166 Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.

1 (2011)

Khawārij, Ibn Ḥanbal saw the Islamic community divided between those who were true “believers”
and those he considered just “followers” of Islam. The advice that Ibn Ḥanbal gave his followers, how-
ever, allowed them to coexist with Christians, Jews, and Magians, as well as other Muslims who were
not able to practice Islamic virtues to the extent that Ibn Ḥanbal advocated. Sizgorich, however, never
quite answers the $64,000 question he poses, namely: “What might account for this level of toleration
within the Muslim empire?” (p. 233). Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that he has left some
questions still unanswered.
[After this review went to press, we learned that Thomas Sizgorich, Associate Professor of History
at the University of California, Irvine, died from a stroke on January 27, 2011 at the age of 41.]

Christopher H. MacEvitt
Dartmouth College

Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History. By Ahmad Dallal. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 239. $27.50.

i
This book is based on a series of four lectures that the author gave at Yale University in 2008 as part
of the Dwight H. Terry lecture series, in which he set out to do no less than give an overview of the
nature and status of science in the Muslim world from the eighth century to the present day. The scope
and ambition of the project are attested to by the book’s chapter titles: (1) “Beginnings and Beyond,”
(2) “Science and Philosophy,” (3) “Science and Religion,” and (4) “In the Shadow of Modernity.” The
central question to which the book returns in each of these chapters is a nuanced one: what cultural,
intellectual, and social factors produced and characterized Muslim attitudes to the natural sciences in
speciic periods (p. 9)? The main discourses in which Dallal is interested can be grouped under the
labels science, philosophy, and religion, categories the conditional and contingent nature of which he
readily acknowledges. While this book is largely a thoughtful synthesis of a substantial body of second-
ary material produced by historians of Islamic science over the past few decades, at a number of places,
notably with the seventeenth-century Moroccan jurist al-ʿArabī Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām al-Fāsī (p. 8) and
with the fourteenth-century theologian and astronomer Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa al-Bukhārī (pp. 135–38)—the
subject of Dallal’s irst monograph—the author draws upon his own reading of works still in manu-
script. Dallal ofers insight into central historiographical questions that have characterized the study
of the history of the sciences in the Muslim world during the past decades. The result is an excellent
summation of the current state of the ield that should be the irst reference for any future student of the
subject, and it will prove valuable for those currently working on the area.
Chapter one begins with a brief consideration of the important role of astronomy in determining
the direction of prayer within Islamic law, introducing one of Dallal’s central arguments: Muslim
scholars in the premodern period by and large considered scientiic and religious discourses to func-
tion in separate spheres, in which each was considered authoritative in its own right (pp. 3–8). He then
turns to the origins of the natural sciences in the early Islamic empires of the eighth to ninth centuries.
Strikingly and characteristic of his approach in general, Dallal is interested less in scientiic precedent
than in what factors in the late Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid periods provided the foundation for what
became one of the largest and most important translation movements in history. Drawing on the work
of Dimitri Gutas and George Saliba, he argues that the emerging scientiic tradition of the ninth cen-
tury in Baghdad was not, as is often readily assumed, the result of the translation movement associated
with the caliph al-Maʾmūn (d. 833), but its cause (pp. 14–16). Without a prior “scientiic culture” and
interest in not only Greek but also Persian and Indian science, there would have been no demand for
the translation of works of medicine, astronomy, and astrology that “turned Arabic into a universal
language of science” (p. 16). Dallal is agnostic on whether the scientiic culture he speaks of was the
result of the “Arabization of the [Byzantine, Sasanid] administrative apparatus” (Saliba) or the work of
a group of international and multilingual scholars (Gutas).
 Reviews of Books 167

From the question of beginnings, Dallal turns to the “Social and Institutional Contexts” of science
in the formative period of Islamdom (p. 17). How was it possible that science continued to be practiced
and developed in a multiplicity of historical contexts? Here he rejects the characterization of the natu-
ral sciences as marginal to educational contexts in the Muslim world, an argument made by George
Makdisi and, more recently, enthusiastically and somewhat recklessly adopted by Toby Huf; draw-
ing on the work of Sonja Brentjes, Robert Morrison, Nahyan Fancy, and ʿAbd al-Qādir Muḥammad
al-Nuʿaymī al-Dimashqī, Dallal argues that the teaching and transmission of the natural sciences were
not only present within madrasas and individual tutorials, but also within institutions such as observa-
tories. The earliest of these was founded by al-Maʾmūn, and astronomical observations continued to
be made, and innovative works written, by astronomers such as al-Ṭūsī (d. 1274), based in the famed
observatory of Marāghā, and Ibn al-Shāṭir (d. 1375), timekeeper in the great mosque of Damascus
(p. 25). Dallal emphasizes here a point that has been accepted as fact within the ield, the implications
of which, however, are all too often ignored outside of it, namely, that far from simply preserving Greek
(and Persian and Indian) science, Muslims pursuing Arabo-Islamic science advanced and transformed
received knowledge, in part by systematizing and synthesizing translated works, in part by mathema-
tizing received astronomical thought (pp. 26–36). This scientiic culture was not only the purview of
scholars; due to a favorable attitude towards practical application of scientiic knowledge—a trait that
diferentiated them from the Greeks—as in engineering new irrigation systems, for example, the cen-
tral importance and value of science were established and institutionalized within Muslim societies in
general (pp. 49–52).
In chapter two Dallal turns to the relationship between science and philosophy. If in the previous
chapter he focused on describing the factors that enabled the entry and lourishing of science within
Islamdom, here he is anxious to dispel the misperception that because Muslims allegedly focused
solely on the practical and not philosophical aspects of science, their study and practice of science had
no cultural ramiications (p. 54). On the contrary, Dallal describes how for the past few decades histo-
rians of Islamic science have discovered that much of the work carried out by premodern Muslim sci-
entists, especially astronomers, was driven by philosophical and epistemological questions (pp. 55–57).
In making this observation, he nuances the current diferentiation between an Eastern (Iran, Syria)
interest in reining Ptolemy’s models mathematically, drawing on new observations, and a Western
(Andalusī) attempt to argue for a pre-Ptolemaic Aristotelian cosmology in the interest of philosophical
purity (p. 64). The Eastern tradition, which culminated with Shams al-Dīn al-Khafrī (d. 1550), was
similarly characterized by philosophical commitments, albeit ones that resulted in a demarcation of an
epistemological boundary between mathematical astronomy and natural philosophy (pp. 84–85). Dallal
makes this point most forcefully in the context of an eleventh-century debate between the astronomer
al-Bīrūnī (d. 1048) and the philosopher Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037):

Al-Bīrūnī maintains that it does not matter whether the astronomer uses a geocentric or a helio-
centric model as far as mathematical astronomy is concerned. This is so because the relative
motions will be the same, and the diference amounts to a simple transfer of coordinates. The
observational technology available to mathematical astronomy at the time of Al-Bīrūnī (and,
indeed, Copernicus) was not accurate enough to provide a satisfactory answer to the question of
which model to use. Thus, Al-Bīrūnī concludes that the discussion pertaining to the nature of the
motion of heavenly bodies is primarily philosophical, not mathematical, and since he thought
of himself as a mathematical astronomer, he did not feel that it was his responsibility to address
this philosophical question. (p. 74)

Throughout this chapter, Dallal explains how astronomy and natural science operated as paral-
lel discourses, and how within the Eastern tradition there was a rejection of the universal principles
elevated by the Aristotelian tradition that such Western scholars as Averroes (d. 1198) defended in the
areas of astronomy and medicine at the expense of empirical evidence (pp. 92–93). Summing up, he
concludes that
In the mainstream of Islamic scientiic culture, the natural philosophical and metaphysical prin-
ciples that uniied the sciences of antiquity were eroded. The various sciences operated, not on
168 Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.1 (2011)

the assumption of a unifying universal reason, but on the assumption that the criteria of rational-
ity were not independent from the intellectual and historical contexts of the disciplines in which
rationality was deployed. (p. 109)
Chapter three begins with Dallal asserting that religious and scientiic knowledge cannot histori-
cally be theorized as independent bodies of knowledge, and that both scientists and religious scholars,
in diferent contexts and due to changing contingent factors, could play on supposed tensions between
the two for purposes of social capital (pp. 111–14). For the most part, however, he continues to argue
that Muslim religious scholars treated science as a parallel discourse to Islamic studies. In the case
of Qurʾanic exegesis, for example, scholars did not consider the Qurʾan an authority on the nature or
workings of the natural world (pp. 126–29). With regards to theology (kalām), Dallal spends some time
showing how, contrary to consensus, prominent theologians such as al-Ījī (d. 1355), while claiming
that theology was the most noble of all disciplines, were claiming this distinction based on its divine
subject matter and not on its having authority over other types of knowledge, including the sciences
(pp. 132–35). He then turns to the issue of causality in Muslim theological thought, especially in the
works of the brilliant and inluential jurist, theologian, and philosopher al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), a subject
on which much ink has lowed in recent years. Al-Ghazālī’s views on causality have attracted attention
from Frank Grifel, Ulrich Rudolph, Lenn Goodman, Leor Halevi, Eric Ormsby, and others due to his
imposing stature as an intellectual in his own day and his arguable inluence on subsequent genera-
tions of Muslim scholars. Dallal bases his reading of al-Ghazālī’s views on causality on the Tahāfūt
al-falāsifa, and concludes that al-Ghazālī, while denying that secondary causality exists, asserts that the
only way humans can make observations about nature is to assume that causal relationships exist (pp.
142–43). Al-Ghazālī’s approach to the status of scientiic discourse is further clariied in the case of
eclipses—regarding which the Prophet had ordained prayer until they end—when he reconciles possi-
ble tensions between Prophetic Tradition and empirical observation by stressing that religious ritual and
astronomical predication relate to separate spheres and discourses (p. 140). Dallal grants al-Ghazālī’s
views considerable authority when he claims that, after this thinker, religion was no longer invoked
to defend science, not because science was not practiced, but because it was so widely accepted as an
autonomous ield of knowledge (p. 146). Here, at the end of the third chapter, Dallal makes an observa-
tion of central importance to the book as a whole:
To be sure, scientiic autonomy came at a price. For better or for worse, science did not turn into
an ethical value to which other values would be subordinated. Yet while religion dominated the
moral sphere and claimed a higher rank there on account of the nobility of its subject matter, it
did not exercise an epistemological hegemony over science. That the unity of knowledge would
give meaning to a hierarchical ranking of systems of knowledge was no longer assumed (irre-
spective of whether science or religion comes irst). (p. 147)
The fourth and inal chapter, “In the Shadow of Modernity,” takes on the diicult task of explaining
the status of the natural sciences in the Muslim world during the last two centuries. As Dallal notes,
explaining absences is a far more speculative and fraught task than interpreting scientiic texts and
practices (p. 150). Nonetheless, and especially in light of a contemporary consensus that the natural
sciences are sadly neglected in the Muslim world (p. 159), the question of what happened between the
early modern and modern periods is of vital interest. Before ofering a series of observations on debates
around science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dallal argues that, unlike those who attribute
the decline of the natural sciences in the Muslim world to an essential cultural or epistemological char-
acteristic, he sees this decline as being the result of speciic historical and cultural factors, and thus out-
side of the scope of his book, which focuses on the nature of Islamic science itself (p. 152). That said,
Dallal, drawing on Saliba, ofers as the beginning of an explanation for the ascent of Europe, scientiic
and otherwise, from the sixteenth century onwards, the European drive to develop a direct trade route to
India and the subsequent discovery of the New World with its economic resources (p. 154). The chap-
ter’s discussion then turns to the ways in which Muslims have responded to Western science since the
1880s, pointing out how Muslim thinkers have begun describing the relationship between religion and
 Reviews of Books 169

science quite diferently from their premodern predecessors: the famous nineteenth-century reformer
Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, for example, in his debate with the Orientalist Ernest Renan, accepted that
science and religion were opposed, while denying that Islam was the only religion for which this was
true (p. 161). When it comes to the actual content of modern science, it is interesting that Muslim think-
ers have been far less perturbed by a Copernican, heliocentric, view of the universe—irst introduced
to the Middle East in the late nineteenth century and soon accepted—than they have been by Darwin-
ism, which was iercely rejected by al-Afghānī and more recently by a growing creationist movement
in Turkey (pp. 166–68). At the end of this last chapter Dallal emphasizes the modern tendency in
the Muslim world to claim that science is subservient to religion within Islam, often involving the
apologetic proposition that all modern science was present in the Qurʾan (pp. 169–70). These claims,
he argues, involve a deep ignorance if not abuse of premodern Islamic thought, and impede the future
productive development of Islamic science (p. 176).

ii
Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History is an excellent book, in which Ahmad Dallal ofers a
broad and insightful synthesis of a ield most often characterized by either focused studies accessible
only to specialists, or by shallow apologetics and polemics. This is not to say that one cannot wish
that the book had also included more on the interaction between Islamic (though personally I would
have preferred Hodgson’s term “Islamicate”) science and Islamic law, particularly regarding the role
of expert witnesses, as discussed recently in Ron Shaham’s The Expert Witness in Islamic Courts
(Chicago, 2010). Another book that appeared at the same time as Dallal’s book, Giancarlo Casale’s
The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford, 2010), contends that the diferentiation between a sixteenth-
century Europe challenged and enriched by its discovery of new worlds and a Muslim world content
in its trade routes running from India to the Mediterranean is untenable, considering the Ottoman
sixteenth-century exploration of the Persian Gulf and their naval confrontations with the Portuguese
there. Consideration of these books, admittedly not accessible to Dallal, could have supplemented his
argument, and Casale’s especially draws attention to the ield’s general poverty in ofering satisfactory
master narratives for intellectual developments in the Muslim world in the early modern period. But
these suggestions for further reading are just that—useful supplements to Dallal’s masterful synthesis.
A inal hope for future work based on the framework presented by Dallal would be to move, whenever
possible, beyond consideration of the views of such prominent thinkers as al-Ghazālī and al-Afghānī
to a broader analysis of how other less famous thinkers of the same period approached the subject of,
respectively, causality and Darwinism. Seeking more neglected views and comparing them with those
expressed by those famous igures to which we, collectively as a ield, return time and again, would
help us better understand whether the views of these rightfully lauded thinkers were actually emblem-
atic of the periods in which they lived and to what degree their contemporaries considered them in the
same light that we do today.
An observation for those who teach subjects related to Islamic science at the undergraduate level
is that this book, despite and perhaps even because of its scope, will be diicult to use in anything but
advanced seminars to which students have come with ample background on Middle East and Islamic
history. This observation is less a criticism of Dallal’s admirable efort than a recognition of how much
work still needs to be done in the ields of Islamic studies and Middle East history regarding the teach-
ing of the early modern period and the creation of new master narratives for undergraduate teaching
that go beyond the established paradigms of stasis and decline. In this efort, Islam, Science, and the
Challenge of History will be a useful and productive resource.

Justin Stearns
New York University-Abu Dhabi