Was medieval Islamic culture inhospitable to science?

Myth #4 in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion is Syed Nomanul Haq’s arti­cle enti­tled “That Medieval Islamic Culture was Inhospitable to Science.” Haq is cur­rently a vis­it­ing fac­ulty mem­ber at Lahore University of Management Sciences, in Pakistan. He also teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. His under­grad­u­ate degree is in applied physics, while his doc­tor­ate is in Graeco-Arabic intel­lec­tual his­tory from the University of London.

The main point of his arti­cle is to com­bat the den­i­grat­ing myth that cred­its the Greeks for “all that was note­wor­thy in Arabic sci­ence” (note that the term “sci­ence” itself is poten­tially con­tro­ver­sial, but I will keep it for the sake of its util­ity). In con­trast, Haq argues that the Arabic trans­la­tions of Greek texts, begun in earnest in the ninth cen­tury and heav­ily relied upon by European schol­ars begin­ning in the twelfth, were far more than sim­ple restate­ments of Greek texts in the Arabic lan­guage. Haq says, instead, that the process was a cre­ative act, and that is should be no sur­prise as such that Christian European schol­ars pre­ferred the Arabic texts, even when the orig­i­nal Greek ones were avail­able, because of the Arabic clar­i­fi­ca­tions, improve­ments, and recasting.

Haq also takes issue with the claim that Islam’s sci­en­tific schol­ars were mar­gin­al­ized by main­stream Muslim soci­ety, and that oppo­si­tion by “ortho­dox” reli­gious lead­ers like Abu Hamid al-Ghazali in the 12th cen­tury effec­tively ended sci­en­tific pur­suits in the Islamic world. Instead, says Haq, Islamic sci­ence con­tin­ued to flour­ish in an “open mar­ket­place” of ideas until fad­ing by the time of “the so-called sci­en­tific rev­o­lu­tion in west­ern Europe.”

Absent from Haq’s arti­cle is much of an expla­na­tion of why Islamic trans­la­tors sought to recast ancient Greek texts into Arabic, or why this pur­suit was sup­ported by the Abbasid elites.

Similarly, although Haq rejects the idea that Islamic the­o­log­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal ortho­doxy even­tu­ally led to the set­ting of Islam’s “sci­en­tific star,” he does not pro­vide a robust alter­na­tive expla­na­tion, other than to point to “sev­eral severe rever­sals” expe­ri­enced by polit­i­cal Islam, includ­ing the Christian recon­quista in Spain and Hulagu Khan’s sack­ing of Baghdad and cap­ture of Damascus in the thir­teenth century.

So if medieval Islamic cul­ture was so con­ducive to sci­en­tific pur­suits, why didn’t it last? And why shouldn’t con­tem­po­rary Islamic soci­ety be equally sup­port­ive of science?

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