Islamic art and science didn't start or end in Cordoba, Spain, a place very much in the news today, and one nearly completely misunderstood. But it's a good jumping off point.
"Science and Islam: A History" was written to accompany a BBC television series about how one major Abrahamic religion dealt with a tool for understanding the world, how it preserved old scientific knowledge, invented new ways of thinking about the natural world and transmitted and shared that information with the rest of the world. Here's one brief mention of what Cordoba was about:
"The Umayyad leaders and their wealthy entourage ensured that Cordoba and other Andalusian cities such as Toledo and Seville all had well-stocked libraries and well-paid jobs for intellectuals. Like Baghdad, Cordoba was a cosmopolitan city and Christians, and especially Jews, found that they were welcome here. For many centuries, Jewish intellectual life flourished in what has been called the Jewish Golden Age."
Cordoba wasn't even all that unique in the Islamic empire, though it was a key player in the collection and dissemination across other cultures of knowledge about the world, in a broad spectrum of fields: astronomy, engineering, math, medicine and chemistry.
What this book does first is outline what is meant by Islamic science, including explaining that early Muslims didn't fully even have a word specifically for science, relying instead on the word "ilm" or knowledge, and in same cases, arguing that science and faith, author Ehsan Masood writes, are two sides of the same coin.
From there, the author takes readers through a detailed account of how the Islamic culture, over roughly 700 years, led the way with creating new knowledge and tools, from the Ninth Century Musa al-Khwarizimi who developed algebra to the Turkish engineer who developed such tools as the camshaft and the reciprocating piston. The book covers the centuries between 700 and 1400.
Much of what the Muslims knew wound up being translated into other languages and then spread to Europeans; some was rejected on the basis of scientific understanding in those other communities; some was rejected on the basis of religious beliefs, while other concepts were simply accepted, absorbed, with or without credit, and expanded upon.
It is remarkable to learn what occurred during this time period and how awareness of it has been overlooked. Masood quotes Michael Hamilton Morgan of the New Foundation for Peace calling this general lack of knowledge "lost history." And historian Jack Goody calls it the "theft of history." Masood writes, "It is as if the memory of an entire civilisation and its contribution to the sum of knowledge has been virtually wiped from human consciousness."
It does no one any good to deny history, whether what is recovered is positive or negative. A book like this helps set the record straight and deserves to be read and understood by everyone for the facts it puts in front of all.
The book is available at several Long Island bookstores.
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