Muslim Journeys Book Discussion

The Arabic legacy of science and philosophy has long been hidden from
the West. British-Iraqi physicist Jim Al-Khalili unveils that legacy to
fascinating effect by returning to its roots in the hubs of Arab
innovation that would advance science and jump-start the European
Renaissance. Inspired by the Koranic injunction to study closely all of
God's works, rulers throughout the Islamic world funded armies of
scholars who gathered and translated Persian, Sanskrit, and Greek texts.
From the ninth through the fourteenth centuries, these scholars built
upon those foundations a scientific revolution that bridged the
one-thousand-year gap between the ancient Greeks and the European
Renaissance.

Many of the innovations that we think of as hallmarks of Western
science were actually the result of Arab ingenuity: Astronomers laid the
foundations for the heliocentric model of the solar system long before
Copernicus; physicians accurately described blood circulation and the
inner workings of the eye ages before Europeans solved those mysteries;
physicists made discoveries that laid the foundation for Newton's
theories of optics. But the most significant legacy of Middle Eastern
science was its evidence-based approach-the lack of which kept Europeans
in the dark throughout the Dark Ages. The father of this experimental
approach to science-what we call the scientific method-was an Iraqi
physicist who applied it centuries before Europeans first dabbled in it.
Al-Khalili details not only how discoveries like these were made, but
also how they changed European minds and how they were ultimately
obscured by later Western versions of the same principles.

With transporting detail, Al-Khalili places the reader in the
intellectual and cultural hothouses of the Arab Enlightenment: the House
of Wisdom in Baghdad, one of the world's greatest academies, the holy
city of Isfahan, the melting pots of Damascus and Cairo, and the
embattled Islamic outposts of Spain.

Al-Khalili tackles two tantalizing questions: Why did the Arab world
enter its own Dark Age after such a dazzling enlightenment? And how much
did Arabic learning contribute to making the Western world as we know
it? Given his singular combination of expertise in both the Western and
Middle Eastern scientific traditions, Al-Khalili is uniquely qualified
to solve those riddles