Bernard Lewis

What Went Wrong

In the development and transmission of the various branches of science, men in the medieval Middle East—some Christian, some Jewish, most of them Muslim—played a vital role. They had inherited the ancient wisdom of Egypt and Babylon. They had translated and preserved much that would otherwise have been lost of the wisdom and science of Persia and Greece. Their enterprise and their openness enabled them to add much that was new from the science and techniques of India and China.

Nor was the role of the medieval Islamic scientist purely one of collection and preservation. In the medieval Middle East, scientists developed an approach rarely used by the ancients—experiment. Through this and other means they brought major advances in virtually all the sciences.

Much of this was transmitted to the medieval West, whence eager students went to study in what were then Muslim centers of learning in Spain and Sicily, while others translated scientific texts from Arabic into Latin, some original, some adapted from ancient Greek works. Modern science owes an immense debt to these transmitters.

And then, approximately from the end of the Middle Ages, there was a dramatic change. In Europe, the scientific movement advanced enormously in the era of the Renaissance, the Discoveries, the technological revolution, and the vast changes, both intellectual and material, that preceded, accompanied, and followed them. In the Muslim world, independent inquiry virtually came to an end, and science was for the most part reduced to the veneration of a corpus of approved knowledge. There were some practical innovations—thus, for example, incubators were invented in Egypt, vaccination against smallpox in Turkey. These were, however, not seen as belonging to the realm of science, but as practical devices, and we know of them primarily from Western travelers.

The changing attitudes of East and West in the development and acceptance of scientific knowledge are dramatically exemplified in the discovery of the circulation of the blood. In Western histories of science, this is normally credited to the English physician William Harvey, whose epoch-making Essay on the Motion of the Heart and Blood was published in 1628 and transformed both the theory and practice of medicine. His great discovery was preceded and helped by the work of a Spanish physician and theologian, Miguel Serveto, usually known as Michael Servetus (1511-1553), who owes his place in scientific history to the discovery, published in 1553, of the lesser or pulmonary circulation of the blood. This discovery was anticipated, in surprisingly similar detail, by a thirteenth-century Syrian physician called Ibn al-Nafis. Among his writings was a medical treatise in which, in defiance of the revered authority of Galen and Avicenna, he set forth his theory of the circulation of the blood in terms very similar to those later used by Servetus and adopted by Harvey, but unlike theirs, based on abstract reasoning rather than experiment. Modem orientalist scholarship has shown, with a high degree of probability, that Servetus knew of the work of Ibn al-Nafis, thanks to a Renaissance scholar called Andrea Alpago (died ca. 1520) who spent many years in Syria collecting and translating Arabic medical manuscripts.

Ibn al-Nafis was a successful and wealthy physician, who died at the age of about 80. A childless widower, he left his luxurious house, his estate, and his library to a Cairo hospital. His book and his theory remained unknown and had no effect on the practice of medicine. Servetus was arrested in Geneva on August 14, 1553, and charged with blasphemy and heresy. The Protestant authorities, and notably Calvin, demanded that he retract his religious opinions or face the consequences. Servetus refused; he was condemned on October 26, 1553, and burned next day as a heretic. His medical work remained, and formed the basis of major scientific advances in the years that followed.

Another example of the widening gap may be seen in the fate of the great observatory built in Galata, in Istanbul, in 1577. This was due to the initiative of Taqi al-Din (ca. 1526-1585), a major figure in Muslim scientific history and the author of several books on astronomy, optics, and mechanical clocks. Born in Syria or Egypt (the sources differ), he studied in Cairo, and after a career as jurist and theologian he went to Istanbul, where in 1571 he was appointed munejjim-bashi, astronomer (and astrologer) in chief to the Sultan Selim II. A few years later he persuaded the new Sultan Murad III to allow him to build an observatory, comparable in its technical equipment and its specialist personnel with that of his celebrated contemporary, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. But there the comparison ends. Tycho Brahe's observatory and the work accomplished in it opened the way to a vast new development of astronomical science. Taqi al-Din's observatory was razed to the ground by a squad of Janissaries, by order of the sultan, on the recommendation of the Chief Mufti.