Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

Islam, Transmission, and the Decline of Islamic Science • 151the fact that we do so as members of a civilization whose mathematicaldevelopment depended importantly on the contributions of themedieval Islamic civilization” (Berggren 1996, 266). In such studies,judgments passed on the scientific achievements of a previouscivilization are invariably based on the developments in modernscience. This creates historiographic problems and entails the dangerof unconsciously slipping from the historical fact into a Whiggishview of history, as if the final purpose of the cultivation of sciencein the other civilization was merely to create modern science. “Thisapproach has had two quite opposite, but equally regrettable, results,”says Berggren:The first is a treatment of medieval Islam as a civilizationdeserving of attention only for its role as a channel throughwhich the great works of the Greeks were carried safely to theeager minds of the European Renaissance. The emphasis fallson the two great periods of translations, that into Arabic in theninth century and that into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenthcenturies, and the developments of the intervening centuriesprovide little more than a series of anecdotes about one curiousresult or another that was proved by an occasional great figure.The second result of this Whiggish attitude is a selective andtendentious reading of medieval Arabic texts to show howIslamic science prefigured that of modern times…it wouldbe invidious to cite contemporary examples of either of theseapproaches—and of little interest to cite earlier examples—andI shall only observe that both of these results, which onthe surface seem to place such different values on Islamiccivilization, should concur in valuing it only insofar as it servedends not its own; this is hardly surprising, since both aremotivated by a fundamental interest not in the past but in thepresent. (Berggren 1996, 266–67)There is yet another perspective on the question of decline,again from within the history of science. Here the approach is toexamine the nature of science in Islamic civilization from within itsown framework and see where it could have gone. What possibilitieswere there for different branches of science within the framework oftheir fields? Aydin Sayili appended a 24-page appendix to his The