Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

30 • The Making of Islamic Sciencerevelation. The end result of this long process was the appearanceof a tradition of learning that examined, explored, and synthesizedits own unique perspectives on nature and the human condition—perspectives that were distinctly Islamic, though not monolithic.Some Recent Perspectives on the Translation MovementThis brief description of the translation movement provides someinsights into the intellectual currents flowing into the Islamictradition during that time. During these three centuries, thematerial infused into the Islamic tradition included philosophy aswell as works on various branches of science drawn from the Greek,Persian, and Indian sources. This process of incorporation of foreignscientific and philosophical thought into the Islamic tradition and itsconsequences has been thoroughly studied by historians of scienceand philosophy, and their studies have yielded opinions rangingfrom reductionism to precursorism—two explanatory terms first usedby Sabra in an important paper (Sabra 1987). Reductionism, in thiscontext, refers to theview that the achievements of Islamic scientists were merely areflection—sometimes faded, sometimes bright, or more orless altered—of earlier (mostly Greek) examples. Precursorism(which has a notorious tendency to degenerate into a diseaseknown as ‘precursitis’) is equally familiar: it reads the futureinto the past, with a sense of elation. (Sabra 1994, 223–24)Despite the work of Sabra and a handful of other historians ofscience, the large-scale infusion of ideas, theories, and scientific datafrom the Greek scientific tradition into Islamic science through thetranslation movement has become a defining feature of the Islamicscientific tradition itself; many histories of science tend to regard theeight hundred years of scientific activity in the Muslim world as beingno more than some kind of depot where Greek science was parkedand from where it was retrieved by Europe in later centuries. AsSabra has noted, the transcivilizational transmission of science was animportant event in history, butapparently because of the importance of that role in worldintellectual history many scholars have been led to look at the