Did Religion Affect the Pursuit of Science?

It might be tempting to argue that highly religious societies like Islam cannot be innovative societies. Religions may be conservative, fearful of change. They may emphasize transcendent spiritual values over material ones. They may attune people to the study of texts and scriptures rather than to mechanical or scientific arts or to business and trade. Some religions are even antithetical to trade and money-making. Money-lending was denounced in the Quran and Islamic legal literature (and in Christian texts too). To some degree the widespread adoption of Christianity in the old Roman world ushered in a period of intellectual and material decline along these lines. But as with the case of Islam and as we shall see later with Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, and other religions, there need not be a conflict between innovative, creative, inquisitive thinking, and religious pursuits. In fact, religious, scientific, as well as political roles often overlapped. Ibn Rushd (later know as Averroes in the West) was a great Islamic natural philosopher who also served as a judge specializing in religious law, initially in Seville and then in Cordoba in Andalusian Spain. He argued that both religious and natural philosophy were valid forms of knowledge. When Islamic mathematicians developed trigonometry in its modern form, the need to find the precise direction of Kaaba in Mecca (which must be faced during prayer) formed the impetus for these studies. Indeed, religions can inspire invention and creativity.

The sciences pursued by Islamic scholars were closely linked to the moral and religious thought of Islam in this era. A large number of Islamic thinkers, important theologians, and philosophers held that the knowledge gained by studying nature and natural philosophy was useful to the understanding of God. With astronomy in particular we see how religious motivation could inspire innovation. Religiously-committed scholars made great strides in advancing knowledge of astronomy, and they employed geometry and trigonometry to make their calculations. Mathematics served the needs of commerce, civil society, and religion. In Egypt and Syria an important new, mathematically-based profession emerged: the timekeeper, who was attached to the mosque and specialized in the astronomical science of timekeeping. His roles as religious official and mathematician/scientist overlapped. The timekeeper of the Umayyad mosque, Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375), also worked in the Maragha Observatory in western Iran, which was constructed following the sack of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols under the patronage of Hulagu, their ruling leader. Hulagu staffed the observatory with Ibn al-Shatir and a team of Muslim astronomers and mathematicians. While they did not develop the heliocentric system published by Copernicus in 1543, they did improve the Ptolemaic system that modeled the position of the sun, earth, and planets in the heavens. According to Toby Huff, “The Arab-Muslim astronomers criticized and perfected Ptolemaic planetary theory with the result that they produced significantly improved planetary models…” The planetary models of Copernicus formulated 150 years later were mathematically equivalent to those developed by the Muslim astronomers and mathematicians of the Maragha observatory. This has led historians to ask “‘not whether, but when, where, and in what form’” Copernicus gained knowledge of the Maragha models.

Knowledge of the stars, phases of the moon, seasons, and celestial phenomena such as comets and eclipses were considered useful for two reasons. In Islam, as in other religions, important events and festivals are marked by their occurrence in the calendar, moveable feasts that change every year. Thus, it was important to have skilled astronomers who could plot their exact occurrence year by year. In addition, the Muslims’ five daily prayers were to be said within certain time intervals, which had to be calculated according to the altitude of the sun. The science of timekeeping became quite advanced under Islam, and relied upon numerical schemes, geometric constructs, and trigonometric calculations. By contrast, Europeans during this era could not count hours, had no clocks, and were incapable of making much-needed reforms to their calendar.

Many people at the time also believed in astrology and thought that the stars and zodiac foretold events and yielded favorable and fortunate (as well as dangerous) times to perform or undertake certain actions—wage war, start a journey, have a child. These same beliefs were operating in China as well, another society that invested heavily in knowledge of astronomy and astrology. In both places, astrology provided additional motivation for the refinement of mathematics and astronomy. However, although Islamic Neoplatonic philosophers earned recognition for astrology by identifying divine determination with the constellations, scholastic theologians rejected it because they believed that a causal connection between the stars above and earthbound events contradicted the doctrine that God is the exclusive and immediate creator of all events.

Astronomy and even mathematics served at times as handmaidens to religion, providing strong arguments for their vital importance to and acceptance by the community. As the historian Tamim Ansary has recently explained, “In ninth and tenth century Iraq (as in classical Greece), science as such did not exist to be disentangled from religion. The philosophers were giving birth to it without quite realizing it. They thought of religion as their field of inquiry and theology as their intellectual specialty; they were on a quest to understand the ultimate nature of reality.” But even though a knowledge of astronomy was required for the determination of the correct times of prayer and the precise direction of Kaaba in Mecca, orthodox religious circles did not, in general, favor the astronomical sciences. In fact, the flourishing of science that took place during the Islamic Golden Age would decline as religious orthodoxy asserted itself more strongly.

A growing orthodoxy in Islam worked against the development, spread, and application of new knowledge, threatening the innovative possibilities of the flourishing empire. Religious authorities grew increasingly suspicious of the ancient sciences, and those suspected of unorthodox views were often persecuted. If they were believed to be engaged in heretical thinking and owned large libraries, the libraries could be confiscated and destroyed if they were found to contain books on these subjects or works on astrology and witchcraft. Some studies have shown that even during the Golden Age, there was a high degree of secrecy and concealment by scholars pursuing the study of the natural sciences. Even though scientific inquiry was generally tolerated, and at times encouraged by the ruling elite, it was never institutionalized and formally taught in the madrasas. Scientific studies were pursued outside the colleges, and to specialize in one science, students moved from city to city seeking experts who taught them privately.

Cracks in the utopian vision of a harmonious Muslim blending of piety, learning, and justice were already beginning to bubble up to the surface as scholar-theologians and philosopher-scientists seemed to be moving in competing directions by the eleventh century. A growing chorus of pious voices began to condemn the pursuit of reason, philosophy, and the natural sciences. These intellectual arguments often resulted in violent and bloody clashes, which paralleled the loss of political stability in Islam as a whole as its golden era began to wane.

The religious orthodoxy was most offended by mathematics and geometry in particular. The tenth-century mathematician al-Sijzi wrote that in his region it was lawful to kill “geometers.” He and others argued that these kinds of sciences created pride in human accomplishments and took the practitioner’s attention away from God. And yet these efforts to suppress the work of scientists and mathematicians failed to impede the robust cultivation of these forms of knowledge. In line with our model of innovation, Islamic philosopher-scientists continued to keenly observe the world around them, critically compare their own observations with those of the ancients and publishing their findings. But the conflict with religion and the growing power of orthodox-minded clerics was a sign that the flourishing of science and innovation in the Islamic world had an end date.