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| Constellations Great Bear and Crab - The Book of Fixed Stars by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (Azophi) 964 AD |
"Not all stars have names but two-thirds of those that do have names have Arabic names. There we go okay, there they go and you might say well how did this come to pass. What did that come from? what was going on. Because really shake up the middle east now and it is not where you do not say there are folks naming stars. You go back a thousand years this long 800 to 1100 in that period which is generally called the golden age of Islam, of Islamic science. True golden age. There was no greater golden age in the history of the world before or after when you look at some of the advances that came out of that period. In Bagdad, algebra was invented in that period. Algebra is itself an Arabic word. Algorithm is an Arabic word. Our numerals are Arabic numerals, ever wonder why? Just stop and think why they are called Arabic numerals. In that period mathematics took great leaps and bound. Agriculture, engineering, medicine, navigation. Navigation, star maps were made to assist navigation. Astrolabes were crafted. Then it all stopped. It ended. It ended.
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| Constellations Sagittarius and Taurus - The Book of Fixed Stars by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (Azophi) 964 AD |
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| Different phases of the moon illustrated by al-Biruni (973–1050 AD) |
If you are historian typically you would focus on history as marked by changes of kings and leaders and wars. That’s the lens through which many historians look at the past and so if you ask people to sell the Mongols sacked Bagdad and so that’s why it all ended if that were the only force operating then later when the Islamic culture rose you would still see this tradition of scientific innovation. But it has not recovered; it has not come back at all compared to what was going on in that three hundred years and what you do is you read the writings of Al Ghazali, who is a Muslim cleric and he was to Islam what Saint Augustine was to Christianity. What he did was to teach you how to be a good Muslim, he taught you how to read the Koran and how to obey the commands that back then people were just interpreting it for themselves. He came along he was an academic scholar; he interpreted the Koran so this is how you must do it. First has social influence and then the political and cultural influence and basically, his interpretation took over. And it that interpretation it included the perspective that the manipulation of numbers is the work of the devil. This cuts the kneecaps out of any mathematical advances that would unfold. Math is the language of the universe. If you take that out of your personal equation, you no longer contribute to the advance of human understanding of that universe and that absence of Muslim presence in the frontier of science persists to this day.
Take a look at the Nobel prize from 1900 to 2010. I can do this for the Jews for example. How many Jews in the world is like 15 million tops? 15 million out of 7 billion people. These are the numbers of Jews who have won the Nobel Prize in the sciences. 150 out of 609. 25% of the Nobel prizes. We have a Jewish person in the audience… congratulations…(laughter) ok fine ok. This is rightly something to be extraordinarily proud of. The traditions of Jews in the 20th century is one of education and scholarship. In earlier centuries, it was one of very strict sort of a … the study of the Torah did not involve the natural world. This was a later emergence of the Jewish culture to exhibit this. Let’s look at the numbers for Islam. So, these are Jews, they’re 15 million Jews, 25 percent of the Nobel Prizes. There is 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. These are the numbers. Two and a half. O.50%. Okay, I’ll give you 3, if you really want to include economics as a full number there. (laughter). Okay, if you got to give it a full number okay, okay. Now for me, by the way, you can analyze this in any number of ways. There are 50 times the number of Nobel Prizes, 180th the population is 4,000 times the impact.
I lose sleep at night with the question, how many secrets of the universe lay undiscovered because 1.3 billion people, who in an ancestral time would have participated in this enterprise and are now not. That is what I think of as a scientist. Whole populations. By the way, there are other populations that never contributed. I’m not going to them and blame them and now I’m talking about a population that already did contribute. It’s in… It’s in the cultural heritage already. All we’re asking is to resurrect it. It has not happened."
(Excerpt from Neil deGrasse Tyson's lecture at the University of Washington, covering Astronomy, Sociology, and Scientific development on 5/12/2011)
Image credit: https://wikivisually.com
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