Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History.

• Author: Stearns, Justin
• Position: Book review

Islam, 5cience, and the Challenge of History. By AHMAD DALLAL. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2010. Pp. xii + 239. $27.50.

This book is based on a series of four lectures that the author gave at Yale University in 2008 as part of the Dwight H. Terry lecture series, in which he set out to do no less than give an overview of the nature and status of science in the Muslim world from the eighth century to the present day. The scope and ambition of the project are attested to by the hook's chapter titles: (1) "Beginnings and Beyond," (2) "Science and Philosophy," (3) "Science and Religion," and (4) "In the Shadow of Modernity." The central question to which the book returns in each of these chapters is a nuanced one: what cultural, intellectual, and social factors produced and characterized Muslim attitudes to the natural sciences in specific periods (p. 9)? The main discourses in which Dallal is interested can be grouped under the labels science, philosophy, and religion, categories the conditional and contingent nature of which he readily acknowledges. While this book is largely a thoughtful synthesis of a substantial body of secondary material produced by historians of Islamic science over the past few decades, at a number of places, notably with the seventeenth-century Moroccan jurist al-'Arab[i.bar] Ibn 'Abd al-Sal[a.bar]m al-F[a.bar]s[i.bar] (p. 8) and with the fourteenth-century theologian and astronomer Sadr al-Shar[i.bar]'a al-Bukh[a.bar]r[i.bar] (pp. 135-38) the subject of Dallal's first monograph--the author draws upon his own reading of works still in manuscript. Dallal offers insight into central historiographical questions that have characterized the study of the history of the sciences in the Muslim world during the past decades. The result is an excellent summation of the current state of the field that should be the first reference for any future student of the subject, and it will prove valuable for those currently working on the area.

Chapter one begins with .a brief consideration of the important role of astronomy in determining the direction of prayer within Islamic law, introducing one of Dallal's central arguments: Muslim scholars in the premodern period by and large considered scientific and religious discourses to function in separate spheres, in which each was considered authoritative in its own right (pp. 3-8). He then turns to the origins of the natural sciences in the early Islamic empires of the eighth to ninth centuries. Strikingly and characteristic of his approach in general, Dallal is interested less in scientific precedent than in what factors in the late Umayyad and early 'Abb[a.bar]sid periods provided the foundation for what became one of the largest and most important translation movements in history. Drawing on the work of Dimitri Gutas and George Saliba, he argues that the emerging scientific tradition of the ninth century in Baghdad was not, as is often readily assumed, the result of the translation movement associated with the caliph al-Ma'm[u.bar]n (d. 833), but its cause (pp. 14-16). Without a prior "scientific culture" and interest in not only Greek but also Persian and Indian science, there would have been no demand for the translation of works of medicine, astronomy, and astrology that "turned Arabic into a universal language of science" (p. 16). Danal is agnostic on whether the scientific culture he speaks of was the result of the "Arabization of the [Byzantine, Sasanid] administrative apparatus" (Saliba) or the work of a group of international and multilingual scholars (Gutas).

From the question of beginnings, Dallal turns...