Islamic Acquisition of the Foreign Sciences: A Cultural Perspective J. L. Berggren The study of the transmission and transformation of ancient science is more than a study of which texts were translated, when, and by whom. It was a complex process, better seen as beginning rather than ending with the trans- lation of relevant books, for the heart of the process is the assimilation rather than the simple reception of the material. Scientific ideas move because peo- ple study books, compute with tables, and use instruments, not simply be- cause they translate books, transcribe tables, or buy pretty artifacts. It suffices to recall that the scholars of the Byzantine Empire, despite their status as the direct heirs of the classical Greek scientific tradition and their direct access to whatever classical Greek manuscripts the Islamic world eventually came to possess-indeed to more of them and from an earlier date-were largely uninterested in this knowleldge. Hence no account of the transmission of sci- entific knowledge can be complete if it does not recognize that it is, at root, an account of the activities of what Dupree has called "homo supiens in a social context. '" Two Caveats At the outset of this paper, two points mu5t be taken into consideration. First, although we may wish to study the whole process of the Islamic acqui- sition of the foreign sciences as it took place over several centuries and over an area extending from Spain to Afghanistan, it must be realized that the examples given refer to specific events that took place at specific times and in specific places. As a result, eminent Islamic thinkers and writers are quoted without any accompanying claim that each one is representative of all Islamic thinkers at all times and in all places. It is sufficient that when a person such without any accompanying claim that each one is representative of all Islamic J . L. Berggren is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. 'A. Hunter Duuree. "The Historv of American Science: A Field Finds Itself." American Historical Review,*no. '71 (1969): 869. Quoted from Paul Forman, "Sarton Medal Citation," Isis 82:2:213 (1991): 282. Berggren: Islamic Acquisition of the Foreign Sciences 31 1 thinkers at all times and in all places. It is sufficient that when a person such as Ibn K h a l a is quoted that his statement be accepted as indicative of an important attitude held by some of the intelligentsia in North Africa and Mus- lim Spain in the latter half of the foutteenth century C.E. In order to show the importance of various cultural factors, it is not necessafy to demonstrate what is false, namely that each of them operated at all times and in all places. Secondly, when cultural factors in the transmission and tdo rma t ion of ancient mathematics in medieval Islamic civilization are studied, a problem arises: there are cultural factors that condition our thought. This can be seen most clearly when it is realized that contempomy Westem scholars are mem- bers of a civilization whose mathematical development was largely dependent on the contributions of medieval Islamic civilization. As Shlomo Pines has put it: "The history of science, in contradistinction for instance to many ap- proaches to the history of philosophy, has ... a built-in principle of valuation. In assessing scientific achievements of the past, it tends to judge their value by the similarity or opposition to the concepticms of modem science."' This creates historiographic problems which would hardly arise were we discussing the transmission of Chinese mathematics to Japan, for our undoubted debt to medieval Islamic civilization may be responsible for a tendency to slip uncon- sciously from this historical fact and to approach any study of the transmis- sion process as one whose end was the creation of our mathematics. This approach has had two quite opposite but equally regrettable results. The fitst is to treat medieval Islam as a civilization deseming our gratitude for being a channel through which the great works of the Greeks were carried safely to the eager minds of the Eutopean Renaissance. The emphasis falls on the two great periods of translation, the ninth centuty C.E. (into Arabic) and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries C.E. (into Latin), while the developments of the intervening cenbxies offer little moTe than a series of anecdotes about one curious result or another that was proved by an occ8sional great figure. The second d t of this attitude is to stress those elements of Islamic science closest to our own, for the goal now is to show how far Islamic sci- ence prefigured that of modem times. To cite only mathematical examples, rings of polynomials, non-Euclidean geometry, mathematical induction, parts of differential calculus, and other mathematical concepts can be found in Ara- bic texts, according to the adherents of this approach. As it would be invidi- ous to cite contemporary examples of either of these approaches, and of little interest to cite earlier examples, such matters will not be dealt with here. However, the observation that both of these results, which on the surface seem to place such different values on Islamic civilization, should concur in %. Pines, "What Was Original in Arabic Science," Scientific Change, ed. A. C. Crombie (New York, 1%3). 312 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 9:3 valuing it only insofar as it served ends not its own is hardly surprising, as both ate motivated by a basic interest not in the past but in the present. Four Factors Affecting Islamic Assimilation There ate several factots affecting the Islamic assimilation of foreign sciences. The first one is the principal unifying factor of Islamic civilization: the religion of Islam, which includes both moral and religious teachings and the Shati'ah. The Shari'ah contributed to Islamic civilization in two ways. On a gen- eral level, it provided a set of precepts on which was based a unified attitude towards most of life's activities. One specific requirement-the pilgrimage to Makkah at least once in the lifetime of any Muslim physically and financially able to do so-had such an important effect in its own right that it demands a sepamte mention here. This requirement legislated the means for the cultural interchange that is such a marked feature of Islamic civilization. The resulting unprecedented scale of travel provided Muslims from Afghanistan, for ex- ample, a chance to meet and to share life's great experience with Muslims from Samaqand or Spain. It also affected Muslim science by creating a sa- cred center of the Muslim world, a development that provided a viable alter- native to Greek scientific geography, a sacred geography which d t e d in the production of a special literature, special methods for finding the direction of Makkah (the qibZuh), and the making of maps based on this ge~graphy.~ The second factor, and another unifying principle in this vast empire, was the Arabic language, a tongue chosen by God as the vehicle for His final revelation to humanity. Since the Qur'an was decreed to be untranslatable, the Arabic language automatically became the first subject studied in Muslim education, and thus was cmted a Zinguafranca of the written and, for schol- ars, the spoken word. Fruits of this luxuriant linguistic growth are now pre- served in our own contemporary scientific language: alcohol, algebra, algo- rithm, Betelgeuse (indeed, most star names), azimuth, alkali, zero, zenith, na- dir, and cipher. This supremacy of Arabic in the religious sciences seems to have had an effect on the mathematical sciences where, after an initial period of transli- teration of the difficult terms, the foreign sciences took on a generally Arabic garb. It is possible that this represents a response to a strong social bias in favor of a particular language, for the Arabization of foreign sciences (Islami- zation would come later) must have been an important factor in any judgment made by the Muslim intelligentsia concerning their acceptability. In a nearly I 3David Kmg has drawn attention to this tradition in medieval Islam. Berggren: Islamic Acquisition of the Foreign Sciences 313 contemporary and linguistically similar case, that of Syriac, the situation was otherwise. Rosenthal cites as an example the Syriac translators' failure to coin a Syriac equivalent for the Greek word oudeteros (neuter) and remarks "The number of comparable c8ses is extremely large. Syriac thus became hospitable to Greek wods, some of them long known .:and fully adapted, many others .. very conspicuous in their fo~ignness."~ That quite the opposite happened in Arabic was, I suggest, partially the result of cultural factors. Thus Islam provided a common faith, law, and language that created an intellectual unity which was enriched, rather than destroyed, by geographical, ethnic, and political diversity. A third factor, one which gave an element of diversity to this unity, was the widespread tolerance of other religious gmups within the Islamic world. The fact that Christians, Jews, and Sabians came to share in an "Islamicate" culture had widespread consequences for the spread of the foreign sciences in the Islamic world. What would have been the effect on Islamic science if scholars like &mayn, m, Mii ShZ All&, or Thait had been excluded from intellectual participation in the Islamic community? It is a paradox that, although Islam is unthinkable apart from the revelation to the Prophet, Rosen- thal is c o m t when he writes that Islamic civilization as we know it "would simply not have existed without the Greek heritage,"' which was com- municated in large part by non-Muslims. A fourth factor, one which encowged variety within a larger unity, was the tendency of large kingdoms to break up into smaller units. For example, the 'AbbZsid revolt in the mid-eighth century C.E. and the subsequent political separation of Muslim Spain and North Africa were only the earliest of many examples of schisms with important consequences for the d e velopment of science. On a general level, Djebbar, in his study of Ibn has noted that the fragmentation of Andalusia into small kingdoms gave rise to a "fruitful scientific competition between such regional centers as Seville, Toledo, Valencia, Cordova and Saragossa."6 One thinks, too, of the differ- ences in forms of the numerical ciphers and the development of an arithmetic- 'F. Rcsenthal, "Near Eastern Continuity in Translation Activity: Syriac and Arabic," unpublished. 9. Rosenthal, The Ckzssical Heritage in Ishm (Berkeley: University of California Press, I 1975 14. Rcsenthal relates this phenomenon to the fact that "for them [the Syriac wxitem Greek. re resented a higher civi+zation," an attitude .reflected in the