Great Muslim scientists

Scientific American has a neat slide show showcasing the work of some historic Muslim scientists whose names deserve to be better known. Among them: Abu al-Iz Ibn Ismail ibn al-Razaz al-Jazari, who lived during the 13th century. He designed water-powered automata (including moving peacocks) and invented the crankshaft and camshaft as we know them.

• [Anonymous]

  Their names might deserve to be better known, but like many mono-linguistic Westerners, I’d struggle to even pronounce “AbÅ« al-’Iz Ibn Ismā’Ä«l ibn al-Razāz al-JazarÄ«”, let alone “أَبُو اَلْعِزِ بْنُ إسْماعِيلِ بْنُ الرِّزاز الجزري”. How am I supposed to remember a name I can’t even pronounce?!

  • [Anonymous]

    Shhh… don’t let them know you believe a practical explanation. It’s also worth pointing out that the number of European scientists that most people could name could be counted on your fingers. I’d be surprised if most people got past Einstein and Newton.

• [urbanhick]

  Ley’s just say I’d graduated before college before you were even born.

• [heydemann3]

  I have built replicas of Al-Jazari’s water clocks using Dan Hill’s excellent translation from the Oxford University Press. Next I want to try the pitcher that pours different liquids!

• [subhan]

  I saw a PBS program once on the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of books quietly moldering away in dozens of private libraries in Timbuktu, some dating all the way back to the 13th century. Timbuktu was center of the book trade in the Islamic world for centuries.

• [Anonymous]

  Many of the Islamic scholars named above were not Arab, but Persian, such as Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā, known in the West as Avecenna, and Omar Khayyam.

  • [Luna_the_cat]

    @anon I don’t believe anyone was claiming these were all “Arab”; they were, however, all Muslims who wrote in Arabic.

    On a side note, @grikdog — I did not know that about the knitting. Thank you. :)

• [grikdog]

  Aside from world-making achievements in mathematics, astronomy and chemistry (all the hard sciences, in other words), you might be interested in adding a subtler accomplishment: Knitting. The first knitted socks known to history come from Andalucian Spain in roughly the 11th Century, but they imply a long history of prior art (provenance unknown) since the Muslim woman who knitted them was obliged to work the name of Allah into the socktops to avoid accusations of witchcraft. Any white anglo male who has tried to learn knitting understands that.

• [Nadreck]

  It was some Muslim guys who invented statistics too. They invented it to do a statistical analysis of word counts and sentence constructions in the Koran in order to try and figure out what order the chapters should be in. In old Granada (now a part of Spain) you can see how the Christian conquerers of the descendants of the Muslim conquerers kept the Muslim civil engineers and architects around in order to build their palaces as, after having seen their work, there was no way they were going to live in crappy Christian technology buildings.

  How the mighty have fallen. These days the translation of technical books and papers into the local languages is of a lower volume for the entire Muslim world than that of any one large European country. The 8 million or so inhabitants of Israel pump out more Nobel Prize winning stuff and more patents than any Muslim country ten times their size. (Although, to be fair, Israel is the highest per capita country for both those things in the world.) If you want to see what happens when the fundamentalist branch of your religion takes over you need look no farther.

• [urbanhick]

  And let’s not forget that that invaluable contribution Muslim scholars made to mathematics: the Zero. Without it, we’d still be trying to multiply and divide Roman numerals. It can be done, but it’s quite the procedure.

  It’s so typical of centuries of Western thinking – ignore anything that wasn’t invented by Whitey.

  Muslim countries had universities and other centres of higher learning when most of the West had barely progressed beyond living in caves and wiping their asses with thistles. Sheesh!

  • [WhyBother]

    The notion of positional zero, like the nominally Arabic numeral system, were inventions of Indian culture, though numerous other cultures had approximate or similar traditions that arose independently. As with many inventions, they were disseminated by the Arabic and Persian cultures during their golden age (which coincides with the various medieval European “dark ages”).

  • [Anonymous]

    Who ignores the contributions? Arabs are rightly credited for a lot in astronomy, alchemy, and algebra, the latter two of which obviously bear Arabic names. They aren’t credited with zero because, as pointed out, they borrowed the idea, but we call the numerals Hindu-Arabic simply because their versions were so important.

    We often skip the names of individual scientists, but I think this is in no small part because they’re confusing. I look forward to when there’s one standard transliteration system, so you can actually compare different texts.

    • [urbanhick]

      See Luna the Cat’s post above.

      Other than perhaps algreba and alchemy (which the names give away, if one is paying attention), did you ever hear about any scientific innovation from the Arabic world when you were in school? University? I certainly didn’t.

      If I had never read beyond what I was taught in school, I would have believed that pretty well everything in the world (other than paper and gunpowder) had been invented by white men from England in the 18th or 19th century.

      • [Anonymous]

        Most of what Luna mentioned are parts of algebra and alchemy, except calculus which was expanding on the Greeks, and the medicine. I missed the last, but added astronomy, so fair trade. It just happens that things like “algebra” are actually vast and diverse fields when you look at them, but in school you almost never do; in truth we didn’t learn more about Greek mathematics than “Euclid did geometry!” either.

      • [jackie31337]

        did you ever hear about any scientific innovation from the Arabic world when you were in school? University? I certainly didn’t.

        Out of curiosity, when did you go to school/University, and what did you study? I graduated from high school in 1995 and college in 1998. I can’t remember when I first heard about the contributions of Arabic scientists, but I’m sure I was aware of it by high school, and certainly by university. Then again, I studied Spanish starting in middle school and majored in Spanish in college. Spain’s culture and even the Spanish language were heavily influenced by the Moors, so it’s kind of a given that you’d learn about the influence from the Arabic world while studying Spanish language and history.

• [Anonymous]

  That’s always something that has fascinated me. The Islamic world was the primary steward to the realms of science and mathematics throughout the middle ages. But coming into the modern era, the contributions and even attitude towards the sciences amongst Muslim-dominated countries has substantially diminished. I’ve always wondered about the reason for the decline.

• [Joe]

  No, the Muslims got zero from the Hindus. It’s true that it’s non-Western; the Greeks went to great lengths to avoid zero or explicit infinity in their mathematics.

• [Woolly Mittens]

  “Historic” is the keyword here. These innovations large predate the profet Mohamed and the pre-enlightened dark ages Islam seems to be stuck in.

  • [SamSam]

    “Historic” is the keyword here. These innovations large predate the profet Mohamed and the pre-enlightened dark ages Islam seems to be stuck in.

    Care to name a single one of the innovations mentioned here or in the main article’s link that predated the “profet Mohamed”[sic]?

    Or was it just impossible for you to imagine that Muslims could be innovative, so you just assumed your bigoted belief was correct without trying to do an iota of fact-checking?

    • [Jonathan Badger]

      Plenty (although not all) of these inventions did predate Islam. The automata of al-Jazari? Impressive, but somewhat less amazing if you know of the work of Hero of Alexandria, whose works al-Jazari had access to. Not that there is anything wrong with that — the medieval Muslims quite openly admired classical Greek culture at a time when the West saw it as evil paganism.

  • [adamlcox]

    Ok, I’ll bite: how were they Muslim before Muhammad? That’s like saying there were Christians before Christ.

    I mean, sure, your comment betrays a deep ignorance of Islamic history and I should know better than to reply, but I just can’t help it.

    • [OldBrownSquirrel]

      Christian thinkers sometimes built on the work of Muslim thinkers, and Muslim scientists sometimes built on the work of pre-Islamic thinkers (Indian zero, Greek technology that produced the Antikythera mechanism, etc.). Hence, it may be argued that some of “[t]hese innovations,” or at least the foundations upon which these specific Muslim scientists later built, predate Islam. There’s no inconsistency there.

  • [Anonymous]

    Not a single one of these predate the prophet Mohammad. The history of the Arabs before him is almost entirely one of local towns and traders. Large kingdoms and great discoveries only come with the caliphates and their successors, and for a long time they were far more enlightened than anything further west.

• [Anonymous]

  As part of our mission the Arabian Natural History Association also covers the topic of medieval Muslim scholars. If interested you’re invited to check out our young and still learning blog at http://anhadhahran.tumblr.com

• [urbanhick]

  In reply to Joe and WhyBother:

  Thanks for the clarification. I had meant to point out that the Zero was TRANSMITTED to the west via Muslim scholars. Writing too fast and getting ahead of myself = my bad. Sorry!

• [the_headless_rabbit]

  Neil deGrasse Tyson gave a great little talk about this era of Islamic enlightenment, and what brought about it’s end.

  In short, whoever gets there first gets “naming rights”.

  That’s why most of the heavy elements are named after American states and universities. – because America was there first.

  That’s why math and stars are mostly Arabic names – most of them were discovered and catalogued when Baghdad was the centre of the academic world – they were there first.

  link:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oxTMUTOz0w

• [eaglescout1984]

  I don’t think it’s a question of race/religion/ethnicity. I think it’s a question of timing. Name any scientist before the renaissance. Most of us might rattle of the Greek philosophers like Archimedes, but I think that’s all we can muster. Most early scientists have long been forgotten due to the march of progress. I’ll admit I’m guilty of this too. I’d much rather read how Micheal Faraday’s contributions have shaped our world because they seem easier to relate to than the earliest of scientific discoveries.

• [Lobster]

  I hope we’ve all limbered up a bit. Lots of contortions going on here. My favorite is how we can somehow divide Muslims into the “good” Muslims and the “bad” Muslims, with the good ones all trapped in ancient history and now irrelevant to our just and right work of killing the bad ones. With absolutely no point of distinction between the two or allowance that there may still be good Muslims.

  Like taking a guy’s wallet and then insisting it was never his because he clearly lacks a wallet.

• [AirPillo]

  Al Jazari, Geber, and their confederates could fairly be credited with building the backbone of scientific progress in their region.

  Some of what they pioneered was discovered independently elsewhere in the world, or else I would give them credit for being major players in the construction of modern science itself (and I wish I could without someone calling me out for the hyperbole).

• [Luna_the_cat]

  Let’s see, here are a few Muslim scientists I already knew about.

  Most famously, Musa al-Khwarizmi invented much of the system of algebra and developed it, building on work of Hindu mathematicians.

  Hassan ibn al-Haitham of 11th-C. Cairo laid down the foundations of integral calculus, developing techniques for calculating areas and volumes.

  The poet Omar Khayyam found the solutions to all 13 different kinds of cubic equations. In the year 1079 he managed to calculate the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days, which is out by only the sixth decimal place — essentially, fractions of a second — from its true astronomical value, which is derived with the aid of radio telescopes and an atomic clock. He also demonstrated with models that the earth rotates on its axis.

  Al-Razi was the first person to distinguish between the diseases of smallpox and measles, and wrote a textbook on each which was the standard reference text on these and other diseases up until the 19th century. He also conducted formal clinical trials to test the efficacy of bloodletting as a medical treatment (which somehow DID end up supporting bloodletting, in all fairness), and he called the “humours” theory of disease into doubt (although that aspect of his work was not taken up).

  Ibn-Sina was a remarkable polymath. He wrote one of the first encyclopedias ever, drawing on the royal library at Bukhara (modern Uzbekistan) among many other sources; he identified a number of astronomical phenomena, and was the first to classify forms of energy in a manner which we still use in physics today — heat, light, and mechanical — and identified some key aspects of the concept of “force.” He developed a mathematical technique for verifying squares and cubes, and he is thought to be the originator of the idea of superposition in geology, which was not fully developed and verified until further investigations of rock layers in the 17th century (ibn-Sina was born in 980 AD). However, he’s mostly known for writing the book al-Qann fi al-Tibb, translated as “The Canon of Medicine”, which was the standard medical textbook in Europe, Asia, and North Africa for over six centuries. Among his insights were the fact that tuberculosis was a contagious disease which passed from person to person, but that other contagious diseases could be passed via contaminated soil or water, and that nerves function to transmit pain and also to signal muscle contraction. He also designed formal procedures and principles for testing new drugs, which are not so different in base concept from our procedures today. He also wrote on and developed the concept that there are immutable “laws of nature”, and that there is a set of physical principles which can explain the physical universe, which functions consistently and does not rely on miracle.

  Al-Kindi, who officially worked as a translator, wrote extensively to expose the charlatan nature of astrology and alchemical promises to turn base metal into gold, and he developed crytographic techniques such as frequency analysis as a way of cracking cyphers, which is still in use today. As a sort of side effort, he also developed basic recipes and production techniques for perfume, of all things, which are still in use.

  On the more engineering side, there are of course the Banu Musa brothers, who designed and built remarkable automatons and clocks, utilising one- or two-way self opening and closing valves, feedback responses, delaying action gears and devices and mechanical memory, which were no different in engineering principle from devices used today, although they were powered by flowing water rather than electricity. And the engineer al-Jazari developed cranks and camshafts and reciprocating pistons; crankshafts appear to have been in widespread use in Islamic cities by the 13th C.

• [muteboy]

  Abdul Alhazred has a lot to answer for, as well

• [Boopy]

  Islam still produces incredible scientists, though the meaning of incredible might be different than you’d hope in this context.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixfk4LsKWnw

• [tmcsweeney]

  If you can get a hold of the BBC documentary “Science and Islam” http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00gnqck it is fascinating look at this period of time. It focuses more on the real sciences of astronomy, mathematics, chemistry and so on rather than the novelties of wind up elephants.

  It is also very good at explaining on why the Islamic nations lead their fields, and also why the west eclipsed them.