Another great quote I found in Jim Al-Khalili's "The Golden Age of Arabic Science" :
“The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.”
— Ibn al-Haytham, c.1025 AD.
I would love to see that quote written in Arabic calligraphy.
ReplyDeleteGreat post. It reads like
ReplyDeletea manifesto of science, reiterated by Richard Fineman,
the first principle is that you must not allow yourself to be fooled and you are the easiest to fool
Their religion was the same, Islam - but the cultural focus was science. All of it.
Medicine, astronomy, optics and mathimatics. Algebra, algorithm, Arabic numerals were theirs. Most of the first magnitude stars (in their hemisphere) bear names given by them.
Around 700a.d. an influential Imam began to teach that a better person would concern himself with learning about Allah rather than worldly goings-on.
Any event was seen as "the will of Allah".
If that's as far as you are willing to go to understand what happened, you will never learn anything.
The cultural focus shifted and they still haven't recovered.
The German deutsche mark has an image of a scientist on it, Gauss - with an image of a bell curve, a distribution diagram right on the money.
It's not a coincidence that German engineering is world renowned.
The difference is not which religion was practiced, but the cultural focus.