An exhibition at London's Science Museum has reopened debate on the science and technology of the mediaeval Muslim world, writes David Tresilian There is a fascinating story to be told about mediaeval Muslim, or Islamic science, this being the scientific culture that thrived in the Muslim lands between approximately the 8th and 14th centuries CE. As Salim al-Hassani, prime mover behind the 1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in our World exhibition currently at the Science Museum in London, points out in his introduction to the book accompanying the exhibition, proper understanding of that story could lead to reevaluating "the role of Muslim civilization in laying the foundations of modern science and technology." In al-Hassani's view, the role of such a reevaluation could also be "to instill confidence and to provide positive Muslim role models for evolving Muslim identities, especially in the West." However, reevaluating the scientific culture of mediaeval Muslim civilisation is, of course, also of much wider interest than that. As Roland Jackson, chief executive of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, points out in his prefatory remarks to the exhibition, "science and technology, in some shape or form, exists and develops within all types of societies and in the context of all shades of religious belief." However, standard western histories of science have sometimes tended to overlook the contributions made to its development by non-western cultures and civilisations, also leaping, in versions of the history of science once commonly taught in schools, from the science of the ancient Greeks and Romans, represented in the works of Aristotle and the engineering feats of the Romans, to the "scientific revolution" associated with the first heroic figures of modern European science. These included Galileo, combating the forces of religious obscurantism in his conflict with the Roman Catholic church, or, on a stranger note, Francis Bacon, an early champion of publicly funded scientific institutions, leaping into the snow to conduct an experiment on refrigeration on a dead chicken and then dying of a fever contracted while doing so. As the Cambridge scientist and historian Joseph Needham demonstrated long ago in his massive work on the history of science in China, some 25 volumes of which were completed before his death in 1995, familiar stories of this sort tend to deflect attention from the scientific achievements of other cultures, producing a version of the history of science that places the emphasis firmly, and perhaps almost exclusively, on Europe. Yet, Needham wrote, Chinese science was historically far more developed than anything in to be found in Europe perhaps at least until the early modern period, which suggested that reasons needed to be found not so much for European scientific progress, when compared to that of other cultures, as for European scientific backwardness, at least until the early modern scientific revolution. An additional question, also considered by Needham, was what factors led to the failure of Chinese science to develop after its early successes. This was the mirror image of a question posed by historically minded European sociologists, who have sought to know the reasons for Europe's take-off and the piling of innovation upon innovation that became a feature of European civilisation from the 18th century onwards. *** While the 1001 Inventions exhibition seeks to re-examine the achievements of mediaeval Muslim science and their contributions to modern science and technology, it is not really true, as al-Hassani seems to imply in his introduction to the exhibition, that this has not been done before as generations of scholars have interested themselves in the subject. It is not quite true, either, even in the context of the presentation of those achievements to the general public in a museum or similar environment. A marvelous exhibition hosted by the Institut du monde arabe in Paris from October 2005 to March 2006, L'Age d'or des sciences arabes, for example (reviewed in the Weekly in November 2005), also considered the science and technology of the Arab and Muslim worlds in the mediaeval period, while at the same time showing how the Arab and Muslim civilisation that stretched from central and south Asia in the east to Morocco and the Iberian peninsula in the west built upon the scientific and technological achievements of the earlier civilisations it either absorbed or came into contact with. Divided into broad sections on astronomy, biology, engineering and the relationships between science, culture and the arts and curated by Ahmed Djebbar, a professor of mathematics at the university of Lille in France, and Jean Audouze of the Institut d'astrophysique in Paris, this exhibition took visitors through a series of rooms displaying both the applications for which the science of the time was used, navigation in the case of astronomy, medicine and veterinary science in the case of biology, as well as the philosophical and speculative writings developed out of it. Mathematics, for example, yielded both techniques for architectural construction drawn from the writings of the ancient Greek writers Euclid and Archimedes, inherited and translated into Arabic, as well as more speculative writings on algebra, a word of Arabic origin, perhaps developed in the spirit of pure inquiry. The same would seem to be true of the work carried out by mediaeval Arab scientists on lenses and qualities of light such as refraction and reflection. Moreover, Arab appropriation and translation of the Greek inheritance, both in the examples mentioned above and in the more familiar cases of astronomy and cartography, characteristically involved much larger issues than simply the technical ones of navigation, in the case of astronomy. In translating the astronomical and cosmological writings of the 2nd century CE Hellenistic philosopher Ptolemy, a native of Alexandria, for example, they also made a digest of Hellenistic thought and practice available in Arabic, which now replaced Greek or Latin as the language of education and intellectual inquiry, this version of Ptolemy's thought, the Almagest, being used to make later European Latin translations. One of the features of mediaeval Arab and Muslim science highlighted by the L'Age d'or des sciences arabes exhibition was the emphasis it placed on theory-building and experiment, also inherited from classical civilisation and distinguishing it from the repertoire of technical methods developed in Indo- Iranian scientific traditions. When Arab astronomers noted from their observations that the stars did not always behave as Ptolemy predicted that they should, they began to offer revisions of Ptolemaic theory in line with the familiar hypothetico-deductive method, an approach famously pursued centuries later by Copernicus. Indeed, such was the distinction of mediaeval Arab and Muslim science that a recent author, T.E. Huff in his 1993 volume The Rise of Early Modern Science, echoes and outdoes Needham's view of Chinese science by writing that "from the eighth century to the end of the fourteenth, Arabic science was probably the most advanced in the world, greatly surpassing the West and China. In virtually every field of endeavour -- in astronomy, alchemy, mathematics, medicine, optics -- Arab scientists were in the forefront of scientific advance." Huff's estimate leads him in the direction of Needham's famous question regarding Chinese science, asking what factor or factors frustrated scientific development in the case of Arab and Muslim science, answers to which are gestured towards in an eloquent catalogue essay by Jean Audouze for the L'Age d'or exhibition. While Audouze's essay, "The Place of Arab Science in History," does not seek to give any final answer to this question, it suggests that religion did not act to frustrate scientific advance. The spectacular achievements of the Arabs, in the fields of algebra, not equaled by western mathematicians "until taken up by Italian mathematicians in the 16th century," or in the concept of infinity, not mastered "until the 19th century and the work of Cantor and Dedekin," or, in the case of optics, until the 17th century when rediscovered by Descartes and Fermat, should be viewed in the context of an entire civilisation, Audouze wrote, part of "a virtuous circle in which the economy encouraged science, which in turn gave rise to every kind of benefit, material and spiritual." While it is a pity that al-Hassani and his team did not make reference to this earlier exhibition when planning the 1001 Inventions show, there are also other examples closer to home, or at least closer to London, of how such an exhibition might be done. A significant aim of the exhibition seems to be to set the historical growth of science in comparative context, placing European achievements in relation to those of other civilisations and the achievements of mediaeval Arab and Muslim civilisation in relation to those of Europe. In meeting this aim, the 1001 Inventions exhibition could have sought inspiration from the cross-cutting approach used by the designers of the new Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, also in England, which, opening late last year, uses the architectural design of the renovated interior spaces to spectacular effect by allowing visitors to look across and between galleries from various bridges and suspended walkways. This echoes the exhibition's theme of making connections and comparisons between cultures, with materials displayed not only by material or places of origin, but also in relation to international trade routes and in the framework of large geographical units. The result is an exhibition that asks visitors to "cross cultures and cross time," a Gandharan statue of the Buddha, made in what is now western Pakistan in the 2nd or 3rd century CE, encapsulating much of the curators' thinking. This statue, they explain, depicting the Buddha as distinctly Indian, but reminiscent of Roman sculpture that itself built on Hellenistic models, demonstrates the connections between Europe and Asia in antiquity. Placing it within a sequence of linked galleries focusing on the representation of gods and humans and at the crossing points of a series of strong visual axes effectively makes the point that the story of one civilisation cannot be sealed off from that of another and that civilisations contain elements taken from various sources. *** The 1001 Inventions exhibition is disappointing on various counts, some of them suggested by comparison with these other exhibitions. Unlike L'Age d'or des sciences arabes, the London show does not seek to give a comprehensive picture of mediaeval Muslim science, and it certainly does not have scholarly ambitions. Unlike the cross-cutting method employed at the Ashmolean, it does not succeed in integrating Muslim science into the history of science more generally, thereby showing up its connections to developments elsewhere in the world, its history, and its distinctive features. Apparently aimed at schoolchildren, probably in an early age range, the exhibition will leave adult visitors frustrated, not only because of the lack of focus -- the emphasis, as the title of the exhibition suggests, is on ingenious inventions rather than on science as such -- but also because of the display techniques employed. These include a Harry Potter-style film show and video presentations of actors in the guise of mediaeval Muslim scientists like Ibn al-Haytham (died c. 1039 in Cairo), famous for his work on optics, and the polymath engineer Al-Jazari (died 1206). Yet, there are other problems besides the Disney-style presentation, which may or may not appeal to younger audiences. The book accompanying the exhibition is divided into sections like "Home," "School," "Hospital," "Market," and "Town," each dedicated to showing how scientific and technological developments made by mediaeval Muslim scientists have left their mark on these domains. The "Home" section, for example, begins with the words, "your home is your private domain, where you can be who you want to be, where the big world stops at the front door," from which it seems reasonable to assume that this is a book aimed at children. What, then, is one to make of the book's thumbnail description of the mediaeval Persian polymath Omar Khayyam, "who gave a complete classification of cubic equations, with geometric solutions found by means of intersecting conic sections," which is by no means the most technical part of the sections on mathematics? This kind of writing cannot be aimed at children, but it is hard to imagine adults reading the book in search of an account of Khayyam's mathematics either. The book has a further reading and reference section, but this will be of little use to anyone not having access to a major library, and it is strangely organised and does not give standard references. Al-Hassani cites various Anglo-American public figures, such as the UK's Prince Charles and the CEO of American computer manufacturer Hewlett-Packard, to the effect that it is desirable for people to have a better knowledge of the contributions made by different civilisations to world science and technology. Everyone will be happy to agree with that. However, what is needed in order for this to come about is a long-term commitment to converting the results of academic research into effective and informative presentations for a broader audience, a commitment that French public institutions have apparently been willing to make. 1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in our World, the Science Museum, London, until 25 April 2010.
