Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

John Freely (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 2009

Aladdin’s Lamp is the fascinating story of how ancient Greek philosophy and science began in the sixth century B.C. and, during the next millennium, spread across the Greco-Roman world, producing the remarkable discoveries and theories of Thales, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Galen, Ptolemy, and many others. John Freely explains how, as the Dark Ages shrouded Europe, scholars in medieval Baghdad translated the works of these Greek thinkers into Arabic, spreading their ideas throughout the Islamic world from Central Asia to Spain, with many Muslim scientists, most notably Avicenna, Alhazen, and Averroës, adding their own interpretations to the philosophy and science they had inherited. Freely goes on to show how, beginning in the twelfth century, these texts by Islamic scholars were then translated from Arabic into Latin, sparking the emergence of modern science at the dawn of the Renaissance, which climaxed in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.

Here is early science in all its glory, from Pythagorean “celestial harmony” to the sun-centered planetary theory of Copernicus, who, in 1543, aided by the mathematical methods of medieval Arabic astronomers, revived a concept proposed by the Greek astronomer Aristarchus some eighteen centuries before. When Newton laid the foundations of modern science, building on the work of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and others, he said that he was “standing on the sholders [sic] of Giants,” referring to his predecessors in ancient Greece and in the Arabic and Latin worlds from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance.

Caliph Harun al-Rashid was one of the Muslim rulers who first promoted translating Greek texts into Arabic. His Baghdad is the setting for The Thousand and One Nights, in which Scheherazades’s “Tale of Aladdin and His Magic Lamp” reflects the marvels of the new science and the amazing inventions it was said to produce. John Freely’s Aladdin’s Lamp returns us to that time and brings to light an essential and long-overlooked chapter in the history of science.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Europe's debt to Islamic scholarship is counted up in this sketchy intellectual history. Freely (Strolling Through Athens), a historian of science, surveys the work of ancient Greek thinkers from Pythagoras through Aristotle and Ptolemy in astronomy, mathematics, physics and medicine. He then recounts how this learning, mostly forgotten in Western Europe during the Dark Ages, was preserved in medieval Islamic capitals, where Arabic translations of Greek scientific texts sparked an intellectual renaissance. Freely contends that Muslim scientists made important advances, but his case falls short with his shallow treatment of their work—little more than a compendium of names, dates and translations. The book deepens when it analyzes the impact on European scientists, from the 11th century onward, of Latin translations of Greco-Arabic scientific texts. Ranging from 13th-century Oxford and the University of Paris to the Newtonian revolution, Freely shows how Western science developed in relation to—and in controversy with—ancient Greek ideas about matter, light, motion and the structure of the heavens. His map of the route from ancient to modern science is informative and intriguing, but it's more of a chronology than a narrative of intellectual history. 33 illus, maps. (Feb. 18)
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From Booklist

A historian of science, Freely chronicles the transmission of scientific ideas from ancient Greece and Rome to an early modern Europe on the cusp of the scientific revolution. Many ancients’ notions about nature were, Freely recounts, preserved from oblivion by scholars based in centers of Islamic learning such as Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba. Before reaching those destinations, Freely profiles the Greek sages, enumerating their surviving works and what information they held about mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, among other subjects. Leaving behind a roster of names that is likely familiar to the core audience, Freely’s account then addresses Islamic rulers, such as the first caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty around 800, who sponsored translations into Arabic of Greek texts. Freely ranges over the names of Islamic scholars so occupied, who served as arks for Greek science, and of original thinkers who formulated such topics as algebra, all of which reached the West in the cultural diffusion Freely describes. A sinuous odyssey through scientific ideas, Freely’s work will most appeal to tastes for intellectual history. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (February 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030726534X
• ISBN-13: 978-0307265340
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,052,850 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars For more [...], June 16, 2009

By 

Alexandro C. Telander "Alex C. Telander" (Roseville, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World (Hardcover)

ALADDIN'S LAMP: HOW GREEK SCIENCE CAME TO EUROPE THROUGH THE ISLAMIC WORLD BY JOHN FREELY: John Freely takes on a subject he clearly already knows a lot about, having written books on Istanbul, Turkey, Crete, and a good portion of Asia Minor. In Aladdin's Lamp he goes into extreme detail in revealing how we are today able to enjoy the Greek classics of Plato, Homer, and many others. While the book at times takes on an almost classroom-like routine with chapter after chapter, throwing more information in an almost dry, regurgitative sense; Aladdin's Lamp is nevertheless a very interesting book into the history of the classics and how they survived.

Freely begins at the beginning, perhaps going on for a little too long, but clearly relishing in telling the reader about some of the great works of the Greeks, with the likes of Archimedes, Plato, and Pythagoras, and what it is they found out in a time when science was a barely flourishing discipline. While on the one hand these were some amazing people who were able to come up with standards of architecture, and a surprisingly close approximation of the circumference of the Earth, Freely needs to get on with the reason for writing this book, and not give us a history lesson on Ancient Greece.

The first third of the book done, Freely finally goes into the next chapter of the Islamic world, how Baghdad was a paradise of the world that flourished with culture and literature. It was because of a number of circumstances, and the constant mixing of peoples with trade from throughout the Western World, that these sacred texts were first preserved after the fall of the Rome and then the Byzantine world, and then translated.

While the information may be overbearing at times and Freely lacks in a certain storytelling quality of making the book as enjoyable as some other works of nonfiction, Aladdin's Lamp does provide insight into the turbulent times of the early Middle Ages, when civilizations and countries rose and fell within the blink of an eye, while culture and literature and science was kept - at times in secret - to be read and enjoyed by future generations.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A lot of undeveloped potential, August 3, 2009

By 

D. Lamblin (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World (Hardcover)

I have read this book cover to cover, occasionally sharing it out-loud with friends and discussing it over a period of weeks. My friends begged me to stop. I myself couldn't believe I didn't just consign this book to the "useless" category. The premise that Greek Science came to Europe through the islamic world is inarguably established in this work, as to the specifics of how, that is still a very vaguely answered question. This book suffers from its breadth and brevity combined. I am almost assured that there was an editor but it seems that this editor unfortunately chose to cut and expand on the wrong parts entirely, as if there was no encompassing vision for the finished work.

When first encountering the book in a store, I randomly read some of the beginning and some of the parts near the end. This accidentally lead me into the only clear and interesting section of the book. So definitely this book is not without its merits. However, several of the chapters seem to have been written independently of the whole, and edited into the work. Most of these appear at the end. The closing chapter, while taking an interestingly personal approach, doesn't add to any part of the book other than to establish the idea that "Aladdin's lamp" is metaphorical for the flourishing of science and that not all scientists under Islam were members of that faith. The section on the Archimedes Palimpsest and the Antikythera computer are relevant and interesting, yet felt like a meld of material I'd read earlier, and didn't directly support any conclusion to this book.

This issue is that while this book may be thorough, grammatically correct, and expansive, it's raw unedited lecture-notes style defies my concept of well-written. One might argue that it is merely not well-edited, but the author himself should have seen the first 12 chapters (of 18) or the first 177 pages of 255 to be a mistaken approach. They are so full of potentially important or interesting information entirely lacking in stress and focus to make them impossible to be committed to memory in all but the broadest sense. The take away is literally "Greek science came to Europe through the Islamic world." It is simply not possible to make heads or tails of the barrage or people's names, places, birth dates, publishing dates, and manuscript titles, often presented in both the original and the Latin name.

Had this book been presented instead as a graph of names, books, dates, and places, it might have made a lot more sense. The organization suffers from neither focussing on any life, nor book, nor time, nor location, instead weaving back and forth through any of these in slowly progressing loops. Although the title chapters might lead one to presume that the main progression is geographic, within each chapter these geographic focuses are quickly broadened and become disjointed. For example, Galileo himself is discussed in parts over 3 chapters. Of course the natural philosophers and other Greeks come up as needed throughout. The link of translation in Baghdad and Al Andalus is presented well after the discussion of the scientific revolution has concluded.

After the disjointed progression through the Ancient and Islamic world, coming to clear sections on Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, and Newton is a breath of fresh air that probably inadvertently mimics what the revolution must have felt like. These sections are filled with an organized set of details from the lives of these important scientists. Tiny scraps of similar information for others are available and occasionally presented throughout the previous sections, and yet they are both too few and too brief to be satisfying. Notes on the supposed magical practices of various scholars of the middle-ages are some of the few interesting diversions to be had for the first 177 pages.

Clearly numerous persons throughout deserve their own biographies, and no one book could adequately touch on fairly complete information for so many persons. However by presenting the first two thirds of the book in a manner that introduces a new person or new work two to five times per page John Freely has stayed too close to a lecture style presentation of facts. This results in a tedious and impenetrable barrage of uncategorizable data points rarely punctuated by a few interesting and unusual insights that fail to be developed with any detail. This method is only briefly given pause when presenting Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Newton, and unfortunately none of the latter sections directly demonstrate the premise of the book. Had the author focused on only the works and actors in the Islamic capitals, or say only in the history of translation in Al Andalus, the work might have been made more interesting, and could have supported clearer though likely multi-volume inquiry into the topic.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Detailed History of Science, May 9, 2010

By 

Blair Dowden - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World (Vintage) (Paperback)

This book is a history of science, and Greek philosophy in general, starting from its origins with the ancient Greeks and following its lineage all the way to Isaac Newton in Western Europe. The accomplishments of each scientist is detailed, in an almost unbroken chain. Although the detail is impressive, the book sometimes reads like a laundry list, and generally fails to present the context of the society in which the science took place. Despite the title, the author details how Greek thought reached Europe not just via the Islamic world, but also directly from the western Roman empire (via the church) and from the Byzantine empire. Less than a third of the book is about Arabic science.

Reading the text, one would think that Islamic history was a long unbroken period of free scientific inquiry. Almost no mention is made of religious opposition to scientific thought, and the many periods in which it was suppressed. Science flourished only when the religious Islam had less influence over the ruling elites. One might think the author (who has spent most of his life teaching in Turkey) is presenting a biased view, but the European section of the book is written the same way. There were significant periods when the knowledge from the Greeks was collected and improved upon, particularly during the Abbasid period starting in 762. Islamic science also flourished during times in Spain and Sicily, from which it reached Western Europe. Two chapters are devoted to the development of European science form the tenth to fifteenth centuries, a period commonly thought of as the wasteland of the Dark Ages.

The book begins with Greek philosophy and science, first mainly in Ionia (now western Turkey) and later in Athens. These Greeks learned mathematics and astronomy from Egypt and Babylonia, and extended it with their own ideas, which were the foundation of scientific knowledge for the next few thousand years. The astronomy was fundamentally flawed by a complex explanation for the movement of the planets, a workable but confusing system that remained in effect until Copernicus. Astrology was an integral part of that astronomy, so those false concepts persisted as well. The next phase of Greek science took place in Alexandria, among many others by Euclid and Archimedes. The astronomer Aristarchus of Samos, around 250 BC, developed a heliocentric theory with the Earth orbiting the sun and spinning on its axis, but this was not accepted because it conflicted with the notion of the earth as the center of the universe.

As the book is largely written in chronological order, I was surprised there was no mention of the Ottoman empire, even though that is where the author lives. That is rectified in the (short) second to last chapter, where he finally takes on the issue of the decline of Islamic science. This began with the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, but the author claims that Islamic science reached a new peak under the Mongol rulers and the Ottoman rulers, who conquered Constantinople in 1453. Science apparently came to an end with the appearance of the comet of 1578. The Muslim religions authority stated that the observatory would bring disaster by prying into the secrets of nature, so it was destroyed. Finally, he says "The question my students always ask is why Islamic astronomy declined so sharply after the time of Takiyuddin (the head of the observatory that was destroyed), whose contemporary Tycho Brahe paved the foundation for the new astronomy of western Europe." But he makes no attempt to answer the question, only mentioning that some astronomy continued to be done to measure the months of the Muslim calendar, and concluding,

"And so Islamic astronomers continued to make observations in the same way as had their Arabic and Greek predecessors, while their European contemporaries began the intellectual revolution that led to the emergence of modern science. Thus the Islamic world was left behind as its vast empires declined and fell, living on the fading memory of the great accomplishments of its [scientists], who passed on Greek science to the West along with the advances they had made on their own."

This is a reasonably good book on the history of science, although it could be improved by reducing the number of short descriptions of minor scientific figures. Instead, provide a timeline as an appendix. The reader interested in Islamic history should realize that this book does not (nor was it really intended to) present a complete or balanced picture.