Was Muslim Astronomy the Harbinger of Copernicanism?

#11, Didn`t Vasco da Gama discover India in the 15th Century? AD! :)

Let`s see Columbus discovered America.
Magellan discovered the Philippines.
Mohammed Bin Qasim discovered Pakistan.
... and Al Gore discovered the Internet. :)

Thanks, Jang. Looking at the Table of Contents, I was surprised at how little I really knew about this ancient past.

Ibn Khaldun`s work ``Muqaddimah`` is an interesting read with reference to the society of those times. They considered science a luxury, and not a necessity. That`s why it wasn`t given the importance given to crafts. This book also has an interesting commentary on music as a profession.

Vertex:

In science and technology, there is a time for every development to take place. Miracles do not happen in science although some scientists do get miraculous inspiration once in a while. I wrote some place that the edifice of science is raised brick by brick, from bottom upward. Copernicus would come only after Ibn-al-Shatir because he needed the groundwork that his predecessors had prepared. Although I also mentioned in the article that it is really strange why the Arab astronomers didn’t go all the way for heliocentrism when they were so very discontent with the geocentric system and had the basic tools for developing the heliocentric theory? Kepler built on Galileo’s and Copernicus’s work; he couldn’t forestall Newton because Kepler’s time was not yet ripe for formulating the theory of gravitation. The industrial revolution came more than a century afterwards.

Einstein needed Newton’s theory of gravitation to develop his relativity and he couldn’t have succeeded without the mathematics developed earlier by Bernhard Riemann. So on, and so forth.

Some better historical information might come to light some day because thousands of documents pertaining to Arab developments are stored in libraries, which have not been read and deciphered yet. History of Arab science is still unraveling. Wishing you well,

Mohammad Gill

The lens of history provides 20/20 hindsight. How nice!

Original ``scientists`` (modern, institutionalized science traces itself back to the 18th century) were at first hacks...nothing more than witch doctors trying methodolgical ways to convert substances into gold. For the most part, they dealt with useless metaphysical concepts, hardly the theories (backed by math) of today.

One thing I think you seriously overlook Gill Sahib was that these scientists really didn`t offer much in terms of application. If you had a bunch of people renumerating on the nature of this and that, and had at no time performed any experiments to back up your results...I don`t think a ``rational`` man of the time would really think twice about the fate of these thinkers.

Today, the Ulema (except the one or two oft quoted Saudi blokes) doesn`t say peep against science. They can`t. You can`t argue with the space shuttle. And they know it.

At best, the can belittle it`s importance...but thanks to technology, even that is a wasted effort. We`re at a point in history where technological acheivement is following scientific discovery...this is powerful.

Most of the Mullah types now seek to usurp science for an ideological goal...but hey, which society isn`t doing that?

One can blame the Mullah for the lack of science in our socities...but the fact is, it`s all about the government. How about shifting blame where it belongs for a change?

kala others interested in university in india..

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0813365996/qid=1123853859/sr=8-14/ref=pd_bbs_sbs_14/104-2276468-6611112?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

this is a very readble book of xuanznag`s travels which he did expressly to come study at the Nalanda. the book is very readable with many pictures and maps and great footnotes. there is a very nice map of nalanda univ and its various colleges.

the visitor claims the indians to be very clean (2 baths a day), dress using wahsable linens and not skins, and he finds them not serious in a philosophical way....they tend to break in to a frivoulos song and a dance. i guess bollywood was alive even then.

vivek

I will need to google a little to answer more specifically, but there were a number of different universities spread all over India, from Taxila in Pakistan to Magadha in Bihar (?), and in the south.

Small universities offered specialized education while the biggest ones like Nalanda aimed to teach everything worth teaching. A great deal of this education was secular, with standard subjects like music, logic, philosophy, astronomy, languages etc.

By the way, Pakistan probably had the world`s first thriving University at Taxila, a full half a millennium or more before Plato established his institution (Academy) in Greece.

Regarding the education being oral, I don`t know if it was any different than it was in the later Greece. I do recall reading somewhere about the Chinese visitor Huen Tsang returning to China, carrying books in sacks loaded on the backs of horses. But that was, of course, in the much later period, about 7th Century AD.

satyamvada,
Agreed with you that invasions played a big role in disrupting institutions, but most of the education was from mouth to mouth, and hence a lot of it was lost with time. Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu has a large collection of manuscripts, but I don`t know how much of it is on science.

kaalchakra,
I am curious, what were the departments in our ancient universities?

Vivek (#28)

India had a long tradition of establishing institutions for transmission of knowledge
of various shastras - including gajashastra (taking care of elephants), ashvashastra (horses), planting crops etc. There are so called `shakas` and the various
guru-shishya parampara in various subjects. There were a number of educational
institutions in India. Read Dharmapal`s book called `The Beautiful Tree` - it indicates
the level of sophistication in India.

One must not forget - that India has suffered tremendously due to invasions - The
temples and educational institutions of learning were wiped out in North India.
Family traditions were destroyed. The destruction is belittled by many to be
politically correct. However, you should read the original documents of the invaders
themselves.

Even with all the destruction, India now has the largest collection of ancient
manuscripts in the world (almost 5 million) - a number which is truly amazing
for the pre-modern world.

Indian society did not take to science because of a few iit`s - as some fools seem
to think. The Indian scientific tradition is long.

Vivek

Interesting thought, but could the ancient universities of say Taxila or Ujjaini have existed without documentation and codification of knowledge?

Check out:
http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/t_es/t_es_shah_m_astronomy_frameset.htm

Many of the so called arabic/islamic science can be attributed to Indian and even
pre-islamic traditions.
The same is true of music. Most of the musical traditions found in the middle east
are remnants of pre-islamic traditions.

Here is one clear explanation of the seven heavens that modern science has only very recently discovered, presented with self-explanatory pictures.

http://www.chowk.com/show_interactor_page.cgi?membername=humara_wah

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Gill sahib and hindvi, why do such explanations maintain a hold on even librarians? Or for that matter, on college professors, or on the readers and the editors of Pakistanlink?

http://www.pakistanlink.com/Opinion/2005/July05/08/03.HTM

If the number of people emotionally eager to accept such `theories` is small, then there isn`t any real problem (the West has its own share of creationists).

I think science in India was achievement of a few great individuals and not of any institution. Lack of institutions showed in the form of lack of documentation leading to lack of systematic growth of science.

Kaalchakra:

Thanks for your positive post.

hindvi:

Huff`s book is enlightening in more than one way. He pinpointed the basic malaise that infected (and still does) the Muslim world as far as science and philosophy were concerned. Science was at the mercy of the rulers and the ulema. If the ulema declared that a particular philosopher or scientist was blasphemer and the ruler withdrew his protection, the philosopher (scientist) was manhandled, his property vandalized and his books were put to fire. This is how the Muslim world lost the works of their ancestral scientists and philosophers. Ibn-al-Rushd was exiled and his books were burnt. He died with a broken heart. On the other hand, his work laid the foundation of science in the west as the western scholars acknowledge it themselves.

Huff’s book was discussed at length by George Saliba, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science, Columbia University. In his response, Huff wrote, “My particular inquiry began with what I called the ‘problem’ of Arabic science, namely, the intellectual question of how it happened that scholars communicating mainly in Arabic excelled in scientific inquiries during certain periods of time and yet, failed to continue these inquiries so that there was a decline, indeed such a steep and long-lasting decline, that people in later centuries might conclude that the ‘Arabs’ had never been masters of science…It is also obvious that dozens of Middle Eastern scholars and observers have agonized over this puzzle and sought to understand it for a very long time.”

As long as science and philosophy remain subservient to religion in the Muslim world, the natural and rational sciences will not flourish. Education and research need to be liberated. Religion should not be allowed to sit in judgment over what is, and isn’t, good science. Our ulema believe that the world began with the inception of Islam. Greek philosophy and sciences were not culturally and freely allowed within the Islamic world; they were considered foreign, alien, and misleading. This was a blind and blanket assessment. The situation at present is more or less the same. Professor Hoodbhoy is fighting a yeoman’s battle in Pakistan against the orchestration of education. Science and education of science need to be liberated from the State control and religion’s stranglehold. The Scriptures are outdated. For instance, the Quran speaks of ‘seven heavens’ repeatedly. What are these seven heavens? They are the spheres of Ptolemy’s astronomy. The Quranic cosmology is outdated as is Ptolemy’s. Space is boundless and is not confined by seven spheres or seven heavens (saba’as-samawaat).

Huff also wrote in his response, “Evidently, the teaching of philosophy and the natural sciences ran against the religious commitments and identity of the madrasas, an entity that persisted into the twentieth century. This was a major issue in my book, but Professor Saliba is entirely silent on the subject.” Professor Saliba and others should come out forcefully against the interference of madrasas in science education. Indeed, they are an outdated species and should be abolished and merged with the regular schools.

Science should become part of our culture. There are hardly any books on history of science written by the Muslim authors. The names of Ibn-al-Shatir, Nasir-al-Din Tusi, al-Battani, etc. are more alien in the Muslim world than Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, etc. The students should be taught about all of them.

More or less, the same is true of the Hindu scientists and philosophers. We have to go to the western sources to learn about the contributions of the Hindu and Muslim scientists. There are hardly any indigenous books on them.

Until science ceases to be considered alien and it does not become part of our culture, there is little hope of rejuvenating it and the fields of other liberal knowledge. As Huff wrote in his response to Professor Saliba, “..It is one thing if an activity is pursued randomly by various actors; it is something else altogether if that activity is carried on collectively as a result of regularized process – that is, an institutionalization of the activity by the enactment of rules, norms and regulations. Clearly, the pursuit of science in Europe via institutionalization in the universities provided it a powerful advantage unknown in the Arab/Muslim world until very recently.” This advantage is still unknown in the Muslim world.

Mohammad Gill

same guy, i read the book a while ago, it has Jahangir on the cover astride a globe

Gill saheb, such information is most welcome. With the West being so obsessed with intellectual property rights these days, we must put in our own claims on the total financial value of zero and algebra :)