From: minhaszt@ucbeh.san.uc.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.iranian
Subject: Re: Can science come back to Islam [Part 2]
Date: 6 Apr 92 17:00:37 EST
Distribution: world
Organization: Univ. of Cincinnati

This is the 2nd in a series that have so far come from scpakistan

zafar

> Indeed, a number of efforts at understanding Islamic science, like
> the planned Islamic Science Summit to be held in 1983 and the
> comparative study on Islamic and Wetsern science backed by the
> international Federation of Institute for Advanced Study, have already
> been initiated. These studies will force a rewriting of world and
> European intellectual history. In fact, as the work of the Turkish
> science historian, Fuat Sezgin, and the scholars at the university
> of Aleppo's Institute for the History of Arab Science, has shown,
> a rewriting of the history of science has now become a matter of
> Western intellectual integrity.
> 
> Fuat Sezgin's Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums--- 6 out of the
> planned 20 volumes have now been published----provides ample
> evidence that the MEDIEVAL WESTERN WORLD DILIGENTLY IMITATED, COPIED
> AND PLAGIARIZED THE WORKS OF MUSLIM SCIENTISTS. Sezgin, who teaches
> history at Frankfurt University and won the First King Faisal
> Foundation Prize for Islamic scholarship in 1979, shows that this
> PIRACY WAS SO COMMON THAT AS EARLY AS 12TH CENTURY, A DECREE WAS
> ISSUED IN SEVILLE, FORBIDDING THE SALE OF SCIENTIFIC WRITINGS TO
> CHRISTIANS BECAUSE THE LATTER TRANSLATED THE WRITINGS AND PUBLISHED
> THEM UNDER ANOTHER NAME!!! Sezgin's research has taken 30 years and
> includes a survey of 1.5 million Arabic manuscripts that he has
> located throughout the world. He stops in the middle of the 12th century
> and shows how even for those first 4 1/2 centuries of Islam, the depth
> and scope of Islamic scientific scholarship is truly staggering.
> 
> While the works of Muslim scientists and technologists and their
> tremendous influence on Western science are relatively unknown, their
> achievements in astronomy, physics, biology, medicine, chemistry and
> mathematics are STILL ATTRIBUTED TO WESTERN SCIENTISTS--- for example,
> the discovery of planetary motion to Kepler and Copernicus, of the 
> circulation of blood to Harvey, and of gravity and various discoveries
> in optics to Newton. Western historians of science have SYSTEMATICALLY
> AND CONSISTENTLY PLAYED DOWN THE CONTRIBUTION OF MUSLIM SCIENTISTS
> TO CIVILIZATION. Pick up any introduction to the history of science
> and it will jump from the Greeks to the Renaissance as though the
> centuries in between were intellectually sterile. (In his four-volume,
> 1325-page, "Science in History", J.D. Bernal devotes 10 pages to
> "Islamic science"!!!) Clearly, serious rectifications have to be made
> in ALL areas of the history of science: for whether they discovered
> the lesser pulmonary circulation or undertook complicated eye
> operations 600 years earlier than in Europe; invented spherical
> trigonometry in the late 10th century; solved equations of third and
> fourth degree or further developed differential and integral
> mathematics; measured the circumference of the Earth and values for
> specific gravities correct to three decimal places almost a thousand
> years ago; used the camera obscura three hundred years before Europe;
> or anticipated relativistic motion, there is scarcely a field where
> Muslim scientists did not think out, investigate or invent something
> exemplary.
> 
> If Muslim scientists were capable of such achievements, it is
> legitimate to ask, what caused the demise of Islamic science and the
> consequent colonization of the Muslim world? Was it something
> inherent in Islam? Or was it purely a result of certain historical
> coincedences?
> 
> [ TO BE CONTINUED]
> 
> Khalid Shahzad
Newsgroups: soc.culture.iranian