For all our sweeping ideas about Western greatness, so many familiar parts of our days find their origin in Oriental innovation, writes M Shahid Alam* At the outset of the classes I teach I always address the question of bias in the social sciences. In one course -- on the history of the global economy -- this is the central theme: critique of Eurocentric biases in several leading Western accounts of the rise of the global economy. This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students: How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West -- in China, India, the Islamic world or Africa? The question befuddled my students. I proceeded to pepper them with questions about the things they do during a typical day, from the moment they wake up. Unbeknownst, my students discover that they wake up in "pyjamas" of Indian origin, based on an Urdu-Persian name. Out of bed, they shower with soap and shampoo, whose origins go back to the Middle East and India. Their toothbrush with bristles was invented in China in the 15th century. At some point after waking up, my students use toilet paper and tissue, also Chinese inventions of great antiquity. Do the lives of my students rise to Eurocentric purity once they step out of the toilet and enter into the more serious business of going about their lives? Not quite. I walk my student through her breakfast. Most likely this consists of cereals, coffee and orange juice, with sugar added to the bargain. None originated in Europe. Cereals were first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent some 10,000 years before Christ. Coffee, orange and sugar still carry -- in their etymology -- telltale signs of their origins, going back to the Arabs, Ethiopians and Indians. Try to imagine your life without these stimulants and sources of calories. How far could my students go without the alphabet, numbers and paper? The alphabet came to Europe courtesy of the ancient Phoenicians. As their name suggests, numerals were brought to Europe by the Arabs, who in turn had obtained them from the Indians. Paper came from China, also brought to Europe by Muslims. Obstinately, my students' day refuses to get off to a dignified Eurocentric start. In her prayer, my Christian student turns to a God who -- in his human form -- walked the earth in Palestine and spoke Aramaic, a close cousin of Arabic. When her thoughts turn to the afterlife, my student thinks of the Day of Judgement, paradise and hell, concepts borrowed from the ancient Egyptians and Persians. "Paradise" entered into English, via Greek, from the ancient Avestan pairidaeza. Of mediaeval origin, the college was inspired by -- and most likely modelled after -- the madrasa or Islamic college, first set up by a Seljuk vizier in 11th century Baghdad. In a nod to this connection, professors at universities still hold a "chair", a practice that goes back to the madrasa where the teacher alone sat in a chair while his students sat around him on rugs. When she finishes college and prepares to receive her baccalaureate at the graduation ceremony, our student might do well to acknowledge another forgotten connection to the madrasa. This diploma harks back to the ijaza -- Arabic for licence -- given to students who graduated from madrasas in the Islamicate. Our student runs into fields of study -- algebra, trigonometry, astronomy, chemistry, medicine and philosophy -- that were introduced, via Latin, to Western Europe from the Islamicate. She also encounters a variety of scientific terms -- algorithm, alkali, borax, amalgam, alembic, amber, calibrate, azimuth and nadir -- which have Arabic roots. If my students play chess over the weekend and threaten the King with "checkmate", that phrase is adapted from Farsi -- Shah maat -- for "the King is helpless, defeated." When she uses coins, paper currency or writes a check, she is using forms of money first used outside Europe. Gold bars were first used as coins in Egypt in the fourth millennium BC. With astonishment, Marco Polo records the use of paper currency in China and describes how the paper used as currency was made from the bark of mulberry trees. At college, my student will learn about modernity, ostensibly the source and foundation of the power and the riches of Western nations. Her professors in sociology will claim that laws based on reasoning, the abolition of priesthood, scientific method, and secularism -- hallmarks of modernity -- are entirely of Western origin. Are they? During the 18th century many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers were keenly aware that the Chinese had preceded them in their emphasis on reasoning by some two millennia. By the end of this century, however, a more muscular, more confident Europe chose to erase their debt to China from its collective memory. Similarly, Islam, in the seventh century, made a more radical break from priesthood than the Reformation in Europe. In the 11th century, an Arab scientist, Alhazen -- his Latinised name -- devised numerous experiments to test his theories in optics, but more importantly theorised cogently about scientific method in his writings. Roger Bacon, the putative "founder" of scientific method had read Alhazen in a Latin translation. When our student reads the sonnets of Shakespeare and Spenser she is little aware that the tradition of courtly love they celebrate comes via Provencal and the troubadours (derived from taraba, Arabic for "to sing") from Arab traditions of love, music and poetry. When our male student gets down on one knee while proposing to his fair lady, he might do well to remember this. On a clear night, with a telescope on her dormitory rooftop, our student can watch stars, many of which still carry Arabic names. This might be a fitting closure to a day in the life of our student, who, more likely than not, remains Eurocentric in her understanding of world history, little aware of the multifarious bonds that connect her life to different parts of the "Orient". * The writer is professor of economics at Northeastern University.
