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Islamic Science

Mid-fifteenth To Nineteenth Centuries

Between the late fourteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, the geographical, political, ethnic, religious, and cultural properties of the Islamic world underwent new, profound changes. Andalusia was gradually lost to invading Christian forces. New, powerful dynasties rose in central Asia (Timurids), Anatolia, Greece, and the Balkans (Ottomans), Persia (Safavids), and north and central India (Mughals). Merchants carried Islam farther east to Sumatra, Java, Bali, and the Philippines. The new imperial dynasties and several smaller Muslim Indian dynasties built their own intellectual landscapes by translating Arabic scientific, geographical, philosophical, historical, literary, and religious texts into Persian and Turkish, Persian texts into Turkish and Sanskrit, and Sanskrit texts into Persian. They sponsored new artistic programs of illuminated works on natural history, astrology, astronomy, geography, history, and literature. Their scholars integrated in these emerging canons written, pictorial, and oral elements of the new sciences that evolved in the Renaissance and during the seventeenth century in Catholic and Protestant Europe. These cultural activities were linked with a conscious religious politics that often took recourse to philosophical concepts and debates. Parallel therewith, various efforts aimed to reform military and educational institutions, to introduce new technologies from Catholic and Protestant Europe, and to apply newly invented methods of observation and measurement to well-known disciplines such as geography and cartography.

Over several centuries, the processes of exchange went in multiple directions, linking the various Islamic societies with one another and with several countries in Christian Europe. Alliances between Christian and Muslim rulers against their immediate enemies, whether Christian or Muslim, were the norm rather than the exception, as was the hiring of scholars, mostly physicians, of different religious creed at the courts in Fez, Istanbul, Agra, or Hyderabad. Colonial expansion of Portugal, Great Britain, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, France, and Russia at different moments in time determined the form and the content of the alliances, not only with respect to weapons, fortress building, military strategy and tactic, and trade but also with regard to scholarly travel, cartographic measurements, astronomical observations, hiring of foreign professors, founding of new teaching institutions—meant first to complement the older educational system and later to replace it—and the creation of botanical gardens. British, French, and Russian colonial supremacy in the nineteenth century, while pursuing different objectives and politics, finally led to the abolishment of Islamic scholarly institutions and knowledge in most of India, central Asia, and northern Africa and to its replacement by those of the colonizers.

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Sonja Brentjes

Additional topics

Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Intuitionist logic to KabbalahIslamic Science - Mid-eighth To The Eleventh Centuries, Twelfth To Mid-fifteenth Centuries, Mid-fifteenth To Nineteenth Centuries