The First Atomic Bomb: How Islam Rejected Science
Politics, not religion, doomed Islamic science.
We all know that Islam regressed over a thousand years. And we all know that Islam was once a global center of learning. So, what happened?
If one were to reasonably rate the greatest knowledge-producing eras in history, most would place Europe (medieval through enlightenment) first and early medieval Islam second. Third place is likely ancient Greece and, after that, the debate opens up. I suspect that no one is even close to those three. Yet while science was invented by the Greeks, applied by the Romans, then took a sabbatical only to return to the Italians, French and Germans, one must wonder why and how science was seemingly permanently banished from the Islamic world. The key factor is something so pernicious that it infects all societies, and given the right political ingredients, it could happen to anyone.
First, when one speaks of Islamic learning, one is usually referring to Baghdad. While there were other centers of Islamic learning from Egypt to the Iberian peninsula, Baghdad was the epicenter. It had the most scholars and students and books. It became (probably) the largest city in the world with the largest library in the world. From about 750 to 850 AD Baghdad wasn’t just the center of Islamic learning; it was the center of all human knowledge.
After a century of rapid expansion, the Islamic world experienced a century of relative stability, but this all started to change by the middle of the 9th century. Samarra, about 70 miles up the Tigris from Baghdad, was the capital of the empire, and in 861, the caliph was murdered by his Turkish guards and thus ignited the “anarchy at Samarra.” Warring factions set off something like a civil war, more caliphs were murdered, and by the end of the decade, the new caliph was essentially a puppet of Turkish military chiefs — whose ancestors had been enslaved by Arabs.
Instability metastasized as regional leaders declared their full or semi independence, and areas ranging from the Caucasus and Anatolia to Egypt and North Africa broke away from Samarran control. The decade after the Samarran anarchy, the Zanj Rebellion occurred in Basra (about 280 miles south of Baghdad) wherein some 500,000 people were killed in what was essentially another civil war.
And so the century of stability was shattered, and it only got worse. Importantly, most of that early instability was self-inflicted. Social unrest and political assassinations were growing more common. But this internal discord was being met with external challenges from Christians and pagans, first by the Crusades, then by a resurgent Byzantine empire, and finally by the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. Even the loss of the Holy Lands and Baghdad — which, together with Mecca, were the crown jewels of Islam — could be largely attributed to self-inflicted wounds. Incredible arrogance combined with a lack of preparation meant that a Baghdad that the Muslims thought was impervious to attack was instead taken by pagan horsemen in a week, nearly all the residents of what was the world’s largest city were killed, and Islam never recovered.
But really, none of that should matter. Even massive instability doesn’t necessarily redefine a civilization’s relationship with science. Even the destruction of a civilization’s major city shouldn’t presage an interminable dark ages. Europe suffered incredible instability in the first half of the 20th century and, it could be argued, once it recovered it only focused more on science. China suffered instability for two centuries and then focused more on science. Instability, in itself, is not a cause.
So, what really happened?
One of the reasons that Baghdad so quickly became the global center for learning was that its scholars consumed learning from everywhere. Initially, Islamic learning wasn’t internal and organic but rather involved the translation of foreign texts. As they consumed these many texts — philosophy, mathematics, science, literature — they attempted to transform them into a coherent Islamic culture — incorporating what they thought was good and useful, jettisoning what was useless. In science, they explored ancient Greek thought, including atomic theory, and attempted to make Islamic sense of it.
This process was informed by the political needs of the time; creating order out of chaos was difficult; maintaining order was even more difficult. As instability began to break out, the political class needed the scholars to help support stability. This was achieved in a very curious way.
Once Islamic scholars approached atomic theory, they began to explore the nature of cause and effect. Can atoms cause something in another atom? Do collections of atoms — as materials or chemicals — cause an effect in other collections of atoms? The fundamental basis of cause and effect may seem remarkably basic, but for Muslims, there were greater philosophical and political consequences. If something — an atom or a human — possessed within it the capacity to cause an effect, then did it have free will? How then does this relate to submitting to God’s will? Further, if there existed free will cause and effect, then political leaders were, it seemed, responsible for the situations of their people. If cause and effect dictated the events on earth, then everything from slavery and poverty to irrigation and military disasters weren’t so much the expression of the will of God but rather the consequences of political action or inaction.
When the initial debate began over causation in the Islamic world, there was no obvious favorite resolution. The Muʿtazilites, rationalists who favored Greek cause and effect, were the dominant school in Baghdad and Basra in the 9th century — so much so that from 833–848 AD those who did not adhere to Muʿtazila doctrine were persecuted. Thus the Islamic golden period was dominated by a rationalist, empiricist school. Islamic scholarship perhaps reached its apex with al-Farabi in the 10th century; al-Farabi was so influential that he became known as “the Second Teacher” (Aristotle was the first). al-Farabi rejected theoretical philosophy and explicitly directed academics to work closely with politicians (those who don’t were “futile”), which strongly echoes Plato’s Philosopher King. Importantly, Muslim scholars were quite involved in the operation of civil society.
But as the Islamic world continued to suffer instability, the political elites sought solutions — any solutions. They did not have the foresight to consider that a denial of cause and effect would substantially limit scientific progress. Rather, they wanted restless populations to become more submissive to the political elite just as they all were to be to Allah. The elites found one solution in “occasionalism,” which states that material substances — from atoms to humans — cannot be the causes of events; rather, all events are caused directly by God.
Occasionalism replaced a world of causation with a world of correlation; what appears to be cause and effect is simply God creating and recreating. Cause and effect is an allusion; what one witnesses is only correlation and has nothing inherent to the materials themselves. Occasionalism would end the search for connections in the natural world just as it would in the political world; the entirety of science rests in the search for cause and effect, the proof of the connection, the ability to repeat the connection, and finally the capacity to predict and manipulate the connection. Occasionalism could end it all.
The end of science is Islam probably started with the anarchy at Samarra but didn’t end with the sack of Baghdad but rather with the publication of The Incoherence of the Philosophers in the late 11th century. Written by professor of law Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers is, more than anything else, a rejection of material causation and promotion of occasionalism. Importantly, Al-Ghazali was initially appointed to his prestigious university position by the de facto leader of the Empire Nizam al-Mulk, so this academic appointment had political motives.
At about the same time Al-Ghazali was writing The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Nizam al-Mulk, his political patron, was writing Siyāsatnāmeh, The Book of Government, which focused on political stability. Both works are a reaction to the widespread instability in the Islamic world over the previous centuries. The Incoherence of the Philosophers was not limited to scholarly debate but rather was widely incorporated into Islamic education; one of Nizam al-Mulk’s reforms was to establish schools across his Empire, and as causation was rejected, critical inquiry was likewise rejected. And so these schools regressed from global centers of learning to religious indoctrination madrassas. Ironically, shortly after writing Siyāsatnāmeh, Nizam ul-Mulk was assassinated, and the instability across the Islamic world did not wane but actually increased as threats both internal and external grew and the rejection of causation was woven into the fabric of Islamic culture.
This was not a debate between “religion” and “science.” Most of the academics involved in the medieval Islamic debates were philosophers of both metaphysics (religion/philosophy) and physics (science); Al-Ghazali was a jurist. So while some scholars who were perhaps more given to religion may have preferred occasionalism, many others would have viewed such an affirmation as an elimination of a substantial part of their field of inquiry. The debate had raged until Nizam ul-Mulk decided that the price of stability was critical inquiry.
It was the politicians who realized that if there was no such thing as cause and effect, then there was no reason to pursue the laws of nature — either they didn’t exist or they didn’t matter. Understanding nature was a process of understanding causation, predicting it, and manipulating it. If such critical inquiry was contrary to God, then critical inquiry could be largely eliminated from society. Not only did this elimination of critical inquiry effectively reject science, but it also rejected reflection. While reflection is an Islamic tenet, the evidence is that critical reflection on the causes of instability, poverty, and general regression in the Muslim world was limited; while St. Augustine reflected on Rome’s fall in City of God (426 AD), Muslims produced nothing similar in the 13th century. (City of God was prompted by the sack of Rome, so the corollary would be a Muslim version when pagans sacked Baghdad. City of God was and still is widely read.)
Little of Islam’s rejection of science seems particularly religious. And yet, part of the reason that Islam was so susceptible to political influence is that Islam is not purely a religion but a broader system of organization — it is religious, cultural, social and political. Like Judaism (but unlike Christianity), Islam is predisposed to political correlation and coordination (and thus, social, legal, financial, etc). Islam and Judaism are at their core both codes of law, the principle example is that they don’t have priests (imams and rabbis are meant to act as jurists, and thus are civil philosophers and teachers). Islam might have recovered from periods of instability — as Christianity did — if it had maintained the tools of critical inquiry required for such a renaissance.
It is important to note the rhetorical method by which The Incoherence of the Philosophers so successfully ended Islamic science. It did not attack science, per se; it did not explicitly attack most features of scientific inquiry. Instead, it rejected causation as an interaction between material conjunctions and rather promoted that events — whether between atoms or people — were the result of the always present will of God. The great destroyer of science was cloaked in reasonableness and logic and ultimately relied on faith to make a case that served political purposes.
The rejection of causation filtered throughout Islam over the centuries. As the Islamic world was collapsing by the 1090s, Muslims were unable to explain why their world was falling apart. Nizam’s schools were progressively regressive, as they continued to replace the old philosophical schools. The scholars of Cordoba (in Spain) rejected occasionalism, siding with the ancient Greeks, but they were doomed by the efforts of the Spanish to reclaim the Iberian peninsula.[1] Modern occasionalism finds a home in the Arab world in movements such as Wahhabism, while the Persian world began to rediscover causation and thus science.[2]
It’s been said that Muslims did not realize how far they were behind the West until Napoleon visited (then invaded) Egypt at the end of the 18th century. (Similarly, the Chinese didn’t realize how far behind the West until the British invaded in the 19th century.) Scholar Bernard Lewis has argued that the current problems in the middle east were largely catalyzed by the internet, which allowed Muslims throughout the region to confront their lack of progress. When Muslim scholars approached Greek atomic theory, they wondered whether any two atoms affected each other; this seemingly basic question led to a detonation that destroyed the civilization. The challenge though is that causation is fundamental to critical inquiry, and critical inquiry into nature likely leads to critical inquiry into political systems. The core tension in the Muslim world is between the interests of the people to recover from the shock of witnessing how advanced Napoleon’s engineers were and the interests of the elites to ensure that what was will always be.
Strategic Observations
1. Golden Age Muslim power and scholarship was largely concentrated in a single city: Baghdad. This made Islam’s institutions — particularly its cultural institutions — very vulnerable. Instability in Baghdad effected the empire. And the sack of Baghdad brought chaos. (Note to China: concentrated power enables rapid ascent and descent.)
2. The rejection of science was not sold to the masses as a rejection of science. It was sold as the most reasonable and ethical position, supported by the best authorities. It was not believed that occasionalism would largely eliminate science but rather would limit critical inquiry in areas that were unproductive or heretical and redirect resources to more productive pursuits. The promotion of occasionalism was an effort to limit speech and thought in order to shape the contours of social discourse. It was wildly effective.
3. The rejection of science was a political effort to attempt to decrease instability but actually decreased cultural dynamism; the resulting sclerotic mind of the Islamic world increasingly solidified the individual positions of those in power though it made the entire civilization more susceptible to existential attack and less able to recover from such attacks.
4. Confusion between causation and correlation can be fatal.
[1] Interestingly, Cordoba, the capital of Islam on the Iberian peninsula, likely would have developed an entirely different — rationalist, empiricist — version of Islam had the Spanish not retaken Spain. Cordoba was the only effective counter-weight to Baghdad and its philosophers largely rejected the occasionalism project.
[2] The irony here is that the bulk of Baghdad scholars were Persian, and occasionalism is effectively a Persian creation. And yet it was the Arabs who more firmly embraced it while the Persians who grew weary of it. That said, the Persians did not overtly reject occasionalism for empiricism/rationalism but rather also entertained various kinds of mysticism.
About Nathan Allen
Formerly of Xio Research, an A.I. appliance company. Previously a strategy and development leader at IBM. His views do not necessarily reflect anyone’s, including his own. (What.) Nathan’s academic training is in intellectual history; his next book, Weapon of Choice, examines the creation of American identity and modern Western power. Don’t get too excited, Weapon of Choice isn’t about wars but rather more about the seeming ex nihilo development of individual agency … which doesn’t really seem sexy until you consider that individual agency covers everything from voting rights to the cash in your wallet to the reason mass communication even makes sense….
