Saliba v. Huff

[zameel]

Hello James. You wrote:

>Saliba’s main beef with Huff appears to be with Huff’s contention that modern western science is something special. Saliba rejects the idea that modern science is either unique or a product of western civilisation. If this is Saliba’s main objection, it is, in my opinion, misguided. It is a fact that modern, western science has no parallel in its success in explaining nature and its origin does require a historical explanation. It is not sufficient to point to the scientific achievements of other civilisations and say they are ‘valid’ too.<

I do agree "western science" does require an explanation as to why it headed in the direction it did in the 16th and 17th centuries, and Saliba does not deny this. But you make the "circular reasoning" that Saliba talks about. By conflating "modern" and "western" science you assume modern science could not have its roots in earlier "science". You simply assume the "fact" you espouse, and it is this assumption that has hampered our knowledge of the scientific activities of earlier civilizations.

The questions of what created western science and what created modern science may indeed be two separate questions. It is Saliba's contention (and others) that the marks of modern science can be found as early as the 9th century under Baghdadian Abbasid Islam. The discontinuity from Aristotelian and Greek science is found in this stage onwards. The characteristics that define this discontinuity, which in turn defines "modern science", is certainly found in Arabic scientists. For example, Biruni (d. 1048) in his correspondence with Avicenna (As'ila wa Ajwiba) rejected the Aristotelian notion that heavenly bodies have an inherent nature, and asserts that their motion could very well be compulsory; he maintains that there is no observable evidence that rules out the possibility of vacuum; he further asserts that, although observation corroborates Aristotle's claim that the motion of heavenly bodies is circular, there is no inherent "natural" reason why this motion cannot be, among other things, elliptical. Other characteristics like observation, mathematisation of nature, experimentation, the view that all physical bodies are describable by the same physical laws etc. are firmly rooted in Arabic science. Of course Alhazen and his "revolution in optics" (AI Sabra), long before Isaac Newton, bears mentioning here.

What Saliba demonstrates is that there is *continuity* in this type of "modern" science developed by the Arabic scientists and western science which simply continued in this Arabic tradition. This is the crux of Saliba's research. He shows how Copernicus had access to the mathematical theorems of Tusi and 'Urdi (the Tusi-couple and the Urdi-lemma) and employed them even without proof. There is no doubt he had some access to the Tusi-couple as he used the exact alphabetical designators Tusi had done over 3 centuries earlier. Although heliocentrism was Copernicus' he simply overlaid Ibn Shatir's planetary model and that of others in the new system, and heliocentrism had little theoretical value without a gravitational theory. This, for Saliba, constitutes an astronomical revolution in the period between the 13th and 14th century. Saliba also finds links between the writings of thirteenth century Ibn Nafis and Severtus and Harvey about pulmonary circulation displacing the earlier Galenic model. The decimal point was also borrowed from the Arabs. All this through an intense interchange of Arabic-Latin languages in 15th and 16th century Italy (see Rethinking Origins of Modern Science by Saliba).

Saliba does away with old myths from the nineteenth century of no Arabic-Latin exchange after the 13th century, of the Arabic scientists as a simple "preservation" tool, and most importantly that renaissance science shows a discontinuity with earlier science.

That's to do with *modern science*. The decline of Arabic science (probably much later than previously thought in the 16th century) and the rise of Western science, however, are certainly questions that need answering and a lot of factors play into it which have not yet been fully appreciated, but economic and sociological factors seem to have been far more important than is made out.

Useful reading:

Rethinking Origins of Modern Science, Saliba

The Interplay of Science and Theology in the Fourteenth Century Kalam, Ahmad Dallal

Early Arabic Critique of Ptolemaic Cosmology: A Ninth Century Text on the Motion of Celestial Spheres, Saliba

Historiography of Arabic Philosophy, Gutas

Epistemological Foundations of Arabic Science, Gutas

The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalisation of Greek Science in Medieval Islam, Sabra

[James Hannam]

Hi Zameel,

Thank you for reposting your message here and welcome to the board. Posting a comment on a blog post from a little while ago unfortunately means it might get overlooked.

Oddly enough I don’t disagree with anything you say after your first paragraph. All the points you make about the importance of Arabic science in later western developments appear in my book (largely, I suspect because we have both been reading and using Saliba!).

But I think your first paragraph is slightly off the mark. Whatever medieval westerners or Islamic philosophers were up to, it was not modern science. There is a big difference between saying that modern science has some of its roots in non-western cultures (this is true, of course) and saying that those cultured practiced modern science. They did not, any more than the ancient Greeks or pre-seventeenth century westerners did. It is essential to get this right or we end up totally mis-understanding what pre-modern people were up to and indulging in anachronism.

Personally, I don’t think ‘modern science’ really appeared until the nineteenth century and it was certainly a western phenomenon. You can make claims for Galileo being the first practitioner of modern science, but almost all his contemporaries were not.

So, modern science is not western science because western science began long before modern science did. But modern science did arise in the context of western science, even if some of its roots lie elsewhere.

By the way, did Biruni actually mention ellipses as a possible way planets might move or just suggest they might be non-circular(I was aware that Appolonius’s Conics was available but not that it was applied to astronomy).

By the way, Icon, my publisher, have a book out on Arabic science next year to accompany a BBC TV series starting in January.

Thank you again for your thoughts.

Best wishes

James

[James Hannam]

By the way, I'm having some trouble chasing down all your recommended reading. Please would you be able include publication dates etc and Journal titles to make it easier.

J

[zameel]

Hello James, thank you for your response. I guess it depends on how you define "modern science". It appears you equate modern science with the methodoligical naturalistic science of the early nineteenth century which probably began with Charles Lyell. For me, however, modern science is independent of its metaphysical or metascientific assumptions, and depends rather on its method as exemplified in the "scientific method". The modern scientific method reaches back as far as Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, who learnt the scientific method from the Latin De aspectibus which he summarised and which is a translation of Ibn al-Haytham's (Alhazen) (d. 1039) Optics. In my opinion, Alhazen was the "first scientist" (Bradley Steffens) as he invented a coherent scientific method that involved observation and experiment. This guided his revolution in optics and physics (Sabra) long before Buridan, Marliani and Newton. His Doubts on Ptolemy where he encouraged seeking truth from the natural world and not from Greek books, led to the revolution in astronomy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Saliba). If "modern science" is seen as an empirical endevour with a particular method of inquiry then it started at the turn of the first Christian millenium*. If however it is a methodological commitment, then it can be said to have began in the nineteenth century. Either way, however, the explanation of origins will require a completely new reformulation from nineteenth century historiographies. And, in what way was Saliba "misguided"?

>By the way, did Biruni actually mention ellipses as a possible way planets might move or just suggest they might be non-circular<

Yes he actually mentioned ellipses in his anti-peripatetic polemic in As'ila wa Ajwiba. As SH Nasr wrote in An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (1993):

>Abu Raihan goes so far as to imply that the heavens could have an elliptical motion without contradicting the tenets of medieval physics...Criticising Aristotle on the point he writes:

“Aristotle has mentioned in his second article that elliptical or lentil-shaped figures need a vacuum in order to have circular motion, while a sphere has no need of a vacuum. Such, however, is not the case, for the elliptical figure is formed by the rotation of that same ellipse about the major axis and the lentil shaped figure by the rotation of that ellipse about the minor axis. Therefore, if in the process of the revolution of the ellipses which form these figures, there be contradiction or infraction, what Aristotle has claimed does not occur. And there remain no necessary conditions for these figures other than those of the sphere, for if we make the axis of rotation of the ellipse the major axis and the axis of rotation of the lentil-shaped figure the minor axis, they will revolve like a sphere and have no need of a void” [reference: As'ila wa Ajwiba]< (p. 170)

>By the way, I'm having some trouble chasing down all your recommended reading. Please would you be able include publication dates etc and Journal titles to make it easier<

I may have muddled up some of their titles. Saliba's is called Rethinking the Roots of Modern Science: Arabic Manuscripts in European Libraries (pub: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 1999). I think the rest are available on the internet.

* Robert Briffault: "Science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence... The Greeks systematized, generalized and theorized, but the patient ways of investigations, the accumulation of positive knowledge, the minute methods of science, detailed and prolonged observation and experimental inquiry were altogether alien to the Greek temperament. […] What we call science arose in Europe as a result of new spirit of enquiry, of new methods of experiment, observation, measurement, of the development of mathematics, in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs"

[bjorn]

For me, however, modern science is independent of its metaphysical or metascientific assumptions, and depends rather on its method as exemplified in the "scientific method".

I think links between one's view of nature and one's natural science ("method") are extremely hard to avoid. All approaches to science are theory ladden, especially the empirical method.

Science is built on "metaphysical or metascientific assumptions" like repeatability, coherence etc., even if the individual scientist may not be quite aware of it.

The modern scientific method reaches back as far as Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, who learnt the scientific method from the Latin De aspectibus which he summarised and which is a translation of Ibn al-Haytham's (Alhazen) (d. 1039) Optics.

You can find natural philosophers using empirical methods a long time before this. e.g. at John Philoponus who in the 6th century seems to have performed one physical experiment later made famous by Galileo.

Still, modern science (we're not talking e.g. physics and not mathematics/geometry/optics) - linking mathematics and empirical studies to check and formulate theories - did not really get going until the 1800's.

[zameel]

>Science is built on "metaphysical or metascientific assumptions" like repeatability, coherence etc., even if the individual scientist may not be quite aware of it. <

These are not assumptions, but the "methods of inquiry" I mentioned above. The metascientific assumption is the "methodological naturalism" that began in the nineteenth century. Repeatability and coherence were elements of Alhazen's and Bacon's scientific method. E.g. Ibn Hindu (d. 1019 AD), a physician contemporary to Alhazen, wrote of his field "practitioners undertook to observe (tarassud) chance happenings, derive information about specific instances by means of testing/experience (tajriba), and draw analogous conclusions (qiyas 'ala) on the basis of principles coming about through observation (rasad) and personal inspection" and "Then other people come after him who receive his knowledge, add to it, and increase it by performing the same observations and drawing the same analogous conclusion" (See Gutas: Epistemological Foundations of Arabic Science, 2002). These methods guided Alhazen's works, which were unmatched until 600 years later by Kepler (Abbott), and were incorporated into the western mentality only centuries later.

>modern science - linking mathematics and empirical studies to check and formulate theories - did not really get going until the 1800's<

"Linking mathematics and empirical studies to check and formulate theories" was probably what made Copernicus famous. But it began in the west with people like Robert Grosseteste and the perspectivists like Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century - but this is found as early as the 10th/11th century in Arabic science.

So, no, if "modern science" is a set of coherent "methods of inquiry" used to investigate the real world, then it began much earlier than the nineteenth century.

[humphreyclarke]

This discussion prompted me to read a bit more about Alhazan, which I found fascinating. I was particularly interested, having written something on the effect of Augustinian ideas about the fall on natural philosophy, in Alhazan's theology in which he appears to have been motivated by the idea that human being are inherently flawed.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham

As to the question of whether the works of him and his contemporaries constitute modern science, for me modern science really only begins in the nineteenth century when we have the first professional organisations devoted to the pursuit of various sciences, and when the sciences come to assume a central place in the university curriculum. Before then we had natural philosophy and natural history.

I think what Alhazan is doing as regards the scientific method is different from 17th century experimental philosophy in which the aim is to interrogate nature and examines it time and time again under what are essentially “unnatural” or artificial conditions. What Alhazan seems to be doing is empirically based Aristotelianism, that is making generalisations on the basis of commonsense observations letting the universe speak for itself.

What we find in the writings of someone like Boyle is that we should manipulate the natural world under special conditions and observe what’s going on. It is only under these contrived conditions that we can actually see, or get insight into, the various processes. This involves communal observation, it involves accumulation of all sorts of observations under different conditions. What made this possible was the gradual emergence of an intellectual culture in which scientific ideas were encouraged and enabled to flourish, along with the social structures and organizations that make possible concerted collective endeavours. Eventually, you can come to conditional conclusions on the basis of this long complicated experimental process. The basis for this is that the natural world itself is in a fallen condition and deceives us. In Alhazan's theology the observer (humanity) is flawed, in the theology of the scientific revolution, both the world and humanity are fallen, nature is deceitful and needs to be probed for its secrets, human beings need to be mindful of their deficiencies and inherently sceptical.

[James Hannam]

Zameel,

If I could just add to the points made by Humphrey, I am not convinced that a coherent method means modern science. If it were, then that would have to be what Aristotle practiced and he was definitely not doing modern science. Neither was Grosseteste and the quote you give from Ibn Hindu suggests he wasn't either. It is terribly important to distinguish between observation and experience (experimentia in Latin) and what we mean by an experiment.

Bacon does appear to pay lip service to testing nature. The trouble is if you actually look at his science (mainly in the field of optics) it is bookwork based on Al Hazen. He simply does not appear to have made any sort of discovery or experiment himself to prove or disprove a theory. It is quite possible that Bacon was engaged in a rhetorical attack on his opponents rather than outlining a programme he was actually engaged in.

So, I cannot accept that western or Islamic medieval natural philosophers were engaged in anything like modern science. A few elements of the final package does not mean you can claim the prize.

Best wishes

James

[zameel]

Surely Alhazen himself was involved in serious experimentation, even if he was not surpassed in this until centuries later - his experiments on lenses, mirrors, refraction and reflection (experimental physics) and his development of experimental psychology in optical illusions. As Sarton wrote "Ibn Haytham's writings reveal his fine development of the experimental faculty. His tables of corresponding angles of incidence and refraction of light passing from one medium to another show how closely he had approached discovering the law of constancy of ratio of sines, later attributed to Snell. He accounted correctly for twilight as due to atmospheric refraction, estimating the sun's depression to be 19 degrees below the horizon, at the commencement of the phenomenon in the mornings or at its termination in the evenings." Furthermore, Geber (Jabir b. al-Hayyan) (d. 815) in the 8th/9th century introduced the experimental method in chemistry, devising such methods as distillation, crystallization, oxidation and synthesis of hydrochloric and nitric acid; this was further advanced by the atheist Rhazes (d. 925) who rejected the four-element theory of Aristotle and laid the foundations of modern chemistry. In biology too, Rhazes was a strong critic of Galen and introduced experimental biology in refuting the latter's theory of humors. Avicenna (d. 1037) and Avenzoar (d. 1161) were pioneers in experimental medicine (e.g. clinical and pharmacological trials, dissection and autopsy). Furthermore, during the astronomical revolution, Kamal al-Din al-Farisi (d. 1320) correctly mathematically explained the rainbow using experiments performed by Descartes and Newton centuries later (http://www.idosi.org/hssj/hssj2(1)07/10.pdf). So if that is the condition for modern science, it surely started much earlier. Ibn Hindu's quote was shown to show the relevance of repeatability and coherence in his science. In geology, Avicenna and Biruni (d. 1048) were credited with the origin of modern geology (http://www.muslimheritage.com/uploads/ibnsina.pdf). Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (d. 1231) is credited with the origin of Egyptology and he along with other Arabic scientists developed elaborate methods of archaeological excavations. And al-Jazari (d. 1206) is widely acclaimed as the father of robotics. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) was the first to write on historiography and introduced the scientific method into history, and for the economist Joseph Shumpeter ibn Khaldun was the founder of modern scientific economics.

I do agree science today has a much stronger sociological influence than it ever had and this because of the institutionalization and new autonomy of science in the nineteenth century. It is not that science in the recent decades hasn't been extraordinary - it certainly has with the Darwinian revolution, the molecular revolution, the new cosmology - but only because that is a continuation of the science developed by earlier civilizations. Saliba's point simply is that science does not have a linguistic, cultural, or religious context but does have a temporal cumulative element with only coincidental geographic location - so the fact that the west developed recent science is only because of its continuity with earlier cumulative knowledge and because it had become the dominant scientific community due to external factors. Motivating factors, methodologies, assumptions are all corollary; science is science and it began with the methods introduced as early as the tenth/eleventh century even if its true practitioners were few. True scientists were few only because science didn't hold the irresistible value then that it enjoys now - people saw science only as one option of many that could be accepted. In fact, according to Biruni it is because Islamically astronomy (science) is assigned to a separate and autonomous realm of its own with no restrictions in sacred texts, that Muslim scientists could pursue a systematic engagement with nature, as opposed to the Indians who were limited by their religion. Periods of acceleration (like the twentieth century) and retardation may have existed but that does not mean real modern science wasn't happening.

[zameel]

In light of the above I think you very much mischaracterise the influence of Arabic science in your assessment "[Arabic scientists'] importance is in the innovative works of philosophy, mathematics and medicine that the Islamic world produced" (p. 19-20, God's Philosophers). They did fundamentally much more than that. Astronomy (e.g. Ibn Shatir), physics/optics (e.g. Alhazen), chemistry (e.g. Geber), biology (e.g. al-Jahiz), physiology (e.g. Ibn Nafis, Rhazes), parasitology (e.g. Ibn Zuhr), surgery (Zahrawi), anthropology (Biruni), sociology (Ibn Khaldun), geography (e.g. al-Idrisi), geology (e.g. Avicenna), engineering (e.g. al-Jazari), archeology (e.g. Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi), history and historiography (Ibn Khaldun), economics (Ibn Khaldun), comparative religion and Indology (Biruni) and agriculture were revolutionised by Arabic scientists long before their western counterparts (in a thoroughly modern way) though the latter are still hailed as founders of the modern sciences e.g. Adam Smith is said to have been the first to propose the labour theory of value but this was first theorised by Ibn Khaldun four centuries before; Severtus, Columbus and Harvey are said to have first proposed pulmonary circulation despite our current knowledge that Ibn Nafis demonstrated this three centuries before them; Bassi is credited with the germ theory of disease although Avicenna espoused this more than a half a millenium before him; uniformitarianism in geology is normally attributed to Hutton and then Lyell despite having been fully espoused in Avicenna's Shifa; al-Jazari described suction pumps long before Taccola; and I'm sure many other examples exist. Is this not a major gap in our current history of science in which historiography should shift to a Salibian continuum of science and not the standard modern revolution myth?

[Useful reading: the series by Ahmad Y Hassan www.history-science-technology.com/Articles/articles%207.htm www.history-science-technology.com/Articles/articles%2071.htm www.history-science-technology.com/Articles/articles%2072.htm "Despite these facts, the influence of the medieval Arab-Islamic civilization in formulating the Western tradition and in providing the foundation for its science and technology is hardly recognized in the mainstream of modern Western literature, except for an occasional reference. There is a resistance by the mainstream of Western historians in acknowledging this influence."]

[James Hannam]

Dear Zameel,

Thank you for your post. I remember Tony Street from John Marenbon’s reading group at Trinity a few years ago. Do say hello to him for me (although, I suppose, I doubt he’d remember me).

While I continue to agree with you that the achievements of Arabic natural philosophy were considerable and important, it is important we do not become anachronistic. The development of science is not simply a question of picking out bits of early thinkers which happen to echo a modern scientific discovery. Many people have done this with the ancient Greeks, Chinese, Indians and now Arabs. But science does not develop this way. You need evidence that the good ideas were noticed, spread and fed into later developments. We have this evidence for the Arabic mathematical constructions used by Copernicus but we don’t have it, for instance, for the pulmonary circulation or for Arabic historiography which was unknown in early modern Europe – the model was Thucydides.

Just let me give you one other example: Avicenna’s theories of disease are not the same as the nineteenth century germ theory. Yes, you can read Avicenna to say things that sound ahead of their time, but he worked squarely within the Galenic paradigm, even as he criticised it. It was only when western physicians finally realised in about 1850 that Galen was not just wrong, but that nothing whatsoever could be salvaged from his work that any progress in medicine could be made. Modern medicine began at year zero in the nineteenth century. Avicenna was still on the syllabus of medical schools in the 18th century, but modern medicine actually owes nothing to him. Only once modern medicine was founded was it possible to look back at Avicenna and see that he may have hit on a few good ideas.

The sources you point to do not say the same thing as you do. They speak of influence and give concrete examples of transmission. Even so, Saliba is wrong to claim that modern science was not invented in the West long after the decline of Islamic civilisation.

I suggest that you have a talk with Tony about this or else perhaps Andrew Cunningham in HPS. They should be able to explain that you cannot use modern scientific categories to describe the work of medieval thinkers.

Best wishes

James

[zameel]

I don't understand what you mean precisely by "modern". Is it cutting the roots of dogma and nostalgic book-work of the ancients? If so, anti-Greek writers were many among Arabic scientists (Alhazen had a book called "Doubts about Ptolemy", Biruni was ostensibly anti-Peripatetic, Rhazes uprooted Galenic theory of humours, Ja'far Sadiq spoke about multiple earth elements as opposed to a single one - the Greek tradition was overturned).

Or does modern science require that the ideas were "noticed, spread and fed into later developments"? Because that is precisely what Saliba and others like Ahmad Y Hassan and Donald Routledge argue. Alhazen's Doubts (Shukuk) is precisely what created the Maragha school. The Banu Musa in the ninth century were the inspiration for al-Jazari's ingenuity in the twelfth century.

>We have this evidence for the Arabic mathematical constructions used by Copernicus but we don’t have it, for instance, for the pulmonary circulation or for Arabic historiography which was unknown in early modern Europe – the model was Thucydides<

But this is precisely what Saliba argues - Severtus and Columbus most likely had access to Ibn Nafis. Arabic was a part of the curriculum well into the seventeenth century, and transfer of Arabic science occurred in Italy, France, Sicily and Spain and into the rest of Europe (see, for summary: www.history-science-technology.com/Articles/articles%207.htm). Newton and Descartes were standing on the shoulders of Alhazen and Kamal al-Din al-Farisi.

As for ibn Khaldun, his ideas in the Muqaddima on social sciences were being discussed in Europe as early as the seventeenth century by d'Herbelot (http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ei2/KHALDUN.htm). The article also quotes Yves Lacoste "If Thucydides is the inventor of history, Ibn khaldun introduces history as a science".

It appears you think of "modern" science in the nineteenth century as a reinvention of the sciences, and to me the suggestion that "modern medicine actually owes nothing to [Avicenna]" is strange indeed. What exactly is the "modern" "stuff" of medicine that was completely reinvented? Ibn Nafis in the thirteenth century was ostensibly anti-Galenic and anti-Avicennan in his writings, in which he mentions both by name (again, showing ideas were fed and developed) and experimentally and by observation he rejected Galen's ideas e.g. on pulsation (Nahyan Fancy).

You speak of "modern medicine" and "modern science" as though they have a particularity about them, which I have yet to appreciate. It is Saliba's contention in his review of Huff that this particularity doesn't exist (http://www.riifs.org/review_articles/review_v1no2_sliba.htm). You have yet to show the discontinuity or break from past science. The idea that this break even exists seems to be what governs mainstream historiography of science, and as AC Graham wrote "it is not altogether easy to break the habit of thinking of history as blindly groping toward a goal that the West alone was clever enough to reach. . . .".

[James Hannam]

Hi Zameel,

Thank you for your posts. I agree that we do fundamentally disagree about the meaning of the terms "modern science" and "modern medicine".

Let me ask a question: modern medicine for me means anticeptic surgery; the germ theory of disease; no use of bleeding or purging as a treatment (aside from rare cases that still exist) and double blind tests of drugs. What does it mean for you?

Now, there is no technological reason why the techniques listed above could not have been used in medieval Islam. However, we have no evidence that the massive decrease in mortality that marks the start of modern medicine in the nineteenth century also occured in medieval Islam. If it had, then yes, modern medicine would have started back then. Finding teasing references in books is not the same as finding the wholesale revolution in medical practice that marks the start of modernity. As I have said, it owed nothing to what came before. Indeed, binning Avicenna was an important marker that modern medicine had began. Even the phrase "First do no harm" is a nineteenth century coining. Prior to that, physicians almost always did more harm than good. A great book on this is Bad Medicine by David Wootton.

On modern science: again the culture did not exist in Islam or the Christian Middle Ages. There were influences that later fed into modern science (unlike for medicine where there was very little influence) but it is wrong to mistake these early hints for full blown modern science.

I think it will be hard to continue our conversation with such a gulf in interpretating the key terms. However, I am very grateful to you for alerting me to how strongly felt some of these issues are. I am going to review my position on Geber for instance, although I can't promise to end up where you would like me to.

Best wishes

James

[zameel]

Hello James, thank you for your response. I still see the circularity Saliba outlines in modern historiography of science present in your comments:

{I agree that we do fundamentally disagree about the meaning of the terms "modern science" and "modern medicine".}

As Saliba points out "Most proponents of this view, whether consciously or not, look at science in our day and assign the term ‘modern’ to that science without defining modernity, relying only on the sheer fact that it is contemporaneous with us. They then ask which leading centres produced this ‘modern’ science and find them in Europe and, by extension, the United States, or what is ambiguously called the West. From there, it becomes easy to jump to the conclusion that modern science is Western science. Thus, all other cultures, no matter where they are located and at what point in their history they are ‘captured’, if they may be ‘captured’ at all, could not possibly contain the roots of modern science, nor allow modern science to develop, by the mere fact that they are not Western cultures".

If modern science is simply science contemporaneous with us, then it has no real singularity - it is merely the eventuality of an existing tradition, transported into the west.

But then, you appear to suggest "science" is equivalent to its social impact: "we have no evidence that the massive decrease in mortality that marks the start of modern medicine in the nineteenth century also occurred in medieval Islam. If it had, then yes, modern medicine would have started back then". But is not science a purely naturalistic enterprise, seeking understanding of the universe not its social advancement?

{On modern science: again the culture did not exist in Islam or the Christian Middle Ages.}

Again, you make the same mistake of which Saliba strongly criticises Huff, "one should also ask whether it makes much sense to speak of science, whether modern or not, in such cultural, linguistic, or national terms, when the very processes of science themselves respect no such boundaries and pay no heed to such sentiments". What evidence is there that a particular culture even produces science? By making the assumption modern science is what science should be, it is only western culture that could have produced it. But why should this assumption be so? As Saliba and others show science as we understand it was happening long before modern times; it is only if we make the assumption that it could not have began earlier that we create a false singularity. Gutas writes:

"...it is possible to distinguish between the [Arabic] scholars whose purposes and methods were scientific, even in our sense of the term, and those who had other aims - personal, theological etc. [e.g. Fakhraddin al-Razi]. In the former case - and these are the scholars we should be investigating - we see that their epistemological foundation was not very different from that of scientists everywhere: applied science resting on experience and observation - and we even get hints that they understood the basics of the experimental method - informed by a theory that was argued for in strict terms of mathematical and logical procedures and by a healthy attitude of skepticism and questioning of authority [footnote reference to Saliba's Origins]...The great advances of Arabic science could not be explained in any other way" (Comments on the Epistemological Foundations of Medieval Arabic Science, 2002, p. 284-285)

He goes on to explain reasons for scientific activity must be social as nothing intrinsic to the science proved to be an impediment to the production of knowledge. He attempts to show that these social elements include the economic success of the Islamic civilisation and state patronage for science, and the ideological laissez-faire in Sunni Islam (much like the "free inquiry" required for scientific activity).

In order to show the uniqueness of contemporary science, you list contemporary achievements: "modern medicine for me means antiseptic surgery; the germ theory of disease; no use of bleeding or purging as a treatment (aside from rare cases that still exist) and double blind tests of drugs" - but just as easily we could construct a long list of scientific knowledge important to medicine today discovered much earlier. The medical science of earlier practitioners was fed into modern developments.

Importantly, I do agree nineteenth century science took a turn for the better and this because of the new autonomy and institutionalisation of science, and the loss of ecclesiastical control. This was a result of the efforts of men like Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, John Tyndall, and of course the simplistic conflict thesis created by Draper and White. But science as a process did not change.

Finally, I think it needs to be asked, is science a process or a set of results? Of course modern science would be far greater than earlier science in term of results and conclusions by the mere fact that it is modern. But if it is the processes that produce scientific knowledge, and the society that generates it, science, even as we know it, stretches back much earlier.

[zameel]

The "first true scientist", Jim Al-Khalili: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7810846.stm

Professor Jim Al-Khalili presents Science and Islam on BBC Four at 2100GMT on Monday 5, 12 & 19 January