Essay, Exchange of Views, I
Toby E. Huff
The Rise of Early Modern Science:
A Reply to George Saliba 1
AN AUTHOR, SUCH AS MYSELF, can only be grateful when a leading historian of Arabic
science takes one of his books so seriously as to write a long review article on it.
Professor George Saliba calls The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and
the West “a refreshing and welcome contribution” to the field “documenting . . .
a whole array of the achievements” of Arabic/Islamic (and Chinese) science in
the ongoing project of modern science (143, 144). At the same time, Professor
Saliba raises a host of issues, not all of equal importance, nor even connected to
the main thesis of my book. In this reply, I shall present my comments under
four headings with the intention of making the themes and thesis of my book
evident to the reader. These headings address the main issues raised in Saliba’s
essay, namely, the nature of ‘modern’ science, the possibility that economic
factors have played a significant role in its rise, innovation in Arabic/Islamic
astronomy after Ibn al-Shatir and the fourteenth century, and the nature and
role of free inquiry.
At the outset, one must say that there is a defensiveness in Professor
Saliba’s essay, which, as it unfolds, repeatedly begs the question that was at the
centre of my original inquiry. In addition, Saliba rather surprisingly opposes the
idea that past and present human communities, institutions, governments and so
on ought to grant greater freedom of expression, inquiry and action to their
participants. This is surely counter-intuitive.
Saliba gets started on the wrong track by labeling the study of the rise
of ‘modern’ science as the search for “origins,” a term I never use. Throughout
my book, I suggest that the propensity to look into the nature of existence and
to propose explanations for it is universal. If we start with that assumption, then
we can focus upon the beginnings that people made in various places around the
world to construct proto-scientific theories and explanations. Clearly, some
groups, communities, societies and civilizations have been more successful than
others in this process and the question then becomes one of analyzing
contrasting cultural and institutional settings that either encouraged or impeded
the progress of scientific inquiry.
My particular inquiry began with what I called the ‘problem’ of Arabic
science, namely, the intellectual question of how it happened that scholars
communicating mainly in Arabic excelled in scientific inquiries during certain
periods of time and, yet, failed to continue those inquires so that there was a
decline, indeed, such a steep and long-lasting decline that people in later
centuries might conclude that the ‘Arabs’ had never been masters of science.2 I
submit that this is a fascinating and vexatious intellectual problem. It is also
obvious that dozens of Middle Eastern scholars and observers have agonized
over this puzzle and sought to understand it for a very long time.
Moreover, in my book, I reviewed the most impressive advances in
astronomy and mathematics that were accomplished by Middle Eastern scholars
by the end of the fourteenth century; in later chapters, I also recounted a
number of achievements in medicine. Then, I asked why this development did
not lead to ‘modern’ science in the Arabic/Islamic context. It is curious that
Professor Saliba does not want to acknowledge that this is an intellectual puzzle
worthy of intense study. For, as he himself points out in his review, Arabic
science was “superior” to Western science (140) prior to the Renaissance. He
even claims that “the most innovative mathematical and astronomical ideas that
were employed during the European Renaissance were themselves borrowed
from Arabic/ Islamic” civilization.3 If these great advances were “the very ideas
that made the astronomy of the European Renaissance possible, in the
mathematical technical sense,” (143) why did they not make it possible in the
Arabic/Islamic context? Indeed, the first four pages of Saliba’s review, with their
apparent emphasis on ‘methodological’ issues, serve no purpose other than to
avoid facing this central problem. Stated differently, it is claimed by Saliba that
certain advances in astronomy in Arabic lands made modern astronomy possible
in Europe, but apparently not in the Middle East. This is surely an intellectual
problem worth investigating, one that goes far beyond his methodological
diversions.
In so far as astronomy is concerned, conventional wisdom says that the
breakthrough to modern astronomy occurred with the appearance of Nicholas
Copernicus’ The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543. This was the book
in which the author proposed abandoning the geocentric orientation of the
celestial system in favour of a heliocentric one. It was revolutionary not only in
this astronomical sense, but in that it challenged the authority of the Christian
Church. Copernicus (who was a Church administrator himself) and his followers
thus claimed to know the composition of the universe better than the official
Church hierarchy. This is a perfectly good landmark for establishing the advent of
modern science, as it unleashed a whole series of intellectual struggles within the
scientific community and within the established religious authority of Europe.
Furthermore, it is obvious that the work of Galileo directly derived from
Copernicus’ great hypothesis and it was he who bluntly challenged the Church on
virtually all epistemological grounds, claiming that there was a source of
knowledge about the world other than religion and the Bible―namely, natural
science.
My book focuses upon the preceding legal, institutional and intellectual
developments that made the Copernican innovation possible. That is, long before
Copernicus and Galileo, there was an intellectual tradition established in Europe,
above all in the universities, that, yes, institutionalized the study of natural
phenomena, particularly by placing the corpus of Aristotle, along with a number
of Arabic works and commentaries, at the centre of the university curriculum.
This occurred in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In short, the Copernican
revolution was a product of the educational system put in place by Europeans
several hundred years earlier. As is well-known, the madrasas of the Middle
Eastern world systematically excluded philosophy and the natural sciences from
any ‘formal’ teaching conducted within their confines during this period of time.
(I put ‘formal’ in quotation marks because there was no formal curriculum in the
madrasas.) Evidently, the teaching of philosophy and the natural sciences ran
against the religious commitments and identity of the madrasas, an identity that
persisted into the twentieth century.4 This was a major issue in my book, but
Professor Saliba is entirely silent on the subject. I shall return to it later. Whether
or not Copernicus benefited directly from Arab astronomers, other than possibly
borrowing ‘the Tusi couple,’ remains an open question, one upon which I remain
to be convinced.5
The highly significant Copernican year of 1543 also contains another
milestone in the rise of modern science: the publication of Vesalius’ nonpareil,
On the Fabric of the Human Body. This famous work, containing a huge number
of highly-detailed anatomical drawings, is generally regarded as laying the
foundations for modern medicine because of its illustrations of the human body’s
main systems―bones, muscles, veins, nerves and internal organs. At the same
time, it represents the expression of an empirical agenda, the first-hand
examination of the body through human dissection (autopsy). This was the
culmination of several centuries of empirical anatomical investigation extending
back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As we know, human dissection was
generally considered to be forbidden in Islamic thought and practice, mainly, it
seems, because it was seen as a form of ‘mutilation’ that was forbidden by
various legal texts.6 Briefly, then, this is another area in which we may point to a
new spirit of inquiry (and routinized activity) that encouraged modern science. It
broke with various intellectual and moral traditions of the past and subjected
various claims to empirical testing. And again, unlike the madrasas, the
universities incorporated medical training, including the practice of human
dissection, into their curricula.
In an effort to deflect the reader from focusing upon these disparities
between the progressive nature of modern science and the stagnating nature of
scientific thought in the Arabic/Islamic context, Saliba cites a comment from A.
C. Graham to the effect that we cannot know whether the ancients or the
moderns have come closer to scientific truth. Yet, it should not escape our
attention that Copernicus and Galileo did argue about the truth of their work or,
at least, about which set of hypothetical constructions, those of the geocentric or
the heliocentric system, better described the world. Despite Saliba’s role as
devil’s advocate, I think that we can fairly conclude that heliocentrism is a better
description of the world and that, although the Copernican system is not a
complete and final theory, it is a better approximation of the celestial
movements than the geocentric view. ‘Science,’ as I understand it, entails this
element of seeking to arrive at a better description of the world and is not just a
calculating device.
Similarly, the anatomical drawings of Vesalius and his discussion of all
the parts and systems of the body are, in fact, a better description of the human
body than the one provided by Galen. Indeed, Vesalius claimed to have corrected
over 200 errors in Galen’s account of human anatomy, which was based almost
wholly upon animal dissections. Moreover, Vesalius’ illustrations are far superior
to anything to be found in the Arabic/Islamic tradition (where pictorial
representation of the human body was particularly suspect) or, for that matter,
in the Chinese and (I presume) Indian traditions.7 This is not to sound a note of
triumph, but rather to clarify the point that modern science represents scientific
progress, a point that Saliba seeks to obscure. Thus, Saliba is correct to say that
“no one seems to question the proposition that the ‘modern’ scientific tradition
made its first appearance” in the “West” (140), a term that he finds problematic,
which I grant, in part. This is so because there is a scholarly consensus on this
point and it comes after at least a century of intense exploration of the historical
records of other sciences and civilizations, above all the Arabic and the Chinese
traditions.
A year after my book was first published, Professor Saliba published an
article about the sixteenth-century astronomer, Shams al-Din al-Khafri (d.
1550).8 According to Saliba, Khafri was a figure of creative continuity in Arab
astronomy and he―and perhaps others of that period―represented a new
‘golden age’ of Arab astronomy, not a period of decline. On the basis of this,
Saliba suggests that all that I say in my book on this subject, especially the idea
of decline in Arab astronomy, “has to be reassessed” (148). Saliba makes many
other claims in this connection, most of which I consider excessive.
Although I have no special training in astronomy and the jury is still out
among historians of science regarding Saliba’s claims, the suggestion that Khafri
was a progressive innovative astronomer, given the fact that he apparently
sought to preserve and perfect the Ptolemaic system, seems highly improbable.
As suggested above, the Copernican model was a progressive new model that
brought us closer to the true constitution of the universe than the Ptolemaic
system. As A. I. Sabra put it, speaking of Khafri’s work, “it would be odd to call
‘revolutionary’ a reformist project intended to consolidate Ptolemaic astronomy
by bringing it into line with its own principles.”9 Saliba’s effort to take refuge in
the argument that, “without a theory of universal gravitation, this new
cosmology [of Copernicus] could not be developed” (150) is counterfactual. As
Noel Swerdlow says, Kepler “went far beyond Ptolemy’s methods, and discovered
entirely new principles for the precise description of the motions of bodies in the
heavens based upon an entirely new physics.”10 The new Copernican theory was
fleshed out by a variety of astronomers who followed, above all by Kepler. It was
he who proved the elliptical (and hence not perfectly circular) orbit of Mars and
related astronomical theorems on the basis of the assumption that the sun was
the approximate centre of our universe. He was also aided by the more exact
observations of Tycho Brahe. The absence of a universal theory of gravitation
until the time of Newton was no impediment to the early adopters of
Copernicanism and even Tycho Brahe, who developed a geo-heliocentric model,
was not stymied by this putative absence, even after he discovered that the
planets were not encased in ‘crystalline’ spheres. This came about with the
observation of the comets of 1577 and 1585, whose trajectories took them
through what would have been the ambiguously understood ‘crystalline’ spheres
of Venus and Mercury. To be sure, he was not a committed follower of
Copernicus, but he was willing to entertain a theory that entailed a partially
heliocentric orientation and without the possibility of crystalline spheres holding
the planets in place.
In a word, the absence of a universal theory of gravitation offered no
impediment to Copernicus himself, nor to his student Rheticus, nor to Galileo,
Maestlin, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Christoph Rothmann and the other Copernicans.
Thus, rather than showing how Europeans might have been held back from
pursuing all of the implications of the new Copernican hypothesis, Saliba’s
comments make us wonder all the more just why Arab astronomers, who were,
according to Saliba, experiencing a golden age (Khafri died only seven years
after Copernicus), were so reluctant to advance bold new theories, theories that
would break with the unworkable Ptolemaic model. At the same time, the wide
discussion―pro and con―of the new Copernican hypothesis over all of Europe
points again to the fact that the study of modern science, especially astronomy,
had been institutionalized, that is, that it had been made a regular and
acceptable part of public discussion (and teaching) in universities, royal courts
and so on. This stands in contrast to the situation in the madrasas of the
Arab/Muslim lands.
Before taking up the putative role of economic factors, I want to
consider the issue of ‘neutral space’ and free inquiry. It is most puzzling that
Saliba rejects these ideas so vehemently, discussing them no less than six times
in as many pages. In my book, I argued that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
witnessed a social, intellectual and legal revolution that laid the intellectual and
institutional foundations upon which modern science was later constructed. At
the heart of this development was the jurisprudential idea of a corporation, a
collection of individuals who were recognized as a singular ‘whole body’ and
granted legitimate legal autonomy.
Such entities were given the right to sue and be sued, to buy and sell
property, to make rules and laws regulating their activities, to adjudicate those
laws and to operate according to the principle of election by consent as well as
the Roman legal aphorism, “what affects everyone should be considered and
approved by everyone.” Among the entities granted status as legitimate
corporations were cities and towns, charitable organizations, professional guilds
(especially of physicians) and, of course, universities. Nothing comparable to this
kind of legal autonomy emerged in China or under Islam. In short, the European
medievals created autonomous, self-governing institutions of higher learning and
then imported into them a methodologically powerful and metaphysically rich
cosmology that directly challenged and contradicted many aspects of the
traditional Christian world-view. This disinterested agenda was no longer a
private, personal, or idiosyncratic preoccupation, but involved a shared set of
texts, questions, commentaries and, in some cases, centuries-old expositions of
unsolved physical and metaphysical questions that set the highest standards of
intellectual inquiry. Through the incorporation of Aristotle’s books on natural
science into the curriculum of the medieval universities, a disinterested agenda
of naturalistic inquiry was institutionalized. It was institutionalized as a
curriculum, a course of study.11
Since these bodies were, in fact, legally entitled to study and teach
whatever they elected to make part of the curriculum, one could say that they
occupied a neutral zone protected by and from political and religious authorities.
At the centre of their curriculum was the main body of Aristotle’s natural
philosophy, that is, his Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption,
On the Soul, Meteorology and Small Works on Natural Things, and biology, such
as his History of Animals, Parts of Animals and Generation of Animals. It is in
these books, as Professor Edward Grant argues, that we find “the treatises that
formed the comprehensive foundation for the medieval conception of the
physical world and its operation.”12 In contrast to this, the Islamic madrasas
deliberately excluded all of the natural works of Aristotle, as well as philosophy,
logic and natural theology. Instead, they taught the ‘Islamic sciences,’ consisting
of the Qur’an, the Sunna, Islamic law, Arabic poetry, literature, history and
genealogy, and some arithmetic. (Later, they did admit the teaching of logic and
Islamic theology.) Furthermore, in Europe (for example, in Paris), the study of
the Aristotelian corpus was fully legitimized by statute in 1255, although it
remained in dispute. As a result, the universities generated a whole literature of
naturalistic questions that became, in turn, a shared agenda of naturalistic
studies. Centred upon Aristotelian natural philosophy, this agenda served as the
intellectual core of university instruction for the next 400 years (including the
education of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and others).
Speculative questions were pursued, such as whether the world is
singular or plural; whether the earth turns on its axis or is stationary; “whether
every effecting thing is the cause of that which it is effecting; whether things can
happen by chance; whether a vacuum is possible; whether the natural state of
an object is stationary or in motion; whether luminous celestial bodies are hot;
whether the sea has tides; and so on for virtually every charted field of
enquiry.”13 Surely, the permissibility of these studies in an officially-recognized
and legally-defined context suggests something more than a random, spasmodic
pursuit of the natural sciences and something more than the pursuit of economic
gain. I submit that they also indicate the existence of a very significant
intellectual zone of free inquiry that was publicly available to scholars, as well as
laymen. The continuity of this ongoing, university-centred debate with respect to
Copernicus’ heliocentric hypothesis has recently been reiterated. As Bernard
Goldstein puts it, Copernicus’ initial commitment to heliocentrism “was a
response to an issue debated in the philosophical community at the time when
he attended universities in Italy, ca. 1500.”14
At least three additional points need to be made. The legal autonomy
that existed in the European universities did not exist in the Muslim world
because the legal concept of a corporation, a groups of actors treated as a
collective whole, did not exist. This legal defect had major implications for
Islamic civilization, not least in the sphere of economic development, as Timor
Kuran has made clear.15
Second, it is one thing if an activity is pursued randomly by various
actors; it is something else altogether if that activity is carried on collectively as
a result of a regularized process―that is, an institutionalization of the activity by
the enactment of rules, norms and regulations. Clearly, the pursuit of science in
Europe via its institutionalization in the universities provided it with a powerful
advantage unknown in the Arab/Muslim world until very recently.16
Third, this institutionalization of scientific pursuits gave European
scholars a surprising degree of freedom of inquiry, not least of all to subject the
Holy Book―the Bible―to naturalistic explanation. As I argued in my book, some
scholarly clerics actually sought to separate the ‘natural’ from the ‘supernatural’
in an attempt to explain by naturalistic means certain problematic passages in
the Bible. For example, a certain Andrew of St. Victor argued that one should
first consider all naturalistic possibilities before offering miracles as explanations
in the interpretation of Scripture. The interpreter, he wrote, “should realize this:
in expounding Scripture, when the event described admits of no naturalistic
explanation, then and only then should we have recourse to miracles.”17
Scholars have pointed to such discussions during this period of time as the
beginning of so-called ‘Higher Criticism,’ the intellectual task of evaluating all of
the strands, sources and meanings of the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. I submit
that this level of freedom of inquiry did not exist in the Arab/Muslim world then
and does not exist now. Anyone who has had contact with Muslim circles in the
West or elsewhere in the world knows that this subject is one of utmost
sensitivity to the Muslim community. H. A. R. Gibb gives the example of an
Egyptian shaykh who published, in 1930, an annotated edition of the Qur’an that
criticized the old commentaries and interpreted supernatural references in
simple, naturalistic ways. Although the purpose of the work was to encourage
the younger generation to study the Qur’an, the book was confiscated by the
police and an injunction was secured to prevent the writer from preaching or
holding religious meetings.18 This sort of response is what I meant when I wrote
of the “barriers to freedom of thought, expression, and action in the interests of
primordial religious and ethnic identities,” but which Saliba apparently doubts
(145). Today, one could also add the various restrictions on internet use in
various parts of the world to indicate such restrictions. (More on which below.)
While there are always some constraints on intellectual inquiry, I am not
as jaundiced as Professor Saliba who seems to believe that “free inquiry is
essentially a fiction determined, for the most part, by the exigencies of the
market place” (144). This sad commentary takes us back to the putative role of
economic factors that constitutes Saliba’s pet theory.
I have suggested that the breakthrough to modern astronomy (with all
its implications) and the anatomical investigations of European medical students
are constitutive of modern science.19 But what, we might ask, was the economic
motive of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Tycho Brahe and all the others, to fashion
the new astronomy? I don’t know of any. There was no profit to be made by their
inquiries, which elicited―especially in the early stages―the wrath of
traditionalists and even religious authorities. Likewise, what was the economic
motive of all those physicians from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries
who carried out and documented anatomical inquiries based upon dissection?
Although Church authorities approved of this practice and, in at least two cases,
ordered autopsies for forensic purposes, it must be said that human dissection is
repulsive to most people. Moreover, these practitioners were hardly in a position
to perform new surgical procedures upon live subjects, for which they might
expect remuneration. Finally, medieval medical practice had been such as to
stigmatize those who used their hands in the practice of medicine; this is why
some forms of surgery and, especially, human dissection had previously been
given over to barbers and uneducated folk. This was a custom that Vesalius
specifically rejected in his master-work. In general, there was no application for
this new knowledge, although a certain prestige probably accrued to those who
had an intimate knowledge of human anatomy.
The capstone of this whole line of inquiry was William Harvey’s
discovery, in the early seventeenth century, of the greater circulation of blood
throughout the body. But that knowledge did not lead to major changes in
surgical procedures until the twentieth century, when blood types and a whole
range of other discoveries made transfusions, for example, possible. It seems
more plausible to say, as Roger French has, that the knowledge of anatomy
gained by the medieval and early modern physicians allowed them to argue with
each other over the makeup of the body and to disprove various medical
authorities, especially Galen, who may have got it wrong.20
If we push back the institutionalizing of naturalistic inquiry to the
medieval universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, I am again baffled
as to how this might be interpreted as an expression of powerful “economic
forces.” It is the implicit crude Marxism of Professor Saliba’s assertion that clouds
vision here. As indicated in my book, there was indeed a ‘commercial revolution’
sweeping Europe from about the twelfth century, but that hardly explains the
great interest in Aristotle in the universities of that period or the decision by
medical practitioners to undertake dissections and to incorporate medical
education into the university curriculum. Similarly, there was another rise in
commercial activities in the sixteenth century, but this hardly explains either the
motivation of the clerical Copernicus, or of Galileo, Kepler, or Tycho Brahe in
developing a new astronomy against the interests of the Church.
Finally, I offer some comments about the general role of science in
society―a role about which Saliba is highly skeptical. Indeed, Saliba’s essay is
replete with disparaging remarks about science and its utility, not to mention the
benefits of freedom of expression. It is my view that scientific inquiry includes
not just the natural sciences, but all of the social sciences. It is not unreasonable
to suppose that the social sciences― economics, political science, psychology and
sociology―have added something to our understanding about how governments
and economies work. Social and economic development are not aided solely by
“scientific production,” as Saliba proposes (146), but by a vast array of insights
drawn from the social sciences concerning, for instance, the nature of labour and
financial markets, the role of technology and other factors in production, and
social and political processes. It should also be obvious that the social sciences
(and the natural sciences) cannot function properly in societies where there is
great secrecy, where all information is considered the unique purview of the
government, where permission must be received from state officials before any
surveys or related inquiries may be carried out, and where there are prohibitions
against the release of such information. Nevertheless, Saliba is of the opinion
that “[i]t is foolhardy to urge underdeveloped countries to adopt the imagined
benefits of such slogans as ‘freedom of thought and expression’ in order to
obtain the golden key to modernity assumed to be so intrinsically embedded in
the processes of modern science” (146). This is such a counter-intuitive claim
that I leave it for others to defend. More neutral observers will have noticed that
the recently released Arab Human Development Report 2002, sponsored by the
United Nations and written entirely by Arab scholars, specifically points to the
lack of freedom as one of three major factors holding back development in Arab
societies.21 What is needed is a great enlargement of what many would call the
public sphere (and I called neutral space), that zone of interaction in which public
and private needs and aspirations merge, so that new alternatives to prevailing
ideas and policies may be proposed, discussed and evaluated without fear of
personal harm. The prevailing inhibition of the free flow of information―scientific
and non-scientific―in the Arab world is dramatically highlighted by the authors of
the Arab development report when they estimate that Spain translates more
books in a single year than have been translated into Arabic since the beginning
of the Arabic/Islamic era.
This brings me to Saliba’s objection to my suggestion that “science is
especially the natural enemy of authoritarian regimes” (145). If we begin with
the assumption that the social sciences have a place alongside the ‘hard’
sciences, then it seems evident that authoritarian regimes in general cannot
maintain their grip on power while allowing free rein to economists, sociologists,
political scientists, or environmentalists. Their national accounts simply will not
balance and they know it. Hence, they routinely crack down upon those who
offer accounts of the way things are that differ from the official line. I am not
aware of the “tremendous achievements” of science during the Nazi regime. If
one considers the highly-developed state of scientific knowledge in Germany
prior to the Nazi takeover and then compares it with the results achieved by the
end of the regime, its scientific achievements seem unimpressive. Hundreds, if
not thousands, of highly trained scientists fled Nazi Germany―to the great
benefit of the United States and England, among others. Recently, a great
debate has broken out over the fact that the Nazis were unable to develop the
atomic bomb, despite considerable effort. The Nazis did carry out a large number
of absolutely horrendous medical experiments on human subjects who lost their
lives in the process. I would not count this as a “tremendous achievement,”
although it is true that some of the information gathered is unique, precisely
because of the inhumanity involved in its collection. Nothing I have written
discounts the possibility that totalitarian regimes may embark upon some grand
research project for nationalistic purposes and actually be quite successful for a
time. On the other hand, I believe all such regimes are doomed and that, in the
final accounting, their scientific achievements are likely to be marginal.
Soviet Russia was, perhaps, the most successful of such regimes but, in
the end, it did collapse, exposing all of the social, economic and environmental
damage that it had done. A not insignificant point seems to be that such a
regime was only able to persist so long as it maintained a very large repressive
apparatus, stifling dissent (people like the physicist Andre Sakharov and
hundreds of others) and preventing disinterested inquiry into its economic and
ecological problems, patterns of governance and so on. Indeed, Manuel Castells
has made a good case for the proposition that the Soviet Empire collapsed
precisely because it could no longer control information in a computer age, with
the result that significant numbers of citizens, including crucial members of the
power structure, called for radical reform.22
But let me add one final example of a global scientific movement that is
clearly not motivated by greed, anticipated remuneration, national
aggrandizement, or the “exigencies of the market place”: the international
environmental movement. It is evident that there is presently a global view
according to which the environment can and must be treated as a single system
of natural processes. It is also evident that this point of view was created and
shaped by natural scientists who carried out the studies illustrating this fact.
And, third, it is now evident that preserving the environment costs money. The
champions of environmentalism wish to show that preserving the environment is
in the global interest, but the irreducible fact is that the human community―and,
hence, all nation-states―will have to pay financially and in terms of economic
development for the apparently long-term interests revealed by science.
Scientists and sympathetic laymen have rallied to the cause, in effect creating a
global environmental movement complete with all sorts of international treaties
and organizations, the objective being what some call a “global institution”
dedicated to preserving the environment.23 Moreover, this movement began in
the nineteenth century and continued to strengthen throughout the twentieth
and now the twenty-first.24 This is as good an example of ‘free inquiry’ being
carried out in the service of the human community as one can find. It clearly
shows that scientists investigate natural phenomena with a view to improving
more than the financial bottom line. This is not so say that vested interests―for
example, chemical and pharmaceutical companies―have never paid scientists to
pursue scientific questions that have purely commercial applications for those
interests. It is only to say that the claim that all free inquiry is just a fiction
supporting the market-place is greatly exaggerated. I continue to believe in the
possibility and the necessity of dispassionate inquiry―of the past as of the
present―for the purpose of better understanding how the world came to be the
way it is and, not least of all, for making the future better than the past.
NOTES
1
George Saliba, “Seeking the Origins of Modern Science?” Bulletin of the Royal Institute
for Inter-Faith Studies 1, no. 2 (1999) : 139-152, a review article on Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern
Science: Islam, China and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The revised second
edition of The Rise of Early Modern Science will be published in the spring of 2003.
2
The reader should note that, in my book, I stated clearly that I used the term ‘Arab’ to
refer collectively to the whole range of people from diverse ethnic groups throughout the broader Middle
East. For the purposes of my study, this common identity was based upon the language they employed, not
ethnic identity in the strict sense. From my point of view, science is always a civilizational undertaking
produced through the cooperation of individuals from diverse societies and communities who share,
nonetheless, an identity on the highest levels, especially regarding religion and law.
3
I am omitting comments on Chinese science in the main text here for simplicity’s sake.
I should say, however, that I think Saliba greatly exaggerates the contributions and influence of Chinese
science, above all its putative influence on the West. As I pointed out in my book (especially chapters seven
and eight), Joseph Needham, in his many volumes on Chinese science and technology, says that there were
no Chinese precursors to Galileo in the area of physics; similarly, Chinese optics was not as advanced as
Arabic optics under Ibn al-Haytham; and, clearly, Chinese astronomy lagged severely behind the level of
Arabic astronomy, as it lacked its geometrical foundation. In addition, trigonometry, which has generally
been conceded to have been an ‘Arab’ invention, was absent in Chinese mathematics. Consequently, no one
has ever shown―and surely not Joseph Needham―that Chinese science had any impact on the disciplines in
the West known as physics, astronomy, optics, or upon the mathematics of the Renaissance. Moreover,
Chinese medicine has been studied by some historians of science, contrary to Saliba’s suggestion, and
Needham, for example, has had many things to say about it. However, it is also true that the Chinese rarely
practiced human dissection so that they were unable to make significant contributions to the fundamental
medical science of anatomy.
4
English readers are familiar with three major studies of the madrasas based upon
original Arabic sources: George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in
Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and
Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190-1350 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
5
I say this after having read the fascinating recent study by F. Jamail Ragep, “Tusi and
Copernicus: The Earth’s Motion in Context,” Science in Context 14, nos. 1-2 (2001) : 145-163. The
similarity of arguments regarding the possible daily axial rotation of the Earth in the writings of Copernicus
and many other writers extending back to the Greeks?and including many Muslim astronomers?provides
evidence not only of possible influence, but more strongly of the often simultaneous, independent, and
multiple discovery of major ideas in the history of science. Hundreds of such cases have been documented
by William F. Ogburn (in the 1920s) and Robert Merton (in the 1960s); for this literature and discussion, see
The Rise of Early Modern Science, 149-51. In the present context, I can recall three independent discoveries
of the physical explanation of the rainbow? by Theodoric of Freiburg (ca. 1304), by al-Shirazi and by Kamal
al-Din al Farisi (ca. 1310).
6
I have discussed these issues in “Attitudes towards Dissection in the History of
European and Arabic Medicine,” in Science: Locality and Universality, ed. Bennacer El Bouazzati (Rabat,
Morocco: Mohamed V University, 2002), 1-26; and also in the revised edition of The Rise of Early Modern
Science.
7
For the Asian tradition regarding dissection, see Saki Shizu, “Concepts of Anatomy in
Traditional Chinese and Japanese Medicine,” in History of Traditional Medicine: Proceedings of the 1st and
2nd International Symposia on the Comparative Study of Medicine: East and West, ed. Teizo Ogawa
(Osaka: Division of Medical History, the Taniguchi Foundation, 1986), 287-302.
8
George Saliba, “A Sixteenth-Century Arabic Critique of Ptolemaic Astronomy: The
Work of Shams al-Din al-Khafri, Journal for the History of Astronomy 25 (1994) : 15-38.
9
A. I. Sabra, “Configuring the Universe: Aporetic, Problem Solving, and Kinematic
Modeling as Themes of Arabic Astronomy,” Perspectives on Science 6, no. 3 (1998) : 322. For Saliba’s
response and Sabra’s reply, see George Saliba, “Arabic versus Greek Astronomy: A Debate over the
Foundation of Science,” Perspectives on Science 8, no. 4 (2000) : 328-41 and A. I. Sabra, “Reply to Saliba,”
Perspectives on Science 8, no. 4 (2000) : 342-45.
10
Noel M. Swerdlow, “Astronomy in the Renaissance,” in Astronomy before the
Telescope, ed. Christopher Walker (London: British Museum, 1996), 187 and 214ff.
11
The material in this and the following paragraphs is taken from my book, The Rise
of Early Modern Science, 187-89 and 335-338.
12
Edward Grant, “Science and the Medieval University,” in Rebirth, Reform, and
Resilience: Universities in Transition, 1350-1770, eds. James Kittelson and Pamela Transue (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1984), 78. After the publication of my book, Ed Grant considerably expanded
his analysis of science in the medieval universities; see Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in
the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
13
See Edward Grant, ed., A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1974), 199-200; and Grant, “Science and the Medieval University,” 82ff. In his
impressive study, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), Professor Grant has catalogued 400 questions in the area of cosmology alone that
were raised during the period that the medieval cosmology persisted. This generated 1,176 known
responses and these were by no means slavish replies. Many contained innovations: During the 14th
century, other dramatic departures from Aristotle occurred when scholastic natural philosophers
demonstrated that an infinite extracosmic void space might lie beyond the world itself; that motion in a
hypothetical vacuum was feasible; that the existence of other worlds was possible; and that the daily axial
rotation of the earth was an intelligible, astronomical concept, even though it was ultimately rejected
(677).
14
Bernard R. Goldstein, “Copernicus and the Origin of His Heliocentric System,”
Journal for the History of Astronomy 33 (2002) : 231.
15
Among his various papers on this topic, see Timur Kuran, “The Islamic Commercial
Crisis: Institutional Roots of Economic Underdevelopment in the Middle East,” USC Center for Law,
Economics & Organization, Research Paper No. C-1-12, 20 November 2001. This is one of a series of papers
he has written on this subject. See <http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=276377>.
16
I discuss the fate of higher learning in the Arab/Muslim world from the eighteenth
century to the present in the new epilogue to The Rise of Early Modern Science (2d ed.) and in a
forthcoming article, “Science and Civilization ‘East’ and ‘West’: The Legacy of the Past in the Internet
World,” Society.
17
As cited in M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century (Boston:
Little Brown, 1968), 17, n. 35.
18
H. A. R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1947), 54.
19
This is not the place to enter into a broader discussion of the epistemological
foundations of the scientific revolution. A highly informed analysis of the conceptual, mathematical and
empirical aspects of the revolution, including a discussion of issues in the medical revolution can be found in
John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (London: Macmillan, 1997),
especially chapter two.
20
Roger French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1999).
21
See United Nations Development Program, Arab Human Development Report 2002;
available online at <www.undp.org/ahdr>.
22
Castells has made this argument on the basis of Russian documents and field work
in the former Soviet Union; see Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), vol. 3, chapter 1. A useful comparative analysis of the science and
technology programs of these two totalitarian regimes may be found in Paul R. Josephson, Totalitarian
Science and Technology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996).
23
David John Frank, Ann Hironaka and Evan Schofer, “Environmentalism as a Global
Institution,” American Sociological Review 65 (February 2000) : 122-27.
24
There is now a significant amount of literature on this subject; see, among others,
David John Frank, “Science, Nature, and the Globalization of the Environment, 1870-1990,” Social Forces
76, no. 2 (1997) : 409-37; and Evan Schofer, “Rationalized Environmental Discourse in World Policy
Formation,” in World Policy Formation, eds. John Boli and George M. Thomas (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999), 81-99.