academics,activists, and public intellectuals, who first convenedtogether in Penang, Malaysia in early 2002, to create a newforum, which has been termed “Multiversity”, that will atonce enable a wholesale but rigorous and searching critiqueof the frameworks of modern knowledge as well as moreecumenical political and cultural futures. Multiversity’smembers are committed to the proposition that there needsto be less conversation with the West and more conversationbetween peoples of the South. Long before India, China,Southeast Asia, and Africa interacted with Europe, theyinteracted with each other; indeed, the Indian Ocean was aglobal world, a crossroads, but part of the effect ofcolonialism has been to obscure these earlier histories. Theconception of what constitutes the “world” has narrowed soconsiderably that everywhere outside Europe it meansknowledge only of one’s own country and of the Euro-American world. These, apparently, are the borders of oursupposed cosmopolitanism.…Readers are invited to learn more about the pamphlet seriesand Multiversity by accessing http://www.multiworld.organd http://vlal.bol.ucla. edu/multiversity/.University of California, Los AngelesJune 2009

Preview page 5 of 16Is ScienceWestern in Origin?C. K. Rajucience is a creation of the West—or so the story goes.On this creation story, science began in Hellenic(Greek) culture, and developed in post-renaissanceEurope. The rest of the world had no clue.A typical account is in the “classic” history of mathematicsby Rouse Ball:The history of mathematics cannot with certainty be tracedback to any school or period before...the...Greeks...thoughall early races... knew something of numeration...and...theelements of land-surveying, yet the rules which theypossessed were...founded only on... observation andexperiment, and were neither deduced from nor did they

Preview page 6 of 16form part of any science. 1He presupposes that (a) deduction is more important toscience than observation or experiment (which leads to mere“rules”), and that (b) only the Greek “race” had deduction.Needham avoids the racist part of the explanation; butlapses into an otherwise similar view about Chinese “landsurveying”versus Euclidean geometry. 2Unlike political history, it is hard to counter or even explainthe biases in the history of science. “Information poverty” isa consequence of industrial capitalism—even otherwiseeducatedpeople are often scientifically illiterate. Like otherilliterates, they uncritically accept and repeat stories fromsocially “authoritative” sources. Scientists, too, may not beknowledgeable enough, for in practice they rely heavily onauthority (again because industrial capitalism breedsexcessive specialization). Moreover, scientists focus ontechnique, and carelessly propagate any given history.Consequently, very few can put science together with itshistory and philosophy and build a counter-story. India is aparticularly pathetic case: it has no university department ofhistory and philosophy of science, even 60 years afterindependence. No wonder, the same old story isperpetuated by current Indian school texts, 3 which mentionmany Greek names as the originators of mathematics andscience. These Greek names are accompanied by images ofCaucasian stereotypes. Children get the underlying racistmessage!This history was contested during the NDA-led regime, 4 butwith such extreme counter-biases that there was a storm of

Preview page 7 of 16protest. Newspapers then highlighted the “saffronization ofhistory”, suggesting that religious fanaticism leads toconcocted history as a means of glorification. Certainly thisis true, and certainly this needs to be highlighted. Butdoesn’t this apply to all situations where religion is mixedwith state power? The Crusades and the Inquisition wereperiods of marked religious fanaticism in Europe. Did thatinfluence the Western history of science? Singularly enough,the role of religious fanaticism in shaping this story seemsnever to have been assessed. Let us do so here.The Crusades and the story ofthe ‘Greek’ origin of scienceThe story of the Greek origin of science postdates theCrusades.Before the Crusades, Christendom was in its “Dark Age”. Inthe 4th c., state and church came together in the Romanempire. The subsequent book-burning edicts of RomanChristian emperors, 5 the burning down of the Great Libraryof Alexandria by a Christian mob, 6 and the closure of allphilosophical schools by Justinian in 529 CE, created avacuum of secular knowledge in Christendom. Such secularknowledge as existed, prior to the Crusades, was pitiful. Theoutstanding mathematician of the time was Gerbert ofAurillac (Pope Sylvester II), who wrote a learned tome onthe abacus (the kindergarten toy of today). So, it would befair to say that the abacus represented the acme ofmathematical knowledge in pre-Crusade Christendom.Ironically, this Christian Dark Age coincided with the

Preview page 8 of 16Islamic Golden Age. In sharp contrast to the book-burningtraditions of Christendom, the Abbasid Caliphate had set upthe Baghdad House of Wisdom by the early 9th c. CE. Thisled to such an explosion in the demand for books that, alongthe lines of the hadith to seek knowledge even from China,paper-making techniques were imported from China to setup a paper factory in Baghdad, which had a flourishing bookbazaar. Libraries proliferated across the Islamic world, andthe 10th c. Umayyad Caliphate in Cordoba had a library,catalogued in 44 volumes, of over 600,000 tomes. 7Quite naturally, prior to the Crusades, Europeans regardedthe Arabs as knowledgeable. To learn mathematics, Gerbertturned to the Islamic Arabs in Cordoba, not to GreekChristian sources in Byzantium. (Hence, the numerals heimported are today known as “Arabic numerals”.) So, thestory of the Greek origins of all science did not exist inEurope prior to the Crusades.The Crusades as “barbarian incursions”How did this story emerge during the Crusades?…Ever since state and church first came together, at the time ofConstantine, Eusebius, a church historian, had initiated theprogram of distorting history to promote church interests.His successor Orosius, in his History Against the Pagans,made it amply clear that history was just another tool of softpower in the church’s armory. This technology of falsehoodwas now applied to “manage” common perceptions. Thestory-line was simple: it was the Greeks who did it. On this

Preview page 9 of 16story, during the 600 years of the Christian Dark Age, all thatthe Arabs did was to preserve Greek works, the rightfulinheritors of which were the chosen people, the Christians ofEurope.It was this fantastic justification—characterizing Arabs asmere carriers of knowledge, and Greeks as the creative fount—which made the (“Greek”) knowledge in Arabic bookstheologically acceptable in Europe, and enabled thetranslated Arabic books to be used as university texts forcenturies in Europe.Arabs did not quite accept this story. In the 9 th c., when theArabs built the Bayt al Hikma (House of Wisdom) inBaghdad, they gathered knowledge from all over the world,including India, Persia and China. They certainly did notrestrict themselves to Greek sources. The actions speak forthemselves: the Arabs did not then think that science wasprimarily a Greek invention.Greek and Roman difficulties with elementary arithmeticThe non-textual evidence provides a good reason for this.More than deduction, science is based on quantitativecalculation. But the Greeks lacked basic arithmetic skillsneeded for calculation. The early Greek (Attic) system ofrepresenting numbers was worse even than Romannumerals. (We will use Roman numerals in the followingexamples, since they are better known.) Greek/Romannumerals are inefficient for two reasons. First they areclumsy: the small number 1788 requires 12 symbols, and iswritten as MDCCLXXXVIII.

Preview page 10 of 16This system is hopeless for large numbers, such as 10 53 ,which the Buddha was asked to name (by an opponent, whosought to test his knowledge). The world might come to anend before one finishes writing down this number in Romannumerals!The unavoidable inference is this: the Greeks and Romansused this primitive system of numeration just because theynever encountered large numbers, and never did thecomplex calculations required for astronomy and science.Conversely, when the need for such complex calculationsarose in Europe, first among the Florentine merchants, andthen among European navigators, Roman numerals wereabandoned in favour of “Arabic numerals”.Can one get around this inefficiency by inventing names forlarger numbers? No. Roman numerals are structurallyinefficient: even the simplest sum needs an abacus. Try XIV+ XVIII! To add two numbers, say 1788 + 1832, one wouldfirst represent these numbers on the Roman abacus, usingcounters.…Multiplication is more difficult. Shakespeare’s clown knowsthat 11 sheep give 28 pounds of wool which sells for aguinea. How much would he get for the wool from 1500sheep? He “cannot do’t without counters”. 9 (We leave outsubtraction and division as too difficult to explain!) TheGreeks obviously could not have done science withoutproperly knowing how to add and multiply.

Preview page 11 of 16The Baghdad House of Wisdom andtransmission TO Greek textsTherefore, while the Arabs valued the “theology ofAristotle”, 10 for arithmetic, they turned to India, not toGreece. Arabs imported various Indian arithmetic texts,notably those of Aryabhata, Brahmagupta and Mahavira.These were digested and transcreated in the Bayt al Hikma,by al Khwarizmi, and became famous as Algorismus afterhis Latinized name. These “Arabic numerals” use the placevaluesystem. That makes it easy to represent large numbers.It also makes arithmetic very easy through “algorithms”—the elementary techniques of addition, subtraction,multiplication, and division that everyone today learns inschool.Although the Baghdad House of Wisdom was a landmark, itonly accelerated a well-established tradition. From the verybeginning of the Abbasid Caliphate, the legendaryBarmakids (from barmak = pramukh) of Persian-Buddhistorigin, who were vazir-s to the Abbasid Khalifa-s, hadalready instituted this system of importing knowledge fromPersia and India.The Barmakids, in turn, were only continuing the earlierPersian tradition of gathering knowledge, and translating itinto Persian (Pahlavi). This continuity is manifest throughtexts, such as the Indian Pancatantra, which were translatedinto Arabic not from Sanskrit but from Pahlavi, along withother Persian books, such as the “Arabian Nights” and theastronomy text called the Almagest. Noticeably, the Almagestcame to Baghdad from Persia, not Byzantium. Had this text

Preview page 12 of 16then existed in Byzantium, it could easily have been sourcedfrom there, for Byzantium was then an abject tributary ofBaghdad.…Euclid: Geometry and MathematicsWe saw that even Needham thought that real mathematicsand science began with deduction, a tradition supposedlystarted by Euclid.But what exactly do we know about Euclid? One authority,the late David Fowler, gave a succinct answer: “Nothing”. 20However, other historians insist that the right answer is“almost nothing”. Let us decide between these twopossibilities!Euclid supposedly wrote a key geometry text called theElements. Naturally, people suppose (on the strength of thestory) that the name “Euclid” is found in front ofmanuscripts of the Elements. But that is not true.…At about this point, many people jump up to say that theydon’t really care about the person Euclid, and it is the bookcalled the Elements which ultimately matters. This is a facileescape route.If Euclid is a concoction, the Elements might have had a non-Hellenic origin in the mystery geometry of pre-AlexandrianEgypt. In that case, it could be better understood as contraryto post-Crusade Christian rational theology. The sameconclusion applies even if we accept seriously the

Neoplatonic philosophy of geometry, as articulated by Platoor by Proclus in his Commentary on the Elements. So,accepting Euclid as a concoction also entails a differentunderstanding of the Elements, and amounts to denying theappropriation of reason by the church. 25 Such a denial wouldalter the present-day philosophy of mathematics, 26 and theidea of deduction as fundamental to science.Preview page 13 of 16

Preview page 14 of 16Multiversity (Penang/Goa)and Citizens International (Penang)Founding Editor, Vinay LalNo. 1No. 2No. 3No. 4No. 5No. 6No. 7Gustavo Esteva Celebaration of ZapatismoFrédérique Apffel-Marglin & Margaret BruchacExorcising Anthropology’s DemonsAshis Nandy The Twentieth Century: TheAmbivalent Homecoming of Homo PsychologicusVinay Lal Empire and the Dream-Work of AmericaRoby Rajan The Tyranny of Economics: GlobalGovernance and the Dismal ScienceNancy Scheper-Hughes The Last Commodity: PostHuman Ethics, Global (In)justice and the Traffic inOrgansC. Douglas Lummis Terror and the Terrorist

Preview page 15 of 16Citizens International (CITIZENS) is a global peoples networkbased in Penang, Malaysia which works on issues of peace,antimilitarism, cultural co-operation, environmental protection,sustainable development and traditional knowledge systems.CITIZENS believes that peoples activism on these issues globallyis essential to arrest the world’s rapid slide towardsincreased militarisation of land, seas, space; wastefulproduction of armaments; irreparable destruction of ourenvironment and ecology; war, poverty and pestilence for theglobal majority.CITIZENS is managed by a Board of Trustees of experiencedNGO activists. The Chairman of the Board is S.M. MohamedIdris, the President of Consumers Association of Penang (CAP)and Sahabat Alam Malaysia (Friends of the Earth, Malaysia)(SAM) and Co-ordinator of Third World Network (TWN).