Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)

thenewatlantis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 413 posts

Re: Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)

#21

Post by europoorr »

petre wrote: post #12

Do you know where the words algorithm , algebra , arithmetic come from? "Born into a Persian family in Khuwarizm (present-day Xorazm Province, Uzbekistan), Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (also known by the Latin form of his name, Algoritmi, circa 780–850 AD, 164–236 AH) was a Muslim mathematician, astronomer, and geographer, and a scholar in the famed House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Al-Khwarazmi wrote Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-…

HN is a far right leaning forum filled with wanna be elon musks and peter thiels, no wonder the plebe has downvoted your comment.

Re: Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)

#22

Post by ayende »

throwaway123x2 wrote: post #8
tasogare wrote: post #4

Short answer to the title: "With the rise of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life" My opinion on the matter is that, in the islamic world, religious careers are more socially rewarding than scientific ones. Thus the best minds seeking a good social position…

I'm from a Muslim country and now living in the West: and I can say that this is incorrect. Generally speaking where I am from, the best minds go to medicine, the next best to engineering and law, and the leftovers go to the military / religious study. The failure of those best minds to produce results is an artifact of non-reason based education (in my country there was a huge emphasis on rote learning) and a lack o…

You are talking about the situation now. What was it like in the period of time that article is talking about?

Re: Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)

#23

Post by mda »

tasogare wrote: post #4

Short answer to the title: "With the rise of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life" My opinion on the matter is that, in the islamic world, religious careers are more socially rewarding than scientific ones. Thus the best minds seeking a good social position…

Not really, Theological studies doesn't take students from the top percentages, but medicine, law and engineering do. Unfortunately pure mathematics and physics are not popular and top students do not pick these subjects. At least in some of the majority Muslim countries I am familiar with.

Re: Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)

#24

Post by Juliate »

mda wrote: post #19

Why does the article focus on "Arabic"? I think "Islamic" or "Muslim" would be a better term as large percentage of scientists and philosophers of the time were not Arabs but of Persian, Moore, Turkic origin.

It's discussed in the article. Look for "A preliminary caution must be noted about both parts of the term “Arabic science.”" (and read the 2 paragraphs after it)

Re: Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)

#25

Post by bonoboTP »

mda wrote: post #19

Why does the article focus on "Arabic"? I think "Islamic" or "Muslim" would be a better term as large percentage of scientists and philosophers of the time were not Arabs but of Persian, Moore, Turkic origin.

Explained in the article.

> A preliminary caution must be noted about both parts of the term “Arabic science.” This is, first, because the scientists discussed here were not all Arab Muslims. Indeed, most of the greatest thinkers of the era were not ethnically Arab. This is not surprising considering that, for several centuries throughout the Middle East, Muslims were a minority (a trend that only began to change at the end of the tenth century). The second caution about “Arabic science” is that it was not science as we are familiar with it today. Pre-modern science, while not blind to utility, sought knowledge primarily in order to understand philosophical questions concerned with meaning, being, the good, and so on. Modern science, by contrast, grew out of a revolution in thought that reoriented politics around individual comfort through the mastery of nature. Modern science dismisses ancient metaphysical questions as (to borrow Francis Bacon’s words) the pursuit of pleasure and vanity. Whatever modern science owes to Arabic science, the intellectual activity of the medieval Islamic world was not of the same kind as the European scientific revolution, which came after a radical break from ancient natural philosophy. Indeed, even though we use the term “science” for convenience, it is important to remember that this word was not coined until the nineteenth century; the closest word in Arabic — ilm — means “knowledge,” and not necessarily that of the natural world.

> Still, there are two reasons why it makes sense to refer to scientific activity of the Golden Age as Arabic. The first is that most of the philosophical and scientific work at the time was eventually translated into Arabic, which became the language of most scholars in the region, regardless of ethnicity or religious background. And second, the alternatives — “Middle Eastern science” or “Islamic science” — are even less accurate. This is in part because very little is known about the personal backgrounds of these thinkers. But it is also because of another caution we must keep in mind about this subject, which ought to be footnoted to every broad assertion made about the Golden Age: surprisingly little is known for certain even about the social and historical context of this era. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, a now-retired professor of the history of Arabic science who taught at Harvard, described his field to the New York Times in 2001 as one that “hasn’t even begun yet.”

Re: Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)

#26

Post by everdrive »

mda wrote: post #19

Why does the article focus on "Arabic"? I think "Islamic" or "Muslim" would be a better term as large percentage of scientists and philosophers of the time were not Arabs but of Persian, Moore, Turkic origin.

Isn't that the point? Scientific advances were often Persian or Turkish rather than Arab after al-Ghazali.

Re: Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)

#27

Post by ceesharp »

mda wrote: post #19

Why does the article focus on "Arabic"? I think "Islamic" or "Muslim" would be a better term as large percentage of scientists and philosophers of the time were not Arabs but of Persian, Moore, Turkic origin.

Which ones? I'm curious to know, thanks!

Re: Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)

#28

Post by netcan »

The problem with theorizing about such things is that, being untestable, it's very hard to distinguish between our own narrative biases and objectivity.

Maybe the golden age was a byproduct of imperialism. Not many naked imperialists out there anymore, but the arguments are easy enough to make. The US, The USSR... both with some stunning scientific achievements (eg nuclear physics, space travel, physics) achievements during their most imperial, post-war years. The British. The Dutch. The Chinese. The Mongol empire(s) were pretty intellectually advanced.

Maybe it was multiculturalism. Circa 8-13th centuries, most muslim countries were pretty diverse. They had muslim leadership, but the plurality was still Christian, Zoroastrian and such.

Maybe it was capitalism. Muslims were traders, especially relative to medieval Christendom.

Maybe it was societal youth. Ibn Khaldun^, IMO greatest of the arab (and ethnically arab) golden age scholars, had a theories parsimonious with this.

Maybe it was "the flame of western civilization." As the article states, they did inherit the post Byzantine world of Greek culture which passed through roman hands from the Greeks. The Greeks themselves inherited it from the Persians, so maybe it's the flame of Persian civilization, or even back to Sumerians if you like your narratives grand.

Maybe religion. Quranic culture requires literacy, and a theological education was common to nearly all of those great scholars.

Maybe it was conquest. The national confidence of a conquering nation.

I don't see a way to pick one idea from another. History is not deterministic. We can reflect though, that Ibn Khaldun is the most noteworthy originator of the (now very western) idea that history does have a logic of this kind.

^Genuinely a forerunner to Smith, Marx & such. A lot of Scottish enlightenment may have been catalyzed by the translation of his "Muqdima."

Re: Why the Arabic world turned away from science (2011)

#30

Post by Yetanfou »

throwaway123x2 wrote: post #8
tasogare wrote: post #4

Short answer to the title: "With the rise of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life" My opinion on the matter is that, in the islamic world, religious careers are more socially rewarding than scientific ones. Thus the best minds seeking a good social position…

I'm from a Muslim country and now living in the West: and I can say that this is incorrect. Generally speaking where I am from, the best minds go to medicine, the next best to engineering and law, and the leftovers go to the military / religious study. The failure of those best minds to produce results is an artifact of non-reason based education (in my country there was a huge emphasis on rote learning) and a lack o…

I suspect many people conflate scholarship with clergy because that was the way things worked in the middle ages in Europe: if you wanted to have enough time for scholarly pursuits the clergy was probably the best place to be. Once it became possible to make a career as a scientist this practice changed but the association between clergy and scholarship still lives in the public perception.
Post reply on HN