A history of Islam and science - with Timothy Winter

thank you uh so much and thank you all for being here on a rather Grim November evening uh no doubt your first question is already in your minds why has tonight's speaker decided to use as his first slide this cheesy AI image of a Muslim marriage as it might be once we have finally crossed the frontier of the holded Singularity and the man machine boundary is finally at an end well probably you've already got the answer it's a simple symbol science and Faith a marriage made in heaven uneasy bedf

ellows were we not brought up with gcsc textbooks that said the 19th century saw the decisive rancorous divorce between faith and science faith is that thing which really begins with Humanity itself in some Misty Paleolithic Age it constituted our way of interpreting the mysterious reality our explanation of things that went bump in the night outside the light shed by the Primeval campfire and it evolved and became more reasonable but surely it's just a legacy of that distant uncomfortable past

now we have a true method of understanding understanding the mysteries of existence and perhaps that true method has shown existence to be more interesting and more miraculous in a secular sense that the religions ever imagined this has become part of our sense of what we are as modern creatures our modernity is really defined by accepting that these are two uh rival epistemes nonoverlapping magisteria in the rather more technical language of Steven J G they coexist but they really can't cohabit

uh uneasy bedfellows so uh as well as the story about Islamic science past and present because I do want to talk about the current state of play um I hope also will be taking home a few additional thoughts about what this relationship might look like outside the familiar cernus Galileo Faraday the wonders of the modern world uh evolutionary idea which tends to buy into perhaps slightly Colonial Notions of History really being about the seamless progress from Primal ooze to the Wonders that we a

re today and to move into somewhat sideways alternative cultural perspectives after all the Chinese did science the Indians did some interesting science the Muslims did science so perhaps this is an exercise in decolonization challenging our eurocentric ideas although we have to acknowled knowled that in this race of the civilizations the West is at the moment very definitely ahead so as well as tracing the history of this very interesting and still really rather important engagement because the

Muslim world has not gone away 24.7% of the world's population self-identify as Muslims and Counting recent surveys by uh something called the Arab barometer which keeps an eye on public opinion in the Middle East and the 15th Arab youth survey indicate that in the last 10 years in the 19 to 29 age group in the Arab world religiosity is actually palpably increased so one of our stereotypes about modernity is kind of being challenged by all of this the old Paradigm is being abrogated by somethin

g new rational empirical demonstrable but religion is still out there so one of the things we need to think about is how we can relate in a positive way this still religious Islamic world to uh the thriving and ever motile world of science so we'll be talking about the history but also about the present day but also about the history of the history by which I mean the way in which we Western academics have looked at the story of Islam and science puzzled it over and explained or tried to explain

certain key things about where it comes from is it native to Islam are these always uneasy bedfellows uh what are the reasons for the decline of Islamic science and the perhaps unexpected growth of the West these are when you think about it some of the most important questions any historian can ask they cut to the heart of our understanding of the Triumph of the West so the history of the history is another of the things that I want to address as well as saying things and perhap showing some pr

etty images of some of the Great Moments in the relationship between Islam and science just to underline my point one of my favorite writers I always put her in wherever I can uh just indicating what is generally taken to be the essence of what religion is although some religionists have been scientists the essence of religion is of the heart and not of the mind it's experience IAL it's the sense of the numinous Isabelle eart some of you might just remember the petero tul film about her life 20

years or so ago uh a fairly typical uh illegitimate daughter of a spoiled drunken Russian priest who learned Arabic uh started hashish smoking in Tunis then converted to Islam dressed as a man traveled all over North Africa became a member of the kadera Sufi order turning her back deliberately on 19th century reason science rationality exploring a medieval world and producing golden Pros like this what can a scientist say to something that is undeniably human like this it's better in French but

it's worth repeating in English standing next to each other she's just gone into a mosque in alers to pray we all prayed as we listen to the exhilarating yet solemn exchange between those two voices the one in front of us sounded golden horse but gradually grew louder till it was strong and powerful while the other one seemed to come from somewhere high up in the mosque's dark reaches as it sang triumphantly in regular intervals of its unshakable radiant faith in Allah and his Prophet I felt alm

ost an exstasy my chest tightening and my heart soaring up towards the Heavenly regions that the second voice seemed to be coming from in a tone of melancholy Joy utterly convinced and at peace oh to lie upon the rugs of some silent mosque far from the Mindless noise of City Life and eyes closed the Soul's gaze turned heavenward listen to Islam's song Forever it's very pretty stuff but how does this engage with modernity at all how does this engage with mathematics empiricism testing what is goi

ng on what is this religious experience is it just some strange vibration somewhere in the frontal lobe of her brain how would we nowadays explain this it's part of our humanity and perhaps faith is part part of the essence historically of our Humanity very human very biological very un robotic another way of Chuck deposing these to super massive black holes we are told lie at the heart of almost all galaxies the result of catastrophic events of gravitational collapse sucking in interstellar gas

es to become truly enormous some of them several billion solar masses whole galaxies swirling around them billions of suns and there are perhaps a trillion of these super massive black holes in the universe on current models and Counting the material sucked in as it nears the Event Horizon Quantum events occur a different universe is opened are we at the gates of the metaphysical is this where the Theologian can start excitedly no because what's beyond it is going to be physics again it's not me

taphysics Beyond it as far as science can tell as far as anybody can tell we'll never visit for ourselves it's still just physics the other image of course the Hajj pilgrimage the enraptured pilgrims Circle the Caba in the time honored way and at the center the Cala black shrouded the symbol of the Divine mystery the ultimate other the metaphysical so does the physical tell us anything about the metaphysical does metaphysics really tell us anything that we need to know about physics there are pe

ople on both sides who are anxious to tell us yes but it's really hard to prove so spoiler I'm not this evening going to try and make any theological points I inhabit a Divinity SCH school but I'm just going to describe and perhaps we'll go home with some enriched perceptions of how this engagement has worked physics and metaphysics science and religion Islam specifically and science but I'm not going to offer you any clear tidy answers the next thing procedurally we need to get out of the way i

t seems is what on Earth are we going to call this and nobody seems to agree academics wouldn't earn a living if they agreed on everything so here we have four very reputable contemporary texts and you can see that well what do we call this thing is it Arabic science makes sense because the language of these discussions throughout the classical Islamic World in its enormous Millennial historical sweep and its three continental gigantic geographical sweep the largest the most Prof uh prosperous t

he most populous premodern civilization ever enormous but they used Arabic just as the West used Latin the lingua Franco it's not a bad idea to call it Arabic science Arabian science sometimes making it more Regional is it Islamic well uh my favorite book on the subject hopefully you can read it on this nice RI hris screen George CBA the best thing to read after hearing my faulting theologians attempts to talk about this Islamic science he calls it that and the making of the European Renaissance

so you can see where he's going to what extent is Islamic science significant in uh providing the foundations for our own story here in the west he calls it Islamic science what he means by that is that it is science pursued within the boundaries of the world of Islam and in some complex and diverse way engaging with the metaphysics and also the moral universe and the procedural boundaries of Islamic law and Islamic civilization another term we use sometimes is islamicate this is becoming more

fashionable also quite useful it means things that are not necessarily from the religion but are associated with the culture that the religion seems to have triggered so Ellie dancing Shisha bars things that are part of Muslim culture but are not really necessarily shed a compliant or religious the Islamic maybe that's useful as well I prefer Arabic science because some of these guys actually were not even Muslims particularly in the world of medicine a lot of them were Christians some of them l

ike the great myones originally from Muslim Spain arabic speaking ended up as personal physician to Saladin the rec conqueror of Jerusalem he was Jewish but he wrote medical texts and was a great medic you can't really call him an Islamic scientist Arabic science will do that's my preferred thing but actually I'm avoiding this whole academic pmic by this evening speaking about Islam and science uh that will be my tone throughout so let's uh make a start by looking at some of our heroes um kavio

didn't actually do paintings of medieval Islamic scientists and theologians but I've sought the help of the AI bot just to kind of artists impression maybe AI originally stood for that if artists can invent Imaging is why can't we do it through AI but there is perhaps some image of what he might possibly have looked like he's from kazm nobody knows where that is now top leftand corner of modern usbekistan a kind of trackless desert horribly polluted High rates of infant mortality and child uh uh

uh sicknesses as a result of Soviet biological nuclear chemical test pretty depressing place but in the Middle Ages one of the three or four great centers for Islamic intellectuality and uh culture and certainly science uh he spent a lot of time in Baghdad and he becomes in the year 820 one of the first heads of perhaps the most important institution at that time in the Islamic world the DAR hekma the House of Wisdom the kff the commander of the faithful uh al- mmon the Great asid kff had decid

ed that science and Greek philosophy and the ancient learning was so interesting that he wanted to actively promote the learning about those cultures in his cifal capital capital with enormous official research grants seems to have been a magnificent Place huge libraries with books in different languages uh rooms for researchers a little Hospital attached students its own mosque it was uh magnificent place and alisi becomes the head of this place and if you think of the the map of the medieval I

slamic world with Bagdad at it Center this great city of a million people the largest city in the world the most diverse city in the world because it's on the Silk Road it's the center of everywhere they're able to access Indian knowledge they're able to access Babylonian science they're able to access Greek science they're able to access really all of the great heritages of the Eurasian land land mass and there's a team of translators who do texts from Greek from syak and other languages into A

rabic it's one of the few unambiguous cases in world history where one civilization has deliberately set out to learn not just about but from another civilization and it has a transformative effect in uh the evolution of Islamic theology Islamic philosophy as well as the Sciences so he's known uh as the father of algebra generally this is how we remember alisi he may even have invented the name because his great book which is one of the great perhaps the great medieval textbooks on algebra mathe

matics generally which was the staple the most popular text on maths in European universities in the Middle Ages once it went into Latin uses this word Al jaabra which gives us algebra it's an Arabic word it's a sign as to how profoundly medieval Arabic science influenced the Latin West uh well M which means something like equivalence one of the things he spotted was that you can make more interesting equations equations of the second degree quadratic equations he seems to have been the first to

have cracked quadratic equations if you find equivalent terms on both sides of the equation you can lock them out simp simplify simplify and you can resolve the equation this is quite important stuff uh and the 12th century Latin translation of the book uh introduces the use of decimal notation and Arabic numerals into Europe beforehand people had been using those shockingly cous Latin numbers with L's and x's and doing sums with that you can imagine now the way is open for all kinds of new Inn

ovations but like a lot of these people he's really a polymath uh academics nowadays hypers specialize in a tiny slice of knowledge or they never get promotion these guys are kind of Renaissance men have all and yes sadly they're all men uh so he produces a the book of the form of the Earth in which he takes the ancient uh Greek stist uh and uh geographer Tommy and checks his measurements toy thought that the Mediterranean world is 64 Dees of longitude long uh but he checked it and he reduced it

to 50° which is not terribly far from the actual reality it's very precise so one of the things we find about these darma scientists is that even though they're reading this ancient Greek stuff in actually very serviceable very good Arabic trans translations is they're not just taking them as the byzantines had done as the last word but they're checking they're doing their own observations they're doing their own measurements one of the paradoxical gifts of the arrival of monotheism in the Midd

le East and this is certainly the case with Islam is that people were inclined to check things because after all the Greeks are a bunch of pagans and we don't have to take their word for anything there's a certain monotheistic skepticism which actually enabled this interrogation of Plato Aristotle platinus uh uid galin uh and uh Tommy which was very characteristic of this great age of Islamic science but of course he gives his name alisi to the algorithm one of the fundamental building blocks of

today's cybernetic World alisi gives us the algorithm ibam alisi the father father of uh algebra ibam the father of Optics he really is born in Basra Southern Iraq uh about 965 again a polymath he seems to have been the first to have thought about what to do with the Nile flood this hely destructive thing it happens or happened every year and he told the Sultan of of Cairo I think think we could build a dam up at S1 he goes looks at the immensity of the river and the size of the Cataract and th

inks probably not and The Story Goes that he goes back to Cairo and uh he's so afraid of the Sultan's displeasure having made these rather large promises which scientists sometimes can do in order to get those research grants uh some things don't change uh he pretends to be mad according to the story and stays in his house 15 years until the sultan moves on to the next world but during those that time he's writing and he's writing and he's playing around with equipment he's very much an experime

ntal observation-based scientist he's the first to have described the camera obscurer he's doing things with dark Chambers with light with lenses he's the father of Optics and hisab manazer is again the great medieval text on Optics and is not just interested in lenses and how they work but he's interested in deciding how moves and he discovers it does indeed move in a straight line he's interested in the eye what is going on after all when we see things it seems intuitive but it's a big strange

mystery really a lot of aristotelians including some of the time Aristotle himself had this intermission Theory which held that the eye sent out a beam that could then kind of see stuff and that's how we detected thing rather like things rather like sonar or radar send out a pulse and then you can can see things that's the way bat see anyway not necessarily strange butan won't buy this he says if you look at the sun it hurts your eye that suggests that the beam coming from your eye is not reall

y a beam coming from you it's something coming from the Sun that's hitting you just as something hits you if a stone hits you or something else it's a pain that comes from outside yourself so this intermission Theory blown out of the water and from that time generally everybody and this is is influential a text on Kepler in particular the great European astronomer later on this theory of the eye where is the image formed is it the lens is it the retina kep went for the retina the lens he thought

May well be the place where the image forms rather difficult for them to determine that but basically he's the first to have a roughly correct theory of vision and uh somebody who is described by of course um the he's a popularizer of Islamic science but it's actually very exact and he knows the latest stuff Jim KH this is his quote the first true scientist not just the father of optic the first true scientist and look at this quote beautiful explanation of the experimental method and an absolu

te refusal just to take stuff on trust just because it's in some ancient Greek test he has to verify everything the world thinks he's mad he's sitting in in his house in Cairo near Al alar and working out these things and he wants to do everything himself in his book on Optics there's hardly anything that is a quote from anyone he wants to ensure that everything is done through experimentation are the regular patterns can I predict the outcome of a particular procedure is my apparatus so precise

that I can predict always what the outcome will be if I put in the same inputs really this is the experimental method uh which is why Jim calls him the first true scientist like a lot of these polys he writes other stuff as well 20 books on astronomy refining Tommy uh in quite drastic ways books on theology uh the kab manazer is subject to various later commentaries including famous One by somebody called fery in the late 14th century uh but he keeps on going another thing that he does perhaps

we've seen this the Moon Illusion another ancient human puzzle about the world around us children notice this daddy why is the moon big tonight it's near the Horizon and it seems to have swollen is that really what's happened or is there something to do with the refraction of the light as Aristotle seems to have thought when it gets near The Horizon the light does funny things IAM thought about this and decided that actually its psycholog logical the moon doesn't really change in size and you ca

n test this for yourselves if you go out when the moon is large and you get a coin or a stone and you put it at a distance that exactly covers this large Moon near the Horizon you go out again in a couple of hours and you put the same sized object in front of the Moon the Moon hasn't actually changed in size psychological this has puzzled a lot of Minds Leonardo D Vinci agonized over it um so did um Emanuel Kant it's kind of paradox of the world but uh IAM spotted that this is actually a psychol

ogical uh rather than an naturual physical change moving on to my next hero Abu Ali iban Cena perhaps even better known avisena an extraordinary polymath unbelievable uh 450 books professors nowadays are complacent if they retire with four books perhaps 450 many of them written on Saddleback bouncing Along on a camel between Central Asian cities and just writing and writing 50 pages a day were told his kab shifat the book of healing one of the great texts maybe the great texts of medieval Islami

c philosophy a late synthesis of neoplatonism and aristotelianism that then goes into Europe and has all kinds of transformative effects uh again here he uh knows that the ancient Greeks liked induction working things out from first principles but he always prefers experience Ted but if you can test something empirically then that yields more certain knowledge is an astronomer he doesn't like Aristotle's idea that the Stars twinkling in the sky are getting their light from the sun he says the au

tonomous sources of light is possible that he observed a Transit of Venus he's a geologist is one of the world's great early logicians mathematics Alchemy and also medicine that's how he's best known in the west and he has a galvanic impact on the evolution of Western medicine so uh this is his theological basis for it all underlying it well this sounds like theology metaphysics rather than science but they in that world where philosophy and natural philosophy were closely bound up one of the mo

st important medieval arguments maybe cosmological maybe ontological for the existence of a first cause it's philosophical really rather than looking like the familiar personal god of the Semitic religions but it's very powerful he thought there must be a wable w a necessary existent Aristotle have thought that you could work that out just by looking at the order that exists in the world kind of argument from design but Aisa bumps it up to a higher more sophisticated level with this proof of uh

the truthful he thought that the complete set of existing entities all the existence that are out there have to have a non-contingent cause otherwise it would just be part of the set of contingent entities so logically there must be a cause behind everything it's more complicated than that but this becomes uh part of the framework for medieval European scholasticism still entertained by some theologians and philosophers of religion to this day so it's moving beyond straightforward arguments from

design look at how nicely everything is made and moving into something that's more abstract about the nature of being itself and then the medicine well ais's Canon of medicine five volumes uh the first volume principles diet why do people get sick the humoral Theory four humors volume two on the medical materials available section three diagnosis and treatment of Single part ailments diagnosis and treatments of diseases affecting the whole body or affecting multiple organs and then a formulary

particularly influentially list an enormous number of simples and about 650 compound drugs this is translated into Latin Again by Gerard of Crona and in Cambridge we're still using this book to teach medical students in the first half of the 17th century the thing lasts almost a thousand years as a kind of pillar of medicine and there are still some in the complimentary medicine world who will find much of this despite the apparent outmoded of the humoral system uh to be of value it's a kind of

compliment therapy that is still used by many so this becomes pandemic the aisen and pandemic the book goes everywhere goes into multiple cultures East as well as West you can see there that there's I take it a Japanese translation there is the first Arabic Edition in Rome in the 16th century subsidized by the pope himself various other Latin translations uh there you have a new age text perhaps avisena medicine for the complimentary therapists uh still going strong in fact avisena may be the gr

eatest medical writer ever and until the 17th century still what was being taught across Europe as well as the Middle East but we must move on little bit further east this time noin torsi no less colorful a character he's from TSS which is top right hand corner of what's now Iran uh now a fairly small place but a great city which produced the likes of Kaz the PO fadelia and so forth a major Hub of civilization uh but the Mongols are on the horizon everybody is wondering what to do uh because the

y destroy karism they leave piles of skulls in their Wick the dreaded hulago Grand son of genjis Khan will in 1258 destroy even the city of Bagdad and according to the chroniclers those who survived the books of the city were thrown into the Tigris and the Mongol warriors were able to ride their horses across the river so great was the cultural destruction the greatest single traumatic event really in the history of the civilization so he leaves TSS and he goes to seek a kind of Bunker there's a

group called The ismaelis Very militant but pH offically minded at the time following an infallible Imam who occupied these inaccessible unstored fortresses in remote corners of the Middle East and he goes to the most famous of these of all the castle of alamot and there he is patronized by the ismaelis uh and he builds an observatory and he stays there for 30 years other Refugee scientists join him and he notes the destruction sadly of his city of TS uh the city of uh nishapur all of Central A

sia really becomes a smoking ruin uh but alamot survives but then hulagu lays Siege to this impregnable Fortress in the middle of Noah a seven-year Siege we're told that eventually they give up not because they're running out of food and drink they've got plenty of that left but because their clothes are so threadbear that they're falling off their bodies and they're almost naked and it's cold and they surrender torsi survives he's a smart guy he sees the writing on the wall he negotiates with h

ulago genjis Khan's uh grandson are saying well I can do good uh astrological charts for you look at my Observatory I want to research grant grant comes back approved the green light uh and he goes to hu's Capital of Maraga and sets up another even greater Observatory uh where he gathers um surviving Scholars uh and this is what's left of it it isn't really much but there was an enormous seant seant there um about 40 ft High a mural seant which enable seant which enabled a very accurate um uh de

piction of the altitude of any celestial object it had a kind of curve to it and a sliding thing uh which enabled you to uh measure not just minutes but also seconds of Arc so this is the heavens measured more precisely than ever before another thing that he does which is kind of important um when this stuff by complex Roots filters into Europe is this thing that we call the torsi couplet or the torsi couple this resolves one of the weird problems of the old to System of astronomy which insisted

that the Earth had to be the center of the solar system system if you believe in that the ancient Greeks all believed in it with a few exceptions aristas and a few cranks on the margins but basically it's a heliocentric system on the margins you can see at night on a clear night the planets are indeed going around the earth it's kind of obvious the sun and the moon going around the Earth but their speeds are variable this is because of the elliptic nature of their orbits and other things that w

e've since been able to work out uh perfectly but that seemed very awkward why should Mars slow down why should sometimes they seem to go backwards so they came up with VAR strange Solutions including this idea of the equant which is that uh black spot uh which is some way from the center of uh the solar system um and in order to get rid of this really inelegant solution torsi derived this couple you can see the man manuscript on the left uh he decided that if the epicycle the circle within whic

h the planet is revolving is in a larger Circle uh and the diameter of the smaller circle is exactly half of the diameter of the larger Circle then you can account for everything moving around in this way without having this eent in the way major Advance on the old toic system it's still hel entric but it seems that uh various Travelers somebody called gilon deell who is a Wandering astronomer who then wrote his Memoirs and others managed to get it into the literary World which cernus occupied i

t's a rather complex teleology but it does seem that this is one of the factors Islamic astronomy never really cracked the the issue of the sun being at the center but these are major steps in that direction commentary on the almagest another of his books Memoir un astronomy uh which Al calls the most important and original book on astronomy to be written in the Medieval World refined further by Ean asarta the great astronomer of Damascus in 1375 so this is all impressive stuff it's all based on

the insistence one has to check the facts with observatories with dark Chambers with investigating for oneself which the byzantines had not done uh but then the question which I alluded to at the outset set begins what went wrong the title of Bernard Lewis's famous book why is it that this civilization which was ahead of the West and giving the West all of its key terms even many of its star names I told my amazed son last week that the name of Arsenal Football Club is actually an Arabic name c

oming from the old Abid idea for a naval Arsenal darus Sinar and he was Gob smacked by this it's a fundamental layer in the evolution of the English language all of those Arabic terms Admiral there's dozens of them but then the tables were turned Western Civilization started to take off when where how hugely important transformation from about 500 before the Common Era to about 1,500 of the Common Era Europeans science was more or less the same thing Islamic world was bouncing around with variou

s Innovations and genuine uh steps in the direction of true experimental method but what happened there's lots of theories about this and I'd like to talk a little bit here about the history of the history uh why is it that the West is now ruling the world much to the shagra of the defeated civilizations which means really every other civilization how did this strange thing happen some people think it was because and this seems to be John wallbridge is idea that it was because the isamic world f

rom the 15th 16th century onwards became increasingly introspective and liked mysticism the universe within rather than exploring the horizons without possibly but there had been mysticism in Gale's time and almost from the beginning of Islam it doesn't really seem to be the sole decisive argument other people just say well it was the Mongols 1258 Capital destroyed quism destroyed Nisha destroyed uh after that there was really not much going on that doesn't really work because we know that there

was a lot of astronomy and medical stuff going on that was Innovative and world-beating until the 16th century it wasn't really the Mongols and Tulsi as we've seen was actually patronized by the Mongols uh doesn't work other theories come to mind one of them is great George saliba's explanation it seems a bit counterintuitive and almost a sort of economic explanation which is that it's to do with 1492 Columbus with many of the proceeds unlocked by the Catholic monarchs destruction of the last M

uslim city of Spain Granada in that same year 1492 opens up the new world enormous New Opportunities and floods of silver go into the West everybody gets Rich the slave trade suddenly the West becomes from this rather unimportant uninteresting swampy cold extension of the more interesting Eurasian land mass a kind of bit that the Arabs never really got around to conquering because there wasn't really much there and the weather was lousy food was bad whatever reason they never went beyond pitier

but they went 92% of the distance from Mecca to London which is you maybe they gone the extra mile this lecture would be a little bit different this evening but Providence did not will it but once the new world is discovered this incredible effulgence of we wealth according to Saliba is actually the explanation because to do more advanced science you need big institutions you need more money you need ability you need places like this you need the Prussian Institute of Sciences you need the colle

ge everything you need institutions which the Islamic world didn't have the resources to produce that's his explanation which is another possible respectable explanation in any case uh in the age of decline whenever exactly we Define it and it's not really that abbasids were great for two centuries and then everything was kind of boring and superstitious it's going on the Islamic world is scientifically ahead until at least the year 1500 uh during this age of decline you have uh European militar

y victories enabled by new science new navigational AIDS Flint locks on muskets uh new kinds of uh sailing ships uh grenades stuff that the Islamic World couldn't really compete with the Ukraine war is now fought over former ottoman territories who knows that adessa was once a thriving ottoman City Katherine the Great had the bigger guns so the Islamic World responds not really by more science but by importing scientists and particularly military technicians from Europe This is the age of the co

nverts Tobias graphs book is really amazing quite recent he talks about all these strange adventurers who end up converting to Islam and serving the sultan they usually go to the otoman Empire there is uh Osman Pasha aka the compt de bonaval who revolutionizes the ottoman core of uh bombadiers and artillery and enables the Ottomans to take back Belgrade from the uh austrians uh makes a significant difference his an honored memory even has a street named after him in Istanbul and then Ibrahim mut

ara uh is a Hungarian Refugee Unitarian goes to Istanbul converts to Islam creates the first printing press 1745 in the Islamic World print some scientific books is really into science he's the one who popularizes the cernic heliocentric uh system in the uh in the Islamic World which had been kind of heard of but he the one who really makes a case for it so this is the age of converts crumbs as it were falling off the demographic table of an increasingly educated Europe and propping up what's le

ft of the Islamic world but what's happening now well it's not quite as bad as you might think uh because we have statistics like this generally the Islamic world is behind in science these are some rough figures uh from a recent survey indicating the number of academic papers scientific papers published in various Muslim countries only turkey and Iran ahead of the are ahead of the global average for countries Iran is actually the one that's growing fastest very often these things are defense re

lated the Iranians now have a Hypersonic missile that kind of thing very often the military are major sponsors of scientific innovation but generally the image is not particularly good science is backward not many Muslim Nobel Prize winners towards the bottom of the keep punching beneath its weight um things may change partly because following the failure of the Arab Spring the regimes are very much focused on science rather than the humanities people doing the humanities can have ideas which ca

n be dangerous and politically problematic and science is a lot safer uh so there's um only 133% of phds now in the Arab world or in the humanities most of them are in science um or engineering topics and that is probably likely to continue but let's go on to talk a little bit about the diagnosis of Islam's decline quite unexpected having ruled the world for seven centuries going into eclipse what was to blame who was to blame well in the 19th century much of the 20th century this kind of thinki

ng explains everything Ernest way one of the great intellectuals of 19th century France in 1983 lecture Islam and science the first real academic assessment of why Muslims don't do science uh to translate it the Semitic race has no mythology no Epic no science no philosophy no fiction nor plastic Arts nor Civil Life in in fact altogether an absence of complexity of nuances uh simply an a sentiment of unity race science in the 19th century dominated everything remember Israel's novel tankered abo

ut the Crusades all his race this was thought to be the scientific explanation for the rise and fall of civilizations it's to do with race Evolution are you Nordic what's the size of your uh brain and so forth this is the way everybody thought and there were responses to this by some uh upset Muslims jalad afani in the Middle East Nam Kamal in Turkey uh but this is the way in which most people were thinking the Triumph of race science as an explanation for the final Muslim failure the end of the

golden age and these three texts particularly influential the comp to goino on the inequality of the human races the explanation for the rise and the defeat the destruction of civilizations hugely influential English translations uh read and devoured by the kind of people you can imagine uh in the early 20th century even in England and the Semitic race just doesn't cut the mustard there's even Arabic translations of some of these things a kind of internalized inferiority complex and orientalism

comes into the Arab world here is Gustav laon's book Arab civilization of the Arabs book six of which is all about the inferiority of the Arab mind and the Arab Decline and why the growth of European Empires is inevitable strange thing to want to pick up in a Cairo Bookshop but they still lap it up and through Leon's book a certain Narrative of decline has crept into even School textbooks about science across the Arab world in particular and also in turkey and then the final book I can hardly r

ead it excuse me for turning around introduction to the study of Muslim philosophy uh the Semitic mind and the Aryan mind this is leopo Gautier born in French Algeria great apologist for Empire science shows that we are racially Superior therefore we deserve to Ru R them and this is why they declined it goes on in this country we're certainly not immune here is the early 20th Century's leading British academic in Arabic studies lordian professor of Arabic in Oxford uh Anglican priest David marol

io uh and he has his own explanation uh it's again race science Beauty among the Islamic peoples is chiefly due to a mixture with Cassian blood literary and scientific ability has usually been the result of the entry into Islam of Indo Germanic elements he dies in 1940 this is quite recent the book is still in print it is being dished out and is on undergraduate reading lists for Islamic Studies in this country until the 1960s and I've put the Turkish translation there just to indicate these ide

as are percolating back into the Islamic World although if you're Turkish and you see this race science is not particularly obvious what you're going to do with it but there's a certain internalized kind of orientalism at work uh another example even more recent Arthur kler why is it that Europe had the Scientific Revolution and got back its true inheritance from the ancient Greeks this is his language the Thor came not by a sudden rise of the Sun but by way of a devious Gulf Stream which winded

its way I love language such it's devious it's devious from the Arab peninsula through Mesopotamia Egypt and Spain the Muslims the Arabs had merely been the goet there had little scientific originality and creativeness of their own the majority of the scholars who wrote in Arabic were not Arabs but Persians Jews and nestorians so even at the end of the 1950s he's still going on about this kind of ethnic thing as being determinative they're not really Muslims because they're kind of Persians or

something else somehow the Jews it's you have to explain this Arabian science in terms terms of some kind of ethnic thing this is really recent Arthur kler very leading uh intellectual um in this country so stepping back from the culture wars uh what's really going on Islam and science shotgun wedding well you have in the Quran endless invocations of nature the beauty of nature the order of nature it's a kind of argument from from design pelzing initially against the Pagan Arabs who in primordia

l form thought well there's a spirit or a goblin moving things and there's a spirit in the Sun and there's a scary creature in that tree all of the signs of nature for the Quran are to be interpreted vertically that is to say they are all signs of the one God so the order of creation the orderliness of creation important apparently hospitable to science even though there are Miracle stories Moses still splits the Red Sea his staff still turns into a serpent the prophet points to the moon and the

moon splits into two there's Miracles but even the idea of Miracle indicates that there is a norm that is being violated creation operates according to orderly principles and those Supernatural events Quantum events it's not really that but there are exceptions that don't disprove the fact that the we inhabit an orderly Cosmos also the Hadith literature tends to get rid of a lot of stuff that had been inherited from the Greeks kind of magical stuff he is not one of us who reads Omens the flight

s of birds casting with arrows drawing Lots investigating the innards of sacrificial animals all of that which was big for the Greeks ruled out three will not enter Paradise the constant drunk Hood the sever of family ties and the believer in Magic you don't go to heaven even if you've done something on your neighbor with some magic Talisman thing Gates of Heaven A Band Prophet doesn't like it the astrologers LIE even when they speak the truth even if it turns out that their predictions are righ

t they're still telling a lie astrology is also ruled out by this new religion the prophet in the Hadith has said so and generally you find that these uh Muslim astronomers are particularly anxious to differentiate themselves from the astrologers even though they get the research grants by being astrologist rulers and Sultans because that's what the rulers are into uh they use that in order to do real science in order to do astronomy so uh avisena writes a book against astrology he doesn't belie

ve in it they invent a new term for astronomy in order to differentiate it from theim astrological thing sometimes they call it Sunni astronomy in other words none of this superstitious stuff real science Real Islam Another Hero of this story we are coming to a close Abu Hassan alir dies in 992 another Nisha poor guy aristan philosopher very interested in determinism and in causation difficult subject causality he writes a book in which he looks at some of this evidence and says we're not a supe

rstitious religion we believe in an ordered Cosmos Islam is particularly hospitable to the development of these ancient Sciences whether they be Greek or persan o is the natural Crucible for reason so the Paradigm starts to ship shift what I call the orientalist flip remember Reno and so forth backwardness the Oriental mind the Semitic mind the latest stuff in the serious academic work on this rather important historic reality is this kind of thing these are the leading figures Yosef van es prof

essor of Arabic at tubing author of the greatest four volume work on early Islamic Theology and a Catholic this is not apologetic says Christianity speaks of the mysteries of Faith Islam is nothing like that for St Paul reason belongs to the realm of the flesh for Muslims reason akal has always been the chief faculty granted human beings by God Oliver Leman is Professor of Jewish studies at the University of Kentucky the Quran does indeed display an unusual commitment to argument and logic in it

s self-explanation whereas Judaism is strongly linked with ethnicity and Christianity with the leap of faith Islam has successfully grown by contrast with these religions by stressing its rationality and evidentiality Dimitri gutas maybe still the greatest expert on the Greek to Arabic transition at the time of the DAR HEK the byzantines turned their back on Ancient science because of Christianity while the Muslims had welcomed it because of Islam so the field has really changed uh margolius mus

t be revolving in his grave this is a religion that according to the latest scholarship and this is far from any kind of theological apologetics uh is that actually this is a religion that historically has valued uh reasoning things out another myth science and philosophy were persecuted in medieval Islam known as the straussian theory because of Leo Strauss um who thought that various mysterious clerical forces suppressed science we now know that because of the Constitution of classical Islam a

nd classical Islamic law there was no possibility of establishing a real Inquisition there's no Pope there's no Vatican there's no clerisy there's no magisterium there's no mechanism to persecute people even if you want to do it bdad continue to be enormously diverse remember we're talking here about classical Islam not about modern fundamentalism islamis and that stuff talking about the normative patterns of the premodern religion The Impossible state by what really a classic of contemporary Is

lamic Studies people should read it not just to understand how medieval Islam managed to be so diverse sustainably so but also why contemporary Muslim societies seem to be in such an uproar the best thing on the subject and then Thomas Bower explains how until the middle of the 19th century ambiguity ambivalence the the welcoming of Divergent opinions was regarded as part and parcel of the normal levantine scholarly culture people appreciated difference in a way that following the rise of modern

isms and fundamentalisms has become unusual in the Islamic world so Islamic world seems to be quite a healthy habitus for science here again uh John wallbridge uh contrast it with the European history in contrast to the situation in Europe prosecutions for heresy were rare the Islamic World produced no Martyrs for science like Bruno and Galileo moreover as later recorded curricular show science actually was taught into the m in the madrasas along with logic natural philosophy and metaphysics ano

ther nail in the coffin of the old racial determinist Islam and science bad bed fellows the field really has flipped almost entirely I want to end a little bit and I might have to rush slightly here um by talking about what's happening now as Muslims reflect on science not just lamenting the fact that the West has got the Hypersonic missiles and is watching us from space and invades Iraq and we can't do much about it and Gaza and it's a kind of neuralgic issue for the Muslim world that the West

has the techniques but not the morality a favorite sermon topic although another aside one of the paradox es and the contradictions in model Islamic fundamentalism is that even though they Envy the West its science they don't really like the medieval Muslim scientists because they're dealing with this Greek stuff that they regard as Pagan fundamentalism is puristic as well as puritanical he doesn't like the idea that you can borrow from other civilizations the Quran should be enough so on the on

e hand they want the science on the other hand they don't like Islam's historic Hospitality to science because it's too inclusive it's one of the Achilles heels in the Islamic fundamentalist platform not that they listen to me um so the hesperos new term which I'm launching this evening we speak of the anthropos that's become it's not really an official geological paleontological term uh the hollene is the nearest we can get it's the idea that we are now in a new geological geomorphological age

where human agency is the principal shaper of landforms and ecosystems on the planet uh it's an age dominated by anthropos human beings but if you want to decolonize this and say well this situation is the result of Western science Western technology Western Capital Western techniques don't blame Chinese civilization or Indian civilization for the climate crisis and the mess that we're all in uh they may be adopting this science but it comes from the West this is the end of a certain type of dar

winian triumphalism the West is the best uh we're in uh hot water increasingly literally and it is the west hesperis where the sun sets we are in the Hesperian age where this much vaunted civilization is actually presenting a proliferation of existential threats that's the age that we're in so Bruno gardoni who is the former director of the French national Observatory at Leon convert to Islam expert in Galaxy formation one of the interesting people to read on this has this thought the great disc

overy of the 21st century has been the realization that science can destroy us the old triumphalism has been humbled just as the Muslim triumphalism has been humbled by modernity maybe that enables a more civilized and um realistic conversation yeah since the first world war James Joyce that generation realized the destructive capacities of scientifically enabled Technologies uh doomsday scenarios which in the Heyday of the Edwardian age had been unimaginable things really changed another term w

hich has occurred to me the biop pause the existential threat is not really to the mineral orders but to living things look at these quotes notes I know I'm going to end on a depressing note uh never mind looking at the world at no very distant date an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world this is the kind of language that REO and goino picking up on you do see certainly when you look at the other orders of creation the oth

er species a massive genocide of the four-legged peoples happening on Earth you don't need to be an ecarrior to observe that and to fret about the consequences Alan Turing talking prophetically about artificial general intelligence let us now assume for the sake of argument that intelligent machines were a genuine possibility and look at the consequences of constructing them there would be no question of the machines dying and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits

at some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control I love that clip of Elon Musk talking to uh Rishi sunak who's got his Rishi sunak smile which starts to crack when Elon starts to talk about well maybe they will take control but we think that the chances are worth it kind of uh apocalyptic welcome to the desert of the real it's part of our dystopic vision for a scientifically triggered and enabled future and then greet to thornberg bless her uh I think that in many wa

ys we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange they keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all and yet they just carry on like before so when Muslims consider the current science they tend to do so in the context of the West's anxieties climate change anxieties a major mental health issue amongst young people nowadays and it's not just climate change it's molecular nano technology it's the possibility of genetic

engineering is the possibility of there are plenty of proliferating threats modernity seems to be a kind of gamble so Muslims when they think about this split into a few theologies I promise I'll let you go shortly this is the kind of Pi resistor what are Muslims thinking about this s husin Nas an influential historian of Islamic science in Washington of Iranian origin thinks that modern science is out of control because its passion is a kind of sublation of the religious urge modern scientist s

ought to quench our profound thirst for the infinite on its own level of finiteness forgetting the limits which which have always been set upon the Sciences from on high and this has led to an explosion of the most dangerous kind which now threatens the very Harmony of the natural order writing this back in the 1970s he hasn't really been proved wrong yet yet I would say so some Muslims reflecting on modern science say it's going to kill us all it's too dangerous a gamble it makes us more comfor

table a bit every year but with each rooll of the dice with the possibility of nuclear disasters or grey go scenarios or whatever it might be we have a center for the study of existential risks now at the University of Cambridge it's a real thing uh how many times do we roll the dice before we get unlucky so for him it's not wor it he's against the modern world he thinks that the Scientific Revolution triggered something that will lend lend itself to complete Annihilation like Nick Bostrom and s

ome others who think that it's the nature of some of these Technologies eventually to destroy us another Muslim response great maybe one of the greatest 20th century religious poets in the Muslim World najib Fel of turkey dies in 1983 reflecting on the Triumph of Apollo 11 very scathing he thinks it's arrogance huous scaling the heavens a child who rides a hobby horse steel helmet on his head plastic Mac on his back a fish in a jar that thinks it's in the sea bitter the Solitude in the boasting

crowd within us within us a throne goinging Spaceman we are liberated from space we go beyond time itself ours is the mystery of dwelling in space there's a hint here of nasar's idea that the modern sciences that look outside are are a kind of sublimation of the deep human quest to figure things out through introspection and the West is seen as arrogant humoristic destructive this again is quite a common Muslim response another one bism it even has a name moris Bai a French G gastroenterologist

dies in 1998 becomes personal physician to members of the that family in Egypt he does things with the bellies of Egyptian mummies and gets into all kinds of interesting um paleo biological stuff but he gets interested in Islam as well and this book The Bible the Quran and science is a runaway bestseller to this day in just about every Muslim publishing space this is the principal modern Muslim response to science and its challenges and the bruising anxiety caused by the Triumph of the West and

its military and economic penetration of proud Muslim countries uh bai's uh text basically is a work of religious apologetics even though it's not quite clear that he ever converted to Islam but his idea was that the Bible is unscientific and the Quran contains all manner of wonderful miraculous anticipations of the latest scientific discoveries particularly in cosmology and in embryology uh and you can see how this particularly a popular level gets lapped up by people like Adnan okar um the sor

t of creationist Maverick Turkish preacher now just as well behind bars for various offenses which since this is a family event I won't reveal to you this evening um sorry story but this is probably the principal Muslim idea the Quran proves its Divine Source by coming up with these miraculous intimations of uh of uh science current trends these are perhaps the four most significant people and yes again you women should be in this space much more Bruno guidoni the Galaxy guy we've already looked

at um skeptic about the Multiverse he prefers fine-tuning he thinks it's an indication of a Divine authorship the Multiverse he thinks is not a scientific conception because it can't be empirically tested it's just a thought experiment it's not real but left to right here nidal gum who is Algerian uh works on gamar astrophysics has a recent book Islam's Quantum question and you can see the gum quote here that really he wants a soft touch he doesn't like this bism he thinks the scientists should

be allowed to do their thing without any kind of theological encouragement or discouragement and then the theology comes along and interprets it's a layer on top and basically that that's the position of all four of these guys Mei gulen Iranian 1997 book from physics to metaphysics is a theoretical physicist uh particularly concerned with the cultural artistic literary moral consequences of what he sees is the increasingly hard physicalism and reductionism of Western science um edrian Shau who'

s one of the more recent figures convert to Islam University of Sheffield lecture in physical chemistry has a book released just last year from science to Faith his position is that uh the obstacles to religion which were encountered by Victorian Christians in their scripture don't actually exist in the quranic text it's not that the Quran is a miraculous anticipation of scientific truth it's just that it doesn't obstruct uh outright um an acceptance of modern scientific realities and finally Ba

s who's an Iraqi particle physicist is interested in the relationship of quantum mechanics to classical Islamic calam understanding of causation here has a book The Divine word and The Grand Design these are for my money the most interesting people to think about so um I am basically done uh sorry to detain you uh maybe their thinking is an indication of where religion can genuinely contribute in terms of applied science how do we genuinely apply moral controls to stop this arms race uh the head

ing towards AGI and then Super intelligence how can we stop the Chinese and the Indians and the Russians and ourselves developing it because if we stop ourselves then they'll get ahead it's very politicized very dangerous very threatening so religion certainly has a role in terms of restoring some kind of ethical um template and limitation to a science that has gone past its age of simple minded triumphalism and is entering into a world where an increasing proportion of real scientific research

has to be directed towards fixing the problems caused by science the the climate change crisis is likely to have a scientific solution rather than any other kind of solution uh so directing young Muslims into the Sciences particularly into what you might call The reparative Sciences uh those that can reduce carbon Footprints greenhouse gases that can think about the responsible use of nanoe technologies that can try and figure out how on Earth you control artificial intelligence before it contro

ls us these areas in which theologians and probably theologians can cooperate across the religions can play a very significant role in reducing these risks and also I think in restoring The public's General confidence in the men in white coats uh that they're not all Doctor Strange Love Types hellbent on destroying the planet uh but that science can once again be reconfigured through uh advice from the religions on applications not on Research or research methods or worldview towards uh the grea

ter good of humanity and after all this Center the age of Faraday and so forth these were idealistic men and many of them driven by religion Faraday certainly was so I've come to an end thank you for your patience um some of you will recognize this quote [Applause]