Science in Medieval Islam: An Illustrated Introduction.

Howard R. Turner. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997 xx + 262 pp., 98 b& w photos, 3 maps, Timeline, Glossary, Bibliography of "works consulted," not matching the chapter headings, Index. Paper $19.95.

Reviewed by George Saliba 

This book would have been inconceivable without the traveling exhibition "The Heritage of Islam" that was mounted on the occasion of the onset of the Fourteenth Centennial of Islam that commenced on 21 November 1979. The exhibit itself toured major cities in the United States between 1982 and 1983. The science curator for that exhibit who diligently collected or photographed the scientific objects exhibited, talked to people all over the world in academic circles, museums, libraries, etc., and finally put pen to paper to share with the general reader the results of his many years of collecting objects for the exhibit. Unfortunately, he decided to insinuate that his book was an illustrated introduction to science in medieval Islam.

From the large number of individuals who are thanked in the acknowledgment for their "guidance" on that project, one can easily detect the skill with which this diplomatic curator operated, a skill that makes it very hard for this reviewer to speak critically of a book in which he is thanked for "valuable guidance."

But an exhibit a book does not make, for an exhibit is one thing and a book is something slightly different, though both products can in principle convey very significant educational messages in their own different ways. In an exhibit, one is bombarded by visual objects, each carrying its own history and context, and no amount of writing on the labels that accompany those objects can actually put those objects, that are usually captured behind glass windows, back in their proper context. In the case of objects illustrating the role of science in Islam, they usually fall into two categories: They are either actual pages of written documents literally torn out of the codices that once embraced them, pictures thereof, or the actual manuscripts themselves opened to specific pages intended as illustrations with the viewer never being allowed to flip the page in order to find out what came before or after that specific page. The other category is that of scientific instruments, in this case mainly those dealing with astronomy like astrolabes, quadrants, globes, directional instruments or pictures thereof. Astrolabes, specifically, played a very important role in Islamic civilization, a role that has yet to be well assessed. At times, they even became highly prized art objects. They have also managed to dominate by their very precision and beauty that category of any exhibition dealing with Islamic scientific cultural remains. As a result they have become the icons of Islamic science and are too often used to illustrate almost anything dealing with that subject. This book is no exception, for a picture of such an astrolabe illustrates its cover. It is not the same astrolabe, however, that also illustrates the beginnings of each chapter. And since every one of the sixteen chapters, as well as the introduction and the other units of this book, are all illustrated by a lower layer of the same photograph of an astrolabe a reader just flipping through the pages of this book will immediately realize how preponderant this very beautiful icon has become.

The sixteen chapters of this book carry titles that refer to the various sciences known to have existed in Islamic medieval times, from Cosmology certainly not to be understood in modern terms, to mathematics - dubbed as "Native Tongue of Science," to astronomy, to astrology - condemned as "Scientific Non-science," to geography, medicine, natural sciences, alchemy and optics. These titles are introduced by four chapters: An introduction in four pages, Islam as an empire in five, forces and bonds: faith, language and thought, in sixteen pages, and roots in ten. Then they are brought to a close by another four chapters: The later years in eight pages, transmission in another eight, the new West in five pages and an epilogue in seven.

The arrangement within the chapters is rather uniform. At the beginning there are usually four or five pages describing the history of that branch of science, followed by excellent photographs of the same objects mentioned before. It is rather unfortunate that the photographs are in black and white. But even so they still exhibit the splendor of the civilization that produced those objects. The very cursory introductory statements prefixed to each chapter are woefully wanting, and most of them are inspired by secondary and tertiary works or ideas such as those held by people like George Satton toward the beginning of this century. Since the photographs are pictures of individual objects from all sorts of contexts, the captions accompanying them form several fragmented narratives that neither complement the introductory notes in a coherent fashion, nor do they develop an alternative thesis of their own that one would expect from a book. Having said that most scientific objects of any Islamic science exhibit usually come from the domain of astronomy, then it is not surprising that the field of astronomy gets the lion's share in this book, covering pages 59-107. Not because the reader is presented with an argument as to why this specific discipline is so important as to require that much space, but presumably because most of the instruments come from that field, and hence the author had more material at his disposal.

While on the subject of astronomy, this reviewer finds it very odd, to say the least, that an illustration from one page of a work by the Damascene astronomer Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375) on mathematical planetary theory is used to illustrate the chapter on cosmology (p. 42) together with two other pictures coming from the works of the mystic Ibn al-'Arabi, and a sixteenth-century Turkish historical text. Incidentally this very same page of Ibn al-Shatir's book is also used extensively by other summary publications on Islamic science despite the fact that the person who completed the original diagram has left a note in it saying that at least one of the circles he had drawn there was drawn by mistake (Sahwun Za'id). There are other better drawn diagrams of the same planetary motions in other surviving manuscripts of Ibn al-Shatir, but apparently no one has bothered to notice the mistake in this one and to replace it with another colorful picture. More importantly, that diagram, or a better version of it, really belongs in the context of objections to Greek astronomy and to the connection with Copernican astronomy, concepts mentioned in captions of other pictures of manuscript pages, photographs of which are reproduced on pages 106-107.

Returning to which objects get illustrated, the field of medicine, for example, receives short shrift in that there are no photographic illustrations of surgical objects in this instance, although we know they exist at Cairo's Islamic Museum, for example. Instead they are represented by an illustration of one page from a manuscript of the same tenth-century Spanish physician al-Zahrawi that we see illustrated almost everywhere and mostly in color, but not in the same frequency as astrolabes. The only instruments illustrated in the section on medicine are those supposedly contained in a jug designated as a "barber's pocket kit," to which a caption is added identifying the barber as more or less the accepted medieval surgeon both in Islamic civilization and elsewhere without any argument as to why this should be so. Although barbers did perform some cuts, for various purposes, the cuts in themselves did not make them surgeons and, in fact, the illustration defeats the purpose of al-Zahrawi who took the pain to illustrate in his book and describe in great detailing the use of more than two hundred surgical instruments as the author himself states in the caption for al-Zahrawi's manuscript page.

This reviewer could go on finding fault with this approach to Islamic science, but space does not allow for it, nor does the book under review really come close to holding a thesis defending any specific approach that one could argue for or against. What one is left with after reading this book is the inescapable feeling that whatever narrative there is in this book is certainly driven by the objects that were either used in the Islamic Heritage Exhibition or were examined for possible use or photographs of which were simply in the author's possession. These photographs do not constitute the necessary research for writing a book of this nature. On this point, there is no evidence that any research was done for the book at all, particularly if one were to judge the sources of ideas by the footnotes that are normally used to demonstrate the research undertaken. There are no footnotes and the reader is left to fend for him/herself and dig out the ideas from the list of "works consulted" which replace the normal bibliography.

One could argue that this book should be read as an alternative catalogue to the original exhibition that initiated it, and in that sense, it is a great success for it brings in rather good photographs; the likeness of objects standing alone almost totally out of context forms a series of puzzles wanting to be integrated into a larger narrative forming a book on the history of Islamic science. This book does not make it yet, but it is a pleasure to browse through it. After leafing through it, one would experience something similar to the experience of visiting a gallery of impressionistic painting. There are clear impressions but no clear ideas or arguments, the stuff upon which a good introductory text on Islamic science ought to be based.

George Saliba is a professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture at Columbia University, New York City.