George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, ser. Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), XII + 315 pp.

摘要

This book is an extended translation of an Arabic text published in 1998, andnbrings together ideas that George Saliba has been developing over a long pe-nriod of time. It has two focuses: the first, on why the wholesale translation ofnGreek works into Arabic was undertaken in ninth-century Baghdad; the sec-nond, on the influence of Arabic science on the Copernican revolution. Joiningnthe two, at least chronologically, is the demonstration that Islamic astronomyncontinued to develop in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.nThese three topics may seem to be rather disparate, and to demand differentnapproaches. But Saliba claims that in Islam we see the ‘rise of a scientific tra-ndition that was crucial to the development of universal science in pre-modernntimes’ (p. 1). Therefore, one must try to find out what was the origin of this sci-nentific tradition. Saliba finds fault with what he calls the ‘Classical Narrative’,nwhich describes how the translation of Greek and Sassanian science in thenearly Abbasid period (ca. 750-900) prompted a relatively brief flowering of Is-nlamic science, which petered out in the face of religious opposition, just afternmuch of it had been handed over to the Latins. This transmission to the Latinsnhas been dubbed ‘the twelfth-century Renaissance’, and from then on Euro-npean scholars developed their own scientific ideas without recourse to Arabicntexts. Saliba takes issue with both ends of this story. Translation into Arabic innthe late eighth and ninth centuries cannot have taken place in an intellectualnvacuum; and it is simply not true that science in Islam ceased to develop afternthe twelfth century. Rather, scientific advances continued to be made, andnthese are so significant that they even had a role in changing the paradigmsnof European science in the sixteenth century.