102 DESTINY DISRUPTED
On the other hand, their interests directed the philosophers into prac-
tical concerns. By compiling, cataloging, and cross-referencing medical
discoveries from many lands, thinkers like Ibn Sina (Avicenna to the Eu-
ropeans) achieved a near-modern understanding of illness and medical
treatments as well as of anatomy-the circulation of blood was known to
them, as was the function of the heart and of most other major organs.
The Muslim world soon boasted the best hospitals the world had ever seen
or was to see for centuries to come: Baghdad alone had some hundred of
these facilities.
These Abbasid-era Muslim philosophers also laid the foundations of
chemistry as a discipline and wrote treatises on geology, optics, botany,
and virtually all the fields of study now known as science. They didn't
call it by a separate name. As in the West, where science was long called
natural philosophy, they saw no need to sort some of their speculations
into a separate category and call it by a new name, but early on they rec-
ognized quantification as an instrument for studying nature, which is
one of the cornerstones of science as a stand-alone endeavor. They also
relied on observation for data upon which to base theories, a second cor-
nerstone of science. They never articulated the scientific method per se-
the idea of incrementally building knowledge by formulating hypotheses
and then setting up experiments to prove or disprove them. Had they
bridged that gap, science as we know it might well have sprouted in the
Muslim world in Abbasid times, seven centuries before its birth in west-
ern Europe.
It didn't happen, however, for two reasons, one of which involves the
interaction between science and theology. In its early stages, science is in-
herently difficulty to disentangle from theology. Each seems to have impli-
cations for the other, at least to its practitioners. When Galileo promoted
the theory that the earth goes around the sun, religious authorities put him
on trial for heresy. Even today, even in the West, some Christian conserv-
atives counterpose the biblical narrative of creation to the theory of evolu-
tion, as if these two are competing explanations of the same riddle. Science
challenges religion because it insists on the reliability and sufficiency of its
method for seeking truth: experimentation and reason without recourse to
revelation. In the West, for most people, the two fields have reached a
compromise by agreeing to distinguish their fields of inquiry: the princi-