Skeptical Inquirer • November/December 2012 Edis & Brentjes — A Golden Age of Harmony? 8/20/2012 (1st Proof) 1 A Golden Age of Harmony? Misrepresenting Science and History in 1001 Inventions Exhibit Its intentions may be good, but a major new exhibit disregards serious differences between medieval and modern science and warps history to serve a present-day agenda of perfect harmony between science and Islam. TAN ER ED IS AN D S O N J A BREN TJ ES V isitors to The National Geographic Museum in Washington, DC, between August 2012 and February 2013 will encounter a touring exhibition called 1001 Inventions: Discover the Golden Age of Muslim Civilization. The exhibit is impressive and has won various awards and gathered endorsements from figures such as Charles, the Prince of Wales. The exhibit and accompanying catalog and website (www.1001inventions.com) are lavishly illustrated and richly produced. With past appearances in London’s Science Museum, Istanbul, the New York Hall of Science, Abu Dhabi, and the California Science Center in Los Angeles, 1001 Inventions tells a story of how, between the seventh and seventeenth centuries, Muslim scientists made groundbreaking discoveries that eventually shaped the modern world. According to the exhibit and catalogue (Al-Hassani 2012), Muslims laid the foundations of modern science and technology. Great Muslims of the past—mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, physicians, architects, engineers, economists, sociologists, artists, artisans, and educators—expressed their religiosity through beneficial contributions to society and humanity. They were the first to discover or invent much in the sciences, technologies, industries, and daily life; and when Muslims continued earlier scholarly projects they often revolutionized their treatment. Much of this story, however, is not accurate. Certainly, it does not hurt to be aware that modern science and technology did not appear out of the blue in Western Europe, and that scholars in medieval Muslim societies did not merely preserve and transmit the knowledge of antiquity. There were times when the richest intellectual life on the planet was to be found in places where Islam was the dominant religion. But 1001 Inventions is a missed opportunity to raise awareness about the history of science. The exhibit presents a series of heroic tales of medieval Muslim discoveries from out of nowhere, with no context, and with a disregard for accuracy that shades into pure fiction. The term “Golden Age” is Skeptical Inquirer • November/December 2012 Edis & Brentjes — A Golden Age of Harmony? 8/20/2012 (1st Proof) occasionally used by historians of science to describe the vibrant intellectual life in a number of predominantly Muslim societies between the eighth and fourteenth centuries. The exhibit 1001 Inventions, however, draws on a more popular, mythic conception of a Golden Age. It disregards serious differences between medieval and modern science and warps history to serve a present-day agenda of perfect harmony between science and Islam. It promotes serious misunderstandings of science and history. Egregious mistakes and disregard for professional standards are very common throughout the exhibit catalogue. A few examples give the flavor. Flight. 1001 Inventions portrays the ninth-century Andalusian Ibn Firnas as the first person to build a flying machine. The catalogue goes on for many pages, describing his success at flight, his design improvements, an injury he sustained in a flight attempt, and so forth (pp. 296–98). It gives artistic impressions of Ibn Firnas strapped with what looks like a frame resembling bird or bat wings. The legend of Ibn Firnas’s flight is popular among many Muslims today; there is an airport north of Baghdad named after him. And yet, this claim of successful powered flight—with wings made out of eagle feathers no less—is based mainly on a few sentences in a Moroccan chronicle from seven hundred years later. 1001 Inventions also endorses and expands on the similar Turkish legend of Hezarfen Ahmet Çelebi, who allegedly used eagle feathers to fly over Istanbul in the seventeenth century, according to another few sentences by a chronicler. (A small airport in Istanbul is named after Hezarfen.) The sparseness of the historical evidence for these feats is evident even with a simple Wikipedia check, and at face value, flight with muscle-powered wings is physically impossible. And yet, 1001 Inventions not only endorses notoriously unreliable accounts but indulges in lengthy and purely fictional elaborations. Optics. A section on “Vision and Cameras” highlights Ibn al-Haytham in 2 the tenth century. Indeed, Ibn alHaytham’s work is recognizably in the tradition of what became physics in today’s sense, and should be better known. But 1001 Inventions presents his optics in a vacuum. Its major illustration is the camera obscura, but other philosophers, astronomers, bureaucrats, and architects long before Ibn alHaytham analyzed the working principles of the camera obscura, wrote about it, and described some of its properties: not only Aristotle or Theon of Alexandria, but allegedly also MoTzi in fifth-century BCE China, Anthemius of Tralles, or al-Kindi. Ibn al-Haytham did not invent the device nor did he develop it to any higher level of complexity or accuracy. Ibn al-Haytham’s main contributions consisted of the theoretical interpretation of what he saw and in the systematic character of some of his experiments. The catalogue says Ibn al-Haytham was “the first to totally reject the theory of the Greeks.” However, his theory of vision combines concepts, methods, and questions from ancient Greek philosophy, optics, and mathematics, which he critically sorted, taking important concepts like the Aristotelian form or the Euclidean geometrical ray aboard his new theory, as well as Ptolemy’s experiments on reflection and Euclidean geometry. The misplaced emphasis of 1001 Inventions on “the first inventor or discoverer” leads the catalogue to declare that the “ninth-century polymath alKindi first laid down the foundations of modern day optics by questioning the Greek theories of vision. He said that how we see, our visual cone, is not formed of discrete rays as Euclid had said, but appeared as a volume, in three dimensions, of continuous radiation” (p. 54). Peter Adamson has studied some of the modifications of the texts known as Euclid’s Optics and those derived from them in Arabic and Latin. He places al-Kindi in the tradition of the Pseudo-Euclidian De Speculis and Johannes Philoponnus (sixth century) who are among the many mostly anonymous teachers and students who modified older positions in the light of philosophical debates about how we Skeptical Inquirer • November/December 2012 Edis & Brentjes — A Golden Age of Harmony? 8/20/2012 (1st Proof) see, debates that were clearly anchored in the intellectual and instrumental contexts of Late Antiquity (Adamson 2006, 213-4). The almost complete erasure of such ancient contexts as well as the contexts of Muslim scholars themselves makes it impossible to understand the achievements of those scholars, their new contributions, and their conceptual peculiarities, limitations, and errors. Claims of al-Kindi laying the foundations of modern-day optics are gross exaggerations resulting from a lack of knowledge about ancient Greek and medieval Arabic as well as Latin texts on optics and the differences between these theories and today’s geometrical optics. Clocks. The section on clocks features al-Jazari, who “was a pious Muslim and highly skilled engineer who gave birth to the concept of automatic machines.” Whether he was a pious Muslim is as unknown as almost everything else about him, except for his works, extant in manuscripts, and possibly a few material objects like clocks. Reading his work on ingenious mechanical devices teaches us, however, that al-Jazari did not see himself as the birth giver of automatic machines or their conceptualization or as an engineer, but as the head of what perhaps signifies constructions (ra’s al‘amal), as which he was apparently highly appreciated. Al-Jazari’s so-called “elephant clock” was not “the first robotics with moving time-telling figures.” Reports about analogous automata are well attested for pre-Islamic cultures. It is highly unlikely that al-Jazari’s clock “celebrated the diversity of humankind” (p. 44; in the second edition, this claim had a stronger religious connotation, ascribing to al-Jazari the intention “to celebrate the diversity of mankind and the universal nature of Islam”). These were not concerns of his time and culture, for which the diversity of humankind and its celebration are completely anachronistic ideas. Historical chronicles of the period aggressively stand against those that are diverse; those that deviate from the writers’ own beliefs and cultural affilia- 3 tions. 1001 Inventions defends the idea that al-Jazari celebrated humankind’s diversity by pointing to the various animals decorating the clock. This interpretation ignores the difficulties that art historians have in identifying the origins of the forms and figures. Caution is needed to find probable meanings of symbols at a concrete place and in a specific time. Education. The chapter on “school” begins with two fundamentally wrong claims in its introductory summary (p. 63), namely that: (1) “the medieval Muslims excelled in learning, from the primary-level mosque schools through to universities and the illustrious House of Wisdom, an intellectual academy in ninth-century Baghdad”; and (2) “the ethos of learning was a culture where enquiring minds searched for truth based on scientific rigour and experimentation, where opinion and speculation were cast out as unworthy pupils. This system of learning embodied by medieval Islam formed the backbone and foundation from which came forth the exceptional inventions and discoveries.” Not a single word in these two sentences can be backed by medieval sources. Not only were there no universities at the time, madrasas as institutions teaching some parts of mathematics and astronomy are later creations only vaguely similar to universities. In general, there were no primary-level mosque schools in all Islamic societies that provided basic education to all boys. There were a limited number of such schools that usually had one teacher and a patron. The situation differed from city to city, town to town, village to village, or even quarter to quarter. Identifying the direct precursors of today’s research and educational institutions in medieval Muslim societies is the work of ideology, not scholarship. These gross errors are just a sample—similar problems repeatedly show up throughout the exhibition catalogue. Such errors are not attributable to the inevitable simplifications necessary to present complex historical matters to the general public, including schoolchildren. Curators are typically Skeptical Inquirer • November/December 2012 Edis & Brentjes — A Golden Age of Harmony? 8/20/2012 (1st Proof) experts themselves and also work closely with other academic experts to produce exhibits that are both accurate and accessible while paying attention to appropriate contexts. 1001 Inventions claims to have relied upon reputable academic resources, and includes some notable historians of science in its list of consultants. Nonetheless, the result is still a mass of distortions that serve a present-day agenda. Indeed, the agenda behind 1001 Inventions is explicit—to boost respect for a Muslim civilizational heritage, and to prevent Muslims, especially young Muslims, from feeling as if they are outsiders to modern scientific and technological enterprises. These are legitimate aims. It is also legitimate to oppose Eurocentric conceptions of history, which, though not very influential among the present generation of scholars, may still have some effect on popular views of science and the history of science. But 1001 Inventions pursues these legitimate aims by setting up a crude counter-myth. In its version of history, a heroic, conventionally devout set of Muslims act as civilizing agents for the rest of the world, laying the foundations for much of modernity. The exhibit is blind to differences between today’s science and its medieval precursors, and sets up its myth of a Golden Age precisely in order to overcome present cultural difficulties involving science. Naturally, the exhibit presses many elements of popular Muslim apologetics into service, such as the common notion that historical tensions between science and religion are artifacts of the Western Christian experience that do not apply to Islam (Aydın 2000, 86). To further this view, 1001 Inventions presents an absurd picture of science—equated to modern science— taught in medieval mosques, in an environment of complete harmony between revealed religion and knowledge about nature: There was little distinction between religion and knowledge as the mosque was both the place of prayer and the place of learning. Subjects included science, so science and reli- 4 gion sat side by side comfortably, which was not the case in other parts of the world. (Al-Hassani 2012, 64) Such an apologetic agenda is not just an innocent device to boost the confidence of Muslim students. Myths of a Golden Age and a frictionless harmony between Islam and science are major aspects of today’s popular Muslim conceptions of science—and these myths are closely connected to the extensive and popular religiously colored pseudoscientific beliefs found in Muslim populations (Edis 2007). Perhaps beliefs such as a Golden Age of harmony between science and religion may make science less alien to Muslim students, overcoming culturally defensive attitudes. There is no good evidence to this effect. However, there is plenty to indicate that when traditional beliefs such as a divine design in nature confront naturalistic scientific theories such as Darwinian evolution, the notion of harmony shields traditional beliefs from criticism. Both in terms of public support and penetration into public education systems, the strongest, most successful versions of creationism today are rooted in Islamic apologetics (Edis 2007; Hameed 2008). The myth of a Golden Age is understandable, maybe even predictable. After all, after the Industrial Revolution, many societies confronted the suddenly overwhelming military and commercial advantage enjoyed by European empires. This advantage was clearly based on science and technology. Therefore the cultural elites of many suddenly subordinated societies were motivated to appropriate science for themselves. Buddhists and Hindus, as well as Muslims, looked to their own pre-modern tradition for traces of science. They sometimes claimed that they had set the stage for modern science, always asserting harmony between true science and religion— often leading to difficulties with evolution by natural selection (Lopez 2008; Brown 2012). Chinese and Japanese elites, like many Muslims, decided to adopt modern technology but also to guard against those aspects of Western thinking that might corrupt spiritual Skeptical Inquirer • November/December 2012 Edis & Brentjes — A Golden Age of Harmony? 8/20/2012 (1st Proof) and moral beliefs (Buruma and Margalit 2004). Recently, the United States had an episode of “Afrocentric” pseudoscience, attributing the foundations of modern science to Africans and promoting a distorted view of science in harmony with spiritual and paranormal beliefs (Ortiz de Montellano 1991; 1992). One of the motivations expressed for Afrocentrism was its alleged value for African American students who felt culturally excluded from educational narratives about the advancement of science. Imagining a Golden Age of harmony between science and Islam, however, is problematic beyond falsifications or decontextualizations of history. Perhaps its most important mistake is what 1001 Inventions exemplifies so well: overlooking the major differences between medieval and modern science. 1001 Inventions translates medieval science and technology into the scientific and technological idiom of today, suggesting closeness, similarity, or even identity between medieval scientific results and technological products and today’s sciences and technologies. It does not warn readers and visitors that many of the disciplines, concepts, methods, or devices named in the book and the exhibition were conceived of by their medieval authors or producers differently, or that disciplines like physics, biology, and chemistry did not exist yet, but came into being much later and in other contexts. By selectively presenting only what they believe can be linked to modern knowledge, those responsible for the exhibit misrepresent a medieval intellectual environment where astrology or various medical superstitions were as respectable as innovations in planetary models or medical theory. 1001 Inventions implies that medieval intellectual and material achievements are the same as the modern forms the writers, editors, and curators gave them when using modern labels, formulas, materials, and visual identifications. This identification of medieval and modern science has negative consequences. A Golden Age myth suggests that instead of adopting a significantly 5 different way of thinking about nature, Muslims need only to reinstate medieval conceptions of nature and medieval habits of thought in order to become creatively engaged in cuttingedge science and technology. That is exactly the wrong thing to do. To the extent that a Golden Age myth influences science and education policy, it is likely to undermine rather than support efforts to improve the present contributions of Muslim populations to science and technology. 1001 Inventions misrepresents science and the history of science. It is especially unfortunate that the exhibit is being hosted by the National Geographic Museum, given the influence National Geographic has in popularizing science in the United States. By uncritically presenting a myth of a Golden Age of harmony, they are performing a serious disservice to the public understanding of science and history. n R eferences Adamson, P. 2006. Vision, light, and color in alKindī, Ptolemy and the ancient commentators. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 16: 207–36. Al-Hassani, S.T.S. (ed.). 2012. 1001 Inventions. The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Civilization. 3rd Edition, Washington, DC: National Geographic. Aydın, M.S. 2000. İslâmın Evrenselliği, İstanbul: Ufuk Kitapları. Brown, C.M. 2012. Hindu Perspectives on Evolution: Darwin, Dharma, and Design. New York: Routledge. Buruma, I., and A. Margolit. 2004. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. New York: The Penguin Press. Edis, T. 2007. An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. Hameed, S. 2008. Bracing for Islamic Creationism. Science 322: 1637–38. Lopez Jr., D.S. 2008. Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ortiz de Montellano, B. 1991. Multicultural pseudoscience: Spreading scientific illiteracy among minorities. SKEPTICAL INqUIRER 16(1): 46–50. ———. 1992. Magic melanin: Spreading scientific illiteracy among minorities. SKEPTICAL INqUIRER 16(2): 163–66. Taner Edis is professor of physics at Truman State University and author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam. Skeptical Inquirer • November/December 2012 Edis & Brentjes — A Golden Age of Harmony? 8/20/2012 (1st Proof) Sonja Brentjes is researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and author of Travellers from Europe in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires,16th–17th Centuries: Seeking, Transforming, Discarding Knowledge. P ossible illustration; note from T aner E dis: T he exhibit is largely an apologetic enterprise that involves serious distor tions of the histor y of science. For example, in the second edition of the catalogue, if you go dow n to pages 308313, you w ill find lengthy stories and illustrations of flights performed by figures such as I bn F irnas and H ezarfen A hmed Ç elebi. T hese however, are legends. T he actual historical documentation behind the alleged events, how ever, are just a few sentences in a single chronicler’s w ork each. I n the case of I bn F irnas, this documentation comes from many centuries later. I n other w ords, the exhibit, in order to glorify medieval M uslim technological achievements, resor ts to just making things up. 6