Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

Islam, Transmission, and the Decline of Islamic Science • 137“The Country is miserably decay’d, and hath lost the Reputationof its Name, and mighty stock of Credit it once had for EasternWisedome and learning; It hath followed the Motion of the Sun andis Universally gone Westward” (Toomer 1996, v).By the end of the seventeenth century, new publications hadstarted to appear on the basis of previously translated Latin texts,which provided foundations for the emergence of Orientalism.As European science surpassed Islamic scientific tradition, thepropagandists of the new science began to single out Arabs asharbingers of scholasticism, mere imitators of the Greeks, whoselearning was derivative and irrelevant. “The sciences which wepossess come for the most part from the Greeks,” wrote FrancisBacon (1561–1626) in Novum Organum, “for what has been added byRoman, Arabic, or later writers is not much nor of much importance;and whatever it is, it is built on the foundations of Greek discoveries”(Bacon 1905, 275). Bacon’s verdict was to become entrenched insubsequent centuries. For him, “only three revolutions and periodsof learning can properly be reckoned; one among the Greeks, thesecond among the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, thenations of Western Europe, and to each of these hardly two centuriescan be assigned. The intervening ages of the world, in respect ofany rich or flourishing growth of sciences, were unprosperous. Forneither the Arabians, nor the Schoolmen need be mentioned; who inthe intermediate times rather crushed the sciences with a multitudeof treatises, than increased their weight” (Bacon 1905, 279). Bacon’sverdict has been repeated time and again and continues to be themain thesis of most mainstream literature on Islamic scientifictradition. “George Starkey criticized all of the Arabic writers becauseof their reliance on Galen and opined that ‘Avicenna was useless inthe light of practical experience’” (Greaves 1969, 90).By the turn of the eighteenth century, not only the scientificlearning of Muslims but Muslims themselves were the subject ofjudgments: “It is certain that the Arabs were not a learned Peoplewhen they over-spread Asia,” wrote William Watton (1666–1727), “sothat when afterwards they translated the Grecian Learning into theirown Language, they had very little of their own, which was not takenfrom those Fountains” (Watton 1694, 140).