George Saliba: Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance.(Book review)

George Saliba: Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007, HC, 315 pp, ISBN: 978-0-262-19557-7

When, where, and how did the Islamic scientific tradition begin? When, where and how did it reach its zenith? What did it accomplish? And when did its decline begin? These are the basic questions that have puzzled historians of science for over a quarter century as they reconsider the "classical narrative" formulated by earlier grand Orientalists such as Goldziher and his successors. George Saliba's new book, which he calls "essentially an essay in historiography" (vii), joins the many seminal works he has written over the last thirty years that have constituted some of the most original studies on the history of Islamic science and have been instrumental in producing the initial cracks in that same classical narrative, which was once considered unassailable. Despite Saliba's longstanding scholarly career and insightful works, however, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance is not a work that can serve a final blow to the classical narrative, for it relies too heavily on thin argumentation with too few proofs to convince adherents of the classical narrative.

The first two chapters on the "Question of Beginnings", for instance, attempt to dislodge the claim of the classical narrative that Islamic scientific tradition came into existence solely through the translation of Greek, Indian, and Persian scientific texts. In his alternate narrative, Saliba relies too heavily on the seventh treatise in Ibn Nadim's al-Fihrist, a weight that the passage quoted and discussed in much detail does not seem able to bear. While it is true that the classical narrative is flawed, biased, and is based on misconstrued understanding of terms such as "ancient sciences", "Islamic sciences", and an equally misunderstood binary of "rational versus traditional" sciences, these problems have already been noted numerous times over the last quarter century and Saliba's reconstruction through Ibn Nadim adds nothing to the argument. His second, rather slow-moving chapter, overstretches the argument, returns time and again to Ibn Nadim, labors over minute details, and restates what he and others have already stated many times over: that there was a local, native, homegrown, independent interest in natural sciences which produced the translation movement--and not the other way around. There were many different currents flowing into the Islamic civilization at the time of the emergence of the scientific tradition and the translation movement was merely one such current; it was not the only current which would beget Islamic science, as the classical narrative would have us believe. Again, however, this summation, with slight additions here and there, does not add any major argument or ...