The Unity of Science in the Arabic Tradition

 

books.google.com

This book is the first to reflect the multi-dimensional nature of the interplay between logic, science, philosophy and language in the Arabic tradition. It presents contributions from the world's leading scholars and historians under the headings 'Epistemology and Philosophy of Science' and 'Logic, Philosophy and Grammar'.

The contents exemplify the liveliness of modern perspectives on the Arabic tradition. It describes new paths for research and understanding not normally raised in the approaches to this subject. It challenges the rigid distinction between Western and Eastern thought and opens the field for a new view on the development of modern science.

Classical Islam: Baghdad's House of Wisdom ~ 2

 In The House of Wisdom, Florence Parry Heide and Judith Heide Gilliland weave an historic, yet timeless tale of 9th century Baghdad. A young boy, Ishaq (Arabic for Isaac), lives with his scholar father in the House of Wisdom, a vast library where manuscripts from all around the known world have been gathered and preserved. Ishaq grows up in this center of learning, knowing how prized these ancient books are--the caliph gives his father a manuscript's weight in gold for translating it!--but not fully grasping the importance of the legacy they represent, until the Caliph presents him with a challenge.  

Only after he leads an expedition himself in search of books, "to Cordova and Samarkand, to India and China," does he understand.

  www.amazon.com 

"The House of Wisdom," a large, vibrantly illustrated book aimed at young readers, brings to life the legacy of the Arab World in its period of enlightenment 1,000 years ago. Through historically-based story-telling, it brings a sense of adventure into the realm of knowledge and its acquisition.

The book's opening words set the tone for a brief, exciting journey to an era still admired for its elevation of learning: "From time to time, as the world turns, something different happens, something mysterious and astonishing. Ideas brush against one another and sparks fly! It can happen anywhere, anytime." 

Thus begins the true story of Ishaq, a young ninth-century Baghdad resident who lives in the great library known as bayt al-hikmah, the House of Wisdom - "the very center of the brightening" - where scholars preserved the great intellectual contributions of the ancient world. Ishaq's father is the master translator Hunayn, whom the Caliph pays in gold equal to the weight of each manuscript.

As he matures in this historic period of enlightenment, Ishaq studies ancient Greek as well as Arabic, and one day is chosen to lead a book-gathering expedition that takes him to Cordova and to China. He returns to Baghdad three years later, delivering thousands of manuscripts. Fueled by his passion for knowledge, Ishaq ultimately becomes the world's greatest translator of Aristotle.

The book is historically informative, written in lyrical prose by Florence Parry Heide, the author of more than 100 books for children, and her co-author and daughter, Judith Heide Gilliland, who has a master's degree in Near Eastern languages and literature and lived in the Middle East for five years.

Visually, "The House of Wisdom" is breathtaking, filled with shimmering lights, handsome faces, and swirling, kinetic tableaux. Inspired by richly patterned Islamic art, the illustrations by Mary Grand Pré use framed boxes and borders reminiscent of old Islamic books, and the figures are alive with movement and texture, depth and light.

A brief historical and geographical review rounds out the narrative, stressing the contributions of the scholars of "The House of Wisdom" who "introduced Greek thought to Europe, sparking the Renaissance," and carried "the torch of civilization for the rest of the world."

 www.aljadid.com

* Who Was the First Scientist? * ~ By Bradley Steffens

 

We live in a scientific age. Millions of young people study science, thousands of universities teach it, and hundreds of publications chronicle it. We even have a cable channel devoted exclusively to its wonders. We are immersed in technology rooted in its discoveries. But what is science, and who was its first practitioner?

Science is the study of the physical world, but it is not just a topic, a subject, a field of interest. It is a discipline--a system of inquiry that adheres to a specific methodology--the scientific method. In its basic form, the scientific method consists of seven steps:

1) observation;
2) statement of a problem or question;
3) formulation of a hypothesis, or a possible answer to the problem or question;
4) testing of the hypothesis with an experiment;
5) analysis of the experiment's results;
6) interpretation of the data and formulation of a conclusion;
7) publication of the findings.

One can study phenomena without adhering to the scientific method, of course. The result, however, is not science. It is pseudoscience or junk science.

Throughout history, many people in many parts of the world have studied nature without using the scientific method. Some of the earliest people to do so were the ancient Greeks. Scholars such as Aristotle made many observations about natural phenomena, but they did not test their ideas with experiments. Instead they relied on logic to support their findings. As a result, they often arrived at erroneous conclusions. Centuries later the errors of the Greeks were exposed by scholars using the scientific method.

Perhaps the most famous debunking of Greek beliefs occurred in 1589 when Galileo Galilei challenged Aristotle's notions about falling bodies. Aristotle had asserted that heavy bodies fall at a faster rate than light bodies do. His contention was logical but unproven. Galileo decided to test Aristotle's hypothesis, legend says, by dropping cannon balls of different weights from a balcony of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He released the balls simultaneously and found that neither ball raced ahead of the other. Rather, they sped earthward together and hit the ground at the same time. Galileo also conducted experiments in which he rolled balls of different weights down inclines in an attempt to discover the truth about falling bodies. For these and other experiments, Galileo is considered by many to be the first scientist.

Galileo was not the first person to conduct experiments or to follow the scientific method, however. European scholars had been conducting experiments for three hundred years, ever since a British-born Franciscan monk named Roger Bacon advocated experimentation in the thirteenth century. One of Bacon's books, Perspectiva (Optics) challenges ancient Greek ideas about vision and includes several experiments with light that include all seven steps of the scientific method.

Bacon's Perspectiva is not an original work, however. It is a summary of a much longer work entitled De aspectibus (The Optics). Perspectiva follows the organization of De aspectibus and repeats its experiments step by step, sometimes even word for word. But De aspectibus is not an original work, either. It is the translation of a book written in Arabic entitled Kitāb al-Manāzir (Book of Optics). Written around 1021, Kitāb al-Manāzir predates Roger Bacon's summary of it by 250 years. The author of this groundbreaking book was a Muslim scholar named Abū 'Alī al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham.

Born in Basra (located in what is now Iraq) in 965, Ibn al-Haytham--known in the West as Alhazen or Alhacen--wrote more than 200 books and treatises on a wide range of subjects. He was the first person to apply algebra to geometry, founding the branch mathematics known as analytic geometry.

Ibn al-Haytham's use of experimentation was an outgrowth of his skeptical nature and his Muslim faith. He believed that human beings are flawed and only God is perfect. To discover the truth about nature, he reasoned, one had to allow the universe to speak for itself. "The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them," Ibn al-Haytham wrote in Doubts Concerning Ptolemy, "but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration."

To test his hypothesis that "lights and colors do not blend in the air," for example, Ibn al-Haytham devised the world's first camera obscura, observed what happened when light rays intersected at its aperture, and recorded the results. This is just one of dozens of "true demonstrations," or experiments, contained in Kitāb al-Manāzir.

By insisting on the use of verifiable experiments to test hypotheses, Ibn al-Haytham established a new system of inquiry--the scientific method--and earned a place in history as the first scientist.

* * *

Bradley Steffens is the author of twenty-one books, coauthor of seven, and editor of the 2004 anthology, The Free Speech Movement. His Censorship was included in the 1997 edition of Best Books for Young Adult Readers and his Giants won the 2005 San Diego Book Award for Best Young Adult & Children's Nonfiction. His latest book is Ibn al-Haytham: First Scientist, the world's first biography of the eleventh-century Arab scholar known in the West as Alhazen.

ezinearticles.com

Science and Islam

In a new series from the BBC, Science and Islam: The Empire of Reason, physicist Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey takes viewers on a journey through the Middle East, across North Africa, to Spain to tell the story of the dramatic advances in learning that emerged in the Muslim world between the eighth and fourteenth centuries.

In this segment, Al-Khalili describes Ibn al-Haytham’s development of a revolutionary methodology that used “true demonstrations,” or experiments, to test hypotheses—a discipline we now call science. 

Watch: Videos for Science and Islam: The Empire of Reason

Ibn Al-Haytham (Alhazen)

Father of Modern Optics

Abu Ali Hasan Ibn al-Haitham, or Alhazen, as he is known in the West, was one of the most eminent Moslem physicists, whose contributions to optics and the scientific methods are outstanding. He was born in 965 A.D.in Basra, Iraq and received his education in Basra and Baghdad. Ibn al-Haitham, who died in 1039 AD in Cairo, was a great scientist and engineer. On a trip to Egypt to study the Nile River, he recommended building a dam at Aswan to store the summer floodwater upstream and use it throughout the year. This project was finally executed in the 20th century!

He also travelled to Spain and, during this period, he had ample time for his scientific pursuits, which included optics, mathematics, physics, medicine and development of scientific methods on each of which he has left several outstanding books. His extensive researches on optics, has earned him the title “ Father of modern Optics”.

Ibn al-Haitham made a thorough examination of the passage of light through various media and discovered the laws of refraction. He also carried out the first experiments on the dispersion of light into its constituent colours. His book Kitab-al-Manadhir was translated into Latin in the Middle Ages and taught in European colleges, along with his book that was dealing with the colours of the sunset.

He described in details the physical phenomena of shadows, eclipses, and rainbow and speculated on the physical nature of light. Al Hazen was the first scholar to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and give a scientific explanation of the process of vision. He also attempted to explain binocular vision, and gave a correct explanation of the apparent increase in size of the sun and the moon when near the horizon. He contradicted Ptolemy's and Euclid's theory of vision that objects are seen by rays of light emanating from the eyes; according to him the rays originate in the object of vision and not in the eye.

We know little of Ibn al-Haytham's years in Basra. It appears that he did not devote himself to the study of mathematics and other academic topics at a young age but trained for what might be best described as a civil service job. He was appointed as a minister for Basra and the surrounding region. However, Ibn al-Haytham became increasingly unhappy with his deep studies of religion and made a decision to devote himself entirely to a study of science, which he found most clearly described in the writings of Aristotle. Having made this decision, Ibn al-Haytham kept to it for the rest of his life devoting all his energies to mathematics, physics, and other sciences.

Ibn al-Haytham went to Egypt some considerable time after he made the decision to give up his job as a minister and to devote himself to science, for he had made his reputation as a famous scientist while still in Basra.

In Cairo, where he lived part of his life, he spent much of his time conducting experiments, of which many involved a dark room with a hole in it. He hung five lanterns outside the room, adjacent to the wall with the hole, and noticed that there were five 'lights' on the wall inside his dark room. He would then place an obstruction between one of the lanterns and the hole, and observed how one of the 'lights' on the wall disappeared. Furthermore the lantern, the obstruction and the hole were in a straight line.

This demonstrated that light travelled in straight lines and that, even though the light from the five lanterns all travelled through the little hole at the same time, it did not get mixed up: there were five 'lights' on the wall inside the room. Ibn al-Haitham deduced that this is how the eye worked, which had been the subject of a long debate. Aristotle had believed that the eye sent out rays to scan objects, but Al Hazen believed that the opposite is true - that light was reflected into the eye from the things one observed, thus overturning a thousand years of scientific thought. His experiment was the first scientific description of the 'camera obscura' (dark room), the principle behind the pinhole camera.

In detailing his experiment with spherical segments (glass vessels filled with water), he came very close to discovering the theory of magnifying lenses, which was developed in Italy three centuries later. It took another three centuries before Snell and Descartes proposed the law of sines.

Ibn al-Haitham's scientific approach differed from that of the Ancient Greeks in that they saw that truth was determined by the logic and beauty of reasoning, and when experiment was used it was only as a demonstration. That's the reason why Ptolemy, even though he did experiments, has supported the erroneous "emission" theory of vision. In contrast, Ibn al-Haitham saw experiments as being the essential factor that distinguished a true theory from a false one - through this insight he created the foundation for the "scientific method".

Al Hazen’s research in catoptrics focused on spherical and parabolic mirrors and spherical aberration. He made the important observation that the ratio between the angle of incidence and refraction does not remain constant and investigated the magnifying power of a lens. His catoptrics contains the important problem known as “ Alhazen's problem”. It comprises drawing lines from two points in the plane of a circle meeting at a point on the circumference and making equal angles with the normal at that point. This leads to an equation of the fourth degree. He also solved the shape of an aplantic surface for reflection.

Ibn al-Haytham's writings are too extensive for us to be able to cover even a reasonable amount. It seems that he has written over 200 scientific works, of which remarkably, 55 have survived. The main topics on which he wrote were optics, including a theory of light and a theory of vision, astronomy and mathematics, including geometry and number theory. We will give at least an indication of his contributions to these areas.

In his book Mizan al-Hikmah, Ibn al-Haitham has discussed the density of the atmosphere and developed a relation between it and the height. He also studied atmospheric refraction and discovered that the twilight only ceases or begins when the sun is 19° below the horizon and attempted to measure the height of the atmosphere on that basis. He has also discussed the theories of attraction between masses, and it seems that he was aware of the magnitude of acceleration due to gravity.

Ibn al-Haitham's contribution to mathematics and physics is extensive. In mathematics, he developed analytical geometry by establishing linkage between algebra and geometry. In physics he studied the mechanics of motion of a body and was the first to propose that a body moves perpetually, unless an external force stops it or changes its direction of motion. This is strikingly similar to the first law of motion. He has also discussed the theories of attraction between masses.

A seven-volume work on optics, Kitab al-Manazir, is considered by many to be ibn al- Haitham's most important scientific contribution. It was translated into Latin as Opticae thesaurus Alhazeni in 1270. The previous major work on optics had been Ptolemy's Almagest and although ibn al- Haitham's work did not have an influence to equal that of Ptolemy's, it must be regarded as the next major contribution to the field. The work begins with an introduction, in which ibn al- Haitham says that he will begin "the inquiry into the principles and premises". His methods will involve "criticising premises and exercising caution in drawing conclusions" while he aimed "to employ justice, not follow prejudice, and to take care in all that we judge and criticise that we seek the truth and not be swayed by opinions".

Also in Book I, Ibn al- Haitham makes it clear that his investigation of light will be based on experimental evidence rather than on abstract theory. He notes that light is the same irrespective of the source and gives the examples of sunlight, light from a fire, or light reflected from a mirror, which are all of the same nature. He gives the first correct explanation of vision, showing that light is reflected from an object into the eye. Most of the rest of Book I is devoted to the structure of the eye but here his explanations are in error since he does not have the concept of a lens, which is necessary to understand the way how the eye functions. His studies of optics did lead him, however, to propose the use of a camera obscura, and he was the first person to mention it.

Book II of the Optics discusses visual perception while Book III examines conditions necessary for good vision and how errors in vision are caused. From a mathematical point of view Book IV is one of the most important since it discusses the theory of reflection.

Book VI of the Optics examines errors in vision due to reflection while the final book, Book VII, examines refraction.

Abu al-Qasim ibn Madan was an astronomer who proposed questions to ibn al-Haytham, raising doubts about some of Ptolemy's explanations of physical phenomena. Ibn al- Haitham wrote a treatise Solution of doubts in which he gives his answers to these questions.

Ibn al- Haitham’s main purpose in Analysis and synthesis is to study the methods mathematicians use to solve problems. The ancient Greeks used analysis to solve geometric problems but ibn al- Haitham sees it as a more general mathematical method, which can be applied to other problems such as those in algebra. In this work ibn al- Haitham realises that the analysis was not an algorithm thath could automatically be applied using given rules but he realises that the method requires intuition.

Ibn al-Haitham's influence on physical sciences in general, and optics in particular, has been held in high esteem and, in fact, it ushered in a new era in optical research, both in theory and practice.

-- Dr. Mahmoud Al Deek

www.alshindagah.com

Alhazen ~ Ibn Al-Haytham

Abu Ali Hasan Ibn al-Haitham, or Alhazen, as he is known in the West, was one of the most eminent Moslem physicists, whose contributions to optics and the scientific methods are outstanding. He was born in 965 A.D.in Basra, Iraq and received his education in Basra and Baghdad. Ibn al-Haitham, who died in 1039 AD in Cairo, was a great scientist and engineer. On a trip to Egypt to study the Nile River, he recommended building a dam at Aswan to store the summer floodwater upstream and use it throughout the year. This project was finally executed in the 20th century!

 

  He also travelled to Spain and, during this period, he had ample time for his scientific pursuits, which included optics, mathematics, physics, medicine and development of scientific methods on each of which he has left several outstanding books. His extensive researches on optics, has earned him the title “ Father of modern Optics”.

  Ibn al-Haitham made a thorough examination of the passage of light through various media and discovered the laws of refraction. He also carried out the first experiments on the dispersion of light into its constituent colours. His book Kitab-al-Manadhir was translated into Latin in the Middle Ages and taught in European colleges, along with his book that was dealing with the colours of the sunset. He described in details the physical phenomena of shadows, eclipses, and rainbow and speculated on the physical nature of light. Al Hazen was the first scholar to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and give a scientific explanation of the process of vision. He also attempted to explain binocular vision, and gave a correct explanation of the apparent increase in size of the sun and the moon when near the horizon. He contradicted Ptolemy's and Euclid's theory of vision that objects are seen by rays of light emanating from the eyes; according to him the rays originate in the object of vision and not in the eye. 

  We know little of Ibn al-Haytham's years in Basra. It appears that he did not devote himself to the study of mathematics and other academic topics at a young age but trained for what might be best described as a civil service job. He was appointed as a minister for Basra and the surrounding region. However, Ibn al-Haytham became increasingly unhappy with his deep studies of religion and made a decision to devote himself entirely to a study of science, which he found most clearly described in the writings of Aristotle. Having made this decision, Ibn al-Haytham kept to it for the rest of his life devoting all his energies to mathematics, physics, and other sciences.

  Ibn al-Haytham went to Egypt some considerable time after he made the decision to give up his job as a minister and to devote himself to science, for he had made his reputation as a famous scientist while still in Basra.

 
In Cairo, where he lived part of his life, he spent much of his time conducting experiments, of which many involved a dark room with a hole in it. He hung five lanterns outside the room, adjacent to the wall with the hole, and noticed that there were five 'lights' on the wall inside his dark room. He would then place an obstruction between one of the lanterns and the hole, and observed how one of the 'lights' on the wall disappeared. Furthermore the lantern, the obstruction and the hole were in a straight line.

  This demonstrated that light travelled in straight lines and that, even though the light from the five lanterns all travelled through the little hole at the same time, it did not get mixed up: there were five 'lights' on the wall inside the room. Ibn al-Haitham deduced that this is how the eye worked, which had been the subject of a long debate. Aristotle had believed that the eye sent out rays to scan objects, but Al Hazen believed that the opposite is true - that light was reflected into the eye from the things one observed, thus overturning a thousand years of scientific thought. His experiment was the first scientific description of the 'camera obscura' (dark room), the principle behind the pinhole camera.

  In detailing his experiment with spherical segments (glass vessels filled with water), he came very close to discovering the theory of magnifying lenses, which was developed in Italy three centuries later. It took another three centuries before Snell and Descartes proposed the law of sines.

  Ibn al-Haitham's scientific approach differed from that of the Ancient Greeks in that they saw that truth was determined by the logic and beauty of reasoning, and when experiment was used it was only as a demonstration. That's the reason why Ptolemy, even though he did experiments, has supported the erroneous "emission" theory of vision. In contrast, Ibn al-Haitham saw experiments as being the essential factor that distinguished a true theory from a false one - through this insight he created the foundation for the "scientific method".

  

Al Hazen’s research in catoptrics focused on spherical and parabolic mirrors and spherical aberration. He made the important observation that the ratio between the angle of incidence and refraction does not remain constant and investigated the magnifying power of a lens. His catoptrics contains the important problem known as “ Alhazen's problem”. It comprises drawing lines from two points in the plane of a circle meeting at a point on the circumference and making equal angles with the normal at that point. This leads to an equation of the fourth degree. He also solved the shape of an aplantic surface for reflection.

  Ibn al-Haytham's writings are too extensive for us to be able to cover even a reasonable amount. It seems that he has written over 200 scientific works, of which remarkably, 55 have survived. The main topics on which he wrote were optics, including a theory of light and a theory of vision, astronomy and mathematics, including geometry and number theory. We will give at least an indication of his contributions to these areas.

  In his book Mizan al-Hikmah, Ibn al-Haitham has discussed the density of the atmosphere and developed a relation between it and the height. He also studied atmospheric refraction and discovered that the twilight only ceases or begins when the sun is 19° below the horizon and attempted to measure the height of the atmosphere on that basis. He has also discussed the theories of attraction between masses, and it seems that he was aware of the magnitude of acceleration due to gravity.

 

  Ibn al-Haitham's contribution to mathematics and physics is extensive. In mathematics, he developed analytical geometry by establishing linkage between algebra and geometry. In physics he studied the mechanics of motion of a body and was the first to propose that a body moves perpetually, unless an external force stops it or changes its direction of motion. This is strikingly similar to the first law of motion. He has also discussed the theories of attraction between masses. 

          

  A seven-volume work on optics, Kitab al-Manazir, is considered by many to be ibn al- Haitham's most important scientific contribution. It was translated into Latin as Opticae thesaurus Alhazeni in 1270. The previous major work on optics had been Ptolemy's Almagest and although ibn al- Haitham's work did not have an influence to equal that of Ptolemy's, it must be regarded as the next major contribution to the field. The work begins with an introduction,  in which ibn al- Haitham says that he will begin "the inquiry into the principles and premises". His methods will involve "criticising premises and exercising caution in drawing conclusions" while he aimed "to employ justice, not follow prejudice, and to take care in all that we judge and criticise that we seek the truth and not be swayed by opinions". 

 

  Also in Book I, Ibn al- Haitham makes it clear that his investigation of light will be based on experimental evidence rather than on abstract theory. He notes that light is the same irrespective of the source and gives the examples of sunlight, light from a fire, or light reflected from a mirror, which are all of the same nature. He gives the first correct explanation of vision, showing that light is reflected from an object into the eye. Most of the rest of Book I is devoted to the structure of the eye but here his explanations are in error since he does not have the concept of a lens, which is necessary to understand the way how the eye functions. His studies of optics did lead him, however, to propose the use of a camera obscura, and he was the first person to mention it.

  Book II of the Optics discusses visual perception while Book III examines conditions necessary for good vision and how errors in vision are caused. From a mathematical point of view Book IV is one of the most important since it discusses the theory of reflection. 

  Book VI of the Optics examines errors in vision due to reflection while the final book, Book VII, examines refraction.

  Abu al-Qasim ibn Madan was an astronomer who proposed questions to ibn al-Haytham, raising doubts about some of Ptolemy's explanations of physical phenomena. Ibn al- Haitham wrote a treatise Solution of doubts in which he gives his answers to these questions. 

  Ibn al- Haitham’s main purpose in Analysis and synthesis is to study the methods mathematicians use to solve problems. The ancient Greeks used analysis to solve geometric problems but ibn al- Haitham sees it as a more general mathematical method, which can be applied to other problems such as those in algebra. In this work ibn al- Haitham realises that the analysis was not an algorithm thath could automatically be applied using given rules but he realises that the method requires intuition.

  Ibn al-Haitham's influence on physical sciences in general, and optics in particular, has been held in high esteem and, in fact, it ushered in a new era in optical research, both in theory and practice.

-- Dr. Mahmoud Al-Deek

www.alshindagah.com

O P T I C S

Wikipedia.org/Book_of_Optics

 

The optics of Ibn al-Haytham: Books I-III, On Direct Vision

 

V I S I O N

 

www.press.uchicago.edu

books.google.com

Of Arabs & Greeks

Dr. Dimitri Gutas

Professor of Arabic and Graeco-Arabic (Ph.D. Yale 1974) did his undergraduate and graduate work at Yale in classics, history of religions, and Arabic and Islamic studies.

Dimitri Gutas studies and teaches medieval Arabic and the medieval intellectual tradition in Islamic civilization from different aspects. At the center of his concerns lies the study and understanding of classical Arabic in its many forms as a prerequisite for the proper appreciation of the written sources which inform us about the history and culture of Islamic societies. 

He also has an abiding interest in the transmission of Greek scientific and philosophical works into the Islamic world through the momentous Graeco-Arabic translation movement in Baghdad during the 8th-10th centuries AD (2nd-4th Hijri). 

Out of these two interests grew the longstanding project to compile, in collaboration with Professor Gerhard Endress of Bochum University, Germany, A Greek and Arabic Lexicon, which provides “materials for a dictionary of the medieval translations from Greek into Arabic” (Leiden 1992 and ff.). The Lexicon is compiled in fascicles that appear in regular intervals, and interested graduate students in the Department have the opportunity to participate in the continuing project and sharpen their linguistic skills in both classical Arabic and classical Greek. 

In addition to his lexicographical interests in Graeco-Arabic studies, Dimitri Gutas has devoted a large part of his scholarly career to the edition and study of Greek philosophical texts translated into Arabic and their influence in the Islamic world. In this field he has published Greek Wisdom Literature in Arabic Translation. A Study of the Graeco-Arabic Gnomologia (New Haven 1975), Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition (Aldershot, Hampshire 2000), and has been involved from the beginning as co-editor in Project Theophrastus. 

This project has so far published Theophrastus of Eresus. Sources for his Life, Writings, Thought & Influence, 2 volumes edited by W.W. Fortenbaugh, P.M. Huby, R.W. Sharples, and D. Gutas (Leiden 1992), containing all the extant fragments of Theophrastus in Greek, Arabic, and Latin, six volumes of commentaries, and a number of his shorter works. One of the latter was recently published by Gutas in his Theophrastus, On First Principles (transmitted as his Metaphysics). 

Greek Text and Medieval Arabic Translation, edited and translated, with an Excursus on Graeco‑Arabic Editorial Technique, Leiden 2009. The methodology and technique of Graeco-Arabic studies, treated in the latter publication, is also a main area of concern and it is regularly taught in his graduate seminars.

The significance of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement for Arabic letters and Islamic civilization in general led Dimitri Gutas also to investigate its position in the social history of the early Abbasid caliphate in which it took place. This study led to the publication of Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (@ amazon) (London and New York 1998), which looked into the major social, political, and ideological factors that occasioned the translation movement. The social history of intellectual currents in early Islamic civilization, which includes an investigation of the multicultural elements that constituted it, is increasingly becoming the focus of contemporary research worldwide.  

Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (@ google) has been translated into seven languages: Italian, Greek, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Japanese, and French. The Greek translation won the 2002 Special Honorary Award for the Study of Civilization, awarded by the Greek Society of Letters. Pursuing his interest in this subject, Dimitri Gutas is currently engaged in a book-length study on translations from and into Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin from the Hellenistic period to the Renaissance. 

The Greek philosophical texts that were translated into Arabic upon demand by interested scholars during the translation movement led to the development of a strong and long-lived philosophical tradition in Arabic. A considerable amount of the teaching and research effort of Dimitri Gutas has been spent on the study of the Arabic philosophical tradition. 

General assessments of the state of research are presented in the following articles: “The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. An Essay on the Historiography of Arabic Philosophy,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 29 (2002) 5-25, and “The Heritage of Avicenna: The Golden Age of Arabic Philosophy, 1000 - ca. 1350,” in Avicenna and His Heritage, ed. by J. Janssens and D. De Smet (Leuven 2002), 81-97. Dimitri Gutas is on the editorial board of numerous scholarly periodicals publishing on Arabic philosophy, including the leading journal, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, published by Cambridge University Press. 

He is currently engaged as co-editor and contributor in the new edition of the classic German history of philosophy (Ueberweg. Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie) which will now devote four volumes to Arabic philosophy: Philosophie in der islamischen Welt (Verlag Schwabe, Basel). 

Within Arabic philosophy, Gutas has concentrated in particular on its greatest exponent, Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in the medieval Latin world), on whom he wrote the fundamental Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition. Introduction to Reading Avicenna's Philosophical Works (Leiden 1988). Gutas has continued work on Ibn Sina in numerous articles and is currently engaged in the annotated translation of Ibn Sina's works on the soul. The study of Ibn Sina and other Arabic philosophical texts forms a regular subject of his graduate seminars.

www.yale.edu

Of Arabs and Western Civilization

The House of Wisdom:

How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization
 

By

Jonathan Lyons

The remarkable story of how Medieval Arab scholars preserved ancient learning and made dazzling advances in science - and how itinerant European scholars brought this lost wisdom back to the West

For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict.

Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to visit cities like Baghdad or Antioch. There, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge, as well as keeping alive the works of Plato and Aristotle. When the best libraries in Europe held several dozen books, Baghdad's great library, The House of Wisdom, housed four hundred thousand. Jonathan Lyons shows just how much "Western" ideas owe to the Golden Age of Arab civilization.

Even while their countrymen waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, hungry for knowledge, traveled East and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance. In this brilliant, evocative book Jonathan Lyons reveals the story of how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning.

Reviews for House of Wisdom

"Sophisticated and thoughtful...In The House of Wisdom, Jonathan Lyons shapes his narrative around the travels of the little-known but extraordinary Adelard of Bath, an English monk who traveled to the East in the early 12th century and learned Arabic well enough to translate mathematical treatises into English.... Mr. Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant."

—Eric Ormsby, Wall Street Journal. Read full review.

“Dust will never gather on Jonathan Lyons' lively new book of medieval history... Lyons tells his multilayered story deftly, forsaking the tyranny of chronology to flesh out ideas and personalities.”

—Stephen O’Shea, Los Angeles Times Book Review Read full review. This review picked up by Baltimore Times

"This is a refreshing book, one that discovers, or rediscovers, common ground between Islam and Christendom, a historical survey that reminds us that civilizations can converse as well as clash."

—Robert Cremins, Houston Chronicle. Read full review.

“Lively and well researched, the book clarifies how Arabic books, ideas, and knowledge were found and brought back to Europe to help shape Western ideas. With a list of significant events and leading figures; highly recommended for general readers.”

– Library Journal. Read full review.

"The House of Wisdom presents complex, fascinating historical processes with a clarity that makes for compelling reading, as the author provides insight into parallel, and at times intersecting, intellectual and cultural histories."

—History Book Club. See site review.

“The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization is a 320-page treasure trove of information for the uninitiated that packs a powerful punch of science, history, geography, politics and general knowledge at a time when so much disinformation about the Arab world is swirling around in various media.”

— Magda Abu-Fadil, Huffington Post Read post.

"Jonathan Lyons tells the story of the House of Wisdom, the caliphs who supported it and the people who worked there, at a riveting, breakneck pace."

—Times (UK) Read review.

"Former Reuters editor and foreign correspondent Lyons fashions an accessible study about early Western acquisition of scientific knowledge from the Arab world.

Wading through centuries of anti-Muslim propaganda, Lyons traces how the brilliance of Arab knowledge, brought back by visiting scholars from intellectual centers like Baghdad, Antioch and Cordoba, transformed Western notions of science and philosophy. The Western "recovery" of classical learning, as championed later in the Renaissance, was actually first transmitted by these early Arab giants of learning, many of whom emerged from the Baghdad think tank, translation bureau and book repository called the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), built by Caliph al-Mansur in the eighth century.

The Baghdad court linked the triumphs of classical wisdom--especially that of the Greeks--with Persian, Hindu and other traditions, spurring the work of significant Arab thinkers such as al-Khwarizmi, who developed star tables, algebra and the astrolabe; al-Idrisi, who accepted a royal commission by Roger II of once-Muslim Sicily to construct the first comprehensive world's map, The Book of Roger; Avicenna, a Persian philosopher and physician who was an authority on medicine; and Averroes, the Muslim philosopher whose commentaries on Aristotle were a major contribution to Western thought.

Lyons capably delineates the fascinating journey of this knowledge to the West, highlighting a few key figures, including Adelard of Bath, whose years spent in Antioch paid off grandly in bringing forth his translations of Euclid and al-Khwarizmi; and Michael Scot, science adviser and court astrologer to Frederick II, who translated Avicenna and Averroes. Lyons cleverly--though too briefly--ties these early theories to the work of Thomas Aquinas and Copernicus and the subsequent "invention of the West."

Pertinent study that should aid in a better understanding between East and West."

—Kirkus Reviews

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EXCERPT

Chapter Two:

The Earth is like a Wheel

Seven years before the earthquake that shook the moral foundations of Crusader Antioch, Adelard surveyed the world around him and pronounced it rotten. His recent studies at the famed French cathedral school at Tours had provided him with the best education of his day. He enjoyed the support and patronage of the powerful bishop of Bath, the French court physician and scholar John de Villula. He practiced the art of hunting with falcons, a sign of his noble rank and the life of leisure it generally afforded. And he was an accomplished musician, who years later still fondly recalled the time he had been invited to play the cithara, a forerunner of the guitar, for the queen.

In short, Adelard of Bath was the model country gentleman. His father, Fastrad, was one of Bishop John's richest tenants and most senior aides, ensuring a life of privilege for his son. The family appears sporadically in official documents of Church and state. The Pipe Rolls, or royal accounts, later list Adelard as the beneficiary of a pension from the revenues of Whiltshire, in southwest England. Still, young Adelard saw little of value in the contemporary world, and he despaired at the state of Western learning in particular. "When I examine the famous writings of the ancients – not all of them, but most – and compare their talents with the knowledge of the moderns, I judge the ancients eloquent, and call the moderns dumb," he proclaimed in the opening line of his coming-of-age essay and first known work, On the Same and the Different.

Adelard's disdain for the "the moderns" was understandable, for the West at the end of the eleventh century was a mess. Daily life staggered under the burden of rampant violence and social instability. Bands of mercenaries, answerable neither to king nor God, prowled the countryside, their commanders' word the only law of the land. Across Europe, primitive farming techniques could no longer keep pace with a growing population, while antiquated inheritance laws left many impoverished and desperate. Violence – inflamed by the weakness of central political authority and uninhibited by the tenuous moral grip of the Catholic Church – was the currency of the day. As Pope Urban had acknowledged at Clermont when he called the First Crusade, religious leaders were helpless to halt the chaos across the continent. The best the Church could do was to redirect its flock's baser nature against the infidels to the East.

Not even Adelard's remote corner of England was immune to the troubles. It was just two decades since the Norman Conquest, and political and social strife still plagued the land. The uneasy relationship – for centuries punctuated by bouts of armed conflict – between what today comprise the distinct nations of England and France was a regular feature of late medieval life. At the same time, political, cultural, and personal ties ran deep, and so it was not surprising that Adelard could pursue higher education in Tours and that many leading officials and courtiers, like Bishop John, hailed from the European mainland. In 1086, as a young child, Adelard had seen his native West Country town of Bath, including its once-proud abbey of black-robed monks, almost burned to the ground during an uprising against the heir to the throne, William the Red. The rebels had hoped to secure the rule of William's brother, Robert of Normandy, but their bid for power ended in bloody failure and considerable destruction. Robert, eldest son of William the Conqueror, later died a royal prisoner.

Things were little better inside the elite cathedral schools. The chaos and disorder that swept in with the barbarian invasions of the western Roman Empire, beginning in the fourth century AD, had just about destroyed formal education and the perpetuation of classical knowledge. The Muslim conquests three hundred years later sealed the West's isolation by choking off easy access to the Byzantine Christians based in far-off Constantinople, where some traces of the Greek intellectual tradition could still be found. The wonders of classical learning were all but forgotten, or at the best pushed to the extreme margins of European consciousness. Invaluable texts were lost through inattention, destroyed by the illiterate hordes, or simply rendered unintelligible by the general ignorance of would-be scholars or simply by the lost ability to read Greek. The aristocracy of the Roman Empire read the Greek masters in the original, so there was no need at the time for Latin translations of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the engineering wonders of Archimedes, or the geometry of Euclid. The wholesale disappearance of Greek as the language of learning meant centuries of knowledge virtually vanished from the collective mind of Latin-speaking Europe.

There were a few outposts – scattered monasteries in Ireland, northern England, Catalonia, and southern Italy – where the monks labored to keep the classical traditions alive. Yet the results were meager in comparison to the heights once scaled by the Greeks, or to the new and exciting work being carried out in the Arab world. At the West's leading center of mathematical studies, the cathedral school of Laon, the best minds of Adelard's day had no grasp of the use of zero. The masters at Laon taught the latest techniques employed by King Henry I, who ruled both England and Normandy in the early twelfth century, to manage his treasury. These included the use of a special tablecloth, marked out in rows and columns like a chessboard, and based on the principles of the abacus which had reached France from Arab Spain some years before. The cloth was known as the scaccarium, Latin for chessboard, and is the origin of the English term for the treasury, "the Exchequer." Despite the importance of this royal mission, the standard of learning at Laon remained very low; one contemporary textbook reveals consistent errors in even the most basic calculations.

More vexing than sloppy royal accounting was the inability to measure the hours of the day or keep the calendar. Even by the sleepy standards of medieval Christendom, time was a serious business, linked as it was with the pursuit of heavenly salvation. The Rule of St. Benedict, which governed tens of thousands of monasteries from the sixth century onwards, required eight sets of prayers at specific times every twenty-four hours. The practice was based on a reading of two verses in Psalm 119: "Seven times a day I praise thee" and "At midnight I rise to give thee thanks." This was relatively simple during the day, when the changing position of the sun could provide a rough guide to the hour, but at night the monks of the Latin West were left literally in the darkness of their own ignorance.

Excerpted from "The House of Wisdom" by Jonathan Lyons. Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Lyons

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Classical Islam: Baghdad's House of Wisdom

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