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