This is the first time in my life where a western outlet doesn't try and obfuscate the fact that many of the "discoveries" made by europeans in the the renaissance period have taken inspiration from the close to 800 years of Islamic scientific research (who themselves never failed to credit their predecessors).
Typically, when you study the history of science in the west, it starts at ancient greece (who have no contemporaries) then there's a massive blackout of 800 years and poof ! The "light" is magically turned on.
Fair play to the author for not being biased.
The full quote:
"The subject here is different from that of these two disciplines which, however, are often similar to it. In a way, it is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines by anyone. I do not know if this is because people have been unaware of it, but there is no reason to suspect them (of having been unaware of it). Perhaps they have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us. There are many sciences. There have been numerous sages among the nations of mankind. The knowledge that has not come down to us is larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians that 'Umar ordered wiped out at the time of the conquest! Where are the sciences of the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, and the Babylonians, and the scholarly products and results that were theirs! Where are the sciences of the Copts, their predecessors! The sciences of only one nation, the Greek, have come down to us, because they were translated through al-Ma'mun's efforts. (His efforts in this direction) were successful, because he had many translators at his disposal and spent much money in this connection. Of the sciences of others, nothing has come to our attention."
Most American primary/secondary textbooks (in a country where the majority of people still don't go to college). Ask the average person to name an Islamic analogue to Newton, Copernicus, or da Vinci, you're going to get blank stares. I couldn't do it, and I watched Family Guy Cosmos and everything.
Knowing that TV and social media do play as large a role as history books or formal education in knowledge acquisition these days, is it really wrong to question whether "the average person" is a valid point of reference when discussing inter-civilisational exchanges of discoveries.
These days, I've come to treat every clean-cut historical anecdote as suspect; there's too much of a game of telephone between people who want history to prove their point.
But, of course, this is one of the symptoms of the degeneration that now afflicts your particular civilization and is bringing about it's inevitable transformation to something else -- but better this than the fate of the Abassids or the Sung.
I do not know what you have been reading, but most western outlets go out of their way to acknowledge this. If anything people tend to idealise the "Islamic golden age" in the same way they do ancient Greece and Rome.
> Typically, when you study the history of science in the west, it starts at ancient greece (who have no contemporaries) then there's a massive blackout of 800 years and poof
They ignore the significant advances made in medieval Europe, and the Byzantine Empire.
And India ... from which we derive our concept of mathematical zero which underpins everything.
Maybe a lot of people are, but they really do have to not want to learn.
Is this the book you base your argument on?
They also ignored what Europeans discovered in that period.
At the pop culture level a lot of people believe Medieval Europe was in a barbaric dark age and achieved nothing.
The transmission of knowledge between civilizational blocks is fairly well documented (I recently read Jacques Le Goff on this particular topic), and what is owed to the Islamic civilization is no secret.
For those interested in comparable technical developments in Europe around the same time, for the middle ages were not as dark as usually portrayed, I recommend reading Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine (whom Ken Follett relied on extensively for "The Pillars of the Earth") and David Landes' A Revolution in Time.
In fact even the vertices were labelled the same, and followed the order of Arabic letters.
Shoulders of giants indeed. Shoulders of jazari.
The claim that philosophy and the sciences died out in Christian Byzantium and were transferred to the Islamic world can be found in a number of ninth- and tenth-century Arabic sources, edited and translated from the 19th century onwards and mostly taken at face value since then. However, Dimitri Gutas has explained that, during this time of bitter military struggle with Byzantium in which the Arabs were losing ground, emphasizing the Muslim appropriation of the pagan Greek heritage and claiming that Byzantium destroyed it because of the ideological and political break represented by Christianity was a form of anti-Byzantinism expressed as philhellenism. Gutas has also clarified that Abbasid society appropriated Greek philosophy and science in order to address its own needs: negotiating a canonical version of Islam [1].
Wherever the truth lies I do not see any dearth of mentionings of the role played by Islamic scholars.
[1] https://brill.com/previewpdf/display/book/edcoll/97890043490...
[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/91544/how-algorithm...