Question
Why is the Islamic world currently so backward in science compared to the Western world? Despite the fact that the Islamic world had a head-start in the Middle Ages and was fairly advanced mathematically?
Answer
A scientific culture is more than a laundry list of isolated accomplishments, claimed and real. Three critical necessary (but not sufficient) elements are:
When all three are present, you might get the chain reaction and path-dependent exponential explosion that we call "enlightenment." There is a sort of positive feedback loop that involves all three that needs to take off. This has happened only once in history, in Europe in the 1400s. Other examples were copies of the European original.
To borrow a pair of terms from political science that describe state formation, there is a distinction between pristine scientific culture formation, and competitive scientific culture formation. By the time of the first pristine event in Europe in the 1400s, the world was too well connected for other pristine enlightenment events. Other scientific revolutions had to be competitive (i.e. copies of the European model). If the world had been less connected, perhaps similar pristine events would have happened later, elsewhere.
Islamic culture at its best (probably 10th -- 13th centuries) was missing the third ingredient: a strong tradition of metaphoric thinking. This is curious, because strong traditions of metaphor arise out of strong narrative traditions, and these did exist in early Islam (examples include the Arabian Nights stories). But it never grew into a culture of metaphoric imagining. Why?
You could argue that it was actually the strictures in Islam against representation of living things, especially people, in art, that was the culprit. So you have abstract conceptual triumphs like the Alhambra, which is pretty much a museum of Group Theory, and advances in empirical medicine, alchemy and various crafts (like building of waterwheels and even experiments with gliders).
But metaphoric reasoning was dampened. Logic unaided by this quick-and-dirty shortcut mechanism is radically slowed down. Metaphoric reasoning is how you create all those wild initial ideas that you later prove more rigorously with logic. Can you imagine doing science without being able to draw rough sketches on a whiteboard that sorta look like real-world things?
This is of course hard to prove. Many contingencies interfered. For example, the Turks took over Islam (Islamic science was primarily Persian and Arabic in character). The Turks were to the Abassids what Rome was to Greece: a vigorously expansionist military culture rather than a scientific one. And oh yeah, though the crusades looked sort of like a stalemate back in 1453 (fall of Constantinople), we now know that in a crucial geopolitical sense, Islam lost and got rigid and conservative as a response. It turned fundamentalist slowly, as the Ottoman empire went into its long decline, while the West grew more liberal. Which is curious because Protestantianism was originally a fundamentalist movement not unlike 19th century Wahhabism. The difference was that Protestantianism found a large frontier to expand into whereas Islam got increasingly hemmed in on all sides.
For the sake of completeness, I should mention that by this model, Greek and Indian cultures failed to spark a scientific revolution because they were effectively missing the empiricism piece.
There were minor empiricist traditions in both cultures (Archimedes and his Eureka! in Greece, early metallurgy in India), but they were not robust. One theory is that slave ownership in Greece and the caste system in India were responsible for the divorce between the conceptual and metaphoric on the one hand, and the empirical on the other. Empiricism requires people who work with their hands and have access to education.
Chinese culture is the most interesting case. Chinese science, like Islamic, lacked a strong metaphoric component. This is curious because the Chinese language is probably the most metaphoric thing on the planet (or so I've been informed). One theory I've heard (due to D. T. Suzuki) is the Chinese fondness for making everything ineffable. Taoism and Chinese Buddhism are pretty ineffable compared to other spiritual traditions for example. The narrative traditions are austere and drawn from everyday life. Barring a dragon here and there, there was little drive towards the weaving of complicated epic myths with fantastic elements.
You could say that the European enlightenment was a sort of "complete the triangle" event, when the rehydrated conceptual+metaphoric traditions of Greece met the empiricist cultures of Northern Europe. The shift from Catholic (more narrative/metaphor based) to Protestant (more austere and abstract, like Islam) also happened at just the right time. Which is why the enlightenment started in the South (Italy and Spain, the latter partly due to it being the Islamic transfer point), but finished in the North.
Russia offers a good example of a place where something like the Catholic-to-Protestant shift did not happen. So it had to import Western European science.
- A tradition of empiricism
- A tradition of conceptual abstraction
- A tradition of metaphoric reasoning
When all three are present, you might get the chain reaction and path-dependent exponential explosion that we call "enlightenment." There is a sort of positive feedback loop that involves all three that needs to take off. This has happened only once in history, in Europe in the 1400s. Other examples were copies of the European original.
To borrow a pair of terms from political science that describe state formation, there is a distinction between pristine scientific culture formation, and competitive scientific culture formation. By the time of the first pristine event in Europe in the 1400s, the world was too well connected for other pristine enlightenment events. Other scientific revolutions had to be competitive (i.e. copies of the European model). If the world had been less connected, perhaps similar pristine events would have happened later, elsewhere.
Islamic culture at its best (probably 10th -- 13th centuries) was missing the third ingredient: a strong tradition of metaphoric thinking. This is curious, because strong traditions of metaphor arise out of strong narrative traditions, and these did exist in early Islam (examples include the Arabian Nights stories). But it never grew into a culture of metaphoric imagining. Why?
You could argue that it was actually the strictures in Islam against representation of living things, especially people, in art, that was the culprit. So you have abstract conceptual triumphs like the Alhambra, which is pretty much a museum of Group Theory, and advances in empirical medicine, alchemy and various crafts (like building of waterwheels and even experiments with gliders).
But metaphoric reasoning was dampened. Logic unaided by this quick-and-dirty shortcut mechanism is radically slowed down. Metaphoric reasoning is how you create all those wild initial ideas that you later prove more rigorously with logic. Can you imagine doing science without being able to draw rough sketches on a whiteboard that sorta look like real-world things?
This is of course hard to prove. Many contingencies interfered. For example, the Turks took over Islam (Islamic science was primarily Persian and Arabic in character). The Turks were to the Abassids what Rome was to Greece: a vigorously expansionist military culture rather than a scientific one. And oh yeah, though the crusades looked sort of like a stalemate back in 1453 (fall of Constantinople), we now know that in a crucial geopolitical sense, Islam lost and got rigid and conservative as a response. It turned fundamentalist slowly, as the Ottoman empire went into its long decline, while the West grew more liberal. Which is curious because Protestantianism was originally a fundamentalist movement not unlike 19th century Wahhabism. The difference was that Protestantianism found a large frontier to expand into whereas Islam got increasingly hemmed in on all sides.
For the sake of completeness, I should mention that by this model, Greek and Indian cultures failed to spark a scientific revolution because they were effectively missing the empiricism piece.
There were minor empiricist traditions in both cultures (Archimedes and his Eureka! in Greece, early metallurgy in India), but they were not robust. One theory is that slave ownership in Greece and the caste system in India were responsible for the divorce between the conceptual and metaphoric on the one hand, and the empirical on the other. Empiricism requires people who work with their hands and have access to education.
Chinese culture is the most interesting case. Chinese science, like Islamic, lacked a strong metaphoric component. This is curious because the Chinese language is probably the most metaphoric thing on the planet (or so I've been informed). One theory I've heard (due to D. T. Suzuki) is the Chinese fondness for making everything ineffable. Taoism and Chinese Buddhism are pretty ineffable compared to other spiritual traditions for example. The narrative traditions are austere and drawn from everyday life. Barring a dragon here and there, there was little drive towards the weaving of complicated epic myths with fantastic elements.
You could say that the European enlightenment was a sort of "complete the triangle" event, when the rehydrated conceptual+metaphoric traditions of Greece met the empiricist cultures of Northern Europe. The shift from Catholic (more narrative/metaphor based) to Protestant (more austere and abstract, like Islam) also happened at just the right time. Which is why the enlightenment started in the South (Italy and Spain, the latter partly due to it being the Islamic transfer point), but finished in the North.
Russia offers a good example of a place where something like the Catholic-to-Protestant shift did not happen. So it had to import Western European science.