Manuscript of Ismail al-Jazarī's Ingenious Mechanical Devices (ca. 17th century)

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/arabic-machine-manuscript/

by YoctoYARN • 1 year ago

100 38 1 year ago

He stood on the shoulders of Persian, Greek, Indian, and Chinese precursors, while Renaissance inventors, in turn, stood on his.

This is the first time in my life where a western outlet doesn't try and obfuscate the fact that many of the "discoveries" made by europeans in the the renaissance period have taken inspiration from the close to 800 years of Islamic scientific research (who themselves never failed to credit their predecessors).

Typically, when you study the history of science in the west, it starts at ancient greece (who have no contemporaries) then there's a massive blackout of 800 years and poof ! The "light" is magically turned on.

Fair play to the author for not being biased.

graemep3• 1 year ago

This is the first time in my life where a western outlet doesn't try and obfuscate the fact

I do not know what you have been reading, but most western outlets go out of their way to acknowledge this. If anything people tend to idealise the "Islamic golden age" in the same way they do ancient Greece and Rome.

Typically, when you study the history of science in the west, it starts at ancient greece (who have no contemporaries) then there's a massive blackout of 800 years and poof

They ignore the significant advances made in medieval Europe, and the Byzantine Empire.

contingencies2• 1 year ago

And China... almost everything, including probably the paper it came on and the printing used to produce it.

And India ... from which we derive our concept of mathematical zero which underpins everything.

gostsamo2• 1 year ago

I'd agree with the gp. An amazing example for such an attitude was some french edition like "History of the World in Ten Chapters and a Half" which said in the introduction that it will talk about greek and roman history and then the modern times because the Byzantine empire just kept the torch burning. I stopped reading right there. Maybe it is different in the more academic literature, but the pop culture narrative is that the eastern roman empire, the islam world, the chinese, and the mongols were some autocratic religious barberians who worshiped things that they do not understand. If western Europe wasn't leading the way, some people reason, then everyone else shouldn't be allowed to stand above. Politics has the habit of using history to justify its own ends and it is true everywhere and in every century.

everdrive• 1 year ago

I thought you were going to go the other direction. All I ever read is that the west relied on Islamic science and math, but "no one" will acknowledge this. Except of course it's the only perspective I ever hear about, so I'm not sure who this mythical "no one" is. On the other hard, vanishingly few sources do seem to acknowledge that the Islamic sources "stood on the shoulders" of Greeks and others. Ibn Khaldun states this directly in the Muqaddimah: "The sciences of only one nation, the Greek, have come down to us, because they were translated through al-Ma'mun's efforts."

The full quote:

"The subject here is different from that of these two disciplines which, however, are often similar to it. In a way, it is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines by anyone. I do not know if this is because people have been unaware of it, but there is no reason to suspect them (of having been unaware of it). Perhaps they have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us. There are many sciences. There have been numerous sages among the nations of mankind. The knowledge that has not come down to us is larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians that 'Umar ordered wiped out at the time of the conquest! Where are the sciences of the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, and the Babylonians, and the scholarly products and results that were theirs! Where are the sciences of the Copts, their predecessors! The sciences of only one nation, the Greek, have come down to us, because they were translated through al-Ma'mun's efforts. (His efforts in this direction) were successful, because he had many translators at his disposal and spent much money in this connection. Of the sciences of others, nothing has come to our attention."

zyklu5• 1 year ago

Indeed. In fact, it is one of the most amusing aspect of the anglophone west (at least for the last few decades). Despite public perception (by public I mean those who have been to university since the 90s), Western historians of science and mathematics in general have never not acknowledged the previous works of the Persianate civilizations commensurate to their knowledge of them in their time. But somehow in the last few decades professional historians have had to waste time figuratively looking over their shoulders lest they be percieved as being Eurocentric. And, if they were to somehow find a way to show -- requiring whatever hermeneutical gymnastics -- that a prominent scientist was influenced (or even better, had stolen) from some other "cultures" than nothing better! (ex: Copernicus from the Maragha school as an example of interpretive gymnastics)

But, of course, this is one of the symptoms of the degeneration that now afflicts your particular civilization and is bringing about it's inevitable transformation to something else -- but better this than the fate of the Abassids or the Sung.

h2zizzle2• 1 year ago

Except of course it's the only perspective I ever hear about, so I'm not sure who this mythical "no one" is.

Most American primary/secondary textbooks (in a country where the majority of people still don't go to college). Ask the average person to name an Islamic analogue to Newton, Copernicus, or da Vinci, you're going to get blank stares. I couldn't do it, and I watched Family Guy Cosmos and everything.

the_third_wave• 1 year ago

You must have read different sources from the ones I read. There is no shortage of mentioning the "Islamic golden age" and the role it played in bringing knowledge from "the east" to "the west" as well as preserving knowledge from and of classical Greece by means of translations to Arabic. There seems to be doubt about the veracity of the latter though as this claim may have been a strategical device to promote 'anti-Byzantinism':

The claim that philosophy and the sciences died out in Christian Byzantium and were transferred to the Islamic world can be found in a number of ninth- and tenth-century Arabic sources, edited and translated from the 19th century onwards and mostly taken at face value since then. However, Dimitri Gutas has explained that, during this time of bitter military struggle with Byzantium in which the Arabs were losing ground, emphasizing the Muslim appropriation of the pagan Greek heritage and claiming that Byzantium destroyed it because of the ideological and political break represented by Christianity was a form of anti-Byzantinism expressed as philhellenism. Gutas has also clarified that Abbasid society appropriated Greek philosophy and science in order to address its own needs: negotiating a canonical version of Islam [1].

Wherever the truth lies I do not see any dearth of mentionings of the role played by Islamic scholars.

[1] https://brill.com/previewpdf/display/book/edcoll/97890043490...

hasmanean• 1 year ago

I think there was a bbc documentary where they showed a manuscript of Newton or Kepler with a geometric proof and compared it to one by Al Jazari. They were identical.

In fact even the vertices were labelled the same, and followed the order of Arabic letters.

Shoulders of giants indeed. Shoulders of jazari.

Mainan_Tagonist5• 1 year ago

I wonder if GP is trying to be witty or simply has an axe to grind.

The transmission of knowledge between civilizational blocks is fairly well documented (I recently read Jacques Le Goff on this particular topic), and what is owed to the Islamic civilization is no secret.

For those interested in comparable technical developments in Europe around the same time, for the middle ages were not as dark as usually portrayed, I recommend reading Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine (whom Ken Follett relied on extensively for "The Pillars of the Earth") and David Landes' A Revolution in Time.

mangodrunk2• 1 year ago

It’s good the author mentions Persian specifically, given most of the influential mathematicians and scientists who comprised the Islamic Golden Age were Persian.

julienchastang• 1 year ago

Disagree. If you spend any time studying the history of science, you know that many stars have Arabic names, we use Arabic numbers, and the word Algorithm is Arabic in origin.

andrewstuart• 1 year ago

I learned recently that Algebra comes from Al-Jabr named by its Arabic inventor Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.

elashri2• 1 year ago

It is also how the word "Algorithm" came from. It is basically a variation of the Latin translation of his name -algoritmi- [1]

[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/91544/how-algorithm...

fakedang• 1 year ago

Whose last name lent the etymology for algorithm.

mangodrunk2• 1 year ago

Al-Khwarizmi was Persian, not Arab. Though he did produce much of his work in Arabic which might cause the confusion.

rpastuszak• 1 year ago

I remember an anecdote about a Persian scholar who said that he preferred receiving invectives in Arabic than compliments in Persian (his mother tongue). Was it him?

(The context being - Arabic was associated with precision, Persian with poetry)

I’m oversimplifying and likely misquoting here so please don’t take that at a face value and put my in historical context. (I love Persian poetry, esp. early New Persian, which I find easier to understand than its later stages; I used to translate Middle Persian on occasion, perhaps because my Arabic is non-existent at this stage).

leyth3• 1 year ago

When will Al-Jahiz finally get credit for his early ideas about evolution, long before Darwin? His book Kitab al-Hayawan is still in print.

echelon_musk2• 1 year ago

Do you have a horse in the race here, so to speak?

Wikipedia [0] has the following to say:

According to Frank Edgerton (2002), the claim made by some authors that al-Jahiz was an early evolutionist is "unconvincing"
If certain historians have claimed that Jahiz wrote about evolution a thousand years before Darwin and that he discovered natural selection, they have misunderstood.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jahiz

leyth3• 1 year ago

Any chance you could finish the article before launching another disk-filling spree?

"He certainly saw ecosystems, as we would call them now, in the natural world. He also understood what we might call the survival of the fittest.[46]"
"Animals engage in a struggle for existence, and for resources, to avoid being eaten, and to breed." He added, "Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming them into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to their offspring."

Masood, E. (2009, March 1). Islam's evolutionary legacy. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/feb/27...

I should also note that I do have a 'horse in the race', having read Al-Jahiz’s work myself. I'm well aware that some struggle to accept that such a monumental intellectual contribution came from a Black scholar—yes, Al-Jahiz—at a time when much of the world was still in the so-called Dark Ages.

anentropic• 1 year ago

Apparently from before the invention of ellipses :)

Manuscript of Ismail al-Jazarī's Ingenious Mechanical Devices (ca. 17th century)

Related Stories