Overblown Nonsense

In Praise of Arab Astronomers

ASTRONOMERS, at least those interested in the history of the science, are annoyed by the statement of the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey that Muslims have contributed little or nothing to it. Their resentment has nothing to do with politics, but concerns Carey's unawareness of how Arab astronomers in the early Middle Ages created so much of our modern knowledge. By the 10th century, astronomy and the other sciences were almost dead in Europe. Intellectuals were mainly interested in obscure theological disputes. As Macaulay put it, ``they filled the world with long beards and long words, and they left it as ignorant as they found it.'' It was the Arabs, headed by the genius of Al Sufi (903-986), with his epochal Book of the Fixed Stars, that awakened Europe to a new interest in the cosmos. Today, anyone with the slightest knowledge of the sky knows such names as Aldebaran, Betelgeuse and Fomalhaut, and such words as azimuth, zenith and nadir. Indeed, more than 90 per cent of the 200 brightest stars have Arab names.

Aristotle

Carey's most irritating passage ran thus:``We owe much to Islam handing on to the West many of the treasures of Greek thought, the beginnings of calculus, Aristotelian thought, during the period known in the West as the Dark Ages...'' Aristotelian thought? Aristotle's overblown reputation enrages true scientists. While his philosophy may command respect, his ``science'' consisted of nothing more than collecting and observing and often misunderstanding a huge range of facts. Doing this no more makes a person a scientist than writing a chronology of the dates of reigns and battles, and getting many of them wrong, makes someone a historian. His beliefs were expressed with dogmatic authority. As a result, they acquired a kind of divine aura. Right up until the 16th century it was thought heretical even to question them---as Galileo found to his cost. So great was his influence that most people's idea of how to solve a scientific problem was to look up what Aristotle had written about it. His works, said the late Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar, ``are a strange and tiresome farrago of hearsay, imperfect observation, wishful thinking and downright gullibility.'' He believed in the existence of only four chemical elements---earth, air, fire and water---that the surfaces of the Sun and Moon were pure and unblemished, that youths only became fertile at 21, that young people produced unusually small and unhealthy babies, and that ``poetical'' statements were preferable to truth. It says something of Carey's scholarship that he should think the greatest achievement of the Arabs was ``handing on'' to Europe the nonsense talked by this ``apostle of wrongness'', as he became known during the Renaissance. The Arabs, Carey also fails to notice, introduced a great deal of colourfulness to astronomy. While the names of the constellations come to us from the ancient Greeks, the meanings of Arab star names have an expressive vividness. Aldebaran, for example, means ``follower of the Pleiades.'' Altair is ``the flying eagle.'' Betelgeuse is the ``hand of Orion.'' Denebola is the ``tail of the Lion'', and Vega is ``the stooping Eagle.'' Without Al Sufi and his colleagues the universe would be a much duller place.