Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

22 • The Making of Islamic ScienceSome dated notions wide-spread amongst the “informed public”and even amongst historians of science include the following:1.The Muslims were fortunate enough to be the heirs to the sciencesof Antiquity.2.They cultivated these sciences for a few centuries but never reallyachieved much that was original.3. They provided, mainly in Islamic Spain, a milieu in which eagerEuropeans emerging out of the Dark Ages could benefit fromthese Ancient Greek sciences once they had learned how totranslate them from Arabic into Latin.Islamic science, therefore, one might argue, is of no consequenceper se for the development of global science and is important onlyinsofar as it marks a rather obscure interlude between a moresophisticated Antiquity and a Europe that later became more civilized.What happened in fact was something rather different. TheMuslims did indeed inherit the sciences of Greek, Indian and PersianAntiquity. But within a few decades they had created out of thispotpourri a new science, now written in Arabic and replete with newMuslim contributions, which flourished with innovations until the 15 thcentury and continued thereafter without any further innovations ofconsequence until the 19 th . (King 2004, xvi)Despite the large amount of new material discovered, published,and studied since those early notions were formed, not manycontemporary writers are willing to reexamine the erroneousparadigm postulated by Goldziher and his generation, which pitIslam against “foreign sciences” (Goldziher 1915). These earlyjudgments were also based, in part, on the works of medievalEuropean scholars who themselves were aware of only a minisculebody of literature on Islamic scientific tradition, mostly retrievedfrom Islamic Spain (al-Andalus), a region that lay outside the maincenters of Islamic scientific activity. It was not until the nineteenthand twentieth centurieswhen historians of science from a multiplicity of nationalbackgrounds investigated Islamic scientific manuscripts inlibraries all over Europe and then in the Near East. Their