Jim Al-Khalili

Challenges popular misconceptions to reveal the unrecognized scientific accomplishments of medieval Islam, profiling innovations that played significant roles in bridging the ancient and modern worlds while promoting the European Renaissance.

How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance

The House of Wisdom

Gavin

Surprisingly dull and unanalytical. al-Khalili is good-natured and knowledgeable, but he puts in too many people, too many dates, and too little science. He tries to cover seven hundred years and multiple kingdoms, and the theological and military context, and ends up shallowly mentioning these things and little more. It would have been better to focus on the greats - Khwarizmi, Kindi, Haytham, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd - and explain their actual achievements, then note that work of this calibre was done by others over centuries too.

Cool questions al-Khalili barely touches:

* The Byzantines ruled Greece. How did they lose Greek thought, while the caliphate found it?
* What did we know before the Golden Age? What did we gain from it?

"Greatest" - 'greatest Muslim physicist', 'greatest Indian mathematician', 'greatest clinician ever' - appears 90 times in 250 pages. We are never told what specific achievements earn them the superlative.

al-Kindi:

  "We ought not to be embarrassed of appreciating the truth and of obtaining it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. Nothing should be dearer to the seeker of truth than the truth itself, and there is no deterioration of the truth, nor belittling either of one who speaks it or conveys it."


It was nice to learn a word for this awesome form of Islam, the Mu'talizi. (I could have guessed from the kind of person who uses their name as an insult: "In contemporary Salafi jihadism, the epithet or supposed allegations of being a Muʿtazilite have been used between rival groups as a means of denouncing their credibility."

The caliphate was a remarkably open society, for its time. This is only confusing because our received images come from the past few centuries of fundamentalism. Sad: 

  The Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, who is one of the most influential intellectuals in the Muslim world today, has stressed that censorship in today's Muslim world is stronger than at any other time in history.

Omar AlHashmi

3.5/5

I've always been interested in Arabic Science. So I thought this was the best opportunity. The book itself is very informative and I liked how detailed it really was. The biggest issue I had with the book is that it is filled with useless information that made no sense being in the book. I wish the author solely focused on the achievements of arabic scientists and focused on how they managed to do those scientific achievements. Those parts were the most fascinating for me and I wish there was more focus on that. All in all it is a good guide for knowing arabic scientists. Hopefully this book will allow me to delve more into this topic.

The House of Wisdom How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance

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