Science and Islam is a great way to get introduced to the contributions of Muslims during their golden age (750-1258). Unfortunately, Western textbooks completely ignore Muslim scientific accomplishments. In reading this book, your understanding of scientific history will be flipped on it's head via facts about Muslim biologists (natural selection 1000 years pre-Darwin), doctors (al-Zahrawi basically invented modern surgery), and mathematics (al-Khawarizmi pioneering liner and quadratic equations).

The only shortcoming of the book is that if you are already moderately informed about this subject, it will simply repeat what you already know. It is fairly short, and has big print (which could be a positive or a negative). It rarely goes into great detail about the people it talks about and leaves you wanting more.

Overall, it is a good introduction to Muslim scientists but if you're looking for something more in-depth, try Michael Hamilton Morgan's "Lost History".

Does a great job in highlighting the great contributions of Muslim scientists and scholars centuries before European Renaissance.

Very well written and insightful. A part of history rarely told.

Review of Science and Islam: A history by Eshan Masood

CITATION: Masood, E. (2009). Science and Islam: A history. London: Icon Books.

Reviewer: Dr William P. Palmer

This is an excellent little book for the non-expert, which was written by Eshan Masood to accompany a major BBC (British Broadcasting Company) television series. One consequence of this is that it contains no illustrations except a map of the Mediterranean area, presumably to keep the price of the book low and to allow the television screen to provide the illustration. The book consists of fifteen chapters (three parts) with a prologue, timeline and index, etc. and is only 240 pages long. Roughly the first section of the book consists of Islamic history, explaining the main rulers and the shifts in power and empires after the death of Mohammed until the ‘Middle Ages’.

The second section of the book contains a summary of the progress of each of the major sciences over the whole period, with the emphasis being on mathematics and astronomy. As a chemist, I would have liked to see more detail in the chemistry section (Chapter 11), but perhaps that demands a different book. The usual description of Islamic science as a preserver of Greek science that formed a basis for the later European science of the Middle Ages is made, but the original scientific contributions made by a variety of Islamic scientists is also explained. The book carefully keeps to the middle ground emphasizing the positive achievements of all scientists whether Greek, Islamic or European and all are described in a non-partisan way. Similarly religious bias is avoided.

This book is thoroughly recommended.

BILL PALMER

Ehsan Masood (Twitter) produced a BBC documentary on Islam and science. This book is its companion. It's excellent as a survey introduction to this topic in the history of science. It discusses multiple causes of historical phenomenon and the predominant historiography and its dissenters.

As in any work of history presented to the public, the academic academician, or even the humble ABD history student such as myself, can find weaknesses. But the wider public is not reading and watching our fascinating works, so maybe we can cut people like Ehsan Masood and Henry Louis Gates, Jr (Ali Mazrui's series on African history is better) and Neil deGrasse Tyson a break if they slip up now and again. Hopefully, the public intellectual strives to be like Carl Sagan and not Thomas Friedman, who can no doubt answer all of your questions.

The writing style is simple. The only references are listed as a bibliography at the end of the book.

Most readers will come away from the book thinking that, based on Muslims' past acceptance of the validity of scientific work, especially when it supported religiously-mandated activities such as determining prayer times or healing the sick or approved secular activities such as improving quality of life through applied technology in chemistry and horticulture, and their past tolerance of non-Muslims and non-orthodox Muslims, Muslims can participate in the global scientific enterprise. Their history of coercive pre- and early modern monarchies and colonial administrations has placed some stumbling blocks in their path, primarily mass suspicion of the science class, so to speak, as an arm of the state. The few who want more will simply need to follow up on the clues Dr. Ehsan has left for them to follow.

I personally think the bigger problem facing Muslim-majority society's participation in scientific production is the lack of infrastructure to support modern science (see this article for a description of how medical research might take place in a clinical setting), which is no longer a matter of one brilliant individual with enough time and energy to conduct his/her own experiments.

Brain drain is a serious problem. Mills et al estimated that nine sub-Saharan African countries lost more than 2 billion USD of investment through the emigration of trained doctors. This investment equates to subsidizing medicine in the developed nations to which they immigrated.

Based on the number of doctors working from the nine source countries and the average cost of medical education in these countries, this equals a saving of at least $621m for Australia, $384m for Canada, $2.7bn for the United Kingdom, and $846m for the United States; $4.55bn in total.

The World Health Organization has adopted the WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel, but implementation is not widespread (see Norway's effort).

Muslims are participating in the global scientific enterprise (my guess again is in applied science), as evidenced by searches in PubMed, the National Library of Medicine's indexing service of peer-reviewed biomedical publications. See articles where the first author's last name begins with Abdul (350 as of 2012-Jul-26), Abdel (299), and Abdal (156).* Or Moham (679), Muham (68), Ahmad (845), and so on. They're just not participating, for the most part, in institutions in Muslim-majority countries.

And to whip out a Tom Friedman-like anecdote on you, I remember in 1988 or 1989 meeting in Cairo an Egyptian who studied physics in the Soviet Union. He told me how frustrated he was at not being able to do physics in Egypt because there was no institutional backing and lack of equipment.

Brain drain is simply one of the obstacles world systems theory predicts developing nations have to face.

I don't remember Ehsan Masood dealing with these types problems at all in his book.

Review my other blog entries related to science, particularly my reviews of Taner Edis's book Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam and George Saliba's Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. I also liked a volume Ehsan Masood edited about how people are adapting to their arid climates.

On another note, no Georgia public library participating in the PINES system had the book, so I had to request it using my public library's Interlibrary Loan process. This cost me $8.65. Certainly this kind of book is appropriate for public libraries. Why doesn't my library carry this book?

*Christian Arabs have names like Abdulla and Abdelmasih, so some of these authors are certainly not Muslims.