[HN Gopher] Ismail al-Jazari - the medieval 'Father of Robotics'
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Ismail al-Jazari - the medieval 'Father of Robotics'
Author : mih
Score : 73 points
Date : 2021-02-28 12:03 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nationalgeographic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nationalgeographic.com)
| christkv wrote:
| I've always wondered if the Ottoman Empire in many ways was the
| root of the problem as it traded stability of empire over
| anything else.
| keiferski wrote:
| Al-Jazari lived centuries before the Ottomans existed.
|
| Otherwise, having studied the Ottomans extensively, I wouldn't
| say they chose stability over anything else. Their slow
| downfall was due more to a gradual fossilization of their
| institutions. For example, the Janissaries went from a highly-
| trained elite force to essentially a social club that everyone
| wanted to join. The sultans themselves also gradually became
| less competent.
|
| Also of note is that the Ottomans were initially on the cutting
| edge of military technology and even exported quite a lot of it
| to the Mughals, who then had an advantage over their opponents.
| So, they certainly weren't "behind" technologically.
|
| Pretty much the same pattern as any empire, really. Initial
| warrior class conquers land, their immediate descendants
| develop a refined culture, and it's all downhill from there as
| following generations aim but fail to recapture the magic.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > Their slow downfall was due more to a gradual fossilization
| of their institutions.
|
| Sounds like an inevitable phase in the life cycle of empires.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Two black marks in my book
|
| Selim I banning the printing press and and destruction of
| Taqiuddin's observatory under Murad III
| Cyph0n wrote:
| The printing press ban probably had a huge impact. It was
| much easier to spread ideas if you didn't have to
| transcribe them by hand.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| in my family there has been a simple question being raised for as
| many years i can remember but there has never been a satisfactory
| answer yet. "if early muslims had all the science, mathematics,
| geography, philosophy and all fields of science including
| hundreds of scientists who laid down the foundations of modern
| science with their works, what happened 800 years ago that all
| that science just vanished?"
|
| Then years ago i read "origin" by "Dan brown" where an
| interesting line caught my attention
|
| "By the end of the eleventh century," Edmond said, "the greatest
| intellectual exploration and discovery on earth was taking place
| in and around Baghdad. Then, almost overnight, that changed. A
| brilliant scholar named Hamid al-Ghazali--now considered one of
| the most influential Muslims in history--wrote a series of
| persuasive texts questioning the logic of Plato and Aristotle and
| declaring mathematics to be 'the philosophy of the devil.' This
| began a confluence of events that undermined scientific thinking.
| The study of theology was made compulsory, and eventually the
| entire Islamic scientific movement collapsed."
|
| Since reading this, i've been trying to understand 2 things. 1,
| is this just fiction on the part of author and in that case, isnt
| it slander, spreading false information about a scholar who many
| hold to high regards and 2, if this is true, then this fucking
| asshole is responsible for causing immeasurable harm to "science"
| as a human idea on the whole.
|
| While i think just one person "might not" be responsible for
| single-handedly causing such a travesty on his own, there is no
| doubt "something" happened that caused this change. This author
| says it was this ghazali guy, maybe there were others also. I
| don't know but i surely would want to know
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > what happened 800 years ago that all that science just
| vanished?
|
| A big part of the answer is the Sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the
| Mongol armies.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)#Destru...
|
| >Contemporary accounts state Mongol soldiers looted and then
| destroyed mosques, palaces, libraries, and hospitals. Priceless
| books from Baghdad's thirty-six public libraries were torn
| apart, the looters using their leather covers as sandals.[36]
| Grand buildings that had been the work of generations were
| burned to the ground. The House of Wisdom (the Grand Library of
| Baghdad), containing countless precious historical documents
| and books on subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy, was
| destroyed. Claims have been made that the Tigris ran red from
| the blood of the scientists and philosophers killed.[37][38]
| Tales of the destruction of books - tossed into the Tigris such
| that the water turned black from the ink - seem to originate
| from the 14th century.[39][40]
|
| Baghdad at the time was the religious, political, and
| intellectual center of Islam. You could think of it as the
| combined New York, Washington DC, and Silicon Valley of the
| Islamic world. Think what would happen to American culture if
| all of a sudden, those 3 were suddenly destroyed. How would
| that shift the balance of culture? Something very similar
| happened to Islam in 1258, and I would say, we are probably
| still seeing the fallout of that to this day.
| christkv wrote:
| This happened to China as well yet it recovered better.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| China was different. Kublia Khan actually preserved a lot
| of the Chinese institutions but put himself on top. There
| was not the wholesale destruction of books and scholars.
| This would have been like Hulagu going to Baghdad,
| converting to Islam and making himself Caliph and reigning
| from Baghdad. That is not what happened to Baghdad.
| [deleted]
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| yes. I had read this one some time ago. My question still
| stands, what made muslims go from inquisitive science seekers
| like the one in the article, father of robotics, to
| "science=bad". This sentiment is continuing to this day with
| almost all the religious preachers who find it
| "incomprehensible" that science can exist in the same plane
| as religion. To explain my point, the "talk of the town" is
| usually whenever the weatherman comes on the news and says
| something like "we forecast heavy rains for 2 days then sunny
| day for a week". As a person who "gets science" i know what
| this guy just said so i'm like "ok. fine so prepare for a
| jacket to work" while the religious folk say "this is heresy.
| do you know if god wants, god can change night into day, rain
| into sun in the blink of an eye. saying what will happen
| tomorrow is saying you are not a believer in god because god
| can end the world today and there be no tomorrow or god can
| make tomorrow a sunny day when this guy is saying it will
| rain".
|
| You know in india and pakistan, in present times, 2020 and
| coming 2021, there is "always" a fight between science people
| and religious people on the "appearance of crescent" on
| religious days. the science folk say the motion of moon is
| calculated and we can precisely know for next hundreds of
| years if on a particular day the crescent will be visible
| from a location but the religious folk refuse to accept.
|
| what i am saying is what made these religious folk distrust
| and hate science ? did someone tell them don't promote
| science or it will eat their lunch? or something else?
| abdulhaq wrote:
| Religious muslims don't say that the weather forecast is
| heresy, that would be nonsense. Perhaps someone said to you
| that God can change the weather to be other-than-what-was-
| forecast, which from the Islamic POV is simple plain sense.
|
| Religious folk don't deny that the course of the moon can
| be calculated, some say that for establishing the start of
| the lunar month a sighting must be obtained, this is a
| complex issue that has nothing to do with believing or not
| in the predictable motions of astronomical objects.
| nethunters wrote:
| In the Islamic empire it was mostly due to the economic and
| political conditions that caused the decline of scientific
| study. However in the modern world, people of science
| generally view religious folks with distrust and they have
| the mindset that you can't be religious and a person of
| science yet historically most scientists were religious as
| well. Take Isaac Newton as an example who was a scientist
| and a theologian and had even written multiple literary
| works on the Bible.
|
| With the moon sighting issue you presented this is similar
| in other countries too. However it isn't predominantly due
| to a distrust of science; sometimes certain scholars and
| groups will not adapt their rulings due to the fact that
| their parents and previous generations did this and they
| won't change not because they hate science.
|
| The view in the UK on the moon-sighting debacle is that
| viewing the moon is necessary to commence the month as it
| was mentioned to the nearest meaning by the Prophet
| Muhammad (s.a.w) himself that we do not rely on
| calculations and the month is sometimes 29 and sometimes 30
| (not 29 and a fraction of day as is the scientific view).
| The most correct and accepted view is that this isn't
| prohibiting or belittling astronomical calculations in
| deciding the month, rather it is a lessening of the burden
| to calculate and act upon exact calculations.
|
| However the consensus is that astronomical calculations can
| be used to negate impossible viewings of the moon.
| idlewords wrote:
| Baghdad was not the intellectual center of Islam at the time
| of the Mongol invasion, that was Central Asia. Neither was
| the Mongol invasion dispositive, though it is significant
| that the Mongols razed cities whose irrigation systems were
| one of the ingredients for the high degree of technical and
| theoretical knowledge supporting the enlightenment.
|
| As I commented elsewhere in the thread, there's a terrific
| recent history of all of this: https://press.princeton.edu/bo
| oks/paperback/9780691165851/lo...
| mavelikara wrote:
| > , if this is true, then this fucking asshole is responsible
| for causing immeasurable harm to "science" as a human idea on
| the whole.
|
| Irrespective of what you think of the theory, it will help us
| all if we could identify and prevent the people among us now
| who could cause such harm to humanity.
| you_know_the_ wrote:
| I would say the crusade to blame for the decline of Muslims
| golden age. When the crusade started around 12 century, it
| brought devision among Muslims and Christians in places such as
| Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. For centuries, Muslims,
| Christians and Jews lived next to each other and collaborated
| with each other but the crusade killed that friendship.
| gerash wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm no historian. But my guess is it's often not a
| simple cause. This is a lot like how, say, tech companies
| evolve.
|
| For example is there a simple answer to why, say, HP isn't
| considered the most successful tech companies right now while
| it was at some point in time?
|
| My guess is other groups of people learn from them and surpass
| them overtime. This can also be true even within a single
| company where one org used to be the most important one but
| over time another org brings in more money and becomes more
| important
| Zariff wrote:
| Neil deGrasse Tyson also mentioned this. User noufalibrahim
| already gave a good response to that. But if you're interested,
| Mohammed Hijab also replied to that claim in this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRnYNig9jU&t=36s&ab_channel...
| spoonjim wrote:
| Modern Islamic governments are, on average, profoundly anti-
| liberal, anti-progress, and anti-rights, and that cannot
| coexist with a thriving culture of scientific inquiry. It's
| possible that all of this traces back to al-Ghazali but I
| suspect that there is quite a bit more to it than him alone.
| keiferski wrote:
| History is really not that simple and you should always be wary
| of anyone trying to ascribe blame to a single person or event.
|
| There were many events that led to the "end of the Islamic
| Golden Age," but a closer analysis reveals that nothing really
| ended, but simply was moved around.
|
| Consider that the Ottomans were technologically superior to
| Europeans until about the 17th century, or that Al-Andalus was
| around until the 15th century.
|
| But, overall, the single biggest event to impact the era was
| probably the Mongol sacking of Baghdad. That ended a lot of
| intellectual culture in rather violent fashion.
| jbay808 wrote:
| > But, overall, the single biggest event to impact the era
| was probably the Mongol sacking of Baghdad.
|
| Just goes to show how Eurocentric my history education was; I
| never heard about this. Fascinating.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| This is an oft repeated piece of idle scholarship that atheists
| and orientalists use to "explain" the decline of the so called
| "Islamic Golden Age". I've seen Steven Weinberg mention this as
| well as Neil Tyson.
|
| The factors were complex. There were economic and socio-
| political events that affected the stability and life in these
| societies. Several other reasons contributed to this downfall
| and it finally happened. To pin all the blame on a single
| scholar is disingenuous. Al Ghazzali's "Incoherence of the
| philosophers" was a warning against some of the techniques
| philosophers used especially in the context of interpreting the
| primary texts of Islam to come up with religious rulings. There
| were also philosophical arguments against scientific (read
| material) explanations precluding the hand of God in material
| affairs but this wasn't one killing blow against centuries of
| scientific scholarship.
|
| Here are a few articles that discuss this from a traditional
| Muslim point of view if you're interested.
| https://mohamedghilan.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/an-illusion-o...
| https://traversingtradition.com/2020/11/19/science-
| history-a.... I had something that addressed it more directly
| but can't find it right now.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| no. You are not answering my question. you are simply saying
| dont blame ghazali. My question is, what caused the death of
| "desire for scientific temper" and economic conditions do not
| change someones quest for knowledge or for that matter,
| influence an entire population away from science who took to
| avoid it like the plague. I had this talk with a guy last
| week and when i mentioned ghazali, he said something on the
| lines of "are you talking about his first phase or second
| phase?" then when i showed him this quote, this person goes
| "yes. obviously his first phase. in his second phase he
| rejected his earlier texts and even started learning the same
| thing he rejected earlier but the damage was done".
|
| You cant just tell a population to reject a way of thinking
| but apparently someone did manage to do that
| artem247 wrote:
| >> economic conditions do not change someones quest for
| knowledge
|
| In my country science almost ceased to exist after the fall
| of Soviet Union. So economic conditions do play a role. The
| western Age of Reason in XVIII also has relationship to
| complex changes in the society - rise of merchant class,
| acceptance of usury, etc. And I would say that "whole
| population avoids science like a plague" would be a strong
| overstatement more echoing the modern view on Islamic
| countries with strong Salafi influence.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| I would like to see what the OP would do if they were
| suddenly forced to live in the Stone Age. Would they
| spend time doing philosophising or restoring the
| civilisation and actually feeding themselves?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Mongol invasions, Hulagu and Ibn Taymiyyah probably had as
| big a role. Albiruni in Punjab and Ibn Shatir in Damascus
| made fine contributions which are just not studied in
| Islamiyat classes because everyone thinks of glory in terms
| of Alauddin Khliji/Ziauddin Barni or Aurangzeb Alamgir/Shah
| Waliullah instead of building universities, observatories
| etc
| Cyph0n wrote:
| As others have already mentioned, blaming the decline solely on
| al-Ghazali is the simplistic, orientalist view. Neil deGrasse
| Tyson recently helped propagate this argument as well.
|
| The reality was much more complex.
|
| If you're interested, I'd suggest checking out Dr. George
| Saliba's writings on this topic. A good start is "Islamic
| Science and the Making of the European Renaissance". For a
| shorter intro, check out this lecture [1].
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/66bV1rdMois
| [deleted]
| idlewords wrote:
| There is a book you should read, Lost Enlightenment:
| https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691165851/lo...
|
| The flourishing of Islamic science took place not in Baghdad,
| but in Central Asia, and it was already in steep decline when
| al-Ghazali wrote his polemics. The reasons for both the rise
| and decline of the Central Asian enlightenment are fascinating
| and complex.
|
| The tl;dr is that these cities (most now ruins) relied on very
| complicated irrigation systems that required a high degree of
| technical skill to maintain, and were also quite cosmopolitan
| places culturally, since they were never Arabized and lay on
| major trade routes, guaranteeing them exposure to ideas and
| scholarly texts from India (although interestingly, not so much
| from China).
|
| Anyway, it's a great book and will put the rise and decline of
| this period in context for you.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| thank you. I will be going through this book as early as
| possible.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Nitpick: "...as soon as possible" sounds more natural to
| native speakers
|
| Ulugh Beg's observatory was what Ottomans' short lived one
| was built to compete with
| idlewords wrote:
| What sounds most natural to native speakers is not
| correcting people's language unasked.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Fair enough, but he and I share a native non-English
| language, so I thought I was being helpful.
| BeetleB wrote:
| A lot of people hate being corrected on language, but
| many welcome it. In my life, I've certainly had my fair
| share of people come to me upset saying "I've been saying
| it wrong all this time and you never told me!"
|
| Best not to jump to conclusions about the speaker's
| wishes.
| qersist3nce wrote:
| The sudden "thing" that happened was Mongol Invasion[0].
|
| Imagine Germany in 1945 losing the war, only having one major
| library, and the allies burn it down, decimate the population
| to 10% of the prior count[1], and throw the books down to Rhine
| River "...in such quantities that the river ran black with the
| ink from the books"[2].
|
| The Mongols just invaded, pillaged and killed in a mind-less
| fashion. Middle-east was unlucky cause it was just
| geographically near them. They also wreaked havoc on China,
| Korea and Russia. Japan was lucky that storm sank their ships
| (which were forcibly built by conquered Chinese)
|
| I have not studied al-Ghazali but I think the good'ol war had
| the major role in this decline and the current state of the
| middle east.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_E...
|
| [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom#Destruction_by...
| kbk wrote:
| > in my family there has been a simple question being raised
| for as many years i can remember but there has never been a
| satisfactory answer yet
|
| if that is the case you should read to Malek Bannabi[1]: The
| Conditions of Renaissance, Question of Ideas in Muslim World,
| The Ideological Struggle in Third World Countries ...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malek_Bennabi
| abdulhaq wrote:
| Lots of big mistakes here. His name was Abu Hamid alGhazali. If
| you read his "almunqidh min aD-Dalaal" (Deliverance From Error)
| which was an autobiography and summary of his thought, he
| states that e.g.
|
| "MATHEMATICS. This embraces arithmetic, plane geometry and
| solid geometry. None of its results are connected with
| religious matters, either to deny or to affirm them. They are
| matters of demonstration which it is impossible to deny once
| they have been understood and apprehended."
|
| "LOGIC. Nothing in logic is relevant to religion by way of
| denial or affirmation.",
|
| "Just as it is not a condition of religion to reject medical
| science, so likewise the rejection of natural science is not
| one of its conditions, except with regard to particular
| points".
|
| You can find the text at
| https://ghazali.org/books/md/gz101.htm, for me this was a very
| influential book.
| bitdizzy wrote:
| Anyone who tells you history is shaped by the opinions of
| scholars is ill informed on the mechanisms of the world. What
| is true is that political forces will rationalize the actions
| they take for their material interests by finding a convenient
| fig leaf.
|
| The people who spread this theory about the decline of the
| Islamic golden age likely also believe that the Iconoclasm was
| really about graven images or that the ascendancy of the West
| was due to the people with all the power accepting the
| arguments of bookish nerds during the enlightenment.
|
| There were emperors of China who used Laozi to justify the
| burning of books. Do you think they were just being principled
| in their hyperliteralist reading?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| If you believe Joseph Needham (who according to George
| Steiner was not above telling a white lie or two) one would
| think they were getting rid of rival Mohist siege engineers
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