Ya Allahoo!

An author, such as myself, can only be grateful when a leading historian of Arabic science takes one of his books so seriously as to write a long review article on it. Professor George Saliba calls The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West “a refreshing and welcome contribution” to the field “documenting . . . a whole array of the achievements” of Arabic/Islamic (and Chinese) science in the ongoing project of modern science (143, 144). At the same time, Professor Saliba raises a host of issues, not all of equal importance, nor even connected to the main thesis of my book. In this reply, I shall present my comments under four headings with the intention of making the themes and thesis of my book evident to the reader. These headings address the main issues raised in Saliba’s essay, namely, the nature of ‘modern’ science, the possibility that economic factors have played a significant role in its rise, innovation in Arabic/Islamic astronomy after Ibn al-Shatir and the fourteenth century, and the nature and role of free inquiry.

            At the outset, one must say that there is a defensiveness in Professor Saliba’s essay, which, as it unfolds, repeatedly begs the question that was at the centre of my original inquiry. In addition, Saliba rather surprisingly opposes the idea that past and present human communities, institutions, governments and so on ought to grant greater freedom of expression, inquiry and action to their participants. This is surely counter-intuitive.

            Saliba gets started on the wrong track by labeling the study of the rise of ‘modern’ science as the search for “origins,” a term I never use. Throughout my book, I suggest that the propensity to look into the nature of existence and to propose explanations for it is universal. If we start with that assumption, then we can focus upon the beginnings that people made in various places around the world to construct proto-scientific theories and explanations. Clearly, some groups, communities, societies and civilizations have been more successful than others in this process and the question then becomes one of analyzing contrasting cultural and institutional settings that either encouraged or impeded the progress of scientific inquiry.

            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 those inquires 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.2 I submit that this is a fascinating and vexatious intellectual problem. 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.

            Moreover, in my book, I reviewed the most impressive advances in astronomy and mathematics that were accomplished by Middle Eastern scholars by the end of the fourteenth century; in later chapters, I also recounted a number of achievements in medicine. Then, I asked why this development did not lead to ‘modern’ science in the Arabic/Islamic context. It is curious that Professor Saliba does not want to acknowledge that this is an intellectual puzzle worthy of intense study. For, as he himself points out in his review, Arabic science was “superior” to Western science (140) prior to the Renaissance. He even claims that “the most innovative mathematical and astronomical ideas that were employed during the European Renaissance were themselves borrowed from Arabic/ Islamic” civilization.3 If these great advances were “the very ideas that made the astronomy of the European Renaissance possible, in the mathematical technical sense,” (143) why did they not make it possible in the Arabic/Islamic context? Indeed, the first four pages of Saliba’s review, with their apparent emphasis on ‘methodological’ issues, serve no purpose other than to avoid facing this central problem. Stated differently, it is claimed by Saliba that certain advances in astronomy in Arabic lands made modern astronomy possible in Europe, but apparently not in the Middle East. This is surely an intellectual problem worth investigating, one that goes far beyond his methodological diversions.             In so far as astronomy is concerned, conventional wisdom says that the breakthrough to modern astronomy occurred with the appearance of Nicholas Copernicus’ The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543. This was the book in which the author proposed abandoning the geocentric orientation of the celestial system in favour of a heliocentric one. It was revolutionary not only in this astronomical sense, but in that it challenged the authority of the Christian Church. Copernicus (who was a Church administrator himself) and his followers thus claimed to know the composition of the universe better than the official Church hierarchy. This is a perfectly good landmark for establishing the advent of modern science, as it unleashed a whole series of intellectual struggles within the scientific community and within the established religious authority of Europe. Furthermore, it is obvious that the work of Galileo directly derived from Copernicus’ great hypothesis and it was he who bluntly challenged the Church on virtually all epistemological grounds, claiming that there was a source of knowledge about the world other than religion and the Bible―namely, natural science.

            My book focuses upon the preceding legal, institutional and intellectual developments that made the Copernican innovation possible. That is, long before Copernicus and Galileo, there was an intellectual tradition established in Europe, above all in the universities, that, yes, institutionalized the study of natural phenomena, particularly by placing the corpus of Aristotle, along with a number of Arabic works and commentaries, at the centre of the university curriculum. This occurred in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In short, the Copernican revolution was a product of the educational system put in place by Europeans several hundred years earlier. As is well-known, the madrasas of the Middle Eastern world systematically excluded philosophy and the natural sciences from any ‘formal’ teaching conducted within their confines during this period of time. (I put ‘formal’ in quotation marks because there was no formal curriculum in the madrasas.) Evidently, the teaching of philosophy and the natural sciences ran against the religious commitments and identity of the madrasas, an identity that persisted into the twentieth century.4 This was a major issue in my book, but Professor Saliba is entirely silent on the subject. I shall return to it later. Whether or not Copernicus benefited directly from Arab astronomers, other than possibly borrowing ‘the Tusi couple,’ remains an open question, one upon which I remain to be convinced.5

            The highly significant Copernican year of 1543 also contains another milestone in the rise of modern science: the publication of Vesalius’ nonpareil, On the Fabric of the Human Body. This famous work, containing a huge number of highly-detailed anatomical drawings, is generally regarded as laying the foundations for modern medicine because of its illustrations of the human body’s main systems―bones, muscles, veins, nerves and internal organs. At the same time, it represents the expression of an empirical agenda, the first-hand examination of the body through human dissection (autopsy). This was the culmination of several centuries of empirical anatomical investigation extending back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As we know, human dissection was generally considered to be forbidden in Islamic thought and practice, mainly, it seems, because it was seen as a form of ‘mutilation’ that was forbidden by various legal texts.6 Briefly, then, this is another area in which we may point to a new spirit of inquiry (and routinized activity) that encouraged modern science. It broke with various intellectual and moral traditions of the past and subjected various claims to empirical testing. And again, unlike the madrasas, the universities incorporated medical training, including the practice of human dissection, into their curricula.

            In an effort to deflect the reader from focusing upon these disparities between the progressive nature of modern science and the stagnating nature of scientific thought in the Arabic/Islamic context, Saliba cites a comment from A. C. Graham to the effect that we cannot know whether the ancients or the moderns have come closer to scientific truth. Yet, it should not escape our attention that Copernicus and Galileo did argue about the truth of their work or, at least, about which set of hypothetical constructions, those of the geocentric or the heliocentric system, better described the world. Despite Saliba’s role as devil’s advocate, I think that we can fairly conclude that heliocentrism is a better description of the world and that, although the Copernican system is not a complete and final theory, it is a better approximation of the celestial movements than the geocentric view. ‘Science,’ as I understand it, entails this element of seeking to arrive at a better description of the world and is not just a calculating device.

            Similarly, the anatomical drawings of Vesalius and his discussion of all the parts and systems of the body are, in fact, a better description of the human body than the one provided by Galen. Indeed, Vesalius claimed to have corrected over 200 errors in Galen’s account of human anatomy, which was based almost wholly upon animal dissections. Moreover, Vesalius’ illustrations are far superior to anything to be found in the Arabic/Islamic tradition (where pictorial representation of the human body was particularly suspect) or, for that matter, in the Chinese and (I presume) Indian traditions.7 This is not to sound a note of triumph, but rather to clarify the point that modern science represents scientific progress, a point that Saliba seeks to obscure. Thus, Saliba is correct to say that “no one seems to question the proposition that the ‘modern’ scientific tradition made its first appearance” in the “West” (140), a term that he finds problematic, which I grant, in part. This is so because there is a scholarly consensus on this point and it comes after at least a century of intense exploration of the historical records of other sciences and civilizations, above all the Arabic and the Chinese traditions.

            A year after my book was first published, Professor Saliba published an article about the sixteenth-century astronomer, Shams al-Din al-Khafri (d. 1550).8 According to Saliba, Khafri was a figure of creative continuity in Arab astronomy and he―and perhaps others of that period―represented a new ‘golden age’ of Arab astronomy, not a period of decline. On the basis of this, Saliba suggests that all that I say in my book on this subject, especially the idea of decline in Arab astronomy, “has to be reassessed” (148). Saliba makes many other claims in this connection, most of which I consider excessive.

            Although I have no special training in astronomy and the jury is still out among historians of science regarding Saliba’s claims, the suggestion that Khafri was a progressive innovative astronomer, given the fact that he apparently sought to preserve and perfect the Ptolemaic system, seems highly improbable. As suggested above, the Copernican model was a progressive new model that brought us closer to the true constitution of the universe than the Ptolemaic system. As A. I. Sabra put it, speaking of Khafri’s work, “it would be odd to call ‘revolutionary’ a reformist project intended to consolidate Ptolemaic astronomy by bringing it into line with its own principles.”9 Saliba’s effort to take refuge in the argument that, “without a theory of universal gravitation, this new cosmology [of Copernicus] could not be developed” (150) is counterfactual. As Noel Swerdlow says, Kepler “went far beyond Ptolemy’s methods, and discovered entirely new principles for the precise description of the motions of bodies in the heavens based upon an entirely new physics.”10 The new Copernican theory was fleshed out by a variety of astronomers who followed, above all by Kepler. It was he who proved the elliptical (and hence not perfectly circular) orbit of Mars and related astronomical theorems on the basis of the assumption that the sun was the approximate centre of our universe. He was also aided by the more exact observations of Tycho Brahe. The absence of a universal theory of gravitation until the time of Newton was no impediment to the early adopters of Copernicanism and even Tycho Brahe, who developed a geo-heliocentric model, was not stymied by this putative absence, even after he discovered that the planets were not encased in ‘crystalline’ spheres. This came about with the observation of the comets of 1577 and 1585, whose trajectories took them through what would have been the ambiguously understood ‘crystalline’ spheres of Venus and Mercury. To be sure, he was not a committed follower of Copernicus, but he was willing to entertain a theory that entailed a partially heliocentric orientation and without the possibility of crystalline spheres holding the planets in place.

            In a word, the absence of a universal theory of gravitation offered no impediment to Copernicus himself, nor to his student Rheticus, nor to Galileo, Maestlin, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Christoph Rothmann and the other Copernicans. Thus, rather than showing how Europeans might have been held back from pursuing all of the implications of the new Copernican hypothesis, Saliba’s comments make us wonder all the more just why Arab astronomers, who were, according to Saliba, experiencing a golden age (Khafri died only seven years after Copernicus), were so reluctant to advance bold new theories, theories that would break with the unworkable Ptolemaic model. At the same time, the wide discussion―pro and con―of the new Copernican hypothesis over all of Europe points again to the fact that the study of modern science, especially astronomy, had been institutionalized, that is, that it had been made a regular and acceptable part of public discussion (and teaching) in universities, royal courts and so on. This stands in contrast to the situation in the madrasas of the Arab/Muslim lands.

            Before taking up the putative role of economic factors, I want to consider the issue of ‘neutral space’ and free inquiry. It is most puzzling that Saliba rejects these ideas so vehemently, discussing them no less than six times in as many pages. In my book, I argued that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a social, intellectual and legal revolution that laid the intellectual and institutional foundations upon which modern science was later constructed. At the heart of this development was the jurisprudential idea of a corporation, a collection of individuals who were recognized as a singular ‘whole body’ and granted legitimate legal autonomy.

            Such entities were given the right to sue and be sued, to buy and sell property, to make rules and laws regulating their activities, to adjudicate those laws and to operate according to the principle of election by consent as well as the Roman legal aphorism, “what affects everyone should be considered and approved by everyone.” Among the entities granted status as legitimate corporations were cities and towns, charitable organizations, professional guilds (especially of physicians) and, of course, universities. Nothing comparable to this kind of legal autonomy emerged in China or under Islam. In short, the European medievals created autonomous, self-governing institutions of higher learning and then imported into them a methodologically powerful and metaphysically rich cosmology that directly challenged and contradicted many aspects of the traditional Christian world-view. This disinterested agenda was no longer a private, personal, or idiosyncratic preoccupation, but involved a shared set of texts, questions, commentaries and, in some cases, centuries-old expositions of unsolved physical and metaphysical questions that set the highest standards of intellectual inquiry. Through the incorporation of Aristotle’s books on natural science into the curriculum of the medieval universities, a disinterested agenda of naturalistic inquiry was institutionalized. It was institutionalized as a curriculum, a course of study.11

            Since these bodies were, in fact, legally entitled to study and teach whatever they elected to make part of the curriculum, one could say that they occupied a neutral zone protected by and from political and religious authorities. At the centre of their curriculum was the main body of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, that is, his Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, On the Soul, Meteorology and Small Works on Natural Things, and biology, such as his History of Animals, Parts of Animals and Generation of Animals. It is in these books, as Professor Edward Grant argues, that we find “the treatises that formed the comprehensive foundation for the medieval conception of the physical world and its operation.”12 In contrast to this, the Islamic madrasas deliberately excluded all of the natural works of Aristotle, as well as philosophy, logic and natural theology. Instead, they taught the ‘Islamic sciences,’ consisting of the Qur’an, the Sunna, Islamic law, Arabic poetry, literature, history and genealogy, and some arithmetic. (Later, they did admit the teaching of logic and Islamic theology.) Furthermore, in Europe (for example, in Paris), the study of the Aristotelian corpus was fully legitimized by statute in 1255, although it remained in dispute. As a result, the universities generated a whole literature of naturalistic questions that became, in turn, a shared agenda of naturalistic studies. Centred upon Aristotelian natural philosophy, this agenda served as the intellectual core of university instruction for the next 400 years (including the education of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and others).             Speculative questions were pursued, such as whether the world is singular or plural; whether the earth turns on its axis or is stationary; “whether every effecting thing is the cause of that which it is effecting; whether things can happen by chance; whether a vacuum is possible; whether the natural state of an object is stationary or in motion; whether luminous celestial bodies are hot; whether the sea has tides; and so on for virtually every charted field of enquiry.”13 Surely, the permissibility of these studies in an officially-recognized and legally-defined context suggests something more than a random, spasmodic pursuit of the natural sciences and something more than the pursuit of economic gain. I submit that they also indicate the existence of a very significant intellectual zone of free inquiry that was publicly available to scholars, as well as laymen. The continuity of this ongoing, university-centred debate with respect to Copernicus’ heliocentric hypothesis has recently been reiterated. As Bernard Goldstein puts it, Copernicus’ initial commitment to heliocentrism “was a response to an issue debated in the philosophical community at the time when he attended universities in Italy, ca. 1500.”14

            At least three additional points need to be made. The legal autonomy that existed in the European universities did not exist in the Muslim world because the legal concept of a corporation, a groups of actors treated as a collective whole, did not exist. This legal defect had major implications for Islamic civilization, not least in the sphere of economic development, as Timor Kuran has made clear.15

            Second, 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 a 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 its institutionalization in the universities provided it with a powerful advantage unknown in the Arab/Muslim world until very recently.16

            Third, this institutionalization of scientific pursuits gave European scholars a surprising degree of freedom of inquiry, not least of all to subject the Holy Book―the Bible―to naturalistic explanation. As I argued in my book, some scholarly clerics actually sought to separate the ‘natural’ from the ‘supernatural’ in an attempt to explain by naturalistic means certain problematic passages in the Bible. For example, a certain Andrew of St. Victor argued that one should first consider all naturalistic possibilities before offering miracles as explanations in the interpretation of Scripture. The interpreter, he wrote, “should realize this: in expounding Scripture, when the event described admits of no naturalistic explanation, then and only then should we have recourse to miracles.”17 Scholars have pointed to such discussions during this period of time as the beginning of so-called ‘Higher Criticism,’ the intellectual task of evaluating all of the strands, sources and meanings of the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. I submit that this level of freedom of inquiry did not exist in the Arab/Muslim world then and does not exist now. Anyone who has had contact with Muslim circles in the West or elsewhere in the world knows that this subject is one of utmost sensitivity to the Muslim community. H. A. R. Gibb gives the example of an Egyptian shaykh who published, in 1930, an annotated edition of the Qur’an that criticized the old commentaries and interpreted supernatural references in simple, naturalistic ways. Although the purpose of the work was to encourage the younger generation to study the Qur’an, the book was confiscated by the police and an injunction was secured to prevent the writer from preaching or holding religious meetings.18 This sort of response is what I meant when I wrote of the “barriers to freedom of thought, expression, and action in the interests of primordial religious and ethnic identities,” but which Saliba apparently doubts (145). Today, one could also add the various restrictions on internet use in various parts of the world to indicate such restrictions. (More on which below.)             While there are always some constraints on intellectual inquiry, I am not as jaundiced as Professor Saliba who seems to believe that “free inquiry is essentially a fiction determined, for the most part, by the exigencies of the market place” (144). This sad commentary takes us back to the putative role of economic factors that constitutes Saliba’s pet theory.

            I have suggested that the breakthrough to modern astronomy (with all its implications) and the anatomical investigations of European medical students are constitutive of modern science.19 But what, we might ask, was the economic motive of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Tycho Brahe and all the others, to fashion the new astronomy? I don’t know of any. There was no profit to be made by their inquiries, which elicited―especially in the early stages―the wrath of traditionalists and even religious authorities. Likewise, what was the economic motive of all those physicians from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries who carried out and documented anatomical inquiries based upon dissection? Although Church authorities approved of this practice and, in at least two cases, ordered autopsies for forensic purposes, it must be said that human dissection is repulsive to most people. Moreover, these practitioners were hardly in a position to perform new surgical procedures upon live subjects, for which they might expect remuneration. Finally, medieval medical practice had been such as to stigmatize those who used their hands in the practice of medicine; this is why some forms of surgery and, especially, human dissection had previously been given over to barbers and uneducated folk. This was a custom that Vesalius specifically rejected in his master-work. In general, there was no application for this new knowledge, although a certain prestige probably accrued to those who had an intimate knowledge of human anatomy.

            The capstone of this whole line of inquiry was William Harvey’s discovery, in the early seventeenth century, of the greater circulation of blood throughout the body. But that knowledge did not lead to major changes in surgical procedures until the twentieth century, when blood types and a whole range of other discoveries made transfusions, for example, possible. It seems more plausible to say, as Roger French has, that the knowledge of anatomy gained by the medieval and early modern physicians allowed them to argue with each other over the makeup of the body and to disprove various medical authorities, especially Galen, who may have got it wrong.20

            If we push back the institutionalizing of naturalistic inquiry to the medieval universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, I am again baffled as to how this might be interpreted as an expression of powerful “economic forces.” It is the implicit crude Marxism of Professor Saliba’s assertion that clouds vision here. As indicated in my book, there was indeed a ‘commercial revolution’ sweeping Europe from about the twelfth century, but that hardly explains the great interest in Aristotle in the universities of that period or the decision by medical practitioners to undertake dissections and to incorporate medical education into the university curriculum. Similarly, there was another rise in commercial activities in the sixteenth century, but this hardly explains either the motivation of the clerical Copernicus, or of Galileo, Kepler, or Tycho Brahe in developing a new astronomy against the interests of the Church.

            Finally, I offer some comments about the general role of science in society―a role about which Saliba is highly skeptical. Indeed, Saliba’s essay is replete with disparaging remarks about science and its utility, not to mention the benefits of freedom of expression. It is my view that scientific inquiry includes not just the natural sciences, but all of the social sciences. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the social sciences― economics, political science, psychology and sociology―have added something to our understanding about how governments and economies work. Social and economic development are not aided solely by “scientific production,” as Saliba proposes (146), but by a vast array of insights drawn from the social sciences concerning, for instance, the nature of labour and financial markets, the role of technology and other factors in production, and social and political processes. It should also be obvious that the social sciences (and the natural sciences) cannot function properly in societies where there is great secrecy, where all information is considered the unique purview of the government, where permission must be received from state officials before any surveys or related inquiries may be carried out, and where there are prohibitions against the release of such information. Nevertheless, Saliba is of the opinion that “[i]t is foolhardy to urge underdeveloped countries to adopt the imagined benefits of such slogans as ‘freedom of thought and expression’ in order to obtain the golden key to modernity assumed to be so intrinsically embedded in the processes of modern science” (146). This is such a counter-intuitive claim that I leave it for others to defend. More neutral observers will have noticed that the recently released Arab Human Development Report 2002, sponsored by the United Nations and written entirely by Arab scholars, specifically points to the lack of freedom as one of three major factors holding back development in Arab societies.21 What is needed is a great enlargement of what many would call the public sphere (and I called neutral space), that zone of interaction in which public and private needs and aspirations merge, so that new alternatives to prevailing ideas and policies may be proposed, discussed and evaluated without fear of personal harm. The prevailing inhibition of the free flow of information―scientific and non-scientific―in the Arab world is dramatically highlighted by the authors of the Arab development report when they estimate that Spain translates more books in a single year than have been translated into Arabic since the beginning of the Arabic/Islamic era.

            This brings me to Saliba’s objection to my suggestion that “science is especially the natural enemy of authoritarian regimes” (145). If we begin with the assumption that the social sciences have a place alongside the ‘hard’ sciences, then it seems evident that authoritarian regimes in general cannot maintain their grip on power while allowing free rein to economists, sociologists, political scientists, or environmentalists. Their national accounts simply will not balance and they know it. Hence, they routinely crack down upon those who offer accounts of the way things are that differ from the official line. I am not aware of the “tremendous achievements” of science during the Nazi regime. If one considers the highly-developed state of scientific knowledge in Germany prior to the Nazi takeover and then compares it with the results achieved by the end of the regime, its scientific achievements seem unimpressive. Hundreds, if not thousands, of highly trained scientists fled Nazi Germany―to the great benefit of the United States and England, among others. Recently, a great debate has broken out over the fact that the Nazis were unable to develop the atomic bomb, despite considerable effort. The Nazis did carry out a large number of absolutely horrendous medical experiments on human subjects who lost their lives in the process. I would not count this as a “tremendous achievement,” although it is true that some of the information gathered is unique, precisely because of the inhumanity involved in its collection. Nothing I have written discounts the possibility that totalitarian regimes may embark upon some grand research project for nationalistic purposes and actually be quite successful for a time. On the other hand, I believe all such regimes are doomed and that, in the final accounting, their scientific achievements are likely to be marginal.

            Soviet Russia was, perhaps, the most successful of such regimes but, in the end, it did collapse, exposing all of the social, economic and environmental damage that it had done. A not insignificant point seems to be that such a regime was only able to persist so long as it maintained a very large repressive apparatus, stifling dissent (people like the physicist Andre Sakharov and hundreds of others) and preventing disinterested inquiry into its economic and ecological problems, patterns of governance and so on. Indeed, Manuel Castells has made a good case for the proposition that the Soviet Empire collapsed precisely because it could no longer control information in a computer age, with the result that significant numbers of citizens, including crucial members of the power structure, called for radical reform.22

            But let me add one final example of a global scientific movement that is clearly not motivated by greed, anticipated remuneration, national aggrandizement, or the “exigencies of the market place”: the international environmental movement. It is evident that there is presently a global view according to which the environment can and must be treated as a single system of natural processes. It is also evident that this point of view was created and shaped by natural scientists who carried out the studies illustrating this fact. And, third, it is now evident that preserving the environment costs money. The champions of environmentalism wish to show that preserving the environment is in the global interest, but the irreducible fact is that the human community―and, hence, all nation-states―will have to pay financially and in terms of economic development for the apparently long-term interests revealed by science. Scientists and sympathetic laymen have rallied to the cause, in effect creating a global environmental movement complete with all sorts of international treaties and organizations, the objective being what some call a “global institution” dedicated to preserving the environment.23 Moreover, this movement began in the nineteenth century and continued to strengthen throughout the twentieth and now the twenty-first.24 This is as good an example of ‘free inquiry’ being carried out in the service of the human community as one can find. It clearly shows that scientists investigate natural phenomena with a view to improving more than the financial bottom line. This is not so say that vested interests―for example, chemical and pharmaceutical companies―have never paid scientists to pursue scientific questions that have purely commercial applications for those interests. It is only to say that the claim that all free inquiry is just a fiction supporting the market-place is greatly exaggerated. I continue to believe in the possibility and the necessity of dispassionate inquiry―of the past as of the present―for the purpose of better understanding how the world came to be the way it is and, not least of all, for making the future better than the past.

The question of the origins of modern science has been debated for years and will continue to be debated as long as the history of science is still written as the history of various scientific traditions modified by cultural labels such as Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Indian and Arabic/ Islamic. And I am sure it is obvious to all that such terminology simply masks a clear ideological, political and, at times, even hegemonic language. For all pre-modern scientific traditions, the classificatory principle of a particular tradition seems to be linguistic in nature, contrary to what is usually done in the case of modern science itself. Yet, while it is easy to understand why a scientific book written in the pre-modern period, whether in Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian or Turkish, may be readily classified as belonging to a particular culture and tradition, it is not quite clear in which language a modern scientific text must be written to allow its affiliation with modern science.

                As historians of science survey the various scientific traditions, they seem to be constantly prepared to shift the criteria that they use to classify the scientific works which they encounter. No one would dispute the classification of a scientific text written in Chinese or Greek as belonging to the Chinese or Greek cultural spheres respectively. But when it comes to other scientific works, say texts written in Arabic, Persian, Turkish or Urdu, for example, the problem becomes slightly more complicated and those same historians of science drop linguistic classificatory terminology to resort instead to a cultural/religious terminology which designates such works as Islamic. In the case of modern science, both linguistic and cultural/religious designators seem to be dropped and French, English, Italian, German and even Japanese scientific works may be described as modern, with the underlying assumption that all these works must have something in common that is neither linguistic, nor cultural, nor religious, with the vague term ‘Western’, as in ‘Western science’, used to describe them.

                A corollary of this methodological chaos is the notion that there is a definable cultural entity out there that can be called ‘the West’, with its own independent characteristics, and an equally clearly definable scientific tradition that can be called ‘modern science’. In addition, no one seems to question the proposition that the ‘modern’ scientific tradition made its first appearance in this very ambiguous ‘West’ and research is ongoing to determine why this phenomenon took place there and nowhere else. Toby E. Huff’s The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West is one more work which follows this line of enquiry.

                Huff is by no means the first person to attempt to explain why modern science arose in the West and not in the context of another culture. People like Joseph Needham, in his famous Grand Titration,2 or Max Weber, in several of his works, have made similar attempts in the past. In the case of Needham, the question gained much more urgency when he managed to demonstrate that, at the time when modern science was supposed to have been born in the West―namely, during the European Renaissance of the sixteenth century―both the Chinese and Islamic civilizations had attained a level of scientific knowledge, especially in natural science, which was superior to that in the West. And yet, modern science was born in the West and not in those other civilizations. Needham’s attempt to understand why this happened had the unintended result of making the criteria for ‘modern’ science, and the vague definitions of it, identical to the criteria and definitions which would be applied to ‘Western’ science. During that process, another unspoken and rather ill-considered principle also emerged, namely, that one should assess the value and contribution of the sciences of other cultures in terms of the specific aspects of those sciences that were incorporated within the accumulative body of modern science, while passing over other features of those same sciences in total silence. Thus, in the case of Chinese science, the discovery of the geographically-orienting magnet became an acceptable Chinese scientific achievement because it could be translated, through intermediary steps, into the navigational compass, while the whole body of Chinese medicine would be discarded―until very modern times, that is―because it did not have the same impact in the West.

                The least that can be said about this methodology is that it does not yield the kind of history of science that allows a specific science to be spoken of and studied as just another facet of the culture that produced it to meet its own needs. Instead, the works of one cultural science are always evaluated in terms of the criteria of modern science. As a result, the history of science is studied for the sake of discovering the cumulative connecting links that led to the creation of modern science and not as an attempt to understand one more feature of the originating culture in order to comprehend it in its totality.

                Although superficially quite reasonable and legitimate, this manner of formulating the question of why modern science arose in the West, rather than in culture ‘X’ or ‘Y’, hides further theoretical pitfalls. Chief among them is the circularity embedded in this kind of argumentation. For, in order to answer the question, one must exhibit yet another culture, ‘Z’, that followed the same route as the West―whatever that route may have been―and managed to produce modern science in the same way that the West did. Otherwise, the argument quickly collapses into a circular argument in the following manner. Most proponents of this view, whether consciously or not, look at science in our day and assign the term ‘modern’ to that science without defining modernity, relying only on the sheer fact that it is contemporaneous with us. They then ask which leading centres produced this ‘modern’ science and find them in Europe and, by extension, the United States, or what is ambiguously called the West. From there, it becomes easy to jump to the conclusion that modern science is Western science. Thus, all other cultures, no matter where they are located and at what point in their history they are ‘captured’, if they may be ‘captured’ at all, could not possibly contain the roots of modern science, nor allow modern science to develop, by the mere fact that they are not Western cultures.

                Moreover, this argument, and the many variations upon it that range widely in sophistication and acuity, has been put forth now for more than a hundred years without ever an attempt being made first to define what is meant by science, in a culturally neutral fashion, or modernity itself, as it applies to science, or the relationship between science and culture, or, more potently, to determine what aspects of a culture, especially Western culture, are responsible for the rise of a modern science that is implicitly called Western science. Throughout this century and part of the previous one, attempts have been made to define the singularity of modern Western science by isolating factors responsible for its development. Such factors as the emphasis on “experimentation,” the “mathematization of nature” and “freedom from religion,” have been advanced at one point or another as being the key elements in the development of modern science. In the case of Huff, one may add to this list the emphasis on the “institutionalization” or “legal context” of science, or the more general “philosophical world view,” or even his ambiguous “neutral space and free inquiry, concepts integral to modern science,” (Huff, i) as also being pivotal. But as knowledge of non-Western cultural sciences began to increase, especially in the latter half of this century―and here the work of Needham on Science and Civilization in China3 and the many new works on Islamic/Arabic science are crucial―the foundations of the argument for the singularity of modern science have been eroded. For it was found, for example, that both the Islamic and Chinese civilizations derived scientific results from experimentation at a time much earlier than the Renaissance, that they criticized other authoritative scientific theories on the basis of their own observations, and that they expressed the results of their findings in mathematical language; and yet, they did not manage to develop modern science in the manner in which this latter concept is so poorly articulated.

                In order to avoid the pitfalls of this simplistic line of argumentation, one must appeal to the more rigorous grounds upon which such arguments ought to be based. As intimated above, these grounds require that one demonstrate the independence of Western science from other cultural sciences in order to be able to say that whatever factors led to the formulation of modern science in Western culture were, in fact, the product of Western culture itself, while simultaneously determining that any other culture which embodies the same factors would indeed produce the same modern science under discussion. In addition, one must demonstrate the real existence of such a culture.

                When we learn, for example, that the most innovative mathematical and astronomical ideas that were employed during the European Renaissance were themselves borrowed from Islamic/Arabic or Chinese civilizations through many circuitous routes that are now being investigated, then one is forced to ask about the very roots of modern science and whether they should be placed within the parameters of Western culture or the other cultures where those innovative ideas originated.

                This kind of predicament was easier to overcome in the last century, when many of the findings of the Islamic/Arabic or Chinese sciences were not really known in the West. During that time of ignorance, people could speak freely of the so-called modern science and its roots in the genius of Greek civilization―sometimes referred to as the Greek miracle―and thus conceive of that science as a purely Western enterprise, thereby making a direct connection between classical Greek civilization and the modernity of Europe and bypassing the intervening Roman, Islamic and medieval civilizations with impunity. But now, at the end of the twentieth century, we know that the most dynamic revolutionary ideas in astronomy, for example, were developed in the Islamic/Arabic domain―and were developed explicitly to rebut the authority of the Greek astronomical tradition―and yet, they were the very same ideas that made the astronomy of the European Renaissance possible, in the mathematical technical sense, after having been incorporated into that astronomy. This view is quite eloquently expressed by the sinologist A. C. Graham, in the same article quoted at the beginning of this essay, where he says: “Indeed if we wish to find the best historical perspective for looking forward toward the Scientific Revolution, there is much to be said for choosing a viewpoint not in Greece but in the Islamic culture that from A.D. 750 reached from Spain to Turkestan.”4

                With Graham’s words in mind, one can quite legitimately ask about the roots of modern science, and whether those roots should continue to be placed in the context of Western culture, with its far-reaching, a historical extension into classical antiquity. More particularly, one should also ask whether it makes much sense to speak of science, whether modern or not, in such cultural, linguistic, or national terms, when the very processes of science themselves respect no such boundaries and pay no heed to such sentiments. Moreover, since the terms defining the essential characteristics of both ‘modern science’ and the ‘West’ are so vaguely defined, is it not quite legitimate to examine as well the same question that was asked by Graham when he said: “The question may also be raised whether Ptolemy or even Copernicus and Kepler were in principle any nearer to modern science than the Chinese and the Maya, or indeed than the first astronomer, whoever he may have been, who allowed observations to outweigh numerological considerations of symmetry in his calculations of the month and the year.”5 Indeed, the empirical emphasis placed by that very first astronomer on the value of his observations set the inescapable course to modern science. So where would the origins of modern science then lie?

                In this context of trying to determine the building blocks of modern science, Huff’s book is a refreshing and welcome contribution. This is not because it applies a better methodology than previous works on the subject, or because it answers the big question posed above more satisfactorily, but rather because it benefits from the research into the history of Islamic and Chinese sciences that has been going on for about half a century now. As a result, and by bringing to light the complexity of the scientific production itself and the dangers implicit in assigning national, linguistic or cultural tokens to that production, his work has had the unintended consequence of poking holes into the old arguments regarding the singularity of western modern science, or the autonomy of the western culture that produced it. In this regard, the present reviewer is very sympathetic to Huff’s plight. After all, how could he be critical of someone who writes a book on the history of modern science, documenting in it a whole array of the achievements of Islamic and Chinese sciences and acknowledging the integral relationship between those sciences and modern science―a good part of that relationship being based on research by the present reviewer on the history of Islamic planetary astronomy―when others writing on the same subject find no difficulty in jumping from Ptolemy (c. AD 150) to Copernicus (d. AD 1543) without even blinking?6

                Yet, writing general books of this nature, when neither one of the scientific traditions under scrutiny is well understood, has intrinsic difficulties. When one cannot yet demonstrate the exact cultural relationship between modern science and the West, and when we have, at best, truncated knowledge of both Islamic and Chinese science―truncated because, as was stated above, those sciences have been studied until now from the perspective of their relevance to Western scientific tradition rather than for their own sake, as features of their own cultures―how may one make claims to a comparative study of the history of science, as Huff does, without falling into loose and banal arguments and even, at times, contradictory statements? Concepts advanced by Huff such as “neutral space and free inquiry,” concepts deemed integral to modern science, may be argued and discussed, but by no means presumed to be as established as Huff would like to assume. The whole school of the sociology of science, or the more contemporary science studies movement, devotes much space and energy specifically to proving that there is no “neutral space” or “free inquiry” in the sense in which Huff uses the terms. Besides, if it teaches us nothing else, our own experience at the end of the twentieth century should teach us that “free inquiry” is essentially a fiction determined, for the most part, by the exigencies of the market-place and reigning ideologies much more than by cultural imperatives, if there are any such imperatives. We also learn by the end of this century that the best scientific production―now difficult to separate from technological production―does not always abide by the same rationality for which Western culture is celebrated, but rather by the more mundane pressures of economics and marketing which are always lurking behind every scientific development.

                In the following, I will give only a few examples of the kind of statements from which such general books ultimately suffer. When Huff says, for instance, that “science is especially the natural enemy of authoritarian regimes,” (Huff, 1) he must be either ignoring the tremendous achievements by the Nazi or the Soviet regimes in the most technically sophisticated sciences, or suggesting that the authoritarianism of these regimes fades in comparison to what one would have to presume he sees in Islamic and Chinese cultures. The reviewer, who knows Huff personally, is aware that he does not mean the latter, but such statements are inherent in an enterprise which seeks to explain scientific achievements as functions of “neutral space” and “free inquiry.” From that prejudgement, he goes on to illustrate with a diagram (Huff, 4) how “Law and Legal Thought” and the “Theology and Philosophy of Nature,” when channelled through “Reason, Rationalism [and] Rationality,” whatever those terms may mean in this context, lead to “Institutional Structures,” on the one hand―and through those institutions to “Modern Science”―or directly to “Modern Science,” on the other. From that perspective, Arabic science indeed becomes a “problem,” and is perceived as such in the subtitle of chapter 2, since it is difficult to document the same “neutral space,” “free inquiry,” “legal thought,” “theology and philosophy of nature,” “reason, rationalism and rationality” and “institutional structures” in Islamic civilization that would presumably give rise to modern science. It is interesting that neither here, where it would be most relevant, nor in any other place in the book, does Huff speak of the economic factors that may be directly connected to the rise of modern science in the West, from the “discovery” of the New World, to the Age of Discovery and all of its implications and, finally, to “colonization” and the ongoing imperialism of Western culture under the newly-emerging concept of “globalization.” In order to be fair, however, Huff is conscious (Huff, 5-6) of the connection made by Weber between modern science and capitalism―a connection also accepted by Needham―but avoids delving into it for, in his own words, it “would entail another volume altogether.” That indeed will be a very interesting volume if it is ever written.

                Because he has avoided all of the implications of the relationship between economic factors and modern science―and modern society in general―Huff treats contemporary underdevelopment as a problem of “barriers to freedom of thought, expression, and action in the interests of primordial religious and ethnic identities”(Huff, 7). All this when Huff knows very well that the most primordial ethnic and religious atrocities happened in the very bosom of Europe, under the gaze of the most advanced modern science based on principles such as experimentation, the mathematization of nature and “rationality,” and in the most developed scientific society of its time. Until one disentangles the web of relationships between such social, political, and economic forces in Europe itself, where modern science is supposed to have been born, and demonstrates the relationship of such forces to modern science and development, it is foolhardy to urge underdeveloped countries to adopt the imagined benefits of such slogans as “freedom of thought and expression” in order to obtain the golden key to modernity assumed to be so intrinsically embedded in the processes of modern science.

                The danger in this kind of thinking is that it overburdens scientific activity itself by making it solely responsible for modern development when one knows very well that scientific processes are very limited in scope and application, and cannot solve all the problems of modern life, even though we have become so accustomed to falsely believing science to be the ethos and symbol of modernity. In fact, the problem is much more complex than that and, although development can benefit from scientific production, science, whether modern or not, cannot be made responsible for its failure.

                Furthermore, Huff misrepresents the facts, particularly with regard to Islamic culture―being unfamiliar with Chinese culture, I will not offer any criticisms of his presentation of it here―when he claims, for example, that “law and the secrets of God were carefully guarded” (Huff, 12) in Islamic and Judaic cultures, a claim probably based on reiterations, by both Maimonides and Averroes, of the old Greek dictum that the study of philosophy must not be open to the common man, but restricted to the chosen few. The proliferation of legal/theological schools of thought in both Judaism and Islam, and the lack of a centrally-guarded clergy entrusted with such secrets, contradicts Huff’s contention―despite the wishful thinking of Huff, Maimonides, Averroes and their Greek predecessors. In any event, even if those restrictions did exist, what do the secrets of God and law have to do with the development of science? The existence of any relationship between them still awaits a convincing argument. Moreover, how does revealing God’s secrets allow us to understand the development of science and then to write a better history of science, when the purpose of such an enterprise is to formulate a framework within which individual scientists and their work may be understood―in the context of the cultural domain in which the work was produced―thus changing our understanding of each domain as well as its relationship to the rest of the grand narrative of the history of science? Finally, when one speaks of science in such general cultural terms and the cultural “imperatives” that produce science, then one loses the ability to make distinctions among the scientific activities themselves and thereby reach any conclusion as to why, for instance, in certain periods of a cultural science, astronomy advanced while medicine declined.

                On another level, a word should be said about the causes for the decline of Arabic science. Huff places the beginning of that decline at around the thirteenth century, or by the beginning of the fourteenth at the latest. He says quite explicitly that he “would draw the line in terms of significant cultural and scientific growth at the end of the thirteenth century” (Huff, 47, n.1). He then goes on to argue, as do many, that the decline was caused by the dominant role played by religious thought in later centuries, thus making religious thought responsible for stifling scientific thought. This widely-accepted argument goes back to the nineteenth century, when Ghazali (d. 1111) was blamed for the decline of Arabic/Islamic science and his book, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, came to be taken as the harbinger of that decline. Needless to say, this argument rested on the usual antagonistic opposition between religion and science which was already operative in the study of the history of Western science. One of its later manifestations was articulated by Armand Abel in the 1950s and is unfortunately quoted here, with credence, by Huff (Huff, 53). Consequently, the argument of opposition between religion and science was simply applied to Islamic civilization without any consideration being given to the cultural differences between Islamic and Western civilizations.

                Huff adds to the old thesis of religio-scientific conflict a new interpretation of findings recently established on the subject of religious conversions. He uses these results to assert that, since conversion to Islam increased after the tenth century, free thinking was subsequently restricted (Huff, 47, n. 2), as if to imply that the proponents of free thinking were the non-Muslims of earlier centuries, without even attempting to tell the reader what he means by free thinking, or even mentioning the dynamic debates that went on in every conceivable intellectual field within Islamic religious thought in earlier centuries.

                At the same time, however, he diverges from the argument of conflict between religion and science because of his acquaintance with some new facts. He had already learned from another area of recent research, namely, the area of Arabic astronomy and, especially, from ongoing investigations regarding its vital relationship to Copernican astronomy, that the most interesting and revolutionary planetary theories produced by Islamic civilization were not only produced in opposition to Greek astronomical theory, but also well after the time of Ghazali, when Islamic religious thought was supposed to have reigned supreme. He also knows of the relationship between the Damascene astronomer Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375) and his counterpart, Copernicus, who came much later. He obviously knows, as well, of Ibn al-Shatir’s reformed model for the movement of the moon, which was, together with many other theories which he proposed, contrary to Greek theory, but identical to the corresponding theories of Copernicus. It is only in the last forty years that historians have discovered these facts and Huff is to be congratulated for his awareness of them and for now making them accessible to a much wider audience, which this book will surely attract.

                Unfortunately, however, Huff did not keep up with the latest research and the last few years have seen revolutionary findings push forward the date for the beginning of a decline in Arabic science well into the sixteenth century. Moreover, it is becoming more and more apparent that the scientists who were responsible for the production of this radical astronomy were mostly religious men at the same time. Ibn al-Shatir was a timekeeper at the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. Other contemporary and subsequent astronomers like Sadr al-Shari`a al-Bukhari (d. 1347), al-Sharif al-Jurjani (d. 1413), al-Khafri (d. 1550) and several others were religious scholars in their own right. Even the most elementary study of the works of these men permits one to begin characterizing their age as a golden age of astronomy, rather than an age of decline as many, including Huff, have argued.

                This does not mean that there was no age of decline, but it can be documented that it primarily occurred in legal and religious thought, rather than in astronomical thought, during the period in question, a result almost exactly opposite to what the Eurocentric model would predict. Accordingly, works exploring the relationship between science and religion, and between Arabic science and Western science, as well as assumptions made concerning the extent of free thinking under religious Islam, have to be rewritten in light of these new findings, and everything said by Huff on these subjects has to be reassessed.

                On the technical level, much could be said about Huff’s understanding of the role of Arabic astronomy and of Arabic planetary theories in particular. In one place (Huff, 55), he seems to imply that these theories were developed in order to account for “discrepancies between theory and observation,” when it has, in fact, already been established that planetary predictions according to the Ptolemaic models, as well as according to models developed in opposition to them, could yield the positions of the planets with reasonable accuracy, considering the instruments of the time. The same myth is often repeated about Copernican astronomy―that it fitted better with observations, or that it was simpler than Ptolemaic astronomy―myths dismissed more than fifty years ago by Neugebauer and others.7

                The main purpose of all of the theorists whose work is now being pursued in Arabic astronomy―and whose work had a direct bearing on the theories of Copernicus―was to try to harmonize the cosmological requirements of Ptolemaic astronomy with the mathematical models that were supposed to represent the workings of that cosmology. In very few cases were objections to Greek astronomy made on the basis of its failure to account for observed facts. The only instance we know of, so far, is the solitary remark made by Ibn al-Shatir on the contradiction between predictions for the size of the apparent solar disk, as derived from the Ptolemaic model for the sun, and its actual measurements.8 Other discrepancies between observed facts and the predictive elements of Ptolemaic astronomy had already been noted as early as the first half of the ninth century and not in later centuries when the planetary theories were being developed.

                On the same technical level, Huff’s understanding of what Copernican astronomy was supposed to do needs some correction as well. In one instance, Huff states that “Copernicus and Galileo were committed to a realist interpretation of the world” (Huff, 41). Although this judgement may be arguably true for Galileo, one may legitimately ask just what reality Copernicus was appealing to, or committing himself to, in order to propose a heliocentric universe, when he had no universal gravitation theory to hold that universe together cosmologically? The same Arabic-writing astronomers whose mathematical theorems we now know were employed by Copernicus developed their theorems specifically because of their objections to the lack of realism in the cosmological Greek universe as expressed by Ptolemaic astronomy. They aimed at harmonizing that universe to become more scientifically coherent in order to make sense of the ‘reality’ of the geocentric universe that Greek astronomy was supposed to espouse. In that cosmological universe, heliocentrism was already dismissed as unreal. Therefore, going back to it without a developed universal gravitation theory is equally unreal, whether the commitment to it was made by Copernicus, or by anyone else in his time.

                Huff repeats the same claim elsewhere (Huff, 44), agreeing with Benjamin Nelson that the early modern revolution in science was conducted by men who were “committed spokesmen of the new truths clearly proclaimed by the Book of Nature. . . .” Here, one must ask which chapters of the Book of Nature could proclaim heliocentrism before coining a universal gravitation concept? If anything, that book spoke to the contrary.

                Without any further elucidation, Huff makes a very similar assertion regarding heliocentrism (Huff, 57-58), when he asserts that it was the “great metaphysical core of the modern European scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” without telling the reader about the real history of heliocentrism and the benefit which Copernicus accrued from it―only in hindsight and for reasons that have nothing to do with the kind of ‘realist’ he is proclaimed to be. According to those familiar with his mathematical astronomy, it may be claimed that Copernicus was a throw-back to the time of the ancient Greeks, when the coherence of mathematics and the cosmology that mathematics was supposed to represent did not receive much consideration―as opposed to the persistent and long-standing attempts by astronomers working in the context of Islamic civilization, all of whom insisted on the need to match mathematics with the ‘real’ world surrounding them, as expressed within the cosmology of the time. For Copernicus to be a realist he would have had to abandon the ancient Greek geocentric cosmology and offer a new cosmology of his own that would make of heliocentrism more than just elegant mathematics. Without a theory of universal gravitation, this new cosmology could not be developed, as it indeed was about a century after Copernicus―and not by Copernicus.

                Several other claims made by Huff, such as those concerning the failure of Arabic science to break away from geocentrism (Huff, 87) on account of opposition from religious scholars (Huff, 60 and passim), or the need to cling to lunar cycles, are obviously ill-informed and need not be taken seriously. Similarly, his claim that the “naturalization” of the Greek sciences is what led to their decline under Islam (Huff, 65) is highly questionable and not well supported, neither by Huff, nor by Sabra, from whom he borrowed the concept.

                Furthermore, Huff’s claim that “Copernicus borrowed heavily from the Almagest of Ptolemy,” a borrowing supposedly “made easier by the advent of the printing press” (Huff, 322), is really a non sequitur. Almost all of the astronomers who worked under Islam not only borrowed heavily from the Almagest, but corrected it, objected to it, reformulated it and wrote commentaries on it, without the benefit of the printing press.

                Racist remarks such as “even allowing for Arab exaggeration . . . ” (Huff, 74) should no longer have a place in modern-day books, especially those that have a great potential for becoming textbooks for the instruction of young students. Nor should contradictory statements attributing the rise of modern science to factors such as “free thinking” and “neutral space”―if understood to mean fewer constraints on the individual scientist―be used to explain why modern science developed in the West, where such concepts existed, but did not develop under Islam, when Huff himself describes how the relationship between the student scientist and his teacher was free of all constraints in Islamic civilization and depended solely upon their willingness to indulge in whatever scientific activity they wished. In the present day, research institutes for advanced study and apprenticeships in laboratories under individual scientists are considered the main sources of creative science. So why are similar relationships in medieval Islamic civilization considered contrary to the spirit of modern science?                 Finally, Huff erroneously follows David King (Huff, 89), who wrote the biographical entry on Ibn al-Shatir for the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, where he says: “There is no indication in the known sources that any Muslim astronomers after Ibn al-Shatir concerned themselves with non-Ptolemaic astronomy.”9 On the basis of King’s statement, Huff concludes that “an achievement as great as that of Ibn al-Shatir simply fell on deaf ears because it was not part of an ongoing educational system.” Neither statement is true and the published facts now demonstrate the presence of not only those scholars mentioned above, but also Qushji (d. 1474),10 Birjandi (d. 1525) and Khafri (d. 1550)11, all of whom produced equally ‘great’ works along the lines of those by Ibn al-Shatir. In the case of Khafri, he easily surpassed Ibn al-Shatir in sophistication and output. More to the point, and contrary to Huff’s contention, those astronomers who commented on each other’s works and, at times, even incorporated them into their own studies (as Khafri did when he twice included works by Jurjani and Shirazi) represented a continuity of the creative astronomical tradition well into the sixteenth century as far as we can now tell. Later sources have not yet been scrutinized for such theories simply because scholars in the field are still in thrall to the old periodization scheme which Huff, unfortunately, largely follows in his book. According to that scheme, the decline of Islamic science dates back to the beginning of the fourteenth century, thus allowing no room for later developments that we now know took place.

                But, to his credit, Huff also notes that modern discussions on the history of science tend to bypass the role of other, non-Western sciences, especially Arabic science (Huff, 61-62), and his book may generally be considered a desirable corrective to that omission. This is important because it has become increasingly apparent that a true understanding of Western science is impossible to achieve without a proper understanding of the role of Arabic science, the tradition with which Western science has had the longest and most seminal engagement.