the power of doubt

Over the last three weeks, I've followed a BBC documentary in three episodes titled “Science and Islam”, which presented the scientific history of the early Muslim empire and its continuing legacy. Take the words algebra, alkali and alcohol. They have Arabic roots (like many other words starting with al) and are bright monuments to the scientific and technological achievements of that culture. When Europeans lived in the Dark Ages, Arabs developed mathematics, optics and astronomy, chemistry and medicine. Most of this rich heritage is forgotten in the Western world these days.

The Baghdad-born British nuclear physics professor Jim al-Khalili set out to change that. He traveled to Egypt, Syria and Iran to discover evidence of early scientific triumphs that would later, from about the time of the Italian Renaissance, strongly influence European thinking. He talked to experts in the West and in the Middle East to get background information and a sense of context. With his own cultural background and command of the Arabic language, he connected easily with local sources. His inherent sense of curiosity and a scientist's capacity of wonder made him a compelling host. Add to this pictures of places I visited last summer, and you can imagine how captivated I was initially.

Each episode focused on one particular field of science and a concept considered essential for its thriving. The first episode illustrated the development of medicine and showed how the Arabic language contributed enormously to efficient study. Here, my first doubts rose and I was stirred from the comfort of uncritically consuming pretty pictures and sweet talk. It was claimed that Arabic was specifically designed to be precise and unambiguous. I dissent. This is only relevant compared to modern English, which is devoid of any logic regarding spelling and pronunciation. However, there is no advantage over other modern languages like Spanish or German and certainly not over Latin, which prevailed in Europe when Arabic rose to prominence further south.

I would even say, after having studied the language for a few months, that Arabic is particularly vague and ambiguous. Signs (not unlike diacritic marks) denoting short vowels or their absence are optional and not normally added. Newsprint and informal writing is devoid of them. What is written can be understood from the context but might be pronounced differently by speakers in different corners of the Arab world. Latin could have sustained the same technological boom. What Arabic had going in its favor was that it was spoken natively in an extremely large area. The ready exchange of ideas that this facilitated, the clusters of inquiry that were set up from Baghdad to Cairo to Granada and the easy interaction of very diverse great minds are what distinguished Arabic science back then and drove it forward. Islam, in contrast to what the title of the documentary implies, had nothing to do with this besides, importantly, not getting in the way.

The second episode took the concept of reason and showed how optics and chemistry were developed. I found no flaws here and thoroughly enjoyed the hour in front of my computer. In the end I got outright ecstatic when the wise words were uttered that early Islamic scientists “didn't get all the right answers, but they did teach us to ask the right questions”. What's more, they urged us to test any answers we find with rigorous experiments because without experiments, theory remains meaningless and sterile. This is of course in stark contrast to what religion advocates, and again I can only wonder at the choice of title for the documentary. Science, in contrast to religion, is based on repeatable observations and stringent experimentation, not belief of faith.

The concluding episode of the series looked at the development of astronomy and how judiciously applied doubt led to a revision of the ancient Ptolemaic view of the universe. When Ptolemy had developed his theory of planetary and astral motion back in Greece more than a thousand years earlier, Earth was considered the center of the universe. Everything else – the moon, the sun, the planets and the stars – rotated around it in crystal shells. Observation didn't quite bear out the theory, and Ptolemy had to reluctantly introduce arbitrary fudge factors and capricious modifications to his elegant model, but it still didn't completely work out. We know the reason why. Earth and the planets rotate around the sun, which is at the center of our solar system. Ptolemy couldn't make this mental leap, and neither could the Muslim astronomers.

The power of doubt is repeatedly evoked in Arabic astronomy. The scientists in the 15th century were aware that something was foul with the predominant model and they did rigorous and extensive observations to get data for the construction of a better model. In the end, they failed, and it was the Polish astronomer Copernicus who threw Earth from the center of the universe and postulated the current heliocentric view.

Why did the Arabs not get it? Might it be that their rigid religious system simply didn't allow for the necessary amount of doubt to work itself into the thoughts of great thinkers? Religion doesn't encourage doubt, and neither does it foster independent thought. Holy books lay out the eternal truth, and dissent is a sin. Seen in that context, it is amazing that Arabic science and technology developed to the extent it did. But on the other hand, why did Copernicus see the light? He was a Catholic, and that religious system is nearly as strict and ruthless as Islam and held absolute power over Europe back then. Galileo experienced the wrath of the Vatican less than a century later when he defended the same revolutionary views.

When the series ended, these questions remained. In addition, the decline of the Arab world was only mentioned in passing and explained cursorily with its refusal of the printing press and the discovery, by European Christians, of the American continent. There is not too much sense in either reason. What kept the Arabs from discovering America and looting all the gold, for example? Why were they sitting on their sofas (or kneeling on their prayer mats) haplessly watching the Europeans gain strength and ultimately outperform them in nearly every field? So many questions remain that the documentary clearly deserves a continuation.