Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

142 • The Making of Islamic Sciencetradition. The general acceptance granted this answer makesobligatory new work devoted to carefully examining the evidenceprovided for this answer. This is an unpleasant duty, for it burdensthe writer with the task of asking the jury to reopen the case after averdict has already been pronounced.When did the Decline Take Place?The existing literature on dating the decline of Islamic scientifictradition mention dates that differ not by years or decades but bycenturies. When Edward Sachau translated al-Biruni’s monumentalChronology of Ancient Nations in 1879, he marked the tenth centuryas the “the turning point in the history of the spirit of Islam,” andmade al-Ash‘ari and al-Ghazali the culprits: “But for Al Ash‘ari andAl Ghazali the Arabs might have been a nation of Galileos, Keplers,and Newtons” (al-Biruni, tr. 1879, x). In the 1930s and 1940s, whenGeorge Sarton wrote his monumental work, An Introduction to theHistory of Science, he set the eleventh century as the end of the vigor ofthe Islamic scientific tradition, with the twelfth century and to a lesserextent the thirteenth century as the centuries of transition of thatvigor to Europe (Sarton 1931, vol. 2, 131–48). But within two decadesof the publication of his work, the discovery of new texts pushed thisboundary further, and eventually the entire question of dating thedecline had to be recast.What we know now allows us to say with confidence that the workof astronomers and mathematicians such as Athir al-Din al-Abhari(d. ca. 1240), Mu’ayyad al-Din al-Urdi (d. 1266), Nasir al-Din al-Tusi(d. 1274), Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (d. 1311), and Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375)cannot be discounted as isolated examples of individual scientistspursuing first-rate science in the thirteenth and the fourteenthcenturies. Similarly, the work of al-Jazari (d. ca. 1205) in mechanics, ofIbn al-Nafis (d. 1288) in medicine, and of Ghiyath al-Din al-Kashi (d.1429) in astronomy are testimonies to a living and vibrant scientifictradition as late as the fifteenth century. In addition, we have newevidence from studies on Islamic scientific instrumentation whichprovides an altogether different methodology for understanding thequestion of decline, as David King has recently shown by his study