Seeking the Origins of Modern Science?Seeking the Origins of Modern Science?REVIEW ARTICLE by George Saliba, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science, Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University. Toby E. Huf. THE RISE OF EARLY MODERN SCIENCE: ISLAM, CHINA AND THE WEST. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pb. ed., 1995. xiv, 409 pp. Hb. ISBN 0 521 43496 3. Pb. £14.95 (US$19.95), ISBN 0 521 49833 3. “It is not altogether easy to break the habit of thinking of history as blindly groping toward a goal that the West alone was clever enough to reach. . . .” A. C. Graham1 THE QUESTION OF THE ORIGINS OF modern science has been debated for years and willcontinue to be debated as long as the history of science is still written as the history of various scientific traditions modified by cultural labels such as Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Indian and Arabic/ Islamic. And I am sure it is obvious to all that such terminology simply masks a clear ideological, political and, at times, even hegemonic language. For all pre-modern scientific traditions, the classificatory principle of a particular tradition seems to be linguistic in nature,contrary to what is usually done in the case of modern science itself. Yet, while it is easy to understand why a scientific book written in the pre-modern period, whether in Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian or Turkish, may be readily classified as belonging to a particular culture and tradition, it is not quite clear in which language a modern scientific text must be written to allow its affiliation with modern science. As historians of science survey the various scientific traditions, they seem to be constantly prepared to shift the criteria that they use to classify the scientific works which they encounter. No one would dispute the classification of ascientific text written in Chinese or Greek as belonging to the Chinese or Greek cultural spheres respectively. But when it comes to other scientific works, say texts written in Arabic, Persian, Turkish or Urdu, for example, the problem becomes slightly more complicated and those same historians of science drop linguistic classificatory terminology to resort instead to a cultural/religious terminology which designates such works as Islamic. In the case of modern science, both linguistic and cultural/religious designators seem to be dropped and French, English, Italian, German and even Japanese scientific works may be described as modern, with the underlying assumption that all these works must have something in common that is neither linguistic, nor cultural, nor religious, with the vague term ‘Western’, as in ‘Western science’, used to describe them. A corollary of this methodological chaos is the notion that there is a definable cultural entity out there that can be called ‘the West’, with its own independent characteristics, and an equally clearly definable scientific tradition that can be called ‘modern science’. In addition, no one seems to question the proposition that the ‘modern’ scientific tradition made its first appearance in this very ambiguous ‘West’ and research is ongoing to determine why this phenomenon took place there and nowhere else. Toby E. Huff’s The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West is one more work which follows this line of enquiry. Huff is by no means the first person to attempt to explain why modern science arose in the West and not in the context of another culture. People likeJoseph Needham, in his famous Grand Titration,2 or Max Weber, in several of his works, have made similar attempts in the past. In the case of Needham, the question gained much more urgency when he managed to demonstrate that, at the time when modern science was supposed to have been born in the West―namely, during the European Renaissance of the sixteenth century―both the Chinese and Islamic civilizations had attained a level of scientific knowledge, especially in natural science, which was superior to that in the West. And yet, modern science was born in the West and not in those other civilizations. Needham’s attempt to understand why this happened had the unintended result of making the criteria for ‘modern’ science, and the vague definitions of it, identical to the criteria and definitions which would be applied to ‘Western’ science. During that process, another unspoken and rather ill-considered principle also emerged, namely, that one should assess the value and contribution of the sciences of other cultures in terms of the specific aspects of those sciences that were incorporated within the accumulative body of modern science, while passingover other features of those same sciences in total silence. Thus, in the case of Chinese science, the discovery of the geographically-orienting magnet became anacceptable Chinese scientific achievement because it could be translated, throughintermediary steps, into the navigational compass, while the whole body of Chinese medicine would be discarded―until very modern times, that is―because it did not have the same impact in the West. The least that can be said about this methodology is that it does not yield the kind of history of science that allows a specific science to be spoken of and studied as just another facet of the culture that produced it to meet its own needs. Instead, the works of one cultural science are always evaluated in terms ofthe criteria of modern science. As a result, the history of science is studied for the sake of discovering the cumulative connecting links that led to the creation of modern science and not as an attempt to understand one more feature of the originating culture in order to comprehend it in its totality. Although superficially quite reasonable and legitimate, this manner of formulating the question of why modern science arose in the West, rather than in culture ‘X’ or ‘Y’, hides further theoretical pitfalls. Chief among them is the circularity embedded in this kind of argumentation. For, in order to answer the question, one must exhibit yet another culture, ‘Z’, that followed the same route as the West―whatever that route may have been―and managed to produce modern science in the same way that the West did. Otherwise, the argument quickly collapses into a circular argument in the following manner. Most proponents of