Review by Choice Review
While the European scientific revolution is occasionally portrayed as a rejection of all prior "prescientific" ideas and methods, modern science evolved from a long historical tradition of inquiry, and was in some ways a reintroduction of ideas and methods that had been eclipsed in the Latin West but carried on and extended in Islam. Beginning in the ninth century with the translation of Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian works into Arabic, Islamic scholars established a vibrant tradition that extended those ideas to medicine, mathematics, optics, astronomy, and chemistry. Arabic translations of ancient writings and the original works of Islamic scholars subsequently formed an important foundation for the Enlightenment. British-Iraqi physicist Al-Khalili (Univ. of Surrey, UK) retraces this vital contribution of Islamic scientific thought. His enthusiasm, interjection of personal anecdotes, and conversational style will make the story accessible for nonspecialists. The book is marred by the author's repeated admonitions to acknowledge the value and worth of the Islamic tradition, by comparisons of the "greatness" of this or that Islamic figure with one from the Latin West, and, ironically, by assessments of the work of Islamic figures based, not in their historical and intellectual context, but in their closeness to or presaging of modern ideas. Summing Up: Recommended. All general and academic readers. D. Bantz University of Alaska
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
An Iraqi-born physicist recalls the golden age of Islamic astronomy, mathematics, medicine and philosophy. IN the thousand years between the decline of Rome and the springtime of the Renaissance, science and other branches of learning took a holiday throughout Europe. It was a benighted time in the history most of us raced through in school, skipping lightly through Charlemagne and Richard the Lion-Hearted, the Norman Conquest and the Crusades, and arriving none too soon at the time of Leonardo and Michelangelo, Columbus and da Gama, Erasmus and Luther. Ignored for the most part in Eurocentric accounts is the parallel culture that rose in the Middle East with the swift spread of Islam after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632. Lands from Spain to Persia and beyond fell to the Muslim sword, and in time some ambitious rulers made their palaces sanctuaries of learning, the think tanks of their day, where astronomers, mathematicians, physicians and philosophers were allowed to venture beyond the received word and to practice science as an empirical inquiry. Jim al-Khalili, an Iraqi-born physicist who has lived in Britain since 1979, has taken on the task of elevating this neglected period to its rightful place in history. His new book, "The House of Wisdom," reflects a depth of research, an ability to tell a fascinating story well and fair-mindedness where minds too often are closed. Al-Khalili positions himself with care, more or less above the clash of civilizations but with unconcealed pride in his roots. He is the son of a British mother and a Shiite Muslim father of Persian descent, and was educated in England. As a self-described atheist, he declares up front, "My interest in Islam is cultural rather than spiritual." He prefers the more neutral term "Arabic science" to "Arab science." Some of the notable scientists were Christians, Jews and Persians, after all, and they had in common Arabic as the lingua franca. He also reminds readers that in early Islam there was no bitter conflict between religion and science and that the Koran encouraged the close study of all God's works. In this spirit, the author retrieves for us several dozen all but forgotten men of science and philosophy to correct the negative stereotype of Islam "that contrasts with our Western secular, rational, tolerant and enlightened society." A thousand years ago, he emphasizes, "the roles were reversed." Though Arabic science was productive for more than 500 years, its golden age spanned the 9th and 11th centuries. At the head of the author's list of geniuses are Abu Ali al-Hassan ibn al-Haytham, Abu Rayhan Muhammad al-Biruni and Abu Ali ai-Hussein ibn Sina, better known in the West as Avicenna. He ranks Ibn al-Haytham the greatest physicist between Archimedes and Newton, and Ibn Sina the "colossus of philosophy between Aristotle and Descartes." Ibn Sina also wrote extensively on Greek, Persian and Indian medicine, conducted his own research on contagious diseases and anatomy, and was well ahead of his time with the insight that light is composed of particles, which Newton later described and Einstein proved. Al-Biruni contributed significant advances in calculus and trigonometry and boldly criticized Aristotle for relying on pure thought and reasoning, which often led to mistakes, instead of careful observation and experimentation, an early appreciation of the modern scientific method. One of the few widely familiar names cited by al-Khalili makes a mere cameo appearance. Omar Khayyam, better known as a poet and the author of "The Rubaiyat," was also a brilliant mathematician who wrote a treatise on algebra in which he complained of society's hindrances to scientific investigation, for its confusing "the true with the false" and not using what it knew of the sciences "except for base and material purposes." Sounds familiar. ABU JAFAR ABDULLAH ALMAMUN, caliph of Bagdad in the early 9th century, was indispensable to this intellectual flowering. The city was only four decades old but had already become the largest in the world. In this vibrant setting, al-Mamun established an institute, the House of Wisdom, the likes of which had not been seen since the great library at Alexandria. The author compares Baghdad in those days to Renaissance Florence or Athens in the age of Pericles. At first, the caliph followed his great-grandfather's practice of pushing his savants for Arabic translations of Greek books in the country's possession, a legacy of Hellenistic rule for several centuries after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Over the next two centuries, more works of Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Hippocrates, as well as Persian and Indian thinkers, were rendered into Arabic. It became a lucrative business, abetted by advances in papermaking learned from captive Chinese soldiers. Other wealthy patrons, not only the caliph, supported the translation movement, al-Khalili points out, "in part for the practical benefits it brought them in finance, agriculture, engineering projects and medicine, and in part because this patronage quickly turned into a de rigueur cultural activity that defined their standing in society." A modern budget proposal from a science-funding agency could not have put it better. The upshot was, while the Greek works in particular were disappearing in Europe, they were being preserved in Arabic to be retranslated later into Latin for a rebirth of "lost" knowledge. This is one half of the point the author makes frequently in the text and, in boldface, as the book's subtitle. The other half is that contrary to some doubters, the Arab interest in learning extended well beyond translations: thinkers working alone or in observatories and houses of wisdom were conducting original research during "the world's most impressive period of scholarship and learning since ancient Greece." Accordingly, al-Khalili writes that al-Mamun stands as "the greatest patron of science in the cavalcade of Islamic rulers." Sometimes al-Khalili, like a lawyer who suspects a jury of unyielding skepticism, strains to give stature to the leading lights of Arabic science in the Middle Ages. But modern historians of science agree that more attention should be given to the Arab contribution to the preservation and expansion of knowledge at this critical period, and the author has done so in considerable detail and with rising passion. But that was then, and al-Khalili is obligated to end on an inescapable but deflating note: science today is in a chronic state of neglect in the Arab world and the broader Islamic culture of more than one billion people. Al-Khalili spreads the blame widely, citing inadequate financing for research and education, sclerotic bureaucracies, religious conservatism, even an ingrained fear of science. The Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, perhaps the greatest Muslim scientist of the last century, won a Nobel Prize in 1979 and did what he could to promote a scientific renaissance among his people, without success. "Of all civilizations on this planet, science is weakest in the lands of Islam," Salam said in despair. "The dangers of this weakness cannot be overemphasized since the honorable survival of a society depends directly on its science and technology in the condition of the present age." By recounting Arabic science's luminous past, al-Khalili says, he hopes to instill a sense of pride that will "propel the importance of scientific enquiry back to where it belongs: at the very heart of what defines a civilized and enlightened society." John Noble Wilford, a former senior correspondent for The Times, is the author of several books on science and history.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 22, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
A Polish Catholic, Copernicus was far from professing Muslim beliefs. Yet in this fascinating foray into the history of science, al-Khalili shows that the revolutionary astronomer relied heavily on mathematical techniques borrowed from Muslim thinkers. Further research suggests that a ninth-century Muslim experimentalist not the eighteenth-century theorist Lavoisier deserves the title father of chemistry and that an eleventh-century Muslim mathematician anticipated Newton's breakthroughs in both calculus and kinetics. By stressing the surprisingly original work of early Muslim scientists, al-Khalili revises a conventional narrative that acknowledges a Muslim role in science only in the medieval preservation of ancient Greek thought in centers of culture such as Baghdad and Andalusia. Al-Khalili convincingly argues that Muslim scholars challenged and revised the Greek paradigms they preserved. Unfortunately, as al-Khalili surveys twenty-first-century Islam, he finds bureaucratic neglect and religious zealotry retarding scientific initiative. But al-Khalili refuses to despair, believing that a renewed awareness of their forebears can inspire a brilliant new generation of Muslim scientists. Much-needed light on a frequent cause of interfaith misunderstanding.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
There is a commonly held view that during the Middle Ages, Arabic scientists focused mainly on translating into Arabic the scientific knowledge of ancient civilizations while contributing little to scientific advancement. Physicist al-Khalili (Univ. of Surrey, UK; Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed) vigorously challenges this theory by documenting the remarkable contributions of Arabic astronomers, mathematicians, physicians, physicists, chemists, and philosophers, who were scholars at a scientific academy in Baghdad known as the House of Wisdom. While the names of these "forgotten geniuses and unsung heroes" may be unfamiliar to most of us, their scientific legacies still reverberate. One such legacy is that algebra was developed as a distinct branch of mathematics by House of Wisdom scholar al-Khwarizmi in the ninth century. VERDICT Al-Khalili brings to life a vibrant intellectual period of Islamic history when there was not only tolerance for other religions and cultures but a synergy between science and Islam. Anyone interested in the early history of science or the development of the scientific method before Galileo will find this an engaging study.-Cynthia Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Lib., Flemington, NJ (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
