Could the Islamic world have preempted the Europeans in promoting... a [scientific] revolution? Was there in fact a decline, or if you prefer stagnation, of scientific thought in Islam, or perhaps better put, a lack of intellectual nerve which prevented Near Eastern thinkers from innovating a scientific breakthrough that could have led to the equivalent of Europes conceptual paradigm shifts and technological advances? A historian of Islamic mathematics has argued that developments in number theory led th Muslim al-Yazdi (ca. 1630) to the same findings as Descartes and Fermat, the great mathematicians of the West. Similarly others have discovered an Islamic school of astronomy, which flourished in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries and which reportedly arrived at all the necessary mathematical models to replace the Ptolemaic universe, a stupendous achievement credited to Copernicus (d. 1541) in the Latin world...We are thus encouraged to believe that just as Ibn Sinas philosophy continued to flourish among Muslims into modern times, there was no significant decline or even stagnation in the development of scientific thought...if such conceptual breakthroughs in science did take place among the Muslims, why is it they are incapable of building on them as did the Europeans? Even today, with full exposure to the most advanced science developed globally and with enormous sums of money available for investment in scientific institutions, the Arab world (well over 90 percent Muslim) cannot boast of a single truly world class university or scientific research center. Other civilizations more recently introduced to modern science and technology, for example China, India, and Korea, now give rise to cutting edge research and development. Once the great universities of Europe opened their doors to Jewish students and instructors [in the nineteenth century], the latter excelled in any number of disciplines, none more heralded than the various branches of the theoretical and experimental sciences. The number of Jewish Nobel Prize laureates in relation to the total awards granted staggers the imagination. The same is true for the Fields Medal awarded for extraordinary contributions in mathematics. A trivial percentage of the worlds population and, measured by numbers alone, a truly insignificant percentage of the Western world, the Jews of Europe and America were heavily represented at the forefront of scientific achievement in the twentieth century; the trend continues in the twenty-first. For the Jews of the Near East, the local intellectual climate changed dramatically only with the emergence of political Zionism...with the aim of reconstituting the Jewish people on their ancient homeland. Jewish scientific creativity, which had found its expression once again in Europe as a result of enlightenment and emancipation, now made its way to the Near East. With a population less than 2 percent of that of the Arab-Muslim inhabiting the Near East and North Africa, Israel became a world leader in the development of current science and technology. Israel draws its intellectual inspiration from contemporary currents in Europe, America, and those non-Western countries that have accepted the conceptual framework of scientific advancement in the West as well the methods to study and apply it. Were Muslims capable of managing a marriage between the Western propensity for innovation in scientific theory and method and normative Islamic beliefs and practices, the common intellectual interest that bounds Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the region might flourish as it did in the Islamic Middle Ages. Like Europeans of an earlier time, the Muslim peoples of the Near East might use the intellectual legacy of others to develop major scientific advances of their own. To achieve such an intellectual symbiosis will require major changes in Islamic society and culture. The recent Islamic revival has created internal issues still to be settled within the Abode of Islam, the license to innovate being one among many. Beyond that, there is the necessity of a political and, equally important, cultural rapprochement with the West and with the Jews and Christians of the Near East. --Jacob Lassner, Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 06:01:06 +0000
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