PHYSICAL SCIENCES
Arnold Toynbee, the renowned twentieth century English historian, tells us that science is another name for the exploitation of nature. He then raises the question as to why man took so long to control and exploit it when it had existed in our world for millions of years. He himself gives us the answer:
For ancient man nature was not just a treasure trove of ‘natural resources,’ but a goddess, ‘Mother Earth.’ And the vegetation that sprang from the earth, the animals that roamed the earth’s surface, and the minerals hiding in the earth’s bowels, all partook of nature’s divinity, so did all natural phenomena—springs and rivers and the sea; mountains; earthquakes and lightning and thunder. Such was the original religion of all mankind.
When nature is regarded as an object of worship, it cannot, at the same time, be looked at as an object of exploitation, investigation and conquest. Referring to the historical fact mentioned above, Toynbee acknowledges that the age in which nature was sacrosanct was brought to an end only with the advent of monotheism. The concept of monotheism brought nature down from being a deity set upon a high pedestal to being just another part of God’s Creation. Now, instead of the phenomena of nature being held as objects of worship, they came to be held as objects of subjugation and conquest.
This concept of monotheism had been propounded by all the prophets in the past. However, it remained at the level of pronouncement on an individual level; it could not reach the stage of general revolution. The movement based on monotheism finally reached the stage of revolution only through the struggle of the Prophet and his companions. After this, the tendency to regard nature as holy decreased to the point where it no longer existed as such; this was a necessary outcome of such a revolution. Now man started looking at nature with a view to exploring and exploiting it. This process developed in a positive way over the centuries, sometimes slowing, sometimes accelerating, but finally ushering in our modern scientific age.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica states in its article, ‘History of Physical Sciences,’ that Greek science fell into jeopardy after the second century A.D., because the Romans were not interested in it. “Social pressures, political persecution and the anti-intellectual bias of the church Fathers drove the few remaining Greek scientists and philosophers to the East. There they ultimately found a welcome when the rise of Islam in the seventh century stimulated interest in scientific and philosophic subjects. Most of the important Greek scientific texts were preserved in Arabic translations. Although the Arabs did not alter the foundations of Greek science, they made several important contributions within its general framework, and when the interest in Greek learning revived in Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, scholars turned to Islamic Spain for the scientific texts. A spate of translations (from Arabic into Latin) resulted in the revival of science in the west ... scientists of the Middle Ages reached high levels of sophistication and prepared the ground for the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”
Moseoleban asserts in his book, Arab Civilization, that Arab sciences reached Europe not through the crusades, but by way of Andalusia, Sicily and Italy. In 1330, an institute for translation was established under the patronage of
Remond of Taletala, through which famous books were rendered into Latin from Arabic, and through these translations a whole new world was opened up to Europe. This work of translation continued right up to the fourteenth century. Not only the works of Ar Razi, Avicena and Averroes, but also those of Galen, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Eucleides, Ptolemy, etc. were translated from Arabic into Latin. Dr. Guilkirk, in his book on the history of this period, mentions more than three hundred books translated from Arabic into Latin.
Other western scholars have even more openly acknowledged this as a historical fact. Robert Briffault, for example, has written that the Greeks produced system, generalized it, formulated it, but that it was alien to their temperament to go into the labour of observation and experimental research. George Sarton, the famous chronicler of scientific advances, writes that the most fundamental and most distinctive success lay in fostering the latter activities and that what ultimately came to be called science was the result of a new method of experiment, observation and calculation originally brought into being by the Muslims.
This spirit of enquiry prevailed until the twelfth century and was transmitted to Europe through the Arabs. Modern science is, indeed, the greatest legacy of the Islamic civilization.
