Book &Author
Michael Hamilton Morgan: Lost History — The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists
By Dr Ahmed S. Khan
Chicago, IL
“Lost History delivers a missing link to the story of an interconnected world: the achievement of Muslim civilization and its influence on East and West.”
-- President Jimmy Carter
In Lost History — The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists Michael Hamilton Morgan shows how Muslim advancements in science and culture provided the impetus for European Renaissance that led to modern Western society. He chronicles the Golden Age of Islam and narrates the achievements and contributions of great Muslim scientists, scholars and poets like Ibn Al-Haytham, Ibn Sina, Al-Tusi, Al-Khwarizmi, Al-Zahrawi, ibn Firnas, Jabir ibn Haiyan, Maimonides, Ibn Rushd, Al-Kindi, Rumi and Omar Khayyam — the pioneers — whose early work in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, literature, opened new avenues of inquiry for Newton, Copernicus, and others to follow.
The author also provides examples and traits of great leaders —from Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) to Suleman the Magnificent and others — who promoted religious tolerance and encouraged intellectual inquiry. In this regard the author observes: “More often than not, the various Muslim rulers and conquerors seem to know instinctively that a society cannot innovate and be great, if the mind is not free.”
Lost History — The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists , Thinkers and Artists is published by National Geographic Society. The author narrates the story of the golden age of Islam in eight chapters: 1. Rome's children, 2. Lost cities of genius, 3. God in the numeral, 4. Star patterns, 5. Inventors and scientists, 6. Healers and hospitals, 7. Vision, voice, citadel, and 8. Enlightened leadership. The author starts each chapter with a fictional contemporary situation and blends it with the history of power centers of Damascus, Baghdad, al-Andalus, Khorasan, and others.
Michael Hamilton Morgan, a former diplomat, has also authored The Twilight War and co-authored with Robert Ballard Collision with History: The Search for John fir Kennedy's PT-109, and Graveyards of the Pacific. He created and heads New Foundations for Peace, which promotes cross-cultural understanding and leadership among youth.
In the foreword, referring to Islam’s intellectual and cultural achievements and contributions, the Abdullah II Ibn Al Hussein, King of Jordan, states: “Although one can easily distinguish between ‘Christianity’ and —'Christendom,’ in Western languages no such distinction generally exists between ‘Islam’ the religion and ‘Islam’ the world civilization. In these sometimes turbulent times, it is easy to forget the great intellectual tradition and culture to which Islam gave rise. Throughout its over 1,400-year history Muslims have given the world great summits of art, architecture, poetry, philosophy, and science, all while being nourished spiritually by the teachings of the Qur'an and the ambience of Islamic religious piety. The cultural and intellectual achievements of Islam were not unknown to Europe, and indeed Jewish and Christian philosophers, scientists, poets, musicians, and even theologians actively drew upon the achievements of their Muslim counterparts.”
Referring to the nature and demise of civilizations in the Introduction, the author observes: “History teaches us that civilizations flourish, die, and disappear. Sometimes they die swiftly, sometimes in a slow lingering death. And sometimes, as with Rome and others, echoes of that civilization find new life in later cultures. To lose the conscious memory of an entire civilization is especially tragic and dangerous, because each civilization, no matter how grand or flawed, is a laboratory of human ideas and ideals, of dreams and nightmares…a Muslim history that was about invention, creativity, big ideas, tolerance, and coexistence. It is a Muslim history that had been more intellectually accomplished than Christian Europe of the day, and a Muslim past where Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists had flourished and worked together. It is a culture that had seeded the European Renaissance and enabled many aspects of the modern West and global civilization. It is a history that by the beginning of the 21st century had been forgotten, ignored, misunderstood, suppressed, or even rewritten.”
Commenting on how scholars of the West have ignored Islamic history, the author states: “ Most Westerners have been taught that the greatness of the West has its intellectual roots in Greece and Rome, and that after the thousand-year-sleep of the Dark Ages, Europe miraculously reawakened to its Greco-Roman roots. In the conventional telling, this rediscovery of classical Greece—combined with the moral underpinning of the Judeo-Christian faith—led to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the scientific and industrial revolutions. The intellectual contributions of Arabs, Persians, Indians, Chinese, Africans, and others in the Muslim world are relegated to mere footnotes. Most of us are unaware of the details of Muslim history because of language difficulties, the passage of many centuries, a blur of unfamiliar names, places, and events, a triumphalist Eurocentric narrative of the Renaissance and later advances, orthodox Muslim excision of unorthodox Muslim thinkers, and the burning of books and destruction of libraries. A fairly small group of serious academics have looked hard on these issues through often different lenses and have come up with different conclusions.”
The author identifies five groups which have narrated Islamic history according to their own perspectives:
1. Orientalists: This group claims that the Islamic world had a period (800- 1200 AD) of intellectual brilliance — largely enabled by the translation of Greek thinkers — and this Greek body of knowledge was then passed on by the Muslims to the Europeans. But later factors like Mongol attacks and internal inconsistencies prevented the development of a secular, free thinking society, and hence the Muslims lagged behind.
2. Neo-conservatives: This group says that there are elements in Muslim civilization that make it deeply antithetical to intellectual freedom, social and scientific progress, and liberal democracy. This group has developed an unprecedented influence over the United States foreign policy and media.
3. Proto-science: Represented by a number of contemporary scholars, this group holds that until the 15th century, Muslim science and technology was far superior to that in Europe, and many of its breakthroughs got seeped into medieval Europe and provided the impetus for the Renaissance. Later, because of internal inconsistencies and barriers inherent in the culture, coupled with economic and climatic crises, Muslim could not make the leap forward to modern science, and the Europeans excelled in this domain.
4. Liberal: This group holds that the higher values of Islam—such as desire for knowledge and equality of all men before God—promoted many advances in science, technology, and civil society that got propagated into Europe, and then to the world, and are still relevant in the 21st century. This group might hold that European Judeo-Christian civilization should also add the word Muslim as well.
5. Muslim partisan: This group — with very few followers in mainstream academia — holds that the Muslims invented major aspects of modern science, medicine, technology, and social organization, but the credit has not been given them, and they have been marginalized .
Describing his approach, the author notes: “Lost History was written with an awareness of all these views and incorporates some elements from each. As such, it doesn't align with any of them, and it aligns in some ways with all. But Lost History was not written to take a stand in this fairly esoteric academic debate…this book rather focuses on the many ‘golden ages’ of Muslim thought, including Central Asia, Ottoman Turkey, and Mughal India, up to the 18th century. Lost History could never capture the immense detail and complicated nuances of a 1,400-year-old civilization that now incorporates one billion people…What may also emerge is an understanding that all of us, Muslim and non-Muslim, are indebted to these often courageous and sometimes ruthless and sometimes misguided actors of long ago, that Muslim civilization is as much a part of Western civilization as it is not, and that many of the conflicts now filling the newspaper headlines had antecedents and parallels in the debates and conflicts of a thousand years ago.”
Referring to the glory of al-Andalus, the author observes: At its peak in the 11th century, Cordoba will be the most advanced city in Europe with a population of half a million, boasting of some 300 baths, 110 mosques, 50 hospitals, and a high public literacy expressed in libraries, public and private, with more books than in all the rest of Europe.”
Describing the rise, fall and contributions of al-Andalus, the author states: “The hybrid language—the old Latin overlaid with Arabic—will echo this dual heritage and of lost history. In that long interval between the arrival of Tariq in 711 and the reconquest under Queen Isabella in 1492, the unique mix of al-Andalus will produce marvelous innovations in architecture, music, literature, philosophy, medicine, and science. But, sadly, this is also too often lost history, much of it lost in the terror of the Spanish Inquisition and the fleeing of Jews and Muslims from their old Spanish homeland; in the forced conversions and the excisions of historical fact; in the extirpation of languages; in the burning of priceless libraries. Five hundred years after the Inquisition, this lost history is slowly being recovered.”
Expounding on coexistence and opportunities for many faiths in Ottoman empire, the author observes: “Ottoman Turkey is one of the last incarnations of the sweet coexistence of many faiths that has flourished at times throughout the Muslim world. Not that Turkey is the only land of Muslim tolerance. Between the 15th and 16th centuries, Jews and Christians live all over the Muslim world. Large minorities of Christians remain in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and India. Large Jewish communities thrive in the cities of Morocco and all across North Africa in Egypt and Iran…irony is that in 800 years, few if any Jews will hold such high and trusted positions in Muslim society as did Musa bin Maimun, and few Muslims will remember that at one time, Jews thought of Muslim cities as places of opportunity and intellectual refuge, as had Maimonides when he and his family fled Spain.”
Reflecting on the Ottoman hallmark of fairness and diversity, and one of its great Sultans, the author notes: “Some of these liberal views come from the tolerant guidance of the Prophet [pbuh] and thinkers like the rightly guided Caliphs of early unique mix of power tempered with fairness and diversity makes the Turks great. And the very embodiment of all that is greatest about the Turks is Sultan Suleiman I, ruler from 1526 to 1566…It is not a Turk but a Venetian, Bernardo Navagero, who has said that Suleiman, provided he is given all the information, does injustice to no one; and it is another foreigner who calls the Turk ‘il magnifico,’ the magnificent one.”
Commenting on the decline of the Ottoman empire, the author observes: “… the last caliphate of Islam, the last Muslim nation able to challenge and check the rise of Europe, will survive for another 350 years, largely intact, but gradually losing the pieces that Suleiman and his predecessors had fought so hard to weld together. While various efforts at reform and renewal are made, efforts to modernize the empire and make it competitive with the new imperialist states of Europe, the efforts are never enough to halt the slide downward. This is caused perhaps more than anything by the lack of leaders of the quality of Suleiman…”
Referring to the principle of coexistence and diversity of the Mughal empire in India, the author states: “Now 50 years old, not only does Akbar rule, he theorizes, he invents on a grand scale, he tries some of the greatest social experiments in history. He rules over 140 million people, in a time when England has 5 million and all of Europe barely 40 million… For several centuries Akbar's sweeping reforms and intellectual laboratory will seem like esoteric ancient history, when India is under the English overlords, and her wealth is carried off to fund the global dominance of the British Empire. But four centuries later, secular, democratic India will look like a modern version of the inclusive dream of Akbar, even the tolerant dream of Sultana Razia.”
Describing the works of Rumi, the author observes: “…by the 21 st century in the United States Rumi is the best-selling poet in a society that does not often recognize poets,” and cites Rumi’s poetry:
We are all powerless by Love’s game.
How can you expect us
To behave and act modest?
How can you expect us
To stay at home, like good little boys?
How can you expect us
To enjoy being chained like mad men?
Oh, my beloved, you will find us every night
On your street
With our eyes glued to your windows,
Waiting for a glimpse of your radiant face.
Expounding on the brilliance of Omar Khayyam’s insights into mathematics, astronomy and poetry, the author observes: “Khayyam begins to shape his own personal philosophy, not unlike what will arise in Enlightenment Europe 700 years later….In his work in Balkh, Samarkand, and Nishapur, Khayyam authors methods for solving cubic equations that are intelligible only to the most advanced mathematics students a thousand years later… Khayyam discovers the binomial expansion, an important formula giving the expansion of powers of sums. He also critiques Euclid's theories of parallels. His writing in this area gradually makes its way to Europe, where it helps the gradual development of non-Euclidean geometry. And his work in astronomy is just as important and as complicated. His methods hold potential applications such as refining the calendar, which leads to more efficiency in government and trade.”
Reflecting on the accuracy of Khayyam’s work about calculating the length of a year, the author notes: “In 1079 in an astonishing feat of computation without computers, Omar Khayyam will calculate the length of the year to be 365.24219858156 days. In the 21st century, using the Hubble telescope, atomic clocks, and computers, the year will be calculated to be 365.242190 days. Khayyam's error in the sixth decimal place will amount to an inaccuracy of fractions of a second. And in another achievement, Omar Khayyam will demonstrate to an astonished audience how the Earth revolves on its axis, rather than having the heavens orbit it.” The author cites Khayyam’s poetry about human existence:
What we shall be is written, and we are so.
Heedless of God or Evil, pen, write on!
By the first day all futures were decided.
Describing Ibn Sina's impressive contributions to medicine, the author notes: “Aside from providing a massive compendium of much of 11th-century medical knowledge, ibn Sina will tell the world of more than 700 drugs. He will talk about diseases that are spread by water and in the soil. He will conclude that tuberculosis is an infectious disease…He will say that the only way to understand the workings of the body is to scientifically and impartially test and observe, that speculations and theories have no value until proven.”
In the epilogue, the author addresses the people who think history is irrelevant and who believe that history can overwhelm the lessons of history by their sheer wealth, power and technology; for such people history represents a source of anger, resentment, and vendetta. The author poses a few questions: “What does the future hold when mankind is so divided about history and time? Is there a third way to build the future, a way that acknowledges the reality of the present and the value of the past?” and then goes on to expound on the history, by observing: “In 2007, the golden ages of Damascus, Baghdad, Cordoba, Cairo, Samarkand, Isfahan, Agra, and Istanbul are now a distant memory for some, unrecovered memory for most. The British conquest of India, Napoleon's forays into Egypt, assorted European colonial ventures in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I all mark the end of these exceptional cultural flowerings.”
Referring to the geography of Islam and invasion of its centers of inventions, the author states: “The Geography of Islam lies in the cradle of civilization where the earliest cultures arose in Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley, and the Indus Valley with their rich early agriculture. These same regions have turned into deserts over the millennia, providing fewer economic opportunities. The impact on the Muslim heartland by the successive waves of Central Asian invasions, led by the Seljuks, the Mongols, and the Ottomans, gradually destroyed the centers of Muslim invention, while Central and Western Europe were spared the devastation and disruption at the time, allowing them to continue their development even as much of the Middle East, Iran, and Turkey had to rebuild.”
Commenting on the impact of colonialism on Muslim world, the author notes: “In the 17th century, as European nations began to colonize the Americas, they received a flood of overseas wealth that enabled them to also undertake colonial ventures in the Muslim world. The impact of European imperialism on the Muslim world—in the Middle East, Iran, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia—proved the final blow. Colonialism sent much of that world into an economic recession that will take centuries to throw off. Because science and development are based on the support and funding by a nation's leadership, Muslim science declined when its nations had to shift its resources to military defense after the 16th century. The rise of Europe and the decline of the Muslim lands had become two sides of the same coin.”
Reflecting on the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the author notes: “Finally only Turkey and the Arab lands remain in the sway of the failing Ottomans. It takes World War I to end that legacy, when T.E. Lawrence fights alongside Sharif Hussein bin Ali, Emir of Mecca and King of the Arabs (and great grandfather of King Hussein), to create new Arab states. The aftershocks of the Ottoman collapse reverberate still a hundred years later.”
The author further observes that by the 21st century, some of the old Muslim centers of invention become part of the third world aka developing world, and faced the challenges of poverty, economic stagnation, and political instability —and in process lost their glorious history aka the ‘golden age.’
Looking forward to the future the author states: “The world is changing once again…Immigrant Muslim communities in Europe and the Americas have become meeting places, the intersection of cultures creating not only tensions, but disseminating new ideas and understanding. The first Muslim golden ages are gone. But new ones are likely being born, even though today's headlines suggest otherwise. As we look to the future by recovering the past, perhaps the best guiding principle was uttered 900 years ago by the mathematician-poet Omar Khayyam, in his confession of faith:
Both thou and I are born alike
Though some may sink and some may soar
We all are earth and nothing more.”
In Lost History — The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists, Michael Hamilton Morgan has eloquently connected the Golden age of Islam with the Renaissance and modern times; it is a remarkable work — without any biases, and cliches like “clash of civilizations,” — that presents the other side of story; it is an essential reading for students of history, anthropology, science and technology, and general readers who want to discover the missing links between the past and present scientific achievements.
Dr Ahmed S. Khan ( dr.a.s.khan@ieee.org ) is a Fulbright Specialist Scholar.
