Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (review)

In this provocative and engaging book, Professor George Saliba of Columbia University deals with a variety of topics, including the beginnings of science in the Islamic world, the early reception of Greek science, the criticisms of Greek (mainly Ptolemaic) astronomy and the alternative planetary models meant as correctives, the issue of astronomy and religion in Islam, the connection of Islamic astronomy with Copernicus, and the decline of Islamic science.

Saliba begins with the origins of science in Islam and the translations of the extant Greek scientific and philosophical corpus into Arabic: an act of cultural appropriation that had no real precedent and remained unparalleled until fairly recent times. Even for later Muslims it represented an amazing episode, calling forth all sorts of explanations, including a caliph's dream that featured a nocturnal visit from Aristotle. Saliba reviews and critiques earlier explanations in a masterful way, pointing out that previous reconstructions —which he collectively refers to as the "classical narrative" (1) —all suffer from various degrees of implausibility. He dispenses with the caliph's dream along with accounts requiring a flourishing Byzantine scientific culture, or a Persian nationalist sentiment that caused the early Abbasid caliphs to restore a lost heritage plundered by Alexander the Great. In their place, Saliba proposes a sociopolitical narrative in which non-Arab bureaucrats, who after the Arab conquests had occupied high places in the government in order to manage the vast empire, lost standing as government accounting was converted from Persian and Greek into Arabic. These displaced non-Arabs then responded by seeking greater levels of knowledge (and relevance) through translations of the classical Greek sources. Saliba's account is appealing in its attempt to provide an alternative to earlier, rarefied narratives that put too great an emphasis on single rulers or nonexistent scientific traditions. But for my taste he moves too far away from intellectual history, which would ask why such government officials would be interested in translating texts with little practical use, such as Aristotle's Metaphysics. Here the religious controversies of early Islam could provide a context for such puzzling developments.

Most of the rest of the book is devoted to Islamic theoretical astronomy and its relationship to Copernicus, subjects to which Saliba has devoted much of his professional career. The general outlines of this history have been known for some time, and Saliba recapitulates what is known, with an emphasis on his own research. In brief, Islamic astronomers began at a fairly early period to criticize Ptolemaic astronomy both on technical grounds —such as faulty observations —and on theoretical grounds. The latter led to charges that Ptolemy had violated his own stated physical premises by allowing irregular motions to occur in the heavens. By the thirteenth century, there arose a research program to reform Ptolemaic astronomy that introduced new planetary models adhering to the accepted physics of the time, which insisted on uniform circular motions in the heavens. By routes still largely unknown, these models seem somehow to have made their way into the astronomical system of Nicholas Copernicus, which he claimed as his own. Saliba discusses a number of interesting connections between the Islamic world and Renaissance Europe and makes the case that "Renaissance Arabists" may have provided Copernicus and others with knowledge of Islamic science (217). But Saliba does not deal with an obvious issue that would diminish the importance he attaches to the Islamic connection with Copernicus, namely, that the Islamic models Copernicus uses have little to do with the basis of his fame: the proposal of a heliocentric cosmology and all that that implies for the European scientific Renaissance. In fact there is evidence that Copernicus's decision to put the Earth in motion, and, indeed, his overall understanding of astronomy, was influenced by Islamic ideas, so it is a bit surprising that Saliba chooses to relegate this material to endnotes rather than engaging with its possible implications. (For...