Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

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> Arabian (sometimes called "Islamic") scholarship

"Islamic" seems like a much more accurate descriptor than "Arabian"? For example, looking up al-Khowarizmi, I see that the first sentence of his Wikipedia page is:

> Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (Persian: محمد بن موسی خوارزمی‎‎, Arabic: محمد بن موسى الخوارزمی‎‎; c. 780 – c. 850), formerly Latinized as Algoritmi, was a Persian (modern Khiva, Uzbekistan) mathematician, astronomer, and geographer during the Abbasid Caliphate, a scholar in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

Or, looking up ibn Battuta:

> All that is known about Ibn Battuta's life comes from the autobiographical information included in the account of his travels, which records that he was of Berber descent, born into a family of Islamic legal scholars in Tangier, Morocco, on 25 February 1304, during the reign of the Marinid dynasty.

There were a lot more subjects of Arabian empires than there were Arabs.

Why are you mentioning these particular eminent people? Were these the translators of the _Elements_? al-Khwārizmī, of course, is very important in the history of mathematics. But that Battuta guy doesn't seem relevant. Your comment seems kind of random, but maybe you can help me understand your point.

> Why are you mentioning these particular eminent people?

They were the first two Islamic scholars who came into my head. I actually can't name many more.

I'm not commenting on the Elements; I'm commenting on your weird comment that "Islamic" scholarship would be better referred to as "Arabian". That isn't so.

Well, the translators of the _Elements_ were Arabs, and they translated it into Arabic, so I don't see what the controversy is.

I've noticed a tendency (a rather "weird" tendency, in fact) for people to refer to "Islamic" science, math, and other stuff. Sometimes even when the work in question predates Islam. I don't remember ever hearing people talk about Newton's "Christian" physics. Or describe calculus as "Christian" mathematics. That would be weird, wouldn't it? Even though he was a Christian, living in a Christian society. As was Leibniz. So I think it's weird to hear about "Islamic" mathematics. Maybe someone can explain to me why this is normal.

I agree that it would be unusual for people to refer to "Christian" science etc. However, that's not because it's unusual to want to specify what culture something came from -- it's because the conventional identifier is "Western". You shouldn't have much trouble finding discussions of "Western science".

> the translators of the _Elements_ were Arabs, and they translated it into Arabic

There was a translation into Arabic, yes. Do you actually know that it was done by Arabs? All wikipedia says it that this was done "under Harun al-Rashid", whose court was in Iraq or Syria (and seems to have been run mainly by Persians). The translation would have had to be done by people who understood Greek; this seems less likely for Arabs than for locals.

Both of you make persuasive arguments.

FWIW, in my [limited] understanding it was a strain of Sunni Islam that became enamored with learning and preserving Greek and Roman scholarship. This backfired, though, and a strain of theology which very intentionally rejected empiricism and logical deduction emerged to dominate Sunni religious scholarship. At that point the preservation and further development of Western thought decreased significantly; the works produced--those which hadn't been burned--wait for discovery by Europeans centuries later.

Which is why today there are, supposedly, marked differences in the way a society like Iran finances human and physical sciences domestically versus, say, Saudi Arabia where financing of science education is vulnerable to the ire of religious leaders who see it as more of a threat than they otherwise might, similar to many strains of Christian theology which perceive a conflict between scientific scholarship, and acceptance and adherence to their religious creed. Individual adherents can remain oblivious to these esoteric distinctions, but they can matter hugely in terms of the development and atrophy of institutional support within a society.

Heath includes a chapter "Euclid in Arabia" detailing the various translations from Greek to Arabic.

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