Jan P. Hogendijk and Abdelhamid I. Sabra, The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives

Islam & Science, Summer, 2004 by Muzaffar Iqbal

Abdelhamid Sabra's chapter, "Ibn al-Haytham's Revolutionary Project in Optics: The Achievement and the Obstacle" not only brings to light the results of a life-time study of the works of Ibn al-Haytham, it also claims to use the word "revolution" in its title "in the strict sense of a conscious and radical transformation of a widely practiced and accepted approach to a whole scientific discipline, a transformation that goes to the heart of the basic assumptions of the traditional system." (xii) Sabra, one of the co-editors of the volume, has previously published some of the most important conceptual schemes for understanding the processes of transmission of scientific knowledge to and from Islamic civilization. His chapter is "an outline of the single, continuous argument which ... runs through all the seven books that make up the Optics of Ibn al-Haytham: Having totally rejected, on the basis of empirical evidence, the visual-ray hypothesis as the foundation of previous mathematical theories of vision, and aligning himself (again on the basis of experience) with the peripatetic view of vision as the reception of forms of light and color, Ibn al-Haytham was led to accord psychology a new, inevitable and fundamental role never realized earlier in the works of the Greek mathematicians and their Arabic successors." (xii)

Gerhard Endress of the University of Bochum, who has published textual editions and studies of the Arabic translations of Aristotle and late Hellenistic Neoplatonism and who is the co-author (with Dimitri Gutas) of A Greek and Arabic Lexicon: Material for a Dictionary of the Medieval Translations from Greek into Arabic (1992) and (with J. A. Aertsen) Averroes and the Aristotelian Tradition (1999), presents a survey of "Mathematics and Philosophy in Medieval Islam". Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, he constructs two opposing views of mathematics and astronomy. Plato believed that numbers and mathematics were related to an eternal world of ideas--the essence and source of our changing world. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that mathematics was abstracted from reality and not directly related to the essence of the real world. Endress then presents the views of early Muslim philosophers, such as al-Kindi (ca. 830) and his followers, who considered mathematics as an intermediary between philosophy and natural science. Taking his account to the generation of Ibn Sina (d. 1037) and Ibn al-Haytham (d. ca. 1040), Endress constructs a synthetic view of how Ibn al-Haytham, who unlike Ibn Sina, was an accomplished astronomer, tried to bridge the gap between Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy. His survey then turns to Andalusian astronomers and philosophers and ends with the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (d. 1024) and later Muslim philosophers such as 'Adud al-Din al-Iji (d. 1355).

J. L. Berggren, who is currently translating and annotating the extant works of Abu Sahl al-Kuhi, presents an insider's view of mathematics in the tenth century. His chapter, "Tenth-Century Mathematics through the Eyes of Abu Sahl al-Kuhi", also raises a basic question: "What, if anything, about al-Kuhi's work reflects its origins in Islamic civilization?" This is, indeed, one of the most important questions for understanding the relationship between Islam the religion and the scientific tradition that emerged in the Islamic civilization. Berggren explains this question in the context of mathematics in the following manner: