HowAllah Killed ScienceTake, for example, the medical sciences, Muslims established the first
pharma cies and were the firs t to requ ire standard s of knowl edge and
competence from doctors and pharmacists, enforced by an examination.'
Atthe time of the fifth Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid (763-809), the
first hospital was establishe d in Baghdad, and many more followed.
YetIt was nota Muslim,but a Belgian physician and researcher, Andreas
VesaIius (1514-1564), who paved the way for modern medical advances
bypublishing the first accurate description of human internal organs,De
Humani Corporis Fabrica(On the Fabric of theHumanBody) in 1543.
Why? Because Vesalius was able to dissect human bodies, while that
pract ice was forbi dden in Islam, What's more, Vesal ius's book is
fille dwith detaile d anatomi cal drawin gs—but also forbid den in Islam are
artisti crepresentations of the human body.
In mathematics, it's the same story. Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa-
al -Khwa rizm i (780-850) was a pion eeri ng math emat icia n whos e
trea tise on algebra, once translated from Arabic, introduced generations of
Europeans to the rarified joys of that branch of mathematics. But in fact, the
principles upon which al-Khwarizmi worked were discovered centuries
before he was born—including the zero, which is often attributed to
Muslims. Even what we know today as "Arab ic numera ls" did not
origi natein Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India—and they are not used in the
Arabic language today. Nonetheless, there is no denying that al-Khwarizmi
wasinfluenti al.
The wordalgebra itself comes from the first word of the titleofhis
treatiseAl-Jabr wa-al -Muqabilah;and the wordalgorithmisderivedfrom
his name. Al-Khwarizmi's work opened up new avenues ofmathe matic al
and scien tifi c explo rati on in Europ e, so why didn 't it dothe same in the
Islamic world? The results are palpable: Europeans ultimately used algebra,
in conjunction withother discoveries, to make significant technological
advances; Muslims did not. Why?
One answer is that Europe had a long-standing intellectual tradition that-
made such innovations possible, while the Islamic world did not. This