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Secular Sciences and the Question of “Decline”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Najm al-Din Yousefi
Najm al-Din Yousefi*
Affiliation:
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

The fate of secular sciences in Islamic civilization has been the object of intense historical investigation. Historians have long sought to explicate the seemingly mysterious reduction of knowledge production in late medieval Islam. The present article attempts to grapple with this phenomenon by focusing on the social elements of knowledge production at the local, rather than the global level. It argues that the transmission of ancient knowledge to medieval Islam depended largely on a close cooperation among historical agents, who sought to advance various interests. The ultimate reduction of knowledge production—commonly referred to as the “decline” of sciences—was brought about by intense rivalry and the increased tension between different forms of knowledge and their representatives, which in turn hampered patterns of cooperation. The article stresses the contingent nature of the social relations that gave rise to the “decline” of sciences: the configuration of social agents, their interactions, and the final outcomes were not bound to unfold the way they did, nor did they have to follow the same path that led to emergence of modern Western science.

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Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 4: Sciences, Crafts, and the Production of Knowledge: Iran and Eastern Islamic Lands (ca. 184–1153 AH/800–1740 CE) , September 2008 , pp. 559 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2008

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References

1 The use of the term “science” for pre-modern contexts has been contested by several historians and philosophers, who argue that science is a modern phenomenon which did not exist before the eighteenth century; these scholars prefer the term “natural philosophy” in its stead; see, for example, Cunningham, Andrew and Williams, Perry, “De-centring the ‘Big Picture’: The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 26 (1993): 407–432CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nevertheless, historians of science in medieval Islam find it justified to use the term “science” in view of the continuity of many scientific methods and practices. In this article, the term “science” is used in its broadest sense referring to the systematic production of knowledge about natural phenomena.

2 Caution must be exercised so as not to overgeneralize particular findings. The rise of the sciences in medieval Islam took place in such a vast geographic area, from Central Asia and Iran to North Africa and Spain, and over such an extended period, from the second/eighth century to the eighth/fourteenth century, that no single account can possibly capture its complexity and diversity. Fields of inquiry have had different patterns of development while some practices and sociopolitical reactions varied from one region to another.

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16 See Iqbal, Muzaffar, Islam and Science (Aldershot, 2002), 8–9Google Scholar, 44; for an investigation of the conversion to Islam, see Bulliet, Richard W., Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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18 Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, 267–8; Ibn al-Qifī, Tārīkh al-ukamā, 136. According to Mas‘ūdī, the Almagest and the Elements were already translated into Arabic during al-Manūr, see Murūj al-Dhahab, 2:669.

19 ibn Isḥāq, Ḥunayn, Risāla unayn ibn Isāq ila ‘Alī ibn Yayā fi dhikr ma tarjama min kutub Jālīnūs, trans. by Mohaghegh, Mehdi (Tehran, 2005)Google Scholar; also see Meyerhof, Max, “New Light on Hunain ibn Ishaq and His Period,” Isis, 8 (1926): 685–724CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ullmann, Manfred, Islamic Medicine, trans. by Watt, W. Montgomery, (Edinburgh, 1978), 9–10Google Scholar; for the Munajjim family, see Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, 143–144; Khairallah, A. E., “‘Abū Aḥmad Yaḥyā ibn ‘Alī ibn Yaḥyā ibn Abī Manṣūr Abān al-Monajjem,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica (London, 1982), 1: 251–252Google Scholar.

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22 Khwārizmī, The Algebra of Mohammad ben Musa (emphasis added); cf. Samarqandī, Niẓāmī ‘Arūḍī, Chahār Maqālah, ed. by Mu'in, Muhammad (Tehran, 1379/2000), 27–28Google Scholar, 32, 121–122.

23 See Rashed, Roshdi, “Transmission of Greek Scientific Thought into Arabic,” History of Science, 27 (1989): 199–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 ibn Lūqā, Qusṭā, Medical Regime for the Pilgrims to Mecca (the Risāla fi tadbīr safar al-hajj), trans. by Bos, Gerrit (Leiden, 1992)Google Scholar

25 A quick look at any bio-bibliographical source reveals that nearly all translators and patrons in the early period belonged to minority groups; see Afnan, Philosophical Terminology in Arabic and Persian, 14; also see Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 1: 298.

26 The first dīwān is said to have been established under the second caliph ‘Umar ibn al-Khaāb (r. 634–44/13–23) and functioned as a central organization to control payments to the soldiers and commanders of the Muslim army. This early dīwān lacked the sophistication of its later period when it was responsible for various activities, such as taxation, surveying, and even legal judgments, which in turn required multiple specialties. Ansari, A. S. Bazmee, “Dīwān,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1965), 2: 323Google Scholar.

27 Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, 242; cf. Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, 2: 22–23.

28 Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, 2: 23.

29 Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, 29–30 (emphasis added).

30 Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, 30.

31 Franz Rosenthal has offered an impressive survey of the concept of knowledge and its transformation and multiplication in medieval Islam; see Knowledge Triumphant: the Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam, 2nd. ed. (Leiden, 2007)Google Scholar.

32 See Iqbal, Islam and Science, 39 passim.

33 Gutas, Dimitri, “Islam and Science: A False Statement of the Problem,” Islam and Science, 1/2 (2003): 215Google Scholar; Iqbal's response, to my mind, only reasserts the essentialist and reified notion of Islam, , “Islam and Science: Responding to a False Approach,” Islam and Science, 1/2 (2003): 221Google Scholar; also see Gutas, “Certainty, Doubt, Error,” 277–278.

34 Smith, Wilfred C., The Meaning and End of Religion (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, ch. 4.

35 Iqbal, Islam and Science, 72–76, 159.

36 Goldziher, Ignaz, “The Attitude of Orthodox Islam toward the ‘Ancient Sciences’,” in Studies on Islam, trans. by Swartz, Merlin L. (Oxford, 1981), 185–215Google Scholar. For a critique of Goldziher's argument, see Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 166–175; also see Sabra, A. I., “The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam,” History of Science, 25 (London, 1987): 231–232Google Scholar.

37 Cf. Ragep, F. Jamil, “Freeing Astronomy from Philosophy: An Aspect of Islamic Influence on Science,” Osiris, 16 (Chicago, 2001): 50Google Scholar.

38 See Shapin, Steven and Schafer, Simon, Leviathan and the Air Pump; Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Chicago, 1984)Google Scholar, ch. 8; also Shapin, Steven, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996), 123–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Saliba, Islamic Science, 126–127.

39 Ibn al-Qifī, Tārīkh al-ukamā, 239.

40 See Mottahedeh, Roy, “The Transmission of Learning: the Role of the Islamic Northeast,” in Madrasa, La Transmission du Savoir Dans le Monde Musulman, ed. Grandine, Nicole and Gaborieau, Marc (Paris, 1997), 64–65Google Scholar.

41 Ragep has qualified David King's argument by reminding us that Islam provided as much service to astronomy as it received from it: “Since Muslim ritual could have survived perfectly well without the astronomers (does God really demand that one pray to within a minute or less of arc?), it does not take too great a leap of imagination to realize that this ‘service to religion’ was really religion's service to the astronomers, both Muslim and non-Muslim, providing on the one hand a degree of social legitimation and on the other a set of interesting mathematical problems to solve.” “Freeing Astronomy,” 51.

42 Ibn Khaldūn captures the epistemological cohesion of the sciences when he orders them under the general rubric of “philosophical sciences”; see the Muqaddimah, 3: 111–112; cf. Sayili, The Observatory in Islam, 417–418.

43 Sabra, “Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization,” 231–232, 241–242. Sabra calls attention to the concomitant transformation in the notion of knowledge such that it was no longer sought to attain truth and pleasure, but rather to serve divine cause and sharī'a (239–240). “This is the view that accompanied the limited admission of logic and mathematics and medicine into the madrasa and the conditional admission of the astronomer into the mosque,” 240.

44 See Sabra, “Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization,” 241–2; Saliba, Islamic Science, 103, 127, 186–187.

45 See Ragep, “Freeing Astronomy,” n. 38.

46 Bīrūnī, Abū Rayhān, The Exhaustive Treatise on Shadows, trans. by Kennedy, E. S. (Aleppo, 1976), 6–7Google Scholar.

47 Shams al-Dīn Muammad ibn Mamūd Shahrazūrī, Nuzhat al-Arwā wa Rawa al-Afrā, ed. by M. T. Danesh-Pazhuh and M. S. Mowla'i [based on an eleventh/seventeenth century Persian translation by Maqsūd ‘Alī Tabrīzī] (Tehran 1365/1986), 10–11.

48 Yawāqīt al-'Ulūm wa Darārī al-Nujūm, ed. by Danesh-Pazhuh, M. T., 2nd ed. (Tehran, 1364/1985)Google Scholar.

49 Yawāqīt al-'Ulūm, 222.

50 Yawāqīt al-'Ulūm, 210 (author's translation).

51 The story can help us make sense of the attitude that legitimated the whole genre of ibb al-Nabawī (lit. the prophetic medicine), which based the art of therapy on sayings attributed to the Prophet. Two such texts are translated by Cyril Elgood; see “Tibb-ul-Nabbi or Medicine of the Prophet,” Osiris, 14 (1962): 33–192. Elgood describes the growth of medical knowledge in Islam as “one of continual rebellion by the doctors against the system of thought imposed upon them by the theologians,” 38.

52 Yawāqīt al-'Ulūm, 245 (author's translation). Interestingly enough, the classification of astronomy into three categories of mathematical, speculative, and illusive is indicative of the change of attitude toward astronomy whereby astrological aspects had to be separated from hay'a (i.e., the science of the configuration of stars) in order for the latter to continue its services. Saliba has found this separation instrumental in the subsequent flourishing of astronomy; see A History of Arabic Astronomy, Planetary Theories during the Golden Age of Islam (New York, 1994), 61Google Scholar; Islamic Science, 186; also see Ragep, “Freeing Astronomy,” 52.

53 Ghazzālī, Abū Ḥāmid, Al-Munqidh min al-alāl, ed. by Mahmud, Abd al-Halim (Cairo, 1962), 148–150Google Scholar.

54 Al-Ghazālī, , The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-Falāsifa), trans. by Marmura, Michael E. (Provo, 1997), 2Google Scholar.

55 Al-Ghazālī, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, 8–9.

56 Al-Ghazālī, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, 6–7; also see Ghazzālī, Al-Munqidh, 148–150.

57 Ghazzālī, Al-Munqidh, 151; cf. The Incoherence of the Philosophers, 165–169, also discussion 17, 170–181.

58 Ibn al-Qifī, Tārīkh al-ukamā, 49–53. Like Ghazzālī, Ibn al-Qifī starts with three classes of philosophers and proceeds with a taxonomy of the philosophical sciences (i.e., mathematics, logic, natural sciences, ethics, and politics) only to draw the same conclusion as Ghazzālī did about the precaution one must exercise when dealing with these disciplines.

59 Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, 3: 246–267.

60 See Saliba, Islamic Science, 126–127. Saliba touches on the struggle between the scholars of the religious and secular sciences, and its implications for their social authority, but he does not treat the source of the struggle.

61 Iqbal, Islam and Science, 25–27.

62 Mas‘ūdī, Murūj al-Dhahab, 2: 669. Ibn al-Nadīm talks about a certain Muammad ibn ‘Ubayd Allāh, caliph al-Mahdī’s secretary, who due to his zandaqa (apostasy) was put to death at the order of the caliph; see Kitāb al-Fihrist, 338. abarī reports that al-Mahdī stressed to his heir apparent, the future caliph al-Ḥādī, that the zindīqs had to face severe punishment, 8: 220; cf. ‘Abd Aallāh Ṣāḥibī Nakhjavāni, Hindū Shāh ibn Sanjar ibn, Tajārib al-Salaf, ed. by Ashtiyani, Abbas Iqbal, 3rd ed. (Tehran, 1357/1978), 120Google Scholar.

63 See Saliba, Islamic Science, 103, 127.

64 Sourdel, Dominique, “Dār al-‘Ilm,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1965) 2: 127Google Scholar.

65 George Makdisi's pioneering studies offer by far the most reliable account of the institutions of learning in Islam; The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh, 1981); cf. Mez, Adam, The Renaissance of Islam, trans. by Bakhsh, S. Khuda and Margoliouth, D. S. (London, 1937), 175–176Google Scholar.

66 Makdisi, George, “Hanbalite Islam,” in Studies on Islam, trans. by Swartz, Merlin L. (Oxford, 1981), 238Google Scholar. Sourdel states that the destruction of Baghdad's last dār al-‘ilm took place in 447/1055–56, which is the same year that Saljūq troops conquered Baghdad; see Sourdel, “Dār al-‘Ilm,” 127. An interesting case of local struggles to protect scientists in the face of intensifying sectarian tensions may be found in Sayyed Mohammad Hossein Manzoor al-Adjdad, “The Naqīb of Ray Alids and His Support of Scientists,” in this issue of Iranian Studies.

67 Metz believes that the new system was instituted with Ash‘arī schools in Nishāpūr prior to the official establishment of the Niāmīyya, The Renaissance of Islam, 180. Roy Mottahedeh, too, has made a compelling argument, which traces the origins of the madrasa system to a long-standing tradition in greater Khurāsān before the advent of the Saljūqs; see Mottahedeh, “The Transmission of Learning.”

68 Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges, 10. Elsewhere Makdisi states that the Islamic institutions of learning by their very nature did not include “the so-called rationalist sciences,” see “Hanbalite Islam,” 230, 235–236.

71 Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, 3: 263–264.

69 Makdisi writes, “The waqf's exclusory rule did not succeed in excluding the foreign sciences. These were represented in the libraries, where Greek works were preserved, and disputations took place on rationalist subjects. The exclusion meant that the study of the ‘foreign sciences’ had to be pursued privately; they were not subsidized in the same manner as the Islamic sciences and its ancillaries. But there was nothing to stop the subsidized student from studying the foreign sciences unaided, or learning in secret from masters teaching in the privacy of their homes, or in the waqf institutions, outside of the regular curriculum,” The Rise of Colleges, 78; cf. Sayili, The Observatory in Islam, 414–415.

70 The observatory is perhaps the only entity associated with the secular sciences that underwent significant degree of institutionalization thanks to the caliphs' and kings' continued interest in astrology, as well as to the observatory's perceived utility among the elite. This could explain, to some extent, astronomy's strong presence in the Muslim society and its continued growth beyond the ninth/fifteenth century. Nevertheless, the observatory was rarely supported by the instrument of waqf. The use of waqf for the Marāqa and Tabrīz observatories under the Ilkhanids must be considered the exception, rather than the rule. See Sayili, The Observatory in Islam, 332–333.

72 George Saliba has been at pains to document such major contributions of preeminent mathematicians and astronomers of the late medieval Islam, see Islamic Science, 113, 115, 237–240; also see Ragep, “Freeing Astronomy,” 63–64.

73 Iqbal, Islam and Science, 125

74 Cf. Sabra, “Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization,” 238–239; also see Sabra, , “Situating Arabic Science: Locality versus Essence,” Isis, 87 (1996): 654–670CrossRefGoogle Scholar.