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Ismail al-Jazari – the medieval 'Father of Robotics'

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: Ismail al-Jazari – the medieval 'Father of Robotics'

#21

Post by abdulhaq »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #11
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what happened 800 years ago that all that science just vanished? A big part of the answer is the Sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongol armies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)#Destru... >Contemporary accounts state Mongol soldiers looted and then destroyed mosques, palaces, libraries, and hospitals. Priceless books from Baghdad's thirty-six public libraries were torn apart, the looters using th…

yes. I had read this one some time ago. My question still stands, what made muslims go from inquisitive science seekers like the one in the article, father of robotics, to "science=bad". This sentiment is continuing to this day with almost all the religious preachers who find it "incomprehensible" that science can exist in the same plane as religion. To explain my point, the "talk of the town" is usually whenever the…

Religious muslims don't say that the weather forecast is heresy, that would be nonsense. Perhaps someone said to you that God can change the weather to be other-than-what-was-forecast, which from the Islamic POV is simple plain sense.

Religious folk don't deny that the course of the moon can be calculated, some say that for establishing the start of the lunar month a sighting must be obtained, this is a complex issue that has nothing to do with believing or not in the predictable motions of astronomical objects.

Re: Ismail al-Jazari – the medieval 'Father of Robotics'

#22

Post by gerash »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #2

in my family there has been a simple question being raised for as many years i can remember but there has never been a satisfactory answer yet. "if early muslims had all the science, mathematics, geography, philosophy and all fields of science including hundreds of scientists who laid down the foundations of modern science with their works, what happened 800 years ago that all that science just vanished?" Then years…

Disclaimer: I'm no historian. But my guess is it's often not a simple cause. This is a lot like how, say, tech companies evolve.

For example is there a simple answer to why, say, HP isn't considered the most successful tech companies right now while it was at some point in time?

My guess is other groups of people learn from them and surpass them overtime. This can also be true even within a single company where one org used to be the most important one but over time another org brings in more money and becomes more important

Re: Ismail al-Jazari – the medieval 'Father of Robotics'

#23

Post by nethunters »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #11
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what happened 800 years ago that all that science just vanished? A big part of the answer is the Sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongol armies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)#Destru... >Contemporary accounts state Mongol soldiers looted and then destroyed mosques, palaces, libraries, and hospitals. Priceless books from Baghdad's thirty-six public libraries were torn apart, the looters using th…

yes. I had read this one some time ago. My question still stands, what made muslims go from inquisitive science seekers like the one in the article, father of robotics, to "science=bad". This sentiment is continuing to this day with almost all the religious preachers who find it "incomprehensible" that science can exist in the same plane as religion. To explain my point, the "talk of the town" is usually whenever the…

In the Islamic empire it was mostly due to the economic and political conditions that caused the decline of scientific study. However in the modern world, people of science generally view religious folks with distrust and they have the mindset that you can't be religious and a person of science yet historically most scientists were religious as well. Take Isaac Newton as an example who was a scientist and a theologian and had even written multiple literary works on the Bible.

With the moon sighting issue you presented this is similar in other countries too. However it isn't predominantly due to a distrust of science; sometimes certain scholars and groups will not adapt their rulings due to the fact that their parents and previous generations did this and they won't change not because they hate science.

The view in the UK on the moon-sighting debacle is that viewing the moon is necessary to commence the month as it was mentioned to the nearest meaning by the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w) himself that we do not rely on calculations and the month is sometimes 29 and sometimes 30 (not 29 and a fraction of day as is the scientific view). The most correct and accepted view is that this isn't prohibiting or belittling astronomical calculations in deciding the month, rather it is a lessening of the burden to calculate and act upon exact calculations.

However the consensus is that astronomical calculations can be used to negate impossible viewings of the moon.

Re: Ismail al-Jazari – the medieval 'Father of Robotics'

#24

Post by Apocryphon »

keiferski wrote: post #17
christkv wrote: post #7

I’ve always wondered if the Ottoman Empire in many ways was the root of the problem as it traded stability of empire over anything else.

Al-Jazari lived centuries before the Ottomans existed. Otherwise, having studied the Ottomans extensively, I wouldn’t say they chose stability over anything else. Their slow downfall was due more to a gradual fossilization of their institutions. For example, the Janissaries went from a highly-trained elite force to essentially a social club that everyone wanted to join. The sultans themselves also gradually became le…

> Their slow downfall was due more to a gradual fossilization of their institutions.

Sounds like an inevitable phase in the life cycle of empires.

Re: Ismail al-Jazari – the medieval 'Father of Robotics'

#25

Post by selimthegrim »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #15
noufalibrahim wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an oft repeated piece of idle scholarship that atheists and orientalists use to "explain" the decline of the so called "Islamic Golden Age". I've seen Steven Weinberg mention this as well as Neil Tyson. The factors were complex. There were economic and socio-political events that affected the stability and life in these societies. Several other reasons contributed to this downfall and it finally happened. To…

no. You are not answering my question. you are simply saying dont blame ghazali. My question is, what caused the death of "desire for scientific temper" and economic conditions do not change someones quest for knowledge or for that matter, influence an entire population away from science who took to avoid it like the plague. I had this talk with a guy last week and when i mentioned ghazali, he said something on the l…

Mongol invasions, Hulagu and Ibn Taymiyyah probably had as big a role. Albiruni in Punjab and Ibn Shatir in Damascus made fine contributions which are just not studied in Islamiyat classes because everyone thinks of glory in terms of Alauddin Khliji/Ziauddin Barni or Aurangzeb Alamgir/Shah Waliullah instead of building universities, observatories etc

Re: Ismail al-Jazari – the medieval 'Father of Robotics'

#26

Post by jbay808 »

keiferski wrote: post #18
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #2

in my family there has been a simple question being raised for as many years i can remember but there has never been a satisfactory answer yet. "if early muslims had all the science, mathematics, geography, philosophy and all fields of science including hundreds of scientists who laid down the foundations of modern science with their works, what happened 800 years ago that all that science just vanished?" Then years…

History is really not that simple and you should always be wary of anyone trying to ascribe blame to a single person or event. There were many events that led to the “end of the Islamic Golden Age,” but a closer analysis reveals that nothing really ended, but simply was moved around. Consider that the Ottomans were technologically superior to Europeans until about the 17th century, or that Al-Andalus was around until…

> But, overall, the single biggest event to impact the era was probably the Mongol sacking of Baghdad.

Just goes to show how Eurocentric my history education was; I never heard about this. Fascinating.

Re: Ismail al-Jazari – the medieval 'Father of Robotics'

#27

Post by selimthegrim »

bitdizzy wrote: post #5
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #2

in my family there has been a simple question being raised for as many years i can remember but there has never been a satisfactory answer yet. "if early muslims had all the science, mathematics, geography, philosophy and all fields of science including hundreds of scientists who laid down the foundations of modern science with their works, what happened 800 years ago that all that science just vanished?" Then years…

Anyone who tells you history is shaped by the opinions of scholars is ill informed on the mechanisms of the world. What is true is that political forces will rationalize the actions they take for their material interests by finding a convenient fig leaf. The people who spread this theory about the decline of the Islamic golden age likely also believe that the Iconoclasm was really about graven images or that the asce…

If you believe Joseph Needham (who according to George Steiner was not above telling a white lie or two) one would think they were getting rid of rival Mohist siege engineers

Re: Ismail al-Jazari – the medieval 'Father of Robotics'

#28

Post by selimthegrim »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #13
idlewords wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a book you should read, Lost Enlightenment: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691165851/lo... The flourishing of Islamic science took place not in Baghdad, but in Central Asia, and it was already in steep decline when al-Ghazali wrote his polemics. The reasons for both the rise and decline of the Central Asian enlightenment are fascinating and complex. The tl;dr is that these cities (most now r…

thank you. I will be going through this book as early as possible.

Nitpick: “...as soon as possible” sounds more natural to native speakers

Ulugh Beg’s observatory was what Ottomans’ short lived one was built to compete with

Re: Ismail al-Jazari – the medieval 'Father of Robotics'

#29

Post by kbk »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #2

in my family there has been a simple question being raised for as many years i can remember but there has never been a satisfactory answer yet. "if early muslims had all the science, mathematics, geography, philosophy and all fields of science including hundreds of scientists who laid down the foundations of modern science with their works, what happened 800 years ago that all that science just vanished?" Then years…

> in my family there has been a simple question being raised for as many years i can remember but there has never been a satisfactory answer yet

if that is the case you should read to Malek Bannabi[1]: The Conditions of Renaissance, Question of Ideas in Muslim World, The Ideological Struggle in Third World Countries ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malek_Bennabi

Re: Ismail al-Jazari – the medieval 'Father of Robotics'

#30

Post by [deleted] »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #9
christkv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened to China as well yet it recovered better.

China was different. Kublia Khan actually preserved a lot of the Chinese institutions but put himself on top. There was not the wholesale destruction of books and scholars. This would have been like Hulagu going to Baghdad, converting to Islam and making himself Caliph and reigning from Baghdad. That is not what happened to Baghdad.

[deleted]
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