American Missionary Schools

Attempts to encourage greater – and friendlier – contacts with Western Europe meant that by the year 1900, the Ottoman state had given international organisations permission to run 702 primary and secondary schools. Of these, 465 – the single largest share – were led by missionaries from the US, and 100 of these schools had been established during the past twenty years alone. American schools were so popular with parents that in Anatolia one in three school-age children was enrolled at such a school. Why were they so popular? One explanation seems to be that they were not just educational institutions; through these schools, children and their families were able to access the modern hospitals, pharmacies and printing facilities which the schools had established alongside their teaching function. Yet this presented a dilemma for the rulers. They wanted a degree of foreign influence in their educational system, but they did not want the system itself to be taken over by Washington, something which seemed to be in danger of happening. In one official report, for example, the minister for education described the American schools system as an ‘epidemic disease’.

The government felt that it had to act. It would have liked to close the schools down, but recognised that this would lead to serious diplomatic problems. Instead, it ordered the schools to reapply for permission to teach. In addition, the American schools were told that they could no longer recruit Muslim students, nor could they locate their premises in areas where Muslims were the majority community. After much foot-dragging, the schools agreed to reapply for permission to teach, but they did not stop enrolling Muslim pupils. When the US government was pushed on this, it replied that the US, like France, Britain and Russia, had millions of nationals who were Muslims; it would change its enrolment policy only if all other foreign schools did so, too. America was too big a power for the Ottomans to mess with, and the matter was quietly dropped.

Critical Thinking

“Whosoever seeks the truth will not proceed by studying the writings of his predecessors and by simply accepting his own good opinion of them. Whosoever studies works of science must, if he wants to find the truth, transform himself into a critic of everything he reads. He must examine tests and explanations with the greatest precision and question them from all angles and aspects.”

                                            Hassan ibn al-Haitham, Cairo, 10th century

Math and Islamic History

In his work on algebra, al-Khwarizmi worked with both what we now call linear equations – that is, equations that involve only units without any squared figures – and quadratic equations, which involve squares and square roots. His advance was to reduce every equation to its simplest possible form by a combination of two processes: al-jabr and al-muqabala.

Al-jabr means ‘completion’ or ‘restoration’ and involves simply taking away all negative terms. Using modern symbols, al-jabr means simplifying. Al-muqabala means ‘balancing’, and involves reducing all the postive terms to their simplest form. 

In developing algebra, al-Khwarizmi built on the work of early mathematicians from India, such as Brahmagupta, and from the Greeks such as Euclid, but it was al-Khwarizmi who turned it into a simple, all-embracing system, which is why he is dubbed the ‘father of algebra’. The very word algebra comes from the title of his book, al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa’l muqabala or The Compendious Book on Calculating by Completion and Balancing.

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Beyond al-Khwarizmi, many other Arabic-speaking scholars explored mathematics. Indeed, it was fundamental to so many things, from calculating tax and inheritance to working out the direction of Mecca, that it is hard to find a scholar who did not at some time or other work in mathematics. But it wasn’t just practical applications that fascinated many of them, and they began to push mathematics to its limits.

In the early 11th century in Cairo, Hassan ibn al-Haitham, for instance, laid many of the foundations for integral calculus, which is used for calculating areas and volumes. Half a century later, the brilliant poet/mathematician Omar Khayyam found solutions to all thirteen possible kinds of cubic equations – that is, equations in which numbers are cubed. He regretted that his solutions could only be worked out geometrically rather than algebraically. ‘We have tried to work these roots by algebra, but we have failed’, he says ruefully. ‘It may be, however, that men who come after us will succeed.’

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Omar Khayyam is one of the most extraordinary figures in Islamic science, and tales of his mathematical brilliance abound. In 1079, for instance, he calculated the length of the year to 365.24219858156 days. That means that he was out by less than the sixth decimal place – fractions of a second – from the figure we have today of 365.242190, derived with the aid of radio telescopes and atomic clocks. And in a highly theatrical demonstration involving candles and globes, he is said to have proved to an audience that included the Sufi theologian al-Ghazali that the earth rotates on its axis.

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Trigonometry was first developed in ancient Greece, but it was in early Islam that it became an entire branch of mathematics, as it was aligned to astronomy in the service of faith. Astronomical trigonometry was used to help determine the qibla, the direction of the Ka’bah in Mecca. Modern historians such as David King have discovered that the Ka’bah itself is astronomically inclined. On one side it points towards Canopus, the brightest star in the southern sky. The axis that is perpendicular to its longest side points towards midsummer sunrise.

Mecca’s significance is such that when a deceased person is to be buried, contemporary Islamic tradition determines that his or her body must face Mecca. When the famous call to prayer is announced, it must be done facing Mecca. And when animals are slaughtered, slaughtermen must also turn in the direction of the holy city. Islamic-era astronomers began to compute the direction of Mecca from different cities from around the 9th century. One of the earliest known examples of the use of trigonometry (sines, cosines and tangents) for locating Mecca can be found in the work of the mathematician al-Battani, which, according to David King, was in use until the 19th century.

Numbers From India

One of al-Khwarizmi’s greatest contributions was to provide a comprehensive guide to the numbering system which originated in India about 500 CE. It is this system, later called the Arabic system because it came to Europe from al-Khwarizmi, that became the basis for our modern numbers. It was first introduced to the Arabic-speaking world by al-Kindi, but it was al-Khwarizmi who brought it into the mainstream with his book on Indian numerals, in which he describes the system clearly.

The system, as explained by al-Khwarizimi, uses only ten digits from 0 to 9 to give every single number from zero up to the biggest number imaginable. The value given to each digit varies simply according to its position. So the 1 in the number ‘100’ is 10 times the 1 in the number ‘10’ and 100 times the 1 in the number ‘1’. An absolutely crucial element of this system was the concept of zero.

This was a significant advance on previous numbering systems, which were often cumbersome with any large numbers. The Roman system, for instance, needs seven digits to give a number as small as, for example, 38: XXXVIII. Arabic numbering can give even very large numbers quite compactly. Seven digits in Arabic numerals can, of course, be anything up to 10 million. What’s more, by standardising units, Arabic numerals made multiplication, division and every other form of mathematical calculation simpler.

This system quickly caught on, and has since spread around the world to become a truly global ‘language’. Along with the numbers, English also gained another word, ‘algorithm’, for a logical step-by-step mathematical process, based on the spelling of al-Khwarizmi’s name in the Latin title of his book, Algoritmi de numero Indorum. The new numbers took some time to embed themselves in the Islamic world, however, as many people continued with their highly effective and fast method of finger-reckoning.

Numbers

In many areas of science, the contribution of early Islam is sometimes open to interpretation and shifts of opinion, but when it comes to numbers and mathematics the legacy is immense and indisputable. The very numbers in use in our world every day for everything from buying food to calculating the spin on an atomic particle are called Arabic numerals, because they came to the West from scholars who wrote in Arabic. What’s more, with al-Khwarizmi’s algebra, these scholars provided us with the single most important mathematical tool ever devised, and one that underpins every facet of science, as well as more everyday processes.

Copernicus and Islam

Moving the earth

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see that the Islamic astronomers’ basic assumptions were flawed. Of course Copernicus showed in the mid-16th century that the earth does move, circling around the sun with the planets. But even this concept failed to give correct predictions until Kepler showed that the paths of the planets through space are not perfectly circular, but slightly elliptical. And it would have made no sense in terms of existing theories of how the celestial machine held together. It required the addition of Newton’s theory of gravity to complete the picture and show how it all worked.

In conventional accounts, the narrative seems to leap straight from Ptolemy to Copernicus, and to show how Copernicus had the great insight to see that the earth is not fixed, as Ptolemy said it was, but circles around the sun and spins on its axis. In this narrative, the ultimate Islamic contribution to the big picture seems comparatively small or even misguided. The Arab astronomers may have been diligent and ingenious, it seems, but they were barking up the wrong tree in backing the fixed-earth model, and it required Copernicus’s brilliant insight to set things right.

Copernicus acknowledged that some of the data he needed to prove his theory came from the charts of al-Battani and al-Bitruji, but that was all that apparently came from the Arab astronomers. Yet there are clues that this is not the full story.

Islamic source

In 1957, the historian Otto Neugebauer noticed a similarity beween an illustration in Copernicus’s first key book Commentariolus (1514), in which he first set out his idea that the earth moves, and one in ibn al-Shatir’s book in which he answered the problems of the moon’s motion. The similarity was so striking that it seemed hard not to believe that Copernicus had seen ibn al-Shatir’s book. Intrigued, Neugebauer delved deeper for connections between Copernicus and the Islamic astronomers, and soon found another apparent illustration match in Copernicus, this time with al-Tusi’s 1260 Tadhkira, in which he explains the Tusi Couple. Again the similarity was marked, even including an apparent mistake in the copying of an Arabic letter in al-Tusi’s illustration.

Many historians now believe that Copernicus drew directly from the work of the Islamic astronomers in providing proofs for his theories. Recent research has suggested that West European astronomers were far more aware of Arabic work at the time than was imagined. Indeed many may actually have spoken, or at least read, Arabic, including Guillaume Postel, a lecturer at Paris University in the early 16th century, whose highly technical notes in Arabic can clearly be seen on an Arabic astronomical text in the Vatican library.

The Arab contribution

Of course, Copernicus made the great breakthrough suggestion that the earth moved, but the argument is that it was simply yet another step down the road away from the Ptolemaic model. Indeed, at the time, in some ways it seemed like a backward step, since ibn al-Shatir’s work had matched a believably real theory with observations to a remarkable degree. Yet Copernicus’s idea did not. No one at the time could explain how the universe could possibly fit together without the earth at its centre – and Copernicus’s model made considerably less accurate predictions than ibn al-Shatir’s. These problems, as much as any theological problems that the Roman Catholic Church might have had, needed to be solved before most astronomers could accept that the earth moves.

There is no doubt that Copernicus’s idea of a heliocentric (sun-centred) universe was a seismic shift in scientific thinking. But it was a revolution waiting to happen. The way was paved by the gradual chipping away at the edifice of the Ptolemaic system over the centuries by countless Arabic astronomers, both with their observations and their often ingenious theories.

Galen on Trial by Al-Razi

Al-Razi decided to conduct a trial to see if bloodletting worked as a treatment for meningitis. Two things are interesting about this trial. The first is the fact that he was not prepared just to accept Galen’s idea as it stood, but wanted to put it to a proper test. The second thing is the methodology he used, which gives us an insight into his thinking. In his hospital he let one group of meningitis patients go untreated; but he treated another group by bloodletting in the normal way. Interestingly, the results of the trial supported Galen’s view that bloodletting was an effective treatment – although few would accept that particular finding today.

In Doubts about Galen, al-Razi also seems to question the theory behind Galen’s basic system. He asks if it is really true that giving a patient a hot drink would raise their body temperature even higher than that of the drink, as the theory of humours would seem to imply. It takes only a simple test, of course, to show that this is not true. If it is not, al-Razi suggests, there must be other control mechanisms in the body that the humours do not explain, but it is unclear how far he went with such ideas.

No-one really followed up al-Razi’s doubts about the entire system of humours, though, and it was another thousand years before it was seriously challenged. However, in the South Asian Unani school of herbal medicine, it is still used as a basis of medical treatment by a majority of people in countries such as Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. This is partly because modern healthcare is still unaffordable in these regions.

Galen on Trial by Al-Razi

Al-Razi decided to conduct a trial to see if bloodletting worked as a treatment for meningitis. Two things are interesting about this trial. The first is the fact that he was not prepared just to accept Galen’s idea as it stood, but wanted to put it to a proper test. The second thing is the methodology he used, which gives us an insight into his thinking. In his hospital he let one group of meningitis patients go untreated; but he treated another group by bloodletting in the normal way. Interestingly, the results of the trial supported Galen’s view that bloodletting was an effective treatment – although few would accept that particular finding today.

In Doubts about Galen, al-Razi also seems to question the theory behind Galen’s basic system. He asks if it is really true that giving a patient a hot drink would raise their body temperature even higher than that of the drink, as the theory of humours would seem to imply. It takes only a simple test, of course, to show that this is not true. If it is not, al-Razi suggests, there must be other control mechanisms in the body that the humours do not explain, but it is unclear how far he went with such ideas.

No-one really followed up al-Razi’s doubts about the entire system of humours, though, and it was another thousand years before it was seriously challenged. However, in the South Asian Unani school of herbal medicine, it is still used as a basis of medical treatment by a majority of people in countries such as Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. This is partly because modern healthcare is still unaffordable in these regions.

Ibn-Sina

Nevertheless, a few Islamic physicians gradually began to chip away at the edifice of Greek medicine, even as many more used it with dedication and, as Peter Pormann of Warwick University suggests, with some success. However, life for physicians was never quite so encouraging or so supportive as it had been in the early centuries of the Abbasid caliphates. By the time the next great figure in Islamic medicine, ibn-Sina (Avicenna), was born in 980, the empire was no longer under the control of a single caliph. The result was that ibn-Sina spent much of his colourful, varied life moving around trying to find a medical position that would pay him decently and give him the time to carry on with his other scholarly work.

Born near Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan, ibn-Sina was something of a prodigy. By the age of ten, he knew not just the Qur’an but much Arabic poetry by heart, and by the age of sixteen had become a physician. Ibn-Sina proved his competence early on when he successfully treated the Samanid ruler of the eastern Islamic caliphate for a potentially life-threatening diarrhoeal infection. As reward, he was given access to the royal library at Bukhara, and certainly took advantage of it. His skill as a physician became almost legendary, even though the turbulent politics of the time kept him permanently unsettled, either stuck as a teacher or obliged to put himself at the whims of some prince or caliph.

Ibn-Sina managed to become one of the most famous philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers of his time, and wrote books on a range of scientific topics, a vast encyclopedia (one of the first ever written) and even poetry.

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Ibn-Sina made a number of key astronomical observations, devised a scale to help make readings more precise, and made a string of contributions to physics, such as identifying different forms of energy – heat, light and mechanical – and the idea of force. He also noted that if light consists of a stream of particles, then its speed will be finite. The mathematical technique of ‘casting out of nines’, used to verify squares and cubes, is also attributed to ibn-Sina, among others. And he is believed to have suggested the fundamental geological idea of superposition – the concept that in rock layers, the youngest layers are highest – that would not be properly formulated until the 17th century.

Yet his fame, above all, is based on his book al-Qann fi al-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine). Consisting of some half a million words, this multi-volume book surveyed medical knowledge from ancient times to the present day. Its comprehensive, systematic approach meant that it became the reference for Arabic- and Persian-speaking doctors, and once it was translated into Latin it became one of the standard textbooks in Europe for six centuries, with some 60 editions being published between 1500 and 1674, according to the historian Nancy Siraisi.

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There is no doubt that ibn-Sina was a proud, perhaps even arrogant and difficult man. Unfortunately, his absolute certainty that he was right (as he often was), along with his tendency to dismiss his critics as idiots, offended many, including his political patrons. This quality caused him to make some rather bold claims regarding the relationship of science to religion, and it meant that he would one day be charged with heresy.

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Ibn-Sina believed that there exists a single set of principles that can explain the nature of the physical universe, the reason for its creation, and the relationship between mind and body, and he made it his life’s work to find connections between these apparently different fields, and ultimately to discover a theory of everything. This was an ambitious scheme, but then ibn-Sina, according to Yahya Michot of the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, was always supremely confident of his abilities, and believed that God had deliberately made him brighter than the average individual.

So, according to ibn-Sina, miracles must have a physical explanation. To take one example: most Muslims believe that the world will end one day and that when this happens, every member of the human race will return from the dead in a physical form, ready to be judged by God for their conduct during their lifetime. But ibn-Sina held that such bodily resurrection defies the laws of nature, and he thought that the day of judgement might take a different form to that traditionally taught in religion. He also doubted the traditional view of heaven and hell, in part because of his belief that matter cannot be everlasting – no fire can burn forever. And he thought that heaven and hell might take the form of a state of mind, instead of a physical space. The example he gave to support his theory was that of pain. He postulated that if it is possible to feel pain without experiencing pain in the physical sense – such as during a bad dream – it ought to be similarly possible to experience heaven or hell without physically travelling to a different place.

Dreaming of Aristotle

Alongside a lust for power, al-Mamun’s rule was also characterised as a time when science and scholarship were at their peak. Al-Mamun is regarded by historians as the great champion of rationalism, and as the caliph who promoted science more than any other. It is said that once, when al-Mamun achieved a victory over the Byzantines, he asked from them as reparation not gold nor any other such mundane treasures, but a copy of Ptolemy’s great book on astronomy, the Almagest.

There is a famous story telling how al-Mamun once saw Aristotle in a dream. Several versions of the story exist. Here is one transcript of the exchange:

Al-Mamun to Aristotle: What is good?
Aristotle: That which is in the mind.
Al-Mamun: What more is good?
Aristotle: That which is in the law.
Al-Mamun: What more?
Aristotle: The will of the people.
Al-Mamun: And what more?
Aristotle: There is no more.

In another more elaborate version, Aristotle explains that reason and revelation are not in opposition – that Man should seek God’s truth by opening his mind to the power of reason rather than by waiting for divine revelation. He then goes on to instruct al-Mamun to turn all resources to translating the great works of thought and knowledge into Arabic, for ‘Knowledge has no borders, wisdom has no race or nationality. To block out ideas is to block out the kingdom of God.’

The story then goes on to tell how, on waking, al-Mamun instructs men to go to Byzantium and bring back all the greatest books, to go to Gundeshapur in Persia and bring back the contents of its great library, to find all the best scholars and translators, and finally to build a centre at the court in Baghdad for learning and scholarship which he will call the House of Wisdom.

The Role of Paper

One thing that arrived in Baghdad just in time to really help the translation movement, and the whole of Arabic scholarship, was paper. There is an apocryphal story that the Muslims learned the art of papermaking from Chinese prisoners they caught at the Battle of Tallas in 751. It’s probably just as likely that paper arrived from China with the many traders who were at that time journeying far across Asia, and that they brought back Chinese calligraphy as well as paper. Either way, it arrived in Islam just about the same time as the founding of Baghdad by the Abbasids. Its impact was enormous. Parchment was very expensive, hard to come by, thick and awkward to use. Paper, on the other hand, was cheap, available in bulk, light and thin, and was perfect for a new calligraphic style of Arabic writing. If in China, papermaking might have been an art, in Baghdad it became an industry.

With paper, books could be made and copied comparatively cheaply in large numbers, and the boost this gave to learning in Islam is immeasurable. Previously, parchment codexes and scrolls of books had been so rare and so bulky and precious that they were held only in a very few private or royal libraries. With the coming of paper, books and bookshops appeared not just in Baghdad but in many other Islamic cities too. Even those who were moderately wealthy could build up their own private library, and public libraries appeared for the first time. In Bukhara, for instance, there was a public library where scholars could simply drop in, ask the librarian to get them a particular book from the library stacks off to the sides of the main hall, and then sit down to make notes. The library even provided free paper for the scholars. By the 13th century, Baghdad had many public libraries and bookshops, with numerous publishers employing scores of copyists to make the books.

A New Language

The administration of the Islamic territories was probably an equally important stimulus to scholarship and science. For the first few decades, the business of government was performed in the relevant national language, with the aid of interpreters. In the 690s, however, Caliph Abd al-Malik decreed that Arabic was to be used in all official documents. That meant that anyone wanting to work for the government – even conduct business with government officials – had to be able to write Arabic. The long-term impact of this simple measure was huge. Gradually, pretty much everyone from Andalusia to Afghanistan learned to speak a form of Arabic. For anyone who could write, Arabic became effectively a universal language right across the vast extent of the Muslim world. Just as English is the language of science today, so the spread of written Arabic allowed scholars from distant places and numerous different cultures to communicate their ideas easily and note them down for others to read. It’s probable that this, as much as anything, helped to enable and sustain Islamic science over so many centuries.

Legacy to Humanity

It is already well known that coffee came from the East. According to one theory it was discovered after goatherds in Yemen, or perhaps Ethiopia (depending on which version of the story you read), noticed how frisky their charges became after eating certain berries. You might even know that the sugar that sweetens coffee originated here too. Indeed, there are many more everyday pleasures that are to be found in early Islam, but whose history is not so well known.

Take gardens as a place of relaxation rather than just a place for growing vegetables or herbs, for instance. They came to us from Persia. ‘Early Muslims everywhere made earthly gardens that gave glimpses of the heavenly garden to come’, says the historian A.M. Watson in his book Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World. ‘Long indeed would be the list of early Islamic cities that could boast huge expanses of gardens.

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Islamic carpets were imported as essential luxuries for centuries, long before the 18th-century Industrial Revolution meant that they could be made more cheaply in Europe. Chess, developed and played in India, came to Europe around the 9th century via Persia and Arabic-speaking Spain, and via the Viking trade routes from central Asia. The word ‘checkmate’ is similar to the Persian shahmat, meaning ‘the king is defeated’. After your game, you might drink an aperitif from a glass – distillation and drinking-glasses are both innovations developed in Islam.

Even many deeper aspects of Western faith and culture are shared by those of the ancient Islamic world. The arches of some cathedrals, those pinnacles of Christian architecture, are shared by many mosques. And stained-glass windows were also used in Islamic times, as was the music notation: ‘do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do’. Many of our basic institutions, too, can also be found in the world of medieval Islam, including public hospitals and libraries. The medicine of Hussain ibn-Sina (Avicenna) was Europe’s default medical system up until the discovery of germ theory.

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Besides new techniques and water management systems, crops were taken from one part of the world and introduced elsewhere. Oranges and lemons, for instance, came from India to the Middle East around the end of the 9th century and soon spread across the Islamic world and into Spain. In the same way, the empire cultivated and then spread sugar, pomegranates, figs, olives, cotton and many other crops far and wide.

Prejudice

Names such as al-Khwarizmi and ibn al-Haitham are as integral to the history of science and technology as are Newton and Archimedes, James Watt and Henry Ford, but the Arabic-sounding names somehow became lost in the myth of the Dark Ages. The reasons for this are the subject of an intense debate, which is as much about the relationship between the West and Islam as it is about the history of science and technology.

The Dark Age Myth

If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure which stems, I think, from the strait-jacket of history which we have inherited.

                HRH Prince Charles in a speech at Oxford University, 27 October 1993

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In mainstream science education in Britain – until very recently – the history of scientific progress has tended to leapfrog from the classical era of Euclid, Aristotle and Archimedes straight to the birth of the Age of Science in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, with only a cursory mention, if any, of the great swathe of Islamic science in between. In some versions of history, the ‘dark age’ only really ends, and the progress of science only really begins, with the famous conflict in the early 17th century in which Galileo confronts the Catholic Church with the assertion that the earth moves around the sun. As the world eventually acknowledges that Galileo is right, this is presented as the world-changing triumph of the light of reason over superstition. Thereafter, from the 17th century onwards, Western Europe’s scientists are set free to unlock the world’s secrets – William Harvey discovers blood circulation, Isaac Newton launches the study of physics, Robert Boyle pioneers the study of chemistry, Michael Faraday, electricity, and so on. And so we move forward into the Age of Reason and the dramatic progress of modern science.

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The most distorting effect of the Dark Ages myth was the way it seemed to sideline, in the popular imagination at least, the history of the world beyond Western Europe – and virtually ignore the fact that learning had simply shifted eastwards, not completely flickered out. First of all, the Dark Ages myth seemed to turn a blind eye to the fact that the Roman empire did not actually end with the fall of Rome, but moved its centre to Byzantium. As the work of the historian Judith Herrin of King’s College London shows so well, we are just beginning to wake up to the fact that cultural life – a rich cultural life – existed in Byzantium for the entire duration of the Dark Ages. And if Christian Byzantium was left in the shadows, equally telling has been the neglect of the achievements of early Islam.

The Dark Ages myth proved so powerful that even in some academic circles the best that could be said of Islamic scholarship was that it saved the great classical texts so that Europe could rediscover them in the Renaissance – as if retrieving them from a hole where they had been squirrelled away while the thousand-year storm blew past. With the old treasures retrieved, it was surmised, Islam was no longer needed and it was up to Europe alone to take knowledge forward.

The Word Science

The word ‘science’ in its modern context means the systematic study of the natural world, using observation, experimentation, measurement and verification. It comes from the Latin word (from around the 14th century) scientia, which means ‘to know’.

Arabic manuscripts from Islamic times did not have a word for ‘science’ as we know it today. Instead, they had a word similar in meaning to scientia, which is ilm (plural, uloom). Ilm means ‘knowledge’: this could be knowledge of the natural world, as well as knowledge of religion and other things.

Scientists in the Ottoman empire came closest to realising that ilm is not the same as the scientific method. They introduced a new word, fen (plural, funoon), which means ‘tools’ or ‘techniques’. For example, a university of science would be written in Turkish Arabic as darul funoon, or a home for the techniques of science.

The new Ottoman convention, however, did not catch on. Turkish Arabic is all but extinct and Modern Arabic has retained the original dual usage for the word ilm. So, while the Arabic edition of Scientific American magazine is called Majalla Uloom (magazine of knowledge), at the same time, darul uloom (a home for knowledge) is used to describe religious seminaries all over the world.