jim al-khalili's BBC 4 series 'science and islam'

picture of Jim al-Khalili (credit this and picture below: Southern Star Entertainment)

At a time when TV channels around the world were saturated with horrific images of war, death and destruction from Gaza, BBC Four last week offered viewers a very different view of the Middle East when it screened the first part of the series “Science and Islam”. The three-part series explores the contribution of early Islam to the development of scientific knowledge.

The legacy of Arab science is still apparent in the English language in words such as algebra, algorithm and alkali, which are “at the very heart of what science does,” says the presenter of the series, Professor Jim Al-Khalili. “There would be no modern mathematics or physics without algebra, no computers without algorithm and no chemistry without alkalis.” But surprisingly few people in the West today – even scientists – are aware of this medieval Islamic legacy.

Professor Al-Khalili, a nuclear physicist, was born in Baghdad in 1962 to an Iraqi father and English mother. By the time his family left Iraq in the late 1970s, “science was already my great passion in life. As I studied it further I saw myself fully part of the Western tradition, inspired by names like Newton and Einstein”.

But he had a nagging feeling he was ignoring part of his own scientific heritage. “I still remembered my schooldays in Iraq and being taught of a golden age of Islamic scholarship – that between the ninth and twelfth centuries a great leap in scientific knowledge took place in Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and Cordoba.”

In “Science and Islam” Al-Khalili unearths this buried history, and assesses the contribution of its great figures to science. He wanted to answer the question: “Are there medieval Muslim scientists who should be spoken of in the same breath as Galileo or Newton or Einstein?” His series suggests that the answer is a resounding yes.

As an example, Isaac Newton (1643-1727) is regarded as the father of modern optics, but according to Al-Khalili “Newton himself stood on the shoulders of a giant who had lived 700 years earlier.” That giant was Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham born in 965 in what is now Iraq. He was the first scientist to give a correct account of how the eye sees objects, and his use of mathematics to describe and prove the process makes him makes him, in Al-Khalili’s opinion, the first theoretical physicist. Al-Khalili says Ibn al-Haytham was also the first to arrive at the modern scientific method, despite this being generally attributed to Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes early in the 17th century.

In the series Al-Khalili travels to Syria, Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Spain and Italy to uncover the achievements of some of the outstanding figures of medieval Islamic science. He introduces us to a fascinating array of personalities including mathematician Al-Khwarizmi ; physician Abu Sina (Avicenna); astronomer and mathematician Al-Biruni; chemist and physician Al-Razi (Razes) and astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi.

Al-Khalili is Professor of Physics and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at Surrey University. Alongside his scientific activities he has developed a career communicating science to the public through books, articles and broadcasting. He is currently writing a book on the history of Arab science, entitled “The House of Wisdom”, to be published by Penguin Books next year.

He is an engaging and energetic presenter, and has a gift for to explaining scientific topics to a lay audience in a lucid manner. He places Muslim scientists within the wider developments of their time, and examines the relationship between Islam and science. By the early eighth century Islamic caliphs ruled a vast territory and they understood that political power and scientific knowledge go hand in hand. There were compelling practical reasons for this, and Islam as a religion also played a central role.

Caliph Abdel Malik Ibn Marwan needed to find a way of administering the vast empire with its mish-mash of languages, and he decided that it should have a uniform language – Arabic . The adoption of Arabic throughout the empire boosted intellectual life, as it meant scholars and scientists from different lands could exchange ideas and debate with one another in a common language.

In addition, a huge “translation movement” was launched, in which scholars made strenuous efforts to find and translate ancient texts. They scoured far-flung libraries for scientific and philosophical manuscripts in languages including Greek, Syriac, Persian and Sanskrit and brought them back for translation into Arabic.

(Picture right: a 1983 Soviet postage stamp marking mathematician Al-Khwarizmi's 1200th anniversary)
Medicine was of enormous importance to scholars and rulers. The third-century Greek physician Galen was translated into Arabic, but Muslim doctors were keen also to draw on the Islamic tradition of medicine and on other traditions such as the Indian and Chinese. Folk healers were of influence, and in the backstreets of Hammamet, Tunisia, Al-Khalili visits the shop of a woman selling a large range of herbs, spices and other ancient cures which are still used today.
“Islam’s most tangible contribution to medicine is less in its specific remedies and more in its overarching philosophy,” Al Khalili said. “It is after all a religion whose central idea is that we should feel compassion for our fellow humans.”

The towering figure in Islamic medicine was the Persian physician Ibn Sina. His multivolume “Canon of Medicine” was the standard medical text worldwide for more than six centuries. Al-Khalili sees Ibn Sina as embodying the synthesis of religion, faith and reason more than any other Islamic scholar.

In Damascus Al-Khalili visits the Al Bimaristan al-Nouri Hospital, built in 1154 during the reign of Noureddin Zanki and now a medical museum. Islamic medical history expert Dr Peter Pormann of Warwick University, England, notes that within the hospital Islam encouraged a high degree of religious tolerance. “The hospital was open to all communities and so you would have Christians, Jews, Muslims and maybe other denominations both as patients and as practitioners,” he observes.
Al-Khalili identifies eye surgery as one of the main successes of early Islamic medicine. Physicians developed a range of ophthalmological surgical instruments, and a technique known as couching used to treat cataracts had a success rate of over 60 per cent.

The series is full of interesting insights. It finds that medieval Muslims scholars rather than 19th century Europeans were the first Egyptologists. Al-Khalili interviews an Egyptologist, Dr Okasha al-Daly, who has discovered that the ninth century Iraqi scholar Ibn Wahshiyah decoded ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs eight centuries before Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone. Al-Khalili also highlights the role of Islamic astronomers such as al-Tusi in paving the way for the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton.

Al-Khalili says the story of what happened to science in the Islamic world in the eighth and ninth centuries “tells us about the universal truth of science itself”. Before Islam, science was scattered across the world. “The scholars of medieval Islam pieced together this giant scientific jigsaw by absorbing knowledge that had originated far beyond their own empire’s borders.” This great synthesis did not just produce great science. “It showed for the first time that science as an enterprise transcends political borders and religious affiliations. It is a body of knowledge that benefits all humans.”
Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, 12 January 2009