Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

Islam, Transmission, and the Decline of Islamic Science • 143of astronomical instruments, which were being made of the highestcaliber in Iran in the first decades of the eighteenth century (King1999, xiii). These examples can be multiplied to include many otherscientists and instruments.Interestingly, one view on decline implicitly suggests that therewas, in fact, no such thing as decline of the Islamic scientific tradition,because no such tradition ever existed. All that Islamic civilizationdid, the advocates of this view argue, was to “host” the Greek traditionit received through the translation movement for three centuries,during which science failed to take roots in the Muslim world becauseof fierce opposition from religious scholars. Greek science was thentransferred to Europe, where it found its natural home and blossomedto become modern science. We have already dealt with this view inChapters 1 and 2. A variant of this extreme view is the “marginalitythesis”—cogently formulated by A. I. Sabra (1987)—which limits thepractice of natural sciences in Islamic civilization to a small groupof scientists who had no social, emotional, spiritual, or cultural tieswith Islamic polity and who practiced their science in isolation.While Sabra has attempted to show “the falsity of the marginalitythesis…by offering a description of an alternative picture—onewhich shows the connections with cultural factors and forces, therebyexplaining (or proposing to explain) not only the external career ofscience and philosophy in Islam, but at least some of their inherentcharacteristics, possibilities and limitations” (Sabra 1994, 230), hisrefutation remains limited to a “few general remarks.” But a moreserious problem with this refutation is its acceptance of the “two-trackthesis,” which is itself the cornerstone of the marginality hypothesisSabra tries to refute. The two-track thesis views the Islamic scientifictradition in opposition to—or at least in competition with—what itcalls the Islamic religious sciences. The mainstay of these argumentsis phrases such as “sciences of the ancients,” which sometimes occurin certain Islamic texts.What came into the main currents of Islamic thought fromoutside was received into the Islamic intellectual tradition with criticalappraisal and sorting; all living traditions do this. The problem ariseswhen one construes the arrival of the new sciences as if it were arrival