Science and Islam (2009–…): Season 1, Episode 3 - The Power of Doubt - full transcript
The sun, the moon,
the planets and stars
have always fired our imaginations
and fuelled our mythologies.
And studying the heavens -
astronomy - is surely the oldest
scientific discipline there is.
What's really unexpected, I guess,
is that astronomy has repaid our
interest in it over the centuries.
Time after time it's been the place
where new ideas have emerged,
and it's often led
the rest of sciences.
I'm a Professor of Physics
at the University of Surrey,
and the ideas and theories of the
great European scientists
like Galileo, Newton and Einstein
lie at the heart of my work.
But there's another side to me.
I'm half-Iraqi, and
I'm keen to investigate stories I'd
heard as a schoolboy in Baghdad
of great astronomers from
the medieval Islamic world
whose work shaped the discoveries
of these later, Western scientists.
So, I'm going on a journey through
Syria and Egypt, to the remote
mountains in northern Iran,
to discover how the work of these
Islamic astronomers had dramatic
and far-reaching consequences.
There, I'll discover how they
were the first to attack seemingly
unshakeable Greek ideas
about how the heavenly bodies
move around the earth.
It was Islam that paved the way
for one of the greatest upheavals
in the history of science.
This is the University of Padua
in northern Italy.
I'm here to see
incontrovertible evidence
that one of the greatest
breakthroughs in European science
links back to the earlier
work by Islamic scholars.
Astronomer Dr Luisa Pigotti and I
are climbing up to the
18th century observatory.
At the top she promises to show
me one of the most important
books in scientific history.
So, what do we have here?
OK...
This is the second edition of
De Revolutionibus.
Ah, Copernicus. Yes.
This is De Revolutionibus
Orbium Celestium,
which was published in 1543
by the Polish astronomer
Nicolaus Copernicus.
The significance of this
book is enormous.
In it, Copernicus argues for the
first time since Greek antiquity
that all the planets, including
the Earth, go around the sun.
For thousands of years, everyone had
believed a very different view -
that the earth is static and
everything - including the stars,
sun and planets - move around it.
And here there are...all his system,
OK...?
Oh, here we go.
Sol. The sun in the middle.
Yes.
Oh, yes, there's Terra...
With the moon.
With the moon going around it. Yes.
This is an astonishing book.
And many historians credit
it with starting the European
scientific revolution.
The first, crucial step in a
journey that led to modern physics.
Well, I agree.
But it does seem a bit odd
that one doesn't hear much
about where Copernicus got
his ideas and information.
The impression is that
they came out of nowhere.
The beginning...
The beginning is all in Arabic.
It certainly is a real revelation
to me
that he explicitly mentions a
9th century Muslim
for providing him with a great
deal of observational data -
an astronomer who lived in
Damascus, called Al-Battani.
Like all the great scientists of the
Islamic Empire,
Al-Battani lived in
a culture without portraiture.
All we have are later impressions
of what he might have looked like.
And here he mentions Hipparchus,
Ptolemy and so on.
And he started to mention
what he called Machometi Aracenfis,
he means Al-Battani.
OK. And then this second book
here... This second book is...
We can look at the beginning
in Latin... I see...
Copernicus, in fact, made extensive
use of Al-Battani's observations
of the positions of planets,
the sun, the moon and stars.
He worked with Latin
translations, similar to this one,
of the Syrian astronomer's data.
Kitab Al-Zij Al-Battani.
So this is Al-Battani's zij,
his book of star charts.
So it has the Arabic on
one side and...
Yes. And then the Latin version.
That's convenient.
But certainly he had the data, the
observational data, by Al-Battani.
And Copernicus' book is
full of clues
that hints at other past sources.
And though Al-Battani is the
only Islamic astronomer Copernicus
actually names,
recent detective work has uncovered
clues that Copernicus
based many of his ideas
on the work of
other Islamic scholars.
The clearest example is Copernicus's
use of a mathematical idea
devised by the 13th century Islamic
astronomer Al-Tusi,
called the Tusi Couple.
Back in England, I
compared a copy of Al-Tusi's
Tadhkirah Al-Hay Fi'ilm Sl-hay'ah
with another edition of
Copernicus' Revolutionibus.
In it there's a diagram
of the Tusi Couple -
and there's an almost identical
diagram in Copernicus's book.
Even down to the letters that
mark the points on the circles.
So, in Al-Tusi there is the
Arabic Alif, which is A.
There's the Baa, which is B.
Gheem, over here, is the G.
And the Dal at the centre, D.
It's a remarkable similarity.
Now this might just be coincidence,
but it's pretty compelling evidence.
In fact,
I truly believe that Copernicus
must have been aware of Al-Tusi's
work and other Islamic astronomers.
Further detective work also shows
that Copernicus used mathematical
ideas for planetary motion
that are remarkably similar
to ones developed by another
Islamic astronomer,
a 14th century Syrian
called Ibn Al-Shatir.
For some historians
this cannot be coincidence.
Copernicus, to me, I have no proof,
I don't have a smoking gun.
But to me it looked like,
and by analysing his own words,
it looks like he
was working from diagrams.
Somebody gave him a geometric diagram
of what was done by Ibn Shatir to
solve the problem of the moon,
for example, to solve the
problem of the upper planets,
to solve the problem of the movement
of Mercury, he had diagrams,
and he was genius enough
to be able to figure out from the
diagrams what was the underlying
theory behind those diagrams.
So, far from emerging from nowhere,
it seems Copernicus' work would be
better described as
the culmination of the preceding
500 years of Islamic astronomy.
I wanted to investigate this story,
find out more about those
astronomers and their ideas.
But before that, I wanted to
investigate an even deeper question.
What actually motivated
medieval Islamic scholars'
interest in astronomy?
This is the Umayyad Mosque
in the heart of the Syrian capital,
Damascus,
and is one of the
oldest in the world.
And I'm here on a
kind of treasure hunt.
Well, it says says in the books
that there is a sundial on the top
of the Arus Minaret,
the bright minaret over there.
So we'll see whether
it is there or not...
This is Dr Rim Turkmani,
an astrophysicist and medieval
astronomy expert
from Imperial College London.
And we're looking for one of
the most accurate sundials
made in the medieval world.
And equally exciting for me
is the fact that it was made by one
of the Islamic astronomers
who had so heavily influenced
Copernicus, Ibn Shatir.
Let's see...
Officials in the mosque claim that
the sundial was removed in the
19th century,
but Rim's research suggests that an
exact replica might still exist,
high in one of
the minarets, hidden from view.
It's not quite the lost of arc
of the covenant,
but the idea of discovering a
150-year-old artefact
is still quite something.
Would you recognise anything if
you...? Yeah, I need to look out
of the other window, I'm sorry.
Nope. No, it is further up...
Yeah.
Marking time accurately
is essential to Islam.
The Qur'an requires the faithful
to pray five times a day,
at five very precise times.
At the exact moment of dawn,
when the sun is overhead,
in the afternoon, at sunset,
and then again at the
moment of nightfall.
So for early Islam,
an accurate sundial was an extremely
important fixture in many mosques.
That's it. That's it, I've found it!
I've found it!
Here it is, that's it, look!
Just as described in the book.
Wow! It's hidden by the pillar.
Yeah. No wonder they didn't
know that it exists here.
It's all
covered with the pigeons' filth.
Pigeon crap. Yeah. Try that.
Oh, great, thank you.
Now, this consists of three sundials.
The main, big one.
And there's the northern
one and the southern one.
There is a line here for Dhuhr,
the midday prayer, and there is
one for the afternoon prayer.
Ibn Al-Shatir had calculated
the arrangement of these lines
so that the sun dial remains
accurate all through the year,
even though length
of the days change.
They will have a timekeeper.
You know, it's a very important job.
Yeah. So he would sit here watching
the shadow... Exactly.
And the precise moment for prayer,
he'd signal to the muezzin to start
the call for prayer. Exactly.
Ibn Al-Shatir's sundial,
accurate to within minutes,
really showed me how Islam
required its scholars
to make meticulously accurate
observations of heavenly bodies.
And I began to understand why
Copernicus was so impressed by the
work of his Islamic predecessors.
They really brought standards of
accuracy and precision to astronomy
that were unheard of before.
They had calculated the size
of the Earth to within 1 per cent.
And created trigonometric tables
accurate to three decimal places.
And when I met up with Rim
Turkmani again on Mount Qassioun
outside Damascus,
I was to hear about the Islamic
astronomer who personified
accurate observation,
the man whose
astronomical tables and measurements
Copernicus explicitly makes
reference to - Al-Battani.
Born in 858 in southern Turkey,
Al-Battani made accurate
astronomical measurement a
personal obsession.
And the story goes that Al-Battani
used to observe on this mountain here
in this observatory...
Over 40 years from 877 - both here
and in the town of Raqqah -
Al-Battani's great project
was to work to out,
as accurately as possible,
the length of the year.
This is a copy of
the original manuscript.
OK.
I'll show you the chapter at which he
explains the length of the year, OK?
Mm-hmm. The Chapter 27.
So he first started by citing
the ancient values of the
Egyptians and the Babylonians.
And he gives their
length of the year.
Their estimate of the year
was 365 days, 6 hours
and just over 10 minutes.
To improve on this, Al-Battani
used his ingenuity and a device
like this, an armillary sphere.
He used it to measure how
the length of shadows varied
over the course of the year.
With this information he worked
out the precise day
on which it's both light and dark
for exactly the same time -
the so-called equinox.
And he repeated his measurements
over the course of 40 years.
Now here's the clever bit.
He then examined a Greek text that
was written 700 years earlier,
and discovered the precise day on
which its author had also
measured the equinox.
He now had two vital
pieces of data -
the number of days
between the two observations,
and the number of years.
He divided the first number by the
second to arrive at an
astonishing result -
a year is 365 days, five hours,
46 minutes and 24 seconds.
He gets the new number,
which was only two minutes
off the modern observations.
The length of the year to an
accuracy of just two minutes.
Exactly, the one he calculated.
What's astonishing about the
accuracy of Al-Battani's
measurements
is that he had no telescope.
He used an armillary arm, his naked
eye, and devices like this -
an astrolabe.
So you move the pointer,
and you move this disc with it,
to point towards the North Star.
And then these small pointers here,
they will give you the location of
the rest of the stars
and the planets.
Despite this,
among his many other observations
is an incredibly accurate figure
for the Earth's tilt,
of just under 24 degrees -
about a half a degree from the
figure we now know it to be.
And he didn't stop there.
He measured variations in
the sun's diameter with
such accuracy
that it lead him
to astonishing conclusion.
This distance, the furthest
point the sun reaches from the
Earth during the year,
known as its apogee, actually
changes from one year to another.
Also, his tables showing the
position of the sun and moon,
which is what Copernicus refers to
some 600 years later,
set a new standard in
precision and accuracy.
So, Al-Battani and his
fellow Islamic astronomers
were clearly good observers.
But so what, you might ask.
Well, the answer is that their
observations began to suggest to
them
that the prevailing Greek theory
that described how everything
in the heavens revolved around
the Earth had some serious flaws.
This Greek tradition, which had been
unquestioned for over 700 years,
was based primarily on the
work of one of the greatest
astronomers of the ancient world.
Claudius Ptolemaeus, or Ptolemy,
was a Greek astronomer based in
Alexandria in the 2nd century AD.
He wrote one of the greatest
texts in astronomy, the Alamgest,
which was basically a distillation
of all the Greek knowledge
on the celestial world.
Ptolemy believed that the sun,
the moon, the planets and the stars
all sat on crystal spheres
that rotated around the Earth.
So, the moon sits on the
innermost sphere,
followed by the sun and the planets,
and finally, a patchwork
of stars on the outermost sphere.
So, we human beings sit at the
very centre of the universe,
with the rest of the universe
rotating around us.
But, as Ptolemy himself realised,
there's a problem with trying to
describe the heavens
as a place of
mathematically-idealised
perfect spheres.
And that is that the planets
don't really play ball.
As they move across the night sky,
they change speed,
appear to get bigger and smaller
and even go back on themselves.
Ptolemy tried to explain this away
by arguing that the planets sat on
small spheres called epicycles,
which rotated around a bigger sphere
called a deferent.
This explained why they might look
as though they were changing size
and why they sometimes
even changed direction.
Unfortunately,
that still didn't fit all the facts.
It didn't easily explain
why the planets appear to
speed up and slow down.
So rather desperately, Ptolemy
fudged his model further
by moving the Earth away from
the centre of the deferent,
and having the
deferent rotate around an arbitrary
point in space - the equant.
But now the works of astronomers
like Al-Battani
started to strain Ptolemy's
ideas to breaking point.
Their careful observations began
to suggest that even with Ptolemy's
unwieldy equants and deferents,
the actual behaviour of the heavens
didn't fit the data.
So, what do you do if you were an
astronomer living in Baghdad
and you have all these
results on your table?
The very first requirement is to say,
this Greek tradition
is not as trustworthy
as it is advertised to be.
And now of course they begin to say,
"If the fundamental values of the
astronomical measurements
of the Greeks,
"which we could double-check
and we found them to be in error,
what else is in error?"
They began to question now
the more basic foundational
astronomical, cosmological
foundations of the Greek tradition.
And question they did.
What's absolutely striking
about the writings of Islamic
scholars by the 9th century
is the increasing use of the word
"shukuk", which in English
means "doubts".
They showed it's sometimes necessary
to doubt an idea that everyone
around you believes unquestioningly.
Islamic doubting of Greek astronomy
began the slow process of
undermining the notion
that the Earth is at the
centre of the universe.
To doubt takes great
courage and imagination,
but if the great dialogue between
Islamic and European astronomers
shows anything,
it's that doubt, or
shukuk, is the engine that
drives science forward.
One of the first great shukuk
scientists was called
Ibn Al-Haytham.
He was born in the Iraqi
city of Basra in 965AD.
And was among the first
to argue passionately
that scientific ideas are only valid
if they're mathematically consistent
and reflect reality.
And when he applied his fierce,
rigorous intelligence to
Greek astronomy,
he immediately spotted that
there was a fundamental
contradiction at its heart.
On the one hand, Greek cosmology
argued that everything in the
heavens revolves around the Earth.
On the other hand, Ptolemy,
in his Almagest,
argued that if you want to
mathematically predict how
the sun and planets move,
you have to pretend that they go
around an arbitrary point in space -
the so-called equant.
This is clearly a contradiction -
the heavens can't both go around
the Earth and not go around
it at the same time.
Ibn Al-Haytham hated this
nonsensical contradiction.
In the early 11th century, he wrote
a paper, Al-Shukuk Ala-Batlamyus,
or Doubts On Ptolemy.
In it, he writes with
barely contained frustration,
"Ptolemy assumes an
arrangement that cannot exist."
Ibn Al-Haytham says, "That is a total
absurdity. We cannot accept that."
And furthermore he says,
"It's not a slip of the tongue.
"Ptolemy knew that it was absurd."
And he shows us where Ptolemy himself
was embarrassed by having
to introduce it.
So, he says there is a
fundamental reasoning problem,
meaning that the Greeks knew, that
Ptolemy knew he was making a mistake,
but he couldn't do any better,
and hints, now the challenge is to do
much better and hints to be
able to fix this...
That, in my explanation,
begins to be the programme of
research for all astronomers to come.
In order to achieve that project,
you had to be convinced -
you had to be convinced -
that it was possible to make
high-precision mathematical models
of the way in
which planets and stars move,
that would really capture how they
are in the heavens.
Ibn Al-Haytham, in effect,
laid down the challenge for
all astronomers who followed,
which was to come up with an
explanation for how the heavens move
that is both
mathematically consistent,
and agrees with what we observe.
The final answer to this would
come from far-away Europe,
with Copernicus and others.
But the next and crucial
breakthrough came somewhat closer.
The top of this mountain in northern
Iran
was the adopted home of the man
who was the next of Copernicus'
Islamic influences,
Nasir Al-Din Al-Tusi.
He would succeed in
rewriting Ptolemy's theory,
which would ultimately lead to the
overthrow of the geocentric view
of the universe,
and so the birth of
the modern scientific age.
This is the remote castle of Alamut,
Al-Tusi's adopted home.
For many years, it was the home of
a Muslim sect called the Ismailis.
It's a lovely secluded spot,
and it was
the centre of the Ismaili movement.
It's not surprising that
Al-Tusi would find a home here.
And it wasn't just him.
Many other scholars
were gathered here
and there seems to
have been a library -
it was a centre for learning
as well as a military stronghold.
Here, this is the main gate,
northern gate of the upper castle...
A new archaeological dig
is now revealing under the castle,
hewn into the living rock,
a warren of rooms and studies,
a mosque and living quarters
for this extraordinary community
of soldiers and scientists.
This is the court of mosque,
or centre of headquarters of castle.
And it was within these
cramped conditions
that Al-Tusi started his masterwork
of the shukuk,
or the doubts - the Tadhkirah.
In it he finds an answer to
Ibn Al-Haytham's first challenge -
how to eliminate Ptolemy's equant.
Instead of a sphere rotating around
an arbitrary point in space,
Al-Tusi devised a series of
two nested circles,
which rotate around each
other in such a way that
they eliminate the equant.
The nested circles
became known as a Tusi Couple.
This is the mathematical system
that finds it way into Copernicus'
work some 300 years later.
Having found a solution to the
equant problem,
Al-Tusi now wanted to complete the
task Ibn Al-Haytham
had started 200 years earlier -
to find a consistent mathematical
description of the movement
of the celestial bodies.
But to do that he needed
better data,
which meant bigger and better
equipment than he was ever
going to find here at Alamut.
And then something happened which
changed Al-Tusi's life forever -
the Mongols.
Streaming in from the East, an
army of Mongols led by Hulagu Khan
marched into Iran,
crushing everything before them.
By 1255, they had reached
the foothills of Alamut,
intent on its destruction.
Then, in a brilliant
piece of diplomacy,
Al-Tusi managed
to both save his own skin
and satisfy his scientific ambition.
He visited the Mongol leader,
and played on his deep
astrological superstition.
Convincing him he could tell the
future if only he had new equipment,
Al-Tusi persuaded the Khan
to make him his head scientist
and to build him,
just a few hundred miles away,
perched on a hilltop
where the air was clear,
the largest observatory
the world had ever seen.
This is all that remains
of the Maragheh Observatory.
The main instrument is hidden
is under this protective dome.
Al-Tusi's new astronomical centre
was based around
a single large building.
Inside was an enormous metal arc,
an armillary arm, ten metres across.
On its circumference were marked
angles in degrees and minutes.
The scientists would line up
the celestial object under study
with a central point on the arc,
and then make a reading from
the markings on the arc,
giving them the definitive, accurate
position of the object in the sky.
The building was also surrounded
by smaller astronomical equipment,
libraries,
offices and accommodation.
The observatory
even had its own dedicated mosque.
I suppose it is a little
disappointing that there's
not much left of the place now,
so you really have to
imagine what it must have
been like back in its heyday.
After all, what Al-Tusi built here
was nothing less than the world's
greatest observatory for 300 years.
And like any modern-day
international research institute,
he brought together the world's
greatest astronomers from as far
away as Morocco and even China.
I mean, it really must
have been a great
buzzing atmosphere to work here.
With his new observatory
and world-class team,
Al-Tusi was now ready to fulfil
Ibn Al-Haytham's dream -
to try to make Ptolemy's model
scientifically rigorous.
First they attacked the mathematics.
As well as the Tusi Couple,
they invented other systems
of planetary movement.
And with these new systems,
they were able to calculate
mathematically-consistent models
for many of the celestial bodies.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter,
Saturn and the sun and moon.
Al-Tusi and the astronomers he
brought together created what became
known as the Maragheh revolution,
which was a complete paradigm shift
in astronomy, overthrowing
the old Ptolemaic view.
What Islamic scholars and astronomers
like Al-Tusi do
is to organise and make
sense of mathematical astronomy
at a level of unprecedented accuracy,
using instruments more precise
than had been built before,
over longer timescales,
with predictions
of the positions of planets and stars
that no-one had previously reached -
that at Maragheh or at Alamut
we see, I think, genuine
revolutions in the level, scale and
intensity of mathematical astronomy.
But there was still a problem.
The new models were mathematically
coherent and they dispensed
with Ptolemy's unwieldy equant.
But they still firmly placed the
earth at the centre of the universe,
and that inevitably meant that
their descriptions of the heavens
were intricate and complicated,
with epicycles,
deferents and couples - it
was like some great cosmic gearbox.
It would require a huge leap
of imagination to make
the next step in our story.
And that next step would take place
2,000 miles from where I am now.
In my view, the last phase of
the Maragheh revolution took place
not in Iran or anywhere
in the Islamic Empire,
but here in Northern Italy.
Based on the work of
Muslim scholars, places like
the University of Padua were already
starting a new scientific movement -
the Renaissance.
Back in Padua,
where I began my journey,
I now understand
why Islamic astronomers
were so important to Copernicus.
They gave him his motivation.
He's the first European
to share Ibn Al-Haytham's deep
aversion to Ptolemy's cosmology.
And that's what makes Copernicus
not the first great astronomer
of a new European tradition, but
the last of the Islamic tradition.
As we've seen, many of the complex
mathematical models Copernicus uses
in his new heliocentric model,
like the Tusi Couple,
are copied from Islamic astronomers.
But more importantly,
it's Copernicus's deep desire
to bring mathematical consistency
to cosmology that he really owes
to his Islamic predecessors.
Copernicus' ideas set in motion
a train of scientific revelations
that would eventually lead to Isaac
Newton and the discovery of gravity.
In Newton's hands, Ibn Al-Haytham's
dream of an astronomy with rigorous
and coherent mathematics
which agrees with experimental
observation finally took place.
But this begs
two crucial questions -
why was the great
astronomical project
which Islamic astronomers began
completed in Europe
and not in the Middle East?
And how did knowledge
of Islamic science get to Europe
in the first place?
The answers to these questions
lie in one of the most
beautiful cities on earth,
the Queen of the Adriatic - Venice.
Venice was founded on
a swamp off the coast of Italy,
and felt itself separate
from Europe, and not
bound by its laws and traditions.
And as Shakespeare famously pointed
out, the two most important aspects
of Venice were its merchants
and its longstanding links
with the Arabs, or Moors.
It was a rich and
complicated relationship,
sometimes based on piracy and theft.
The story goes that in 828,
two Venetian merchants stole the
bones of a famous Christian saint
from Venice's rival city
across the water, Alexandria.
The bones belonged to St Mark the
Evangelist, and they brought them
back to here to St Mark's Square.
But without doubt, trade with the
East brought to Venice great wealth
and an exchange of ideas,
customs and people, as Venice expert
Vera Costantini showed me.
So this is called the Campo
dei Mori because as you can see
at the corners, there are statues
of what were called Moors.
There's another... Yeah,
there's another one with a turban.
The beard was recommended
to many Venetian merchants even
when they went to the East.
There were manuals written
for Venetian merchants.
How to blend in?
Yes. How to be respected in the East.
As Venetians traded more and more
with their Muslim neighbours,
the influence of
Islam was more strongly felt.
Arabic coffee culture
became hugely popular.
As did Islamic
styles of architecture,
with their characteristic
arches and decorations.
So, the next thing I want to show
you is the Palace of the Camel.
When Venetians traded in the East,
the unit of measurement,
of a load that could be loaded on
a dromedary was called a carrico.
And it was exactly the same unit
of measurement
they had in the East.
And it was called yook.
So it's not coincidence that
they actually imported
that unit of weight.
Yes, of measurement, of weight.
And with the Arabic trade
came the Arabic books.
The great 9th century Arabic
text on algebra appeared
in Latin in the 12th century.
The same century saw the arrival
of Arabic astronomical tables,
and in the 15th century,
the famous canon of medicine
was first published in the West.
And this influx of learning
seems to coincide with
a great historical shift.
The engine of science
begins to move west,
from the Islamic world to Europe.
That's where the great
breakthroughs from the 1500s
would mainly take place.
I encountered an astonishing and
very tangible symbol of this shift,
and a really surprising clue
as to why it happened,
thanks to Professor Angela Nuovo,
from the University of Udine.
20 years ago, in this library
on one of the islands of Venice,
Angela discovered the only surviving
version of a 500-year-old book.
And what did it feel like?
This is a big, big discovery!
Yes, yes. It was a great emotion.
I remember it was July, very hot,
like today - even hotter.
And I felt cold.
Wow!
Yes, it was a great emotion.
What she found was the very first
printed copy of Islam's
holy book, the Qur'an.
This is the first time
she has seen her Qur'an since
she discovered it 20 years ago.
But it struck me as strange
that world's first printed Qur'an
was produced in Venice,
and not in the Islamic world.
And it's obvious at first glance
that it was printed by people
who didn't speak Arabic very well.
HE READS ALOUD
What strikes me is that
it's written in what I would regard
as almost childlike handwriting.
It's clumsy.
Yeah. Well, it's the first attempt
to reproduce the handwriting
in moveable types,
and as you know, the language has an
enormous amount of different sorts.
Every letter changes according
to ligatures and the position.
Of course, so it's difficult.
Yeah, the word meaning "for that",
the dash should be underneath the L,
but it's above it,
so it says the wrong thing.
Probably there were not people
of mother language in the press.
So there were some errors in
the text, which are of course sins.
Yes, of course, as the Qur'an,
every Muslim believes it's the
word of God, you can't change it.
So when you change it, it's a sin.
How was it first received
when it was published?
Well, yes, the hypothesis is,
and I think it's true,
that it was an enormous failure
from the business point of view.
The Muslims didn't accept
the printing press for centuries,
and probably the whole copies
of this book were destroyed.
So we don't have any other copy.
Probably the only one that remained
in the Western world is this book.
'I felt that the failure of
this printed Qur'an to catch on
in the Islamic world spoke volumes.'
800 years earlier, one reason
for Islamic science's success
had been the precision
of the Arabic language -
with over 70 different ways
of writing its letters
and many extra symbols
to define pronunciation and meaning,
it allowed scholars of many
different lands to communicate
in a single, common language.
Now, with the arrival
of the printing press,
scientific ideas should have been
able to travel even more freely.
In the West, books printed
in Latin accelerated
its scientific renaissance.
But because of
its symbols and extra letters,
Arabic was much harder
to set into type than Latin,
and so a similar acceleration in the
Islamic world failed to materialize.
I believe this rejection of the new
technology - the printing press -
marks the moment in history
when Arabic science
undergoes a seismic shift.
Europe has embraced Greek and Arabic
knowledge and the new technology.
And Galileo and his ilk are poised
at the cusp of the Renaissance.
It has been a turning point
both in the history
of the Venetian printing press,
who used to be extremely powerful.
It's the limit of expansion,
let's say.
And in the history of the
general and cultural relationship
between the East and the West.
As acceptation of
printing would have meant
the acceptation of the
first important technology,
so the two histories
started to differ very much.
This initial rejection of printing
was one of the many reasons
that caused science in the Islamic
world to fall behind the West.
It coincided with a host
of global changes, all of which
affected the way science developed.
The first and most obvious reason
for the slowdown in Islamic science
is that the Islamic empire itself
falls into decline
from the mid-1200s.
One reason for this is that
it's under attack from all sides.
From the east are the Mongols.
In 1258, they invaded the capital,
Baghdad, and it's said that
the waters of the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers
ran black for days with the
ink of the books they'd destroyed.
But trouble was also brewing
in the far west of the empire.
Islamic Spain, already fragmented
into separate city states,
now faced a new threat -
a united and determined
onslaught from the Christian north.
The re-conquest, as it was called,
raged for hundreds of years,
but culminated in the 15th century,
when Ferdinand II and Isabella
led an army which forced
the last of the Muslims
in Grenada to surrender in 1492.
The Christians were intent
on removing every last vestige
of Islamic civilization
and culture from Spain.
In 1499, they ordered the
burning in this square in Granada
of all Arabic texts
from Granada's libraries...
except for a small number
of medical texts.
Within about 100 years,
every Muslim in Spain
had either been put to the sword,
burnt at the stake or banished.
And Christians from the east
of Europe were intent on
reclaiming the Holy Land -
the Crusades.
Bent on carving out
a wholly Christian Levant
and claiming
the holy city of Jerusalem,
the Crusaders launched a massive
attack on Northern Syria.
They quickly captured
this castle and turned it
into one of their strongholds.
Then, with ruthless and missionary
zeal, they marched on Jerusalem.
And as the empire
fought with its neighbours,
it collapsed into warring fiefdoms.
The Mamluks, slaves who originally
belonged to the state of Egypt,
became its leaders.
The Bourbon Almohads ruled Morocco
and Spain in the 13th century.
And the north of Syria
and Iraq splintered into
a series of city states.
But for many historians of science,
the biggest single reason
for the decline in Islamic science
was a rather famous event
that took place in 1492.
That year, the entire political
geography of the world
changed dramatically
when a certain Christopher Columbus
arrived in the Americas.
I explain it with the phenomena of
the discovery
of the New World in 1492.
The immediate result is that you got
immense amounts of gold and silver
coming to the royal houses of Europe
at the time and all the adventurers,
empires and
royal houses of the time were
setting colonies all over the world.
And science always follows
the money.
As the 16th and 17th centuries
came and went, that money,
power and hence scientific will,
moved through Italy, Spain
and onto Britain.
By the 17th century, England,
sitting at the centre
of the lucrative Atlantic trade
route, could afford big science.
And that ultimately explains why
the greatest book in world science,
Sir Isaac Newton's
Principia Mathematica,
the book that ultimately explains
the motion of the sun,
moon and planets,
was not published in Baghdad,
but in London.
It was necessary for him to have data
of astonishing accuracy
gathered from across the world.
Global inventories of numbers,
observations, positions.
The heights of tides, the
positions of comets and planets,
the rate at which pendulums beat...
It's a global project,
it's big science.
And many of those observations,
many of those mathematical models
were of course models
initially developed
by Islamic astronomers in Egypt
and the Near East and Central Asia.
But there's
a final twist in the tale.
As the wealth of the Islamic nations
subsided through war,
political and religious entrenchment
and the loss of its lucrative trade,
so its science declined.
But what this doesn't explain
is why their scientific achievements
have been so forgotten.
And that's partly because
as Europeans colonised great swathes
of the Middle East and Asia,
they actively encouraged the idea
that the civilizations
they encountered were moribund
and in decline.
It seems the English and
the French were uncomfortable
with subjugating people
whose knowledge and science might
be as sophisticated as their own.
So it became important
to portray the Islamic world
in a very specific way,
namely that yes, they
once were very sophisticated and had
great scientists and philosophers,
but of course now,
they've fallen into decay.
Somehow this point of view
made the whole colonial enterprise
seem much more palatable.
One of the most fascinating
developments, I think,
in the history
of the encounter between
western Europeans and other cultures
is a kind of shift which has got
fundamental and terrible consequences
amongst western Europeans,
when they start to reflect on
why they are superior.
It doesn't often cross western
Europeans' minds that they might not
be superior to everybody else.
For a very long time after all,
western Europeans in general,
the British, for example,
supposed that their superiority
lay in their religion.
But then I think around the 1700s,
we begin to see a shift.
And the shift is from claiming
that the reason for European
superiority is its religion
to the reason
for European superiority
is its science and technology.
Eventually it ends up with the famous
phrase, "We have the Gatling gun,
and they do not."
Europeans in that period
were quite prepared to acknowledge
that in ancient times,
Islam for example had achieved
great things in the sciences.
But they weren't doing so now.
So even recent Islamic
and Sanskrit astronomy
was imagined to be very old,
because if it was very old,
it meant that the culture the British
were conquering was declining.
And for the British,
that was clearly good news.
And some experts believe
that the effect of this on
Islamic scientific history
is still felt in the Islamic world
today.
The Islamic part and the Arab part
have not yet discovered their history
because their history
was obliterated intentionally
by the colonisation period.
And unfortunately when
they rediscover it now,
they are rediscovering it
in bits and pieces.
So today, for many different
reasons, the great observatories
of the medieval Islamic world
are ruined husks.
And it's true to say that most of
the great scientific breakthroughs
of the last four centuries
have taken place in the West.
But that's not to say
that science has completely ground
to a halt in the Islamic world.
Now, in the 21st century,
there are many examples
of cutting-edge research
being carried out.
I've arrived at
the Royan Institute here in Tehran,
where they carry out
stem cell research,
infertility treatment
and cloning research.
I was surprised to learn that
here in Iran, an Islamic state,
potentially controversial science
like genetic modification
and cloning is condoned, even
funded by a theocratic government.
One of the uses is when a small
part of the heart stops working,
which is finally going to lead
to heart failure...
Right. So the cells from that part
of the heart are actually replaced
with the cells that have been cloned.
Another use
of cloning in therapeutics
is actually creating an animal
which has the medicine
in their milk, for example.
So when we drink the milk,
we actually receive
the medicine we need.
Considering genetic research
has many vociferous opponents
in Christian communities,
I was intrigued to see that here
in Tehran,
they have their own in-house
imam to offer support and advice
on this sometimes
quite controversial research.
TRANSLATION:
We have got this medical ethic
committee here in Royan Institute,
and every project which is proposed
is investigated
in this committee,
and we see different aspects of it,
and they have got
to justify the project for us.
I'm not enough of an expert
in genetics to truly assess
the quality of the work here.
But one thing I can say
is how at home I felt.
Whatever cultural and political
differences we have
with the Iranian state,
inside the walls of the lab,
it was remarkably easy
to find common ground
with fellow scientists.
Nature's rules are refreshingly
free of human prejudice.
That's something the scientists
of the medieval Islamic world
understood and articulated so well.
In the 9th century, Al-Khwarizmi
synthesised Greek and Indian ideas
to create a new kind
of mathematics, algebra.
The polymath Ibn Sina brought
together the world's traditions
of healthcare into one book,
contributing to the creation
of the subject of medicine.
In remote Iranian mountains,
astronomers like Al-Tusi paved the
way for scientists working hundreds
of years later in Western Europe.
These scientists' quest for truth,
wherever it came from,
were summed up by the 9th century
philosopher Al-Kindi, who said,
"It is fitting for us not to be
ashamed of acknowledging truth,
"and to assimilate it from
whatever source it comes to us.
"There is nothing of higher value
than truth itself.
"It never cheapens or abases
he who seeks."
One moral emerges from this
epic tale of the rise and fall
of science in the Islamic world
between the 9th and 15th centuries.
And that is that science
is the universal language
of the human race.
Decimal numbers are just as useful
in India as they are in Spain.
Star charts drawn up in Iran
speak volumes to astronomers
in northern Europe.
And Newton's Principia is as true in
Arabic as it is in Latin or English.
What medieval Islamic scientists
realised and articulated
so brilliantly is that science
is the common language
of the human race.
Man-made laws may vary
from place to place,
but nature's laws
are true for all of us.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
the planets and stars
have always fired our imaginations
and fuelled our mythologies.
And studying the heavens -
astronomy - is surely the oldest
scientific discipline there is.
What's really unexpected, I guess,
is that astronomy has repaid our
interest in it over the centuries.
Time after time it's been the place
where new ideas have emerged,
and it's often led
the rest of sciences.
I'm a Professor of Physics
at the University of Surrey,
and the ideas and theories of the
great European scientists
like Galileo, Newton and Einstein
lie at the heart of my work.
But there's another side to me.
I'm half-Iraqi, and
I'm keen to investigate stories I'd
heard as a schoolboy in Baghdad
of great astronomers from
the medieval Islamic world
whose work shaped the discoveries
of these later, Western scientists.
So, I'm going on a journey through
Syria and Egypt, to the remote
mountains in northern Iran,
to discover how the work of these
Islamic astronomers had dramatic
and far-reaching consequences.
There, I'll discover how they
were the first to attack seemingly
unshakeable Greek ideas
about how the heavenly bodies
move around the earth.
It was Islam that paved the way
for one of the greatest upheavals
in the history of science.
This is the University of Padua
in northern Italy.
I'm here to see
incontrovertible evidence
that one of the greatest
breakthroughs in European science
links back to the earlier
work by Islamic scholars.
Astronomer Dr Luisa Pigotti and I
are climbing up to the
18th century observatory.
At the top she promises to show
me one of the most important
books in scientific history.
So, what do we have here?
OK...
This is the second edition of
De Revolutionibus.
Ah, Copernicus. Yes.
This is De Revolutionibus
Orbium Celestium,
which was published in 1543
by the Polish astronomer
Nicolaus Copernicus.
The significance of this
book is enormous.
In it, Copernicus argues for the
first time since Greek antiquity
that all the planets, including
the Earth, go around the sun.
For thousands of years, everyone had
believed a very different view -
that the earth is static and
everything - including the stars,
sun and planets - move around it.
And here there are...all his system,
OK...?
Oh, here we go.
Sol. The sun in the middle.
Yes.
Oh, yes, there's Terra...
With the moon.
With the moon going around it. Yes.
This is an astonishing book.
And many historians credit
it with starting the European
scientific revolution.
The first, crucial step in a
journey that led to modern physics.
Well, I agree.
But it does seem a bit odd
that one doesn't hear much
about where Copernicus got
his ideas and information.
The impression is that
they came out of nowhere.
The beginning...
The beginning is all in Arabic.
It certainly is a real revelation
to me
that he explicitly mentions a
9th century Muslim
for providing him with a great
deal of observational data -
an astronomer who lived in
Damascus, called Al-Battani.
Like all the great scientists of the
Islamic Empire,
Al-Battani lived in
a culture without portraiture.
All we have are later impressions
of what he might have looked like.
And here he mentions Hipparchus,
Ptolemy and so on.
And he started to mention
what he called Machometi Aracenfis,
he means Al-Battani.
OK. And then this second book
here... This second book is...
We can look at the beginning
in Latin... I see...
Copernicus, in fact, made extensive
use of Al-Battani's observations
of the positions of planets,
the sun, the moon and stars.
He worked with Latin
translations, similar to this one,
of the Syrian astronomer's data.
Kitab Al-Zij Al-Battani.
So this is Al-Battani's zij,
his book of star charts.
So it has the Arabic on
one side and...
Yes. And then the Latin version.
That's convenient.
But certainly he had the data, the
observational data, by Al-Battani.
And Copernicus' book is
full of clues
that hints at other past sources.
And though Al-Battani is the
only Islamic astronomer Copernicus
actually names,
recent detective work has uncovered
clues that Copernicus
based many of his ideas
on the work of
other Islamic scholars.
The clearest example is Copernicus's
use of a mathematical idea
devised by the 13th century Islamic
astronomer Al-Tusi,
called the Tusi Couple.
Back in England, I
compared a copy of Al-Tusi's
Tadhkirah Al-Hay Fi'ilm Sl-hay'ah
with another edition of
Copernicus' Revolutionibus.
In it there's a diagram
of the Tusi Couple -
and there's an almost identical
diagram in Copernicus's book.
Even down to the letters that
mark the points on the circles.
So, in Al-Tusi there is the
Arabic Alif, which is A.
There's the Baa, which is B.
Gheem, over here, is the G.
And the Dal at the centre, D.
It's a remarkable similarity.
Now this might just be coincidence,
but it's pretty compelling evidence.
In fact,
I truly believe that Copernicus
must have been aware of Al-Tusi's
work and other Islamic astronomers.
Further detective work also shows
that Copernicus used mathematical
ideas for planetary motion
that are remarkably similar
to ones developed by another
Islamic astronomer,
a 14th century Syrian
called Ibn Al-Shatir.
For some historians
this cannot be coincidence.
Copernicus, to me, I have no proof,
I don't have a smoking gun.
But to me it looked like,
and by analysing his own words,
it looks like he
was working from diagrams.
Somebody gave him a geometric diagram
of what was done by Ibn Shatir to
solve the problem of the moon,
for example, to solve the
problem of the upper planets,
to solve the problem of the movement
of Mercury, he had diagrams,
and he was genius enough
to be able to figure out from the
diagrams what was the underlying
theory behind those diagrams.
So, far from emerging from nowhere,
it seems Copernicus' work would be
better described as
the culmination of the preceding
500 years of Islamic astronomy.
I wanted to investigate this story,
find out more about those
astronomers and their ideas.
But before that, I wanted to
investigate an even deeper question.
What actually motivated
medieval Islamic scholars'
interest in astronomy?
This is the Umayyad Mosque
in the heart of the Syrian capital,
Damascus,
and is one of the
oldest in the world.
And I'm here on a
kind of treasure hunt.
Well, it says says in the books
that there is a sundial on the top
of the Arus Minaret,
the bright minaret over there.
So we'll see whether
it is there or not...
This is Dr Rim Turkmani,
an astrophysicist and medieval
astronomy expert
from Imperial College London.
And we're looking for one of
the most accurate sundials
made in the medieval world.
And equally exciting for me
is the fact that it was made by one
of the Islamic astronomers
who had so heavily influenced
Copernicus, Ibn Shatir.
Let's see...
Officials in the mosque claim that
the sundial was removed in the
19th century,
but Rim's research suggests that an
exact replica might still exist,
high in one of
the minarets, hidden from view.
It's not quite the lost of arc
of the covenant,
but the idea of discovering a
150-year-old artefact
is still quite something.
Would you recognise anything if
you...? Yeah, I need to look out
of the other window, I'm sorry.
Nope. No, it is further up...
Yeah.
Marking time accurately
is essential to Islam.
The Qur'an requires the faithful
to pray five times a day,
at five very precise times.
At the exact moment of dawn,
when the sun is overhead,
in the afternoon, at sunset,
and then again at the
moment of nightfall.
So for early Islam,
an accurate sundial was an extremely
important fixture in many mosques.
That's it. That's it, I've found it!
I've found it!
Here it is, that's it, look!
Just as described in the book.
Wow! It's hidden by the pillar.
Yeah. No wonder they didn't
know that it exists here.
It's all
covered with the pigeons' filth.
Pigeon crap. Yeah. Try that.
Oh, great, thank you.
Now, this consists of three sundials.
The main, big one.
And there's the northern
one and the southern one.
There is a line here for Dhuhr,
the midday prayer, and there is
one for the afternoon prayer.
Ibn Al-Shatir had calculated
the arrangement of these lines
so that the sun dial remains
accurate all through the year,
even though length
of the days change.
They will have a timekeeper.
You know, it's a very important job.
Yeah. So he would sit here watching
the shadow... Exactly.
And the precise moment for prayer,
he'd signal to the muezzin to start
the call for prayer. Exactly.
Ibn Al-Shatir's sundial,
accurate to within minutes,
really showed me how Islam
required its scholars
to make meticulously accurate
observations of heavenly bodies.
And I began to understand why
Copernicus was so impressed by the
work of his Islamic predecessors.
They really brought standards of
accuracy and precision to astronomy
that were unheard of before.
They had calculated the size
of the Earth to within 1 per cent.
And created trigonometric tables
accurate to three decimal places.
And when I met up with Rim
Turkmani again on Mount Qassioun
outside Damascus,
I was to hear about the Islamic
astronomer who personified
accurate observation,
the man whose
astronomical tables and measurements
Copernicus explicitly makes
reference to - Al-Battani.
Born in 858 in southern Turkey,
Al-Battani made accurate
astronomical measurement a
personal obsession.
And the story goes that Al-Battani
used to observe on this mountain here
in this observatory...
Over 40 years from 877 - both here
and in the town of Raqqah -
Al-Battani's great project
was to work to out,
as accurately as possible,
the length of the year.
This is a copy of
the original manuscript.
OK.
I'll show you the chapter at which he
explains the length of the year, OK?
Mm-hmm. The Chapter 27.
So he first started by citing
the ancient values of the
Egyptians and the Babylonians.
And he gives their
length of the year.
Their estimate of the year
was 365 days, 6 hours
and just over 10 minutes.
To improve on this, Al-Battani
used his ingenuity and a device
like this, an armillary sphere.
He used it to measure how
the length of shadows varied
over the course of the year.
With this information he worked
out the precise day
on which it's both light and dark
for exactly the same time -
the so-called equinox.
And he repeated his measurements
over the course of 40 years.
Now here's the clever bit.
He then examined a Greek text that
was written 700 years earlier,
and discovered the precise day on
which its author had also
measured the equinox.
He now had two vital
pieces of data -
the number of days
between the two observations,
and the number of years.
He divided the first number by the
second to arrive at an
astonishing result -
a year is 365 days, five hours,
46 minutes and 24 seconds.
He gets the new number,
which was only two minutes
off the modern observations.
The length of the year to an
accuracy of just two minutes.
Exactly, the one he calculated.
What's astonishing about the
accuracy of Al-Battani's
measurements
is that he had no telescope.
He used an armillary arm, his naked
eye, and devices like this -
an astrolabe.
So you move the pointer,
and you move this disc with it,
to point towards the North Star.
And then these small pointers here,
they will give you the location of
the rest of the stars
and the planets.
Despite this,
among his many other observations
is an incredibly accurate figure
for the Earth's tilt,
of just under 24 degrees -
about a half a degree from the
figure we now know it to be.
And he didn't stop there.
He measured variations in
the sun's diameter with
such accuracy
that it lead him
to astonishing conclusion.
This distance, the furthest
point the sun reaches from the
Earth during the year,
known as its apogee, actually
changes from one year to another.
Also, his tables showing the
position of the sun and moon,
which is what Copernicus refers to
some 600 years later,
set a new standard in
precision and accuracy.
So, Al-Battani and his
fellow Islamic astronomers
were clearly good observers.
But so what, you might ask.
Well, the answer is that their
observations began to suggest to
them
that the prevailing Greek theory
that described how everything
in the heavens revolved around
the Earth had some serious flaws.
This Greek tradition, which had been
unquestioned for over 700 years,
was based primarily on the
work of one of the greatest
astronomers of the ancient world.
Claudius Ptolemaeus, or Ptolemy,
was a Greek astronomer based in
Alexandria in the 2nd century AD.
He wrote one of the greatest
texts in astronomy, the Alamgest,
which was basically a distillation
of all the Greek knowledge
on the celestial world.
Ptolemy believed that the sun,
the moon, the planets and the stars
all sat on crystal spheres
that rotated around the Earth.
So, the moon sits on the
innermost sphere,
followed by the sun and the planets,
and finally, a patchwork
of stars on the outermost sphere.
So, we human beings sit at the
very centre of the universe,
with the rest of the universe
rotating around us.
But, as Ptolemy himself realised,
there's a problem with trying to
describe the heavens
as a place of
mathematically-idealised
perfect spheres.
And that is that the planets
don't really play ball.
As they move across the night sky,
they change speed,
appear to get bigger and smaller
and even go back on themselves.
Ptolemy tried to explain this away
by arguing that the planets sat on
small spheres called epicycles,
which rotated around a bigger sphere
called a deferent.
This explained why they might look
as though they were changing size
and why they sometimes
even changed direction.
Unfortunately,
that still didn't fit all the facts.
It didn't easily explain
why the planets appear to
speed up and slow down.
So rather desperately, Ptolemy
fudged his model further
by moving the Earth away from
the centre of the deferent,
and having the
deferent rotate around an arbitrary
point in space - the equant.
But now the works of astronomers
like Al-Battani
started to strain Ptolemy's
ideas to breaking point.
Their careful observations began
to suggest that even with Ptolemy's
unwieldy equants and deferents,
the actual behaviour of the heavens
didn't fit the data.
So, what do you do if you were an
astronomer living in Baghdad
and you have all these
results on your table?
The very first requirement is to say,
this Greek tradition
is not as trustworthy
as it is advertised to be.
And now of course they begin to say,
"If the fundamental values of the
astronomical measurements
of the Greeks,
"which we could double-check
and we found them to be in error,
what else is in error?"
They began to question now
the more basic foundational
astronomical, cosmological
foundations of the Greek tradition.
And question they did.
What's absolutely striking
about the writings of Islamic
scholars by the 9th century
is the increasing use of the word
"shukuk", which in English
means "doubts".
They showed it's sometimes necessary
to doubt an idea that everyone
around you believes unquestioningly.
Islamic doubting of Greek astronomy
began the slow process of
undermining the notion
that the Earth is at the
centre of the universe.
To doubt takes great
courage and imagination,
but if the great dialogue between
Islamic and European astronomers
shows anything,
it's that doubt, or
shukuk, is the engine that
drives science forward.
One of the first great shukuk
scientists was called
Ibn Al-Haytham.
He was born in the Iraqi
city of Basra in 965AD.
And was among the first
to argue passionately
that scientific ideas are only valid
if they're mathematically consistent
and reflect reality.
And when he applied his fierce,
rigorous intelligence to
Greek astronomy,
he immediately spotted that
there was a fundamental
contradiction at its heart.
On the one hand, Greek cosmology
argued that everything in the
heavens revolves around the Earth.
On the other hand, Ptolemy,
in his Almagest,
argued that if you want to
mathematically predict how
the sun and planets move,
you have to pretend that they go
around an arbitrary point in space -
the so-called equant.
This is clearly a contradiction -
the heavens can't both go around
the Earth and not go around
it at the same time.
Ibn Al-Haytham hated this
nonsensical contradiction.
In the early 11th century, he wrote
a paper, Al-Shukuk Ala-Batlamyus,
or Doubts On Ptolemy.
In it, he writes with
barely contained frustration,
"Ptolemy assumes an
arrangement that cannot exist."
Ibn Al-Haytham says, "That is a total
absurdity. We cannot accept that."
And furthermore he says,
"It's not a slip of the tongue.
"Ptolemy knew that it was absurd."
And he shows us where Ptolemy himself
was embarrassed by having
to introduce it.
So, he says there is a
fundamental reasoning problem,
meaning that the Greeks knew, that
Ptolemy knew he was making a mistake,
but he couldn't do any better,
and hints, now the challenge is to do
much better and hints to be
able to fix this...
That, in my explanation,
begins to be the programme of
research for all astronomers to come.
In order to achieve that project,
you had to be convinced -
you had to be convinced -
that it was possible to make
high-precision mathematical models
of the way in
which planets and stars move,
that would really capture how they
are in the heavens.
Ibn Al-Haytham, in effect,
laid down the challenge for
all astronomers who followed,
which was to come up with an
explanation for how the heavens move
that is both
mathematically consistent,
and agrees with what we observe.
The final answer to this would
come from far-away Europe,
with Copernicus and others.
But the next and crucial
breakthrough came somewhat closer.
The top of this mountain in northern
Iran
was the adopted home of the man
who was the next of Copernicus'
Islamic influences,
Nasir Al-Din Al-Tusi.
He would succeed in
rewriting Ptolemy's theory,
which would ultimately lead to the
overthrow of the geocentric view
of the universe,
and so the birth of
the modern scientific age.
This is the remote castle of Alamut,
Al-Tusi's adopted home.
For many years, it was the home of
a Muslim sect called the Ismailis.
It's a lovely secluded spot,
and it was
the centre of the Ismaili movement.
It's not surprising that
Al-Tusi would find a home here.
And it wasn't just him.
Many other scholars
were gathered here
and there seems to
have been a library -
it was a centre for learning
as well as a military stronghold.
Here, this is the main gate,
northern gate of the upper castle...
A new archaeological dig
is now revealing under the castle,
hewn into the living rock,
a warren of rooms and studies,
a mosque and living quarters
for this extraordinary community
of soldiers and scientists.
This is the court of mosque,
or centre of headquarters of castle.
And it was within these
cramped conditions
that Al-Tusi started his masterwork
of the shukuk,
or the doubts - the Tadhkirah.
In it he finds an answer to
Ibn Al-Haytham's first challenge -
how to eliminate Ptolemy's equant.
Instead of a sphere rotating around
an arbitrary point in space,
Al-Tusi devised a series of
two nested circles,
which rotate around each
other in such a way that
they eliminate the equant.
The nested circles
became known as a Tusi Couple.
This is the mathematical system
that finds it way into Copernicus'
work some 300 years later.
Having found a solution to the
equant problem,
Al-Tusi now wanted to complete the
task Ibn Al-Haytham
had started 200 years earlier -
to find a consistent mathematical
description of the movement
of the celestial bodies.
But to do that he needed
better data,
which meant bigger and better
equipment than he was ever
going to find here at Alamut.
And then something happened which
changed Al-Tusi's life forever -
the Mongols.
Streaming in from the East, an
army of Mongols led by Hulagu Khan
marched into Iran,
crushing everything before them.
By 1255, they had reached
the foothills of Alamut,
intent on its destruction.
Then, in a brilliant
piece of diplomacy,
Al-Tusi managed
to both save his own skin
and satisfy his scientific ambition.
He visited the Mongol leader,
and played on his deep
astrological superstition.
Convincing him he could tell the
future if only he had new equipment,
Al-Tusi persuaded the Khan
to make him his head scientist
and to build him,
just a few hundred miles away,
perched on a hilltop
where the air was clear,
the largest observatory
the world had ever seen.
This is all that remains
of the Maragheh Observatory.
The main instrument is hidden
is under this protective dome.
Al-Tusi's new astronomical centre
was based around
a single large building.
Inside was an enormous metal arc,
an armillary arm, ten metres across.
On its circumference were marked
angles in degrees and minutes.
The scientists would line up
the celestial object under study
with a central point on the arc,
and then make a reading from
the markings on the arc,
giving them the definitive, accurate
position of the object in the sky.
The building was also surrounded
by smaller astronomical equipment,
libraries,
offices and accommodation.
The observatory
even had its own dedicated mosque.
I suppose it is a little
disappointing that there's
not much left of the place now,
so you really have to
imagine what it must have
been like back in its heyday.
After all, what Al-Tusi built here
was nothing less than the world's
greatest observatory for 300 years.
And like any modern-day
international research institute,
he brought together the world's
greatest astronomers from as far
away as Morocco and even China.
I mean, it really must
have been a great
buzzing atmosphere to work here.
With his new observatory
and world-class team,
Al-Tusi was now ready to fulfil
Ibn Al-Haytham's dream -
to try to make Ptolemy's model
scientifically rigorous.
First they attacked the mathematics.
As well as the Tusi Couple,
they invented other systems
of planetary movement.
And with these new systems,
they were able to calculate
mathematically-consistent models
for many of the celestial bodies.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter,
Saturn and the sun and moon.
Al-Tusi and the astronomers he
brought together created what became
known as the Maragheh revolution,
which was a complete paradigm shift
in astronomy, overthrowing
the old Ptolemaic view.
What Islamic scholars and astronomers
like Al-Tusi do
is to organise and make
sense of mathematical astronomy
at a level of unprecedented accuracy,
using instruments more precise
than had been built before,
over longer timescales,
with predictions
of the positions of planets and stars
that no-one had previously reached -
that at Maragheh or at Alamut
we see, I think, genuine
revolutions in the level, scale and
intensity of mathematical astronomy.
But there was still a problem.
The new models were mathematically
coherent and they dispensed
with Ptolemy's unwieldy equant.
But they still firmly placed the
earth at the centre of the universe,
and that inevitably meant that
their descriptions of the heavens
were intricate and complicated,
with epicycles,
deferents and couples - it
was like some great cosmic gearbox.
It would require a huge leap
of imagination to make
the next step in our story.
And that next step would take place
2,000 miles from where I am now.
In my view, the last phase of
the Maragheh revolution took place
not in Iran or anywhere
in the Islamic Empire,
but here in Northern Italy.
Based on the work of
Muslim scholars, places like
the University of Padua were already
starting a new scientific movement -
the Renaissance.
Back in Padua,
where I began my journey,
I now understand
why Islamic astronomers
were so important to Copernicus.
They gave him his motivation.
He's the first European
to share Ibn Al-Haytham's deep
aversion to Ptolemy's cosmology.
And that's what makes Copernicus
not the first great astronomer
of a new European tradition, but
the last of the Islamic tradition.
As we've seen, many of the complex
mathematical models Copernicus uses
in his new heliocentric model,
like the Tusi Couple,
are copied from Islamic astronomers.
But more importantly,
it's Copernicus's deep desire
to bring mathematical consistency
to cosmology that he really owes
to his Islamic predecessors.
Copernicus' ideas set in motion
a train of scientific revelations
that would eventually lead to Isaac
Newton and the discovery of gravity.
In Newton's hands, Ibn Al-Haytham's
dream of an astronomy with rigorous
and coherent mathematics
which agrees with experimental
observation finally took place.
But this begs
two crucial questions -
why was the great
astronomical project
which Islamic astronomers began
completed in Europe
and not in the Middle East?
And how did knowledge
of Islamic science get to Europe
in the first place?
The answers to these questions
lie in one of the most
beautiful cities on earth,
the Queen of the Adriatic - Venice.
Venice was founded on
a swamp off the coast of Italy,
and felt itself separate
from Europe, and not
bound by its laws and traditions.
And as Shakespeare famously pointed
out, the two most important aspects
of Venice were its merchants
and its longstanding links
with the Arabs, or Moors.
It was a rich and
complicated relationship,
sometimes based on piracy and theft.
The story goes that in 828,
two Venetian merchants stole the
bones of a famous Christian saint
from Venice's rival city
across the water, Alexandria.
The bones belonged to St Mark the
Evangelist, and they brought them
back to here to St Mark's Square.
But without doubt, trade with the
East brought to Venice great wealth
and an exchange of ideas,
customs and people, as Venice expert
Vera Costantini showed me.
So this is called the Campo
dei Mori because as you can see
at the corners, there are statues
of what were called Moors.
There's another... Yeah,
there's another one with a turban.
The beard was recommended
to many Venetian merchants even
when they went to the East.
There were manuals written
for Venetian merchants.
How to blend in?
Yes. How to be respected in the East.
As Venetians traded more and more
with their Muslim neighbours,
the influence of
Islam was more strongly felt.
Arabic coffee culture
became hugely popular.
As did Islamic
styles of architecture,
with their characteristic
arches and decorations.
So, the next thing I want to show
you is the Palace of the Camel.
When Venetians traded in the East,
the unit of measurement,
of a load that could be loaded on
a dromedary was called a carrico.
And it was exactly the same unit
of measurement
they had in the East.
And it was called yook.
So it's not coincidence that
they actually imported
that unit of weight.
Yes, of measurement, of weight.
And with the Arabic trade
came the Arabic books.
The great 9th century Arabic
text on algebra appeared
in Latin in the 12th century.
The same century saw the arrival
of Arabic astronomical tables,
and in the 15th century,
the famous canon of medicine
was first published in the West.
And this influx of learning
seems to coincide with
a great historical shift.
The engine of science
begins to move west,
from the Islamic world to Europe.
That's where the great
breakthroughs from the 1500s
would mainly take place.
I encountered an astonishing and
very tangible symbol of this shift,
and a really surprising clue
as to why it happened,
thanks to Professor Angela Nuovo,
from the University of Udine.
20 years ago, in this library
on one of the islands of Venice,
Angela discovered the only surviving
version of a 500-year-old book.
And what did it feel like?
This is a big, big discovery!
Yes, yes. It was a great emotion.
I remember it was July, very hot,
like today - even hotter.
And I felt cold.
Wow!
Yes, it was a great emotion.
What she found was the very first
printed copy of Islam's
holy book, the Qur'an.
This is the first time
she has seen her Qur'an since
she discovered it 20 years ago.
But it struck me as strange
that world's first printed Qur'an
was produced in Venice,
and not in the Islamic world.
And it's obvious at first glance
that it was printed by people
who didn't speak Arabic very well.
HE READS ALOUD
What strikes me is that
it's written in what I would regard
as almost childlike handwriting.
It's clumsy.
Yeah. Well, it's the first attempt
to reproduce the handwriting
in moveable types,
and as you know, the language has an
enormous amount of different sorts.
Every letter changes according
to ligatures and the position.
Of course, so it's difficult.
Yeah, the word meaning "for that",
the dash should be underneath the L,
but it's above it,
so it says the wrong thing.
Probably there were not people
of mother language in the press.
So there were some errors in
the text, which are of course sins.
Yes, of course, as the Qur'an,
every Muslim believes it's the
word of God, you can't change it.
So when you change it, it's a sin.
How was it first received
when it was published?
Well, yes, the hypothesis is,
and I think it's true,
that it was an enormous failure
from the business point of view.
The Muslims didn't accept
the printing press for centuries,
and probably the whole copies
of this book were destroyed.
So we don't have any other copy.
Probably the only one that remained
in the Western world is this book.
'I felt that the failure of
this printed Qur'an to catch on
in the Islamic world spoke volumes.'
800 years earlier, one reason
for Islamic science's success
had been the precision
of the Arabic language -
with over 70 different ways
of writing its letters
and many extra symbols
to define pronunciation and meaning,
it allowed scholars of many
different lands to communicate
in a single, common language.
Now, with the arrival
of the printing press,
scientific ideas should have been
able to travel even more freely.
In the West, books printed
in Latin accelerated
its scientific renaissance.
But because of
its symbols and extra letters,
Arabic was much harder
to set into type than Latin,
and so a similar acceleration in the
Islamic world failed to materialize.
I believe this rejection of the new
technology - the printing press -
marks the moment in history
when Arabic science
undergoes a seismic shift.
Europe has embraced Greek and Arabic
knowledge and the new technology.
And Galileo and his ilk are poised
at the cusp of the Renaissance.
It has been a turning point
both in the history
of the Venetian printing press,
who used to be extremely powerful.
It's the limit of expansion,
let's say.
And in the history of the
general and cultural relationship
between the East and the West.
As acceptation of
printing would have meant
the acceptation of the
first important technology,
so the two histories
started to differ very much.
This initial rejection of printing
was one of the many reasons
that caused science in the Islamic
world to fall behind the West.
It coincided with a host
of global changes, all of which
affected the way science developed.
The first and most obvious reason
for the slowdown in Islamic science
is that the Islamic empire itself
falls into decline
from the mid-1200s.
One reason for this is that
it's under attack from all sides.
From the east are the Mongols.
In 1258, they invaded the capital,
Baghdad, and it's said that
the waters of the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers
ran black for days with the
ink of the books they'd destroyed.
But trouble was also brewing
in the far west of the empire.
Islamic Spain, already fragmented
into separate city states,
now faced a new threat -
a united and determined
onslaught from the Christian north.
The re-conquest, as it was called,
raged for hundreds of years,
but culminated in the 15th century,
when Ferdinand II and Isabella
led an army which forced
the last of the Muslims
in Grenada to surrender in 1492.
The Christians were intent
on removing every last vestige
of Islamic civilization
and culture from Spain.
In 1499, they ordered the
burning in this square in Granada
of all Arabic texts
from Granada's libraries...
except for a small number
of medical texts.
Within about 100 years,
every Muslim in Spain
had either been put to the sword,
burnt at the stake or banished.
And Christians from the east
of Europe were intent on
reclaiming the Holy Land -
the Crusades.
Bent on carving out
a wholly Christian Levant
and claiming
the holy city of Jerusalem,
the Crusaders launched a massive
attack on Northern Syria.
They quickly captured
this castle and turned it
into one of their strongholds.
Then, with ruthless and missionary
zeal, they marched on Jerusalem.
And as the empire
fought with its neighbours,
it collapsed into warring fiefdoms.
The Mamluks, slaves who originally
belonged to the state of Egypt,
became its leaders.
The Bourbon Almohads ruled Morocco
and Spain in the 13th century.
And the north of Syria
and Iraq splintered into
a series of city states.
But for many historians of science,
the biggest single reason
for the decline in Islamic science
was a rather famous event
that took place in 1492.
That year, the entire political
geography of the world
changed dramatically
when a certain Christopher Columbus
arrived in the Americas.
I explain it with the phenomena of
the discovery
of the New World in 1492.
The immediate result is that you got
immense amounts of gold and silver
coming to the royal houses of Europe
at the time and all the adventurers,
empires and
royal houses of the time were
setting colonies all over the world.
And science always follows
the money.
As the 16th and 17th centuries
came and went, that money,
power and hence scientific will,
moved through Italy, Spain
and onto Britain.
By the 17th century, England,
sitting at the centre
of the lucrative Atlantic trade
route, could afford big science.
And that ultimately explains why
the greatest book in world science,
Sir Isaac Newton's
Principia Mathematica,
the book that ultimately explains
the motion of the sun,
moon and planets,
was not published in Baghdad,
but in London.
It was necessary for him to have data
of astonishing accuracy
gathered from across the world.
Global inventories of numbers,
observations, positions.
The heights of tides, the
positions of comets and planets,
the rate at which pendulums beat...
It's a global project,
it's big science.
And many of those observations,
many of those mathematical models
were of course models
initially developed
by Islamic astronomers in Egypt
and the Near East and Central Asia.
But there's
a final twist in the tale.
As the wealth of the Islamic nations
subsided through war,
political and religious entrenchment
and the loss of its lucrative trade,
so its science declined.
But what this doesn't explain
is why their scientific achievements
have been so forgotten.
And that's partly because
as Europeans colonised great swathes
of the Middle East and Asia,
they actively encouraged the idea
that the civilizations
they encountered were moribund
and in decline.
It seems the English and
the French were uncomfortable
with subjugating people
whose knowledge and science might
be as sophisticated as their own.
So it became important
to portray the Islamic world
in a very specific way,
namely that yes, they
once were very sophisticated and had
great scientists and philosophers,
but of course now,
they've fallen into decay.
Somehow this point of view
made the whole colonial enterprise
seem much more palatable.
One of the most fascinating
developments, I think,
in the history
of the encounter between
western Europeans and other cultures
is a kind of shift which has got
fundamental and terrible consequences
amongst western Europeans,
when they start to reflect on
why they are superior.
It doesn't often cross western
Europeans' minds that they might not
be superior to everybody else.
For a very long time after all,
western Europeans in general,
the British, for example,
supposed that their superiority
lay in their religion.
But then I think around the 1700s,
we begin to see a shift.
And the shift is from claiming
that the reason for European
superiority is its religion
to the reason
for European superiority
is its science and technology.
Eventually it ends up with the famous
phrase, "We have the Gatling gun,
and they do not."
Europeans in that period
were quite prepared to acknowledge
that in ancient times,
Islam for example had achieved
great things in the sciences.
But they weren't doing so now.
So even recent Islamic
and Sanskrit astronomy
was imagined to be very old,
because if it was very old,
it meant that the culture the British
were conquering was declining.
And for the British,
that was clearly good news.
And some experts believe
that the effect of this on
Islamic scientific history
is still felt in the Islamic world
today.
The Islamic part and the Arab part
have not yet discovered their history
because their history
was obliterated intentionally
by the colonisation period.
And unfortunately when
they rediscover it now,
they are rediscovering it
in bits and pieces.
So today, for many different
reasons, the great observatories
of the medieval Islamic world
are ruined husks.
And it's true to say that most of
the great scientific breakthroughs
of the last four centuries
have taken place in the West.
But that's not to say
that science has completely ground
to a halt in the Islamic world.
Now, in the 21st century,
there are many examples
of cutting-edge research
being carried out.
I've arrived at
the Royan Institute here in Tehran,
where they carry out
stem cell research,
infertility treatment
and cloning research.
I was surprised to learn that
here in Iran, an Islamic state,
potentially controversial science
like genetic modification
and cloning is condoned, even
funded by a theocratic government.
One of the uses is when a small
part of the heart stops working,
which is finally going to lead
to heart failure...
Right. So the cells from that part
of the heart are actually replaced
with the cells that have been cloned.
Another use
of cloning in therapeutics
is actually creating an animal
which has the medicine
in their milk, for example.
So when we drink the milk,
we actually receive
the medicine we need.
Considering genetic research
has many vociferous opponents
in Christian communities,
I was intrigued to see that here
in Tehran,
they have their own in-house
imam to offer support and advice
on this sometimes
quite controversial research.
TRANSLATION:
We have got this medical ethic
committee here in Royan Institute,
and every project which is proposed
is investigated
in this committee,
and we see different aspects of it,
and they have got
to justify the project for us.
I'm not enough of an expert
in genetics to truly assess
the quality of the work here.
But one thing I can say
is how at home I felt.
Whatever cultural and political
differences we have
with the Iranian state,
inside the walls of the lab,
it was remarkably easy
to find common ground
with fellow scientists.
Nature's rules are refreshingly
free of human prejudice.
That's something the scientists
of the medieval Islamic world
understood and articulated so well.
In the 9th century, Al-Khwarizmi
synthesised Greek and Indian ideas
to create a new kind
of mathematics, algebra.
The polymath Ibn Sina brought
together the world's traditions
of healthcare into one book,
contributing to the creation
of the subject of medicine.
In remote Iranian mountains,
astronomers like Al-Tusi paved the
way for scientists working hundreds
of years later in Western Europe.
These scientists' quest for truth,
wherever it came from,
were summed up by the 9th century
philosopher Al-Kindi, who said,
"It is fitting for us not to be
ashamed of acknowledging truth,
"and to assimilate it from
whatever source it comes to us.
"There is nothing of higher value
than truth itself.
"It never cheapens or abases
he who seeks."
One moral emerges from this
epic tale of the rise and fall
of science in the Islamic world
between the 9th and 15th centuries.
And that is that science
is the universal language
of the human race.
Decimal numbers are just as useful
in India as they are in Spain.
Star charts drawn up in Iran
speak volumes to astronomers
in northern Europe.
And Newton's Principia is as true in
Arabic as it is in Latin or English.
What medieval Islamic scientists
realised and articulated
so brilliantly is that science
is the common language
of the human race.
Man-made laws may vary
from place to place,
but nature's laws
are true for all of us.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd