Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

Aspects of Islamic Scientific Tradition • 31medieval Islamic period as a period of reception, preservation,and transmission, and this in turn has affected the way in whichthey have viewed not only individual achievements of thatperiod but the whole of its profile. (Sabra 1994, 225)The consequences of this approach toward the Islamic scientifictradition are visible in many science textbooks, where students areled to believe that nothing important happened in science betweenthe Greek scientific activity and the Renaissance; Islamic scientifictradition is either not mentioned at all or is mentioned in a paragraphdefining it as a repository of Greek science. That this distortion ofhistorical facts still predominates is unfortunate, as what came intothe body of Islamic thought from outside was neither accidental normarginal. It would be far more meaningful to understandthe transmission of ancient science to Islam … as an act ofappropriation performed by the so-called receiver. Greekscience was not thrust upon Muslim society any more than itwas later upon Renaissance Europe. What the Muslims of theeighth and ninth centuries did was to seek out, take hold ofand finally make their own a legacy which appeared to themladen with a variety of practical and spiritual benefits. And in sodoing they succeeded in initiating a new scientific tradition in anew language which was to dominate the intellectual culture ofthe large part of the world for a long period of time. ‘Reception’is, at best, a pale description of that enormously creative act.(Sabra 1994, 226)The translation movement was a highly complex phenomenonof cross-cultural transmission that involved a very large numberof people of diverse interests. It had political, cultural, intellectual,and religious motivations. It came into existence owing to certaininternal needs of the Islamic polity of the time and, once in existence,it produced enormous creative energy in an intellectual climatealready filled with curiosity, ready to use whatever it could for itsnew ventures. Some of the new material was regarded as dangerous,extraneous, and foreign by certain quarters. This “foreignness” hasbeen used by some scholars to draw the reductionistic conclusion thatthe scientific tradition in Islam was nothing but a “foreign” entitythat somehow survived despite the opposition it faced from religious