[HN Gopher] Manuscript of Ismail al-Jazari's Ingenious Mechanica...
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Manuscript of Ismail al-Jazari's Ingenious Mechanical Devices (ca.
17th century)
Author : YoctoYARN
Score : 90 points
Date : 2025-04-29 02:16 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (publicdomainreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (publicdomainreview.org)
| cookiemonsieur wrote:
| > He stood on the shoulders of Persian, Greek, Indian, and
| Chinese precursors, while Renaissance inventors, in turn, stood
| on his.
|
| This is the first time in my life where a western outlet doesn't
| try and obfuscate the fact that many of the "discoveries" made by
| europeans in the the renaissance period have taken inspiration
| from the close to 800 years of Islamic scientific research (who
| themselves never failed to credit their predecessors).
|
| Typically, when you study the history of science in the west, it
| starts at ancient greece (who have no contemporaries) then
| there's a massive blackout of 800 years and poof ! The "light" is
| magically turned on.
|
| Fair play to the author for not being biased.
| graemep wrote:
| > This is the first time in my life where a western outlet
| doesn't try and obfuscate the fact
|
| I do not know what you have been reading, but most western
| outlets go out of their way to acknowledge this. If anything
| people tend to idealise the "Islamic golden age" in the same
| way they do ancient Greece and Rome.
|
| > Typically, when you study the history of science in the west,
| it starts at ancient greece (who have no contemporaries) then
| there's a massive blackout of 800 years and poof
|
| They ignore the significant advances made in medieval Europe,
| and the Byzantine Empire.
| contingencies wrote:
| And China... almost everything, including probably the paper
| it came on and the printing used to produce it.
|
| And India ... from which we derive our concept of
| mathematical zero which underpins everything.
| graemep wrote:
| You would have to be pretty badly informed not to know
| those two examples though.
|
| Maybe a lot of people are, but they really do have to not
| want to learn.
| contingencies wrote:
| I don't pretend to understand the world and especially
| other people but this quote seems apt when trying.
|
| _To be ignorant of one 's ignorance is the malady of the
| ignorant._ - Amos Bronson Alcott, 1871
| gostsamo wrote:
| I'd agree with the gp. An amazing example for such an
| attitude was some french edition like "History of the World
| in Ten Chapters and a Half" which said in the introduction
| that it will talk about greek and roman history and then the
| modern times because the Byzantine empire just kept the torch
| burning. I stopped reading right there. Maybe it is different
| in the more academic literature, but the pop culture
| narrative is that the eastern roman empire, the islam world,
| the chinese, and the mongols were some autocratic religious
| barberians who worshiped things that they do not understand.
| If western Europe wasn't leading the way, some people reason,
| then everyone else shouldn't be allowed to stand above.
| Politics has the habit of using history to justify its own
| ends and it is true everywhere and in every century.
| Mainan_Tagonist wrote:
| What book are you referring to exactly? "History of the
| world in 10 1/2 chapters" is a fiction, by Julian Barnes.
|
| Is this the book you base your argument on?
| gostsamo wrote:
| I don't remember the exact book name, but it is not the
| argument, it is an example. The argument is multiple
| instances of pop culture statements and opinions where
| people believe that the world was on a pause between 476
| and 1452 and even if someone else has created something,
| it was given meaning only when the europeans discovered
| and improved it. Don't feel obliged to believe me, I know
| what I've witnessed and shared a data point.
| graemep wrote:
| > it was given meaning only when the europeans discovered
| and improved it.
|
| They also ignored what Europeans discovered in that
| period.
|
| At the pop culture level a lot of people believe Medieval
| Europe was in a barbaric dark age and achieved nothing.
| everdrive wrote:
| I thought you were going to go the other direction. All I ever
| read is that the west relied on Islamic science and math, but
| "no one" will acknowledge this. Except of course it's the only
| perspective I ever hear about, so I'm not sure who this
| mythical "no one" is. On the other hard, vanishingly few
| sources do seem to acknowledge that the Islamic sources "stood
| on the shoulders" of Greeks and others. Ibn Khaldun states this
| directly in the Muqaddimah: "The sciences of only one nation,
| the Greek, have come down to us, because they were translated
| through al-Ma'mun's efforts."
|
| The full quote:
|
| "The subject here is different from that of these two
| disciplines which, however, are often similar to it. In a way,
| it is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come
| across a discussion along these lines by anyone. I do not know
| if this is because people have been unaware of it, but there is
| no reason to suspect them (of having been unaware of it).
| Perhaps they have written exhaustively on this topic, and their
| work did not reach us. There are many sciences. There have been
| numerous sages among the nations of mankind. The knowledge that
| has not come down to us is larger than the knowledge that has.
| Where are the sciences of the Persians that 'Umar ordered wiped
| out at the time of the conquest! Where are the sciences of the
| Chaldaeans, the Syrians, and the Babylonians, and the scholarly
| products and results that were theirs! Where are the sciences
| of the Copts, their predecessors! The sciences of only one
| nation, the Greek, have come down to us, because they were
| translated through al-Ma'mun's efforts. (His efforts in this
| direction) were successful, because he had many translators at
| his disposal and spent much money in this connection. Of the
| sciences of others, nothing has come to our attention."
| zyklu5 wrote:
| Indeed. In fact, it is one of the most amusing aspect of the
| anglophone west (at least for the last few decades). Despite
| public perception (by public I mean those who have been to
| university since the 90s), Western historians of science and
| mathematics in general have never not acknowledged the
| previous works of the Persianate civilizations commensurate
| to their knowledge of them in their time. But somehow in the
| last few decades professional historians have had to waste
| time figuratively looking over their shoulders lest they be
| percieved as being Eurocentric. And, if they were to somehow
| find a way to show -- requiring whatever hermeneutical
| gymnastics -- that a prominent scientist was influenced (or
| even better, had stolen) from some other "cultures" than
| nothing better! (ex: Copernicus from the Maragha school as an
| example of interpretive gymnastics)
|
| But, of course, this is one of the symptoms of the
| degeneration that now afflicts your particular civilization
| and is bringing about it's inevitable transformation to
| something else -- but better this than the fate of the
| Abassids or the Sung.
| spwa4 wrote:
| I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion for this. But it's
| still the truth: just wait until you try to get muslims to
| confirm what exactly about islam "safeguarded" science in
| the middle ages.
|
| The answer is slavery, and patronage by very, very rich
| people (who outright owned the scientists, and these in
| turn kept libraries of the great scientific works of the
| past, as trophies for the sultan, with zero public access).
| Oh and the fact that they recreated the Roman habit of
| kidnapping slaves and then selling them, sometimes an
| enormous distance from where they were captured. That is
| how Hindu numerals spread.
|
| One very famous example is the "Blue Mosque", the greatest
| piece of islamic architecture for over 500 years, the
| tallest building in the world for a very long time (only
| overshadowed by the Church it was copied from: the Aya
| Sofia) which is a copy of a Church building by a Jewish
| architect (who was a slave to the sultan). Yes, minarets
| are a Christian idea.
|
| Perhaps this is the reason the Blue Mosque doesn't have one
| of the defining features of islamic architecture of
| mosques: it doesn't have a catwalk, a podium for selling
| slaves, which most ottoman mosques have.
|
| Then, usually during periods of economic stress, muslims
| destroyed their science, usually for religious reasons. Of
| course, this happened in the Christian west too. In the
| west science (specifically the copying of books by the
| Catholic church, then giving public access to them. No
| public access existed in any caliphate) recovered faster
| than these religious attacks could destroy it. In islamic
| nations it didn't. Islam was more scientifically advanced
| in 800 than in 1800 (or 1900). Or, to put it another way:
| the more actual muslims a society had (in 800 that was
| almost none), the less science existed.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Do you have any credible sources for your claims?
| h2zizzle wrote:
| >Except of course it's the only perspective I ever hear
| about, so I'm not sure who this mythical "no one" is.
|
| Most American primary/secondary textbooks (in a country where
| the majority of people still don't go to college). Ask the
| average person to name an Islamic analogue to Newton,
| Copernicus, or da Vinci, you're going to get blank stares.
| _I_ couldn 't do it, and I watched Family Guy Cosmos and
| everything.
| Mainan_Tagonist wrote:
| Are these same average person able to tell what Newton,
| Copernicus or da Vinci discovered/invented?
| Mainan_Tagonist wrote:
| ps: just want to point out that i'm not being snarky,
| just asking a question in good faith. I heard more than
| once on TV (incidentally by critics of the catholic
| church), that Copernicus or Galileo had been burnt at the
| stake for proving that "the earth wasn't flat".
|
| Knowing that TV and social media do play as large a role
| as history books or formal education in knowledge
| acquisition these days, is it really wrong to question
| whether "the average person" is a valid point of
| reference when discussing inter-civilisational exchanges
| of discoveries.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| It's odd how far people have run with simplified versions
| of Galileo's story. The version I've seen everywhere is
| "The dastardly anti-science Church hated heliocentrism so
| much that it persecuted Galileo for it." The Church's
| support of geocentrism did play a role, but if you look
| at the details, it seems far closer to "The Roman Church
| of Galileo's day was filled with scheming politicians,
| and he (perhaps unwittingly) offended people who he
| couldn't afford to, so his enemies latched onto his
| support for heliocentrism as an excuse to get rid of
| him."
|
| These days, I've come to treat every clean-cut historical
| anecdote as suspect; there's too much of a game of
| telephone between people who want history to prove their
| point.
| elmomle wrote:
| I can't speak to any very recent changes (I'm doubtful
| anything's changed massively, I could be wrong), but I
| was educated in the US and went to highly selective
| schools--and it was only in an obscure, elective history
| of science class fairly late in my college career that I
| learned about al-Haytham (who was called Alhazen in the
| class). Meanwhile, I (and many of my HS classmates) could
| have told you that Copernicus pioneered a heliocentric
| model of the solar system, or about Newton's laws of
| motion, etc., when we were 15.
|
| The Renaissance really was taught as "Europeans
| rediscovered the great classical thinkers", and it was
| only through my own curiosity that I learned that Islamic
| science played a key role.
| Mainan_Tagonist wrote:
| Here in France, we were taught from fairly early on about
| Averroes and Avicenne (Ibn Sinna) for instance. There may
| geographical and societal reasons for these differences,
| but all in all that's besides the point i was trying to
| make, which is : The average person may have heard of
| Newton, Darwin and others, but how many could really
| explain the theory of gravity or that of evolution
| without getting at least some of it wrong?
|
| ("Gravity... ha yes, the guy with the
| apple","evolution... sure, we all are descended from
| apes, right?")
|
| ...Therefore, relying on what the average person may know
| to discuss whether something is publicly acknowledged and
| understood is perhaps the wrong way to go about this.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| You must have read different sources from the ones I read.
| There is no shortage of mentioning the "Islamic golden age" and
| the role it played in bringing knowledge from "the east" to
| "the west" as well as preserving knowledge from and of
| classical Greece by means of translations to Arabic. There
| seems to be doubt about the veracity of the latter though as
| this claim may have been a strategical device to promote 'anti-
| Byzantinism':
|
| _The claim that philosophy and the sciences died out in
| Christian Byzantium and were transferred to the Islamic world
| can be found in a number of ninth- and tenth-century Arabic
| sources, edited and translated from the 19th century onwards
| and mostly taken at face value since then. However, Dimitri
| Gutas has explained that, during this time of bitter military
| struggle with Byzantium in which the Arabs were losing ground,
| emphasizing the Muslim appropriation of the pagan Greek
| heritage and claiming that Byzantium destroyed it because of
| the ideological and political break represented by Christianity
| was a form of anti-Byzantinism expressed as philhellenism.
| Gutas has also clarified that Abbasid society appropriated
| Greek philosophy and science in order to address its own needs:
| negotiating a canonical version of Islam_ [1].
|
| Wherever the truth lies I do not see any dearth of mentionings
| of the role played by Islamic scholars.
|
| [1]
| https://brill.com/previewpdf/display/book/edcoll/97890043490...
| hasmanean wrote:
| I think there was a bbc documentary where they showed a
| manuscript of Newton or Kepler with a geometric proof and
| compared it to one by Al Jazari. They were identical.
|
| In fact even the vertices were labelled the same, and followed
| the order of Arabic letters.
|
| Shoulders of giants indeed. Shoulders of jazari.
| Mainan_Tagonist wrote:
| I wonder if GP is trying to be witty or simply has an axe to
| grind.
|
| The transmission of knowledge between civilizational blocks is
| fairly well documented (I recently read Jacques Le Goff on this
| particular topic), and what is owed to the Islamic civilization
| is no secret.
|
| For those interested in comparable technical developments in
| Europe around the same time, for the middle ages were not as
| dark as usually portrayed, I recommend reading Jean Gimpel's
| The Medieval Machine (whom Ken Follett relied on extensively
| for "The Pillars of the Earth") and David Landes' A Revolution
| in Time.
| mangodrunk wrote:
| It's good the author mentions Persian specifically, given most
| of the influential mathematicians and scientists who comprised
| the Islamic Golden Age were Persian.
| julienchastang wrote:
| Disagree. If you spend any time studying the history of
| science, you know that many stars have Arabic names, we use
| Arabic numbers, and the word Algorithm is Arabic in origin.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I learned recently that Algebra comes from Al-Jabr named by its
| Arabic inventor Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.
| elashri wrote:
| It is also how the word "Algorithm" came from. It is basically
| a variation of the Latin translation of his name -algoritmi-
| [1]
|
| [1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/91544/how-
| algorithm...
| fakedang wrote:
| Whose last name lent the etymology for algorithm.
| mangodrunk wrote:
| Al-Khwarizmi was Persian, not Arab. Though he did produce much
| of his work in Arabic which might cause the confusion.
| leyth wrote:
| When will Al-Jahiz finally get credit for his early ideas about
| evolution, long before Darwin? His book Kitab al-Hayawan is still
| in print.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| Do you have a horse in the race here, so to speak?
|
| Wikipedia [0] has the following to say:
|
| > According to Frank Edgerton (2002), the claim made by some
| authors that al-Jahiz was an early evolutionist is
| "unconvincing"
|
| > If certain historians have claimed that Jahiz wrote about
| evolution a thousand years before Darwin and that he discovered
| natural selection, they have misunderstood.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jahiz
| anentropic wrote:
| Apparently from before the invention of ellipses :)
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