Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance

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This is essentially an essay in historiography. It critiques the current trends of the historiography of Islamic and Arabic science and attempts to make use of the latest historical findings in order to propose a new historiography that could better explain the scientific developments and, in a more general sense, the major trends in the intellectual history of Islamic civilization. It touches on periodization, on the relation of science to the general intellectual environment, on the social and political dimensions of scientific production, and on the relationship between the technical scientific details, in a particular discipline and the social support and recognition of those disciplines.

The main ideas discussed herein have already been articulated, in a preliminary manner, in my book al-Fikr al-'Ilmī al-Arabī (Balamand University Press, Lebanon, 1998). Now they are available — more extensively developed in some major respects — to those who do not read Arabic. The main features of the thesis expressed earlier in al-Fikr are supported here by fuller evidence. Furthermore, the new literature that has appeared since the publication of al-Fikr, especially that which bears on that book's main thesis, is critiqued in this volume. This can, then, be seen as a critique of the contents of that literature, and of the conclusions reached therein. The scrutiny to which those conclusions are now subjected is necessitated by new evidence that has raised doubts about their validity.

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