2012 EDIS & BRENTJES Golden Age

Skeptical Inquirer November/December 2012

Edis & Brentjes A Golden Age of Harmony?

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Visitors to The National Geographic Museum inWashington, DC, between August 2012 andFebruary 2013 will encounter a touring exhibition

called 1001 Inventions: Discover the Golden Age of MuslimCivilization. The exhibit is impressive and has won vari-ous awards and gathered endorsements from figures suchas Charles, the Prince of Wales. The exhibit and accom-panying catalog and website (www.1001inventions.com)are lavishly illustrated and richly produced. With pastappearances in Londons Science Museum, Istanbul, theNew York Hall of Science, Abu Dhabi, and the CaliforniaScience Center in Los Angeles, 1001 Inventions tells astory of how, between the seventh and seventeenth cen-turies, Muslim scientists made groundbreaking discover-ies that eventually shaped the modern world.

A Golden Age of Harmony?Misrepresenting Science andHistory in 1001 Inventions ExhibitIts intentions may be good, but a major new exhibit disregards serious differences between medieval and modern science and

warps history to serve a present-day agenda of perfect harmony between science and Islam.

TANER EDIS AND SONJA BRENTJES

According to the exhibit and cata-logue (Al-Hassani 2012), Muslims laidthe foundations of modern science andtechnology. Great Muslims of thepastmathematicians, astronomers,chemists, physicians, architects, engi-neers, economists, sociologists, artists,artisans, and educatorsexpressed theirreligiosity through beneficial contribu-tions to society and humanity. Theywere the first to discover or invent muchin the sciences, technologies, industries,and daily life; and when Muslims con-tinued earlier scholarly projects theyoften revolutionized their treatment.

Much of this story, however, is notaccurate. Certainly, it does not hurt to

be aware that modern science and tech-nology did not appear out of the blue inWestern Europe, and that scholars inmedieval Muslim societies did notmerely preserve and transmit theknowledge of antiquity. There weretimes when the richest intellectual lifeon the planet was to be found in placeswhere Islam was the dominant religion.But 1001 Inventions is a missed oppor-tunity to raise awareness about the his-tory of science. The exhibit presents aseries of heroic tales of medievalMuslim discoveries from out ofnowhere, with no context, and with adisregard for accuracy that shades intopure fiction. The term Golden Age is



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occasionally used by historians of sci-ence to describe the vibrant intellectuallife in a number of predominantlyMuslim societies between the eighthand fourteenth centuries. The exhibit1001 Inventions, however, draws on amore popular, mythic conception of aGolden Age. It disregards serious dif-ferences between medieval and modernscience and warps history to serve apresent-day agenda of perfect harmonybetween science and Islam. It promotesserious misunderstandings of scienceand history.

Egregious mistakes and disregardfor professional standards are verycommon throughout the exhibit cata-logue. A few examples give the flavor.

Flight. 1001 Inventions portrays theninth-century Andalusian Ibn Firnasas the first person to build a flyingmachine. The catalogue goes on formany pages, describing his success atflight, his design improvements, aninjury he sustained in a flight attempt,and so forth (pp. 29698). It gives artis-tic impressions of Ibn Firnas strappedwith what looks like a frame resem-bling bird or bat wings. The legend ofIbn Firnass flight is popular amongmany Muslims today; there is an air-port north of Baghdad named afterhim. And yet, this claim of successfulpowered flightwith wings made outof eagle feathers no lessis basedmainly on a few sentences in aMoroccan chronicle from seven hun-dred years later. 1001 Inventions alsoendorses and expands on the similarTurkish legend of Hezarfen Ahmetelebi, who allegedly used eagle feath-ers to fly over Istanbul in the seven-teenth century, according to anotherfew sentences by a chronicler. (A smallairport in Istanbul is named afterHezarfen.) The sparseness of the his-torical evidence for these feats is evi-dent even with a simple Wikipediacheck, and at face value, flight withmuscle-powered wings is physicallyimpossible. And yet, 1001 Inventionsnot only endorses notoriously unreli-able accounts but indulges in lengthyand purely fictional elaborations.

Optics. A section on Vision andCameras highlights Ibn al-Haytham in

the tenth century. Indeed, Ibn al-Haythams work is recognizably in thetradition of what became physics intodays sense, and should be betterknown. But 1001 Inventions presentshis optics in a vacuum. Its major illus-tration is the camera obscura, but otherphilosophers, astronomers, bureaucrats,and architects long before Ibn al-Haytham analyzed the working princi-ples of the camera obscura, wrote aboutit, and described some of its properties:not only Aristotle or Theon ofAlexandria, but allegedly also MoTzi infifth-century BCE China, Anthemiusof Tralles, or al-Kindi. Ibn al-Haythamdid not invent the device nor did hedevelop it to any higher level of com-plexity or accuracy. Ibn al-Haythamsmain contributions consisted of thetheoretical interpretation of what hesaw and in the systematic character ofsome of his experiments. The cataloguesays Ibn al-Haytham was the first tototally reject the theory of the Greeks.However, his theory of vision combinesconcepts, methods, and questions fromancient Greek philosophy, optics, andmathematics, which he critically sorted,taking important concepts like theAristotelian form or the Euclidean geo-metrical ray aboard his new theory, aswell as Ptolemys experiments on reflec-tion and Euclidean geometry.

The misplaced emphasis of 1001Inventions on the first inventor or dis-coverer leads the catalogue to declarethat the ninth-century polymath al-Kindi first laid down the foundationsof modern day optics by questioningthe Greek theories of vision. He saidthat how we see, our visual cone, is notformed of discrete rays as Euclid hadsaid, but appeared as a volume, in threedimensions, of continuous radiation (p.54). Peter Adamson has studied someof the modifications of the texts knownas Euclids Optics and those derivedfrom them in Arabic and Latin. Heplaces al-Kindi in the tradition of thePseudo-Euclidian De Speculis andJohannes Philoponnus (sixth century)who are among the many mostlyanonymous teachers and students whomodified older positions in the light ofphilosophical debates about how we

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see, debates that were clearly anchoredin the intellectual and instrumentalcontexts of Late Antiquity (Adamson2006, 213-4). The almost completeerasure of such ancient contexts as wellas the contexts of Muslim scholarsthemselves makes it impossible tounderstand the achievements of thosescholars, their new contributions, andtheir conceptual peculiarities, limita-tions, and errors. Claims of al-Kindilaying the foundations of modern-dayoptics are gross exaggerations resultingfrom a lack of knowledge about ancientGreek and medieval Arabic as well asLatin texts on optics and the differ-ences between these theories andtodays geometrical optics.

Clocks. The section on clocks fea-tures al-Jazari, who was a piousMuslim and highly skilled engineerwho gave birth to the concept of auto-matic machines. Whether he was apious Muslim is as unknown as almosteverything else about him, except forhis works, extant in manuscripts, andpossibly a few material objects likeclocks. Reading his work on ingeniousmechanical devices teaches us, how-ever, that al-Jazari did not see himselfas the birth giver of automaticmachines or their conceptualization oras an engineer, but as the head of whatperhaps signifies constructions (ras al-amal), as which he was apparentlyhighly appreciated.

Al-Jazaris so-called elephantclock was not the first robotics withmoving time-telling figures. Reportsabout analogous automata are wellattested for pre-Islamic cultures. It ishighly unlikely that al-Jazaris clockcelebrated the diversity ofhumankind (p. 44; in the second edi-tion, this claim had a stronger religiousconnotation, ascribing to al-Jazari theintention to celebrate the diversity ofmankind and the universal nature ofIslam). These were not concerns of histime and culture, for which the diver-sity of humankind and its celebrationare completely anachronistic ideas.Historical chronicles of the periodaggressively stand against those that arediverse; those that deviate from thewriters own beliefs and cultural affilia-

tions. 1001 Inventions defends the ideathat al-Jazari celebrated humankindsdiversity by pointing to the various ani-mals decorating the clock. This inter-pretation ignores the difficulties thatart historians have in identifying theorigins of the forms and figures.Caution is needed to find probablemeanings of symbols at a concreteplace and in a specific time.

Education. The chapter on schoolbegins with two fundamentally wrongclaims in its introductory summary (p.63), namely that: (1) the medievalMuslims excelled in learning, from theprimary-level mosque schools throughto universities and the illustriousHouse of Wisdom, an intellectualacademy in ninth-century Baghdad;and (2) the ethos of learning was a cul-ture where enquiring minds searchedfor truth based on scientific rigour andexperimentation, where opinion andspeculation were cast out as unworthypupils. This system of learning embod-ied by medieval Islam formed the back-bone and foundation from which cameforth the exceptional inventions anddiscoveries. Not a single word in thesetwo sentences can be backed bymedieval sources. Not only were thereno universities at the time, madrasas asinstitutions teaching some parts ofmathematics and astronomy are latercreations only vaguely similar to uni-versities. In general, there were no pri-mary-level mosque schools in allIslamic societies that provided basiceducation to all boys. There were a lim-ited number of such schools that usu-ally had one teacher and a patron. Thesituation differed from city to city, townto town, village to village, or even quar-ter to quarter. Identifying the directprecursors of todays research and edu-cational institutions in medievalMuslim societies is the work of ideol-ogy, not scholarship.

These gross errors are just a sam-plesimilar problems repeatedly showup throughout the exhibition cata-logue. Such errors are not attributableto the inevitable simplifications neces-sary to present complex historical mat-ters to the general public, includingschoolchildren. Curators are typically

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experts themselves and also workclosely with other academic experts toproduce exhibits that are both accurateand accessible while paying attention toappropriate contexts. 1001 Inventionsclaims to have relied upon reputableacademic resources, and includes somenotable historians of science in its listof consultants. Nonetheless, the resultis still a mass of distortions that serve apresent-day agenda.

Indeed, the agenda behind 1001Inventions is explicitto boost respectfor a Muslim civilizational heritage,and to prevent Muslims, especiallyyoung Muslims, from feeling as if theyare outsiders to modern scientific andtechnological enterprises. These arelegitimate aims. It is also legitimate tooppose Eurocentric conceptions ofhistory, which, though not very influ-ential among the present generation ofscholars, may still have some effect onpopular views of science and the his-tory of science.

But 1001 Inventions pursues theselegitimate aims by setting up a crudecounter-myth. In its version of history,a heroic, conventionally devout set ofMuslims act as civilizing agents for therest of the world, laying the founda-tions for much of modernity. Theexhibit is blind to differences betweentodays science and its medieval precur-sors, and sets up its myth of a GoldenAge precisely in order to overcome pre-sent cultural difficulties involving sci-ence. Naturally, the exhibit pressesmany elements of popular Muslimapologetics into service, such as thecommon notion that historical tensionsbetween science and religion are arti-facts of the Western Christian experi-ence that do not apply to Islam (Aydn2000, 86). To further this view, 1001Inventions presents an absurd picture ofscienceequated to modern sciencetaught in medieval mosques, in anenvironment of complete harmonybetween revealed religion and knowl-edge about nature:

There was little distinction betweenreligion and knowledge as themosque was both the place of prayerand the place of learning. Subjectsincluded science, so science and reli-

gion sat side by side comfortably,which was not the case in other partsof the world. (Al-Hassani 2012, 64)

Such an apologetic agenda is notjust an innocent device to boost theconfidence of Muslim students. Mythsof a Golden Age and a frictionless har-mony between Islam and science aremajor aspects of todays popularMuslim conceptions of scienceandthese myths are closely connected tothe extensive and popular religiouslycolored pseudoscientific beliefs foundin Muslim populations (Edis 2007).Perhaps beliefs such as a Golden Age ofharmony between science and religionmay make science less alien to Muslimstudents, overcoming culturally defen-sive attitudes. There is no good evi-dence to this effect. However, there isplenty to indicate that when traditionalbeliefs such as a divine design in natureconfront naturalistic scientific theoriessuch as Darwinian evolution, thenotion of harmony shields traditionalbeliefs from criticism. Both in terms ofpublic support and penetration intopublic education systems, the strongest,most successful versions of creationismtoday are rooted in Islamic apologetics(Edis 2007; Hameed 2008).

The myth of a Golden Age isunderstandable, maybe even pre-dictable. After all, after the IndustrialRevolution, many societies confrontedthe suddenly overwhelming militaryand commercial advantage enjoyed byEuropean empires. This advantage wasclearly based on science and technol-ogy. Therefore the cultural elites ofmany suddenly subordinated societieswere motivated to appropriate sciencefor themselves. Buddhists and Hindus,as well as Muslims, looked to their ownpre-modern tradition for traces of sci-ence. They sometimes claimed thatthey had set the stage for modern sci-ence, always asserting harmonybetween true science and religionoften leading to difficulties with evolu-tion by natural selection (Lopez 2008;Brown 2012). Chinese and Japaneseelites, like many Muslims, decided toadopt modern technology but also toguard against those aspects of Westernthinking that might corrupt spiritual

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and moral beliefs (Buruma andMargalit 2004). Recently, the UnitedStates had an episode of Afrocentricpseudoscience, attributing the founda-tions of modern science to Africansand promoting a distorted view of sci-ence in harmony with spiritual andparanormal beliefs (Ortiz deMontellano 1991; 1992). One of themotivations expressed for Afrocentrismwas its alleged value for AfricanAmerican students who felt culturallyexcluded from educational narrativesabout the advancement of science.

Imagining a Golden Age of har-mony between science and Islam, how-ever, is problematic beyond falsifica-tions or decontextualizations of history.Perhaps its most important mistake iswhat 1001 Inventions exemplifies sowell: overlooking the major differencesbetween medieval and modern science.1001 Inventions translates medieval sci-ence and technology into the scientificand technological idiom of today, sug-gesting closeness, similarity, or evenidentity between medieval scientificresults and technological products andtodays sciences and technologies. Itdoes not warn readers and visitors thatmany of the disciplines, concepts,methods, or devices named in the bookand the exhibition were conceived of bytheir medieval authors or producersdifferently, or that disciplines likephysics, biology, and chemistry did notexist yet, but came into being muchlater and in other contexts. By selec-tively presenting only what they believecan be linked to modern knowledge,those responsible for the exhibit mis-represent a medieval intellectual envi-ronment where astrology or variousmedical superstitions were as re -spectable as innovations in planetarymodels or medical theory. 1001 Inven -tions implies that medieval intellectualand material achievements are the sameas the modern forms the writers, edi-tors, and curators gave them whenusing modern labels, formulas, materi-als, and visual identifications.

This identification of medieval andmodern science has negative conse-quences. A Golden Age myth suggeststhat instead of adopting a significantly

different way of thinking about nature,Muslims need only to reinstatemedieval conceptions of nature andmedieval habits of thought in order tobecome creatively engaged in cutting-edge science and technology. That isexactly the wrong thing to do. To theextent that a Golden Age myth influ-ences science and education policy, it islikely to undermine rather than supportefforts to improve the present contri-butions of Muslim populations to sci-ence and technology.

1001 Inventions misrepresents sci-ence and the history of science. It isespecially unfortunate that the exhibit isbeing hosted by the National Geo -graphic Museum, given the influenceNational Geographic has in populariz-ing science in the United States. Byuncritically presenting a myth of a Gol -den Age of harmony, they are perform-ing a serious disservice to the publicunderstanding of science and history. n

R efer ences

Adamson, P. 2006. Vision, light, and color in al-Kind, Ptolemy and the ancient commenta-tors. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 16:20736.

Al-Hassani, S.T.S. (ed.). 2012. 1001 Inventions.The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Civilization.3rd Edition, Washington, DC: NationalGeographic.

Aydn, M.S. 2000. slmn Evrensellii, stanbul:Ufuk Kitaplar.

Brown, C.M. 2012. Hindu Perspectives onEvolution: Darwin, Dharma, and Design.New York: Routledge.

Buruma, I., and A. Margolit. 2004. Occidentalism:The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. New York:The Penguin Press.

Edis, T. 2007. An Illusion of Harmony: Science andReligion in Islam. Amherst, New York:Prometheus Books.

Hameed, S. 2008. Bracing for IslamicCreationism. Science 322: 163738.

Lopez Jr., D.S. 2008. Buddhism and Science: AGuide for the Perplexed. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press.

Ortiz de Montellano, B. 1991. Multiculturalpseudoscience: Spreading scientific illiteracyamong minorities. SKEPTICAL INqUIRER16(1): 4650.

. 1992. Magic melanin: Spreading scien-tific illiteracy among minorities. SKEPTICALINqUIRER 16(2): 16366.

Taner Edis is professor of physics at Truman

State University and author of An Illusion of

Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam.

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Sonja Brentjes is researcher at the Max Planck

Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and

author of Travellers from Europe in the Ottoman

and Safavid Empires,16th17th Centuries:

Seeking, Transforming, Discarding Knowledge.

P ossible i l lustr ation; note fr om T aner E dis:

T he ex hibit is lar gely an apologetic enter pr ise

that involves ser ious distor tions of the histor y

of science. F or ex ample, in thesecond edition

of the catalogue, if you go dow n to pages 308-

313, you w ill find lengthy stor ies and il lustr a-

tions of fl ights per for med by figur es such asI bn

F ir nas and H ezar fen A hmed elebi. T hese

how ever, ar e legends. T he actual histor ical doc-

umentation behind the alleged events, how -

ever, ar e just a few sentences in a single chr on-

icler s w or k each. I n the case of I bn F ir nas, this

documentation comes fr om many centur ies

later. I n other w or ds, the ex hibit, in or der to

glor ify medieval M uslim technological achieve-

ments, r esor ts to just making things up.

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2012 EDIS & BRENTJES Golden Age

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