The Language of Science Science and Islam

My name is Jim Al-Khalili and I'm a professor of physics at the University of Surrey.

Studying the innermost secrets of atoms and their nuclei has been at the heart of my working life.

But there's another side to me...

I was born and grew up in Baghdad,

to an English mother and an Iraqi father,

but left Iraq with my family in the late '70s

when Sadam Hussain came to power.

By then, science was already my great passion in life.

As I studied it further, I saw myself fully part

of the Western tradition, inspired by names like Newton and Einstein.

But buried away was this nagging feeling that I was ignoring part of my own scientific heritage.

I still remembered my schooldays in Iraq and being taught of a golden age of Islamic scholarship.

That between the 9th and 12th centuries,

a great leap in scientific knowledge

took place in Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and Cordoba.

So, I want to unearth this buried history

to discover its great figures

and to assess exactly what their contribution to science really was.

Are there medieval Muslim scientists who should be spoken of

in the same breath as Galileo, Newton and Einstein?

And crucially, what is the relationship

between science and Islam?

My journey into the science of the medieval Islamic world

will take me through Syria, Iran and North Africa.

'I started in the backstreets of the Egyptian capital Cairo,

'with the realisation that that the language of modern science still has many references to its Arabic roots.

'Take scientific terms like algebra, algorithm, alkali.

'I instantly recognise these words as Arabic.

'And these are at the very heart of what science does.

'There would be no modern mathematics or physics without algebra.

'No computers without algorithms and no chemistry without alkalis.

'Surprisingly few people in the west today, even scientists, are aware of this medieval Islamic legacy.

'But it wasn't always so.

'From the 12th to the 17th century,

'European scholars regularly refer to earlier Islamic texts.'

I have here copies of some pages of the book Liber Abacci by the great Italian mathematician,

Leonardo Pisano, otherwise known as Fibonacci.

What's fascinating is that on page 406 is a reference to an older text

called "modum algebre et almuchabale'

and in the margin is the name Maumeht,

which is the Latinised version of the Arabic name, Mohammed.

The person he's referring to is Mohammed ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi.

In fact, Arabic names crop up in many medieval European texts

on subjects as varied as map-making, optics and medicine.

But I want to start with Al-Khwarizmi, because his work

touches on a crucial aspect of all our lives today.

It's thanks to Al-Khwarizmi that the European world realised that their way of doing arithmetic,

which was still essentially based on Roman numerals,

was hopelessly inefficient and downright clunky.

If I asked you to multiply 123 by 11,

you may even be able to do it in your head.

The answer is 1,353.

But try doing it with Roman numerals,

you'd have to multiply CXXIII by XI.

It can be done, but trust me, it's not fun.

Al-Khwarizmi showed Europeans

that there's a better way of doing arithmetic.

In his book entitled The Hindu Art Of Reckoning, he describes a revolutionary idea.

You can represent any number you like

with just ten simple symbols.

This idea of using just ten symbols, the digits from one to nine,

plus a symbol for zero to represent all numbers from one to infinity

was first developed by Indian mathematicians

around the 6th century and I can't overstate its importance.

Here are the numbers in Indian Arabic numerals.

Wahid, ithinin, thalatha, arba'a,

khamsa, sita, saba'a, thamania, tisa'a.

And here are the numbers we're more familiar with in the West.

One, two, three, four, five,

six, seven, eight, nine.

And you can see the similarity between these numbers

and particularly between the numbers two and three.

If I tip this sideways,

you can see how they look like numbers two and three.

And what's powerful about these digits, this numerical system

is how it simplifies arithmetic calculations.

'But Al-Khwarizmi and his colleagues went further than just translating the Indian system into Arabic.

'They created the decimal point.'

This text, written just a century after Al-Khwarizmi's,

is by a man we know only as Al-Uqlidisi.

Here he shows that the same decimal system

can be extended to describe not just whole numbers but fractions as well.

The infinity of possibilities that lie in between the integers.

Here is a copy of Al-Uqlidisi's manuscript

where he showed how the decimal point

is used for the very first time.

He describes it by using a dash.

Here are the digits 17968,

and there's a small dash over the nine indicating the decimal place.

The idea of the decimal point is so familiar to us,

that it's hard to understand how people managed without it.

Like all great science,

it's blindingly obvious after it's been discovered.

'The story of numbers and the decimal point hints

'that even 1,000 years ago science was becoming much more global.

'Ideas were spreading, emerging out of India, Greece or even China

'and cross-fertilising.

'And looking on a map that shows where people lived 1,000 years ago

'gave me my first insight into why medieval Islam

'would play such an important role in the development of science.

'Now look at which city lies at the centre of the known world,

'a place where the widest range of peoples and ideas

'were bound to collide.

'It's the city where I was born,

'the capital of the Islamic empire, Baghdad.

'Recent events mean I can no longer visit the city,

'but these are the home movies of my cousin Farris, filmed in the 60s.

'The Baghdad we knew then looked nothing

'like the bomb-wrecked city it is now.

'I certainly grew up proud to be associated

'with one of the world's greatest cities.

'Baghdad was founded in 762 AD by the caliph Al-Mansur.

'His aim was to make it the glorious capital of a brand new empire

'united by Islam, the rising religion of the time.'

The Abbasid caliphs had claimed their right to rule by declaring

that they were directly related to the prophet Mohammed,

who had founded the new religion over 100 years earlier.

But in that short time,

the armies of Islam had conquered a vast territory.

Starting in a small area around Medina,

they moved rapidly out of the Arabian peninsula

and within a few decades had taken control of the Levant,

North Africa, Spain and Persia.

I think one must bear in mind that this is an era

in which people believed in God,

and the dramatic successes of the Arabs

as they poured out of Arabia

were such that a lot of people did observe

and say they must have God on their side.

This must be the true god, and some people did convert,

or if they didn't convert,

they did submit to Arab-Muslim political control for that reason.

By the early 8th century, Islamic caliphs ruled a vast territory.

And like most successful emperors, from Caesar to Napoleon,

they understood that political power

and scientific know-how go hand in hand.

There were many reasons for this. Some were practical.

Medical knowledge could save lives.

Military technology could win wars.

Mathematics could help deal with the increasing complexities

of the finances of state.

Islam as a religion also played a pivotal role.

The prophet himself had told believers to seek knowledge

wherever they could find it, even if they had to go as far as China.

And many Muslims, I'm sure, felt that to study

and better understand God's creation was in itself a religious duty.

But there were other less edifying motives at play.

To many in the ruling elite of the Islamic Empire,

knowledge itself had a self-serving purpose.

Because possessing it was seen as proof of the new empire's superiority

over the rest of the world.

But with military and political success, the Islamic caliphs faced an inevitable problem.

How do you sensibly govern a hugely diverse population?

Although some of the empire had converted to Islam,

they were still separated by huge distances

and adhered to many different traditions and languages.

In the 8th century AD, the empire's leader, Caliph Abdul Malik,

had to find a way of administering this mish-mash of languages.

Like all the great figures of the Islamic empire, Al-Malik lived in a culture without portraiture.

All we have are later impressions of what he might have looked like.

His solution was sweeping in scale

and, inadvertently,

laid the foundations of a scientific renaissance.

It was this Abdul Malik who said this bureaucratic chaos has to stop.

We cannot continue to run the government

and govern all this span of land with this tower of Babel languages.

He wanted to govern it with a uniform language

and that language was one he wanted to understand,

so he demanded that it be in Arabic.

But the choice of Arabic as the common language of the Empire went beyond administrative convenience.

The decision had extra force and persuasiveness,

because Islam's holy book the Qur'an

is in Arabic, and Muslims therefore consider Arabic

to be the language of God.

The words of the Qur'an are so sacred

that its text hasn't changed in over 1,400 years.

By comparison, English has changed dramatically in just 700 years.

To our ears, Chaucer is almost unintelligible,

whereas any Qur'an can be understood by anyone who reads Arabic.

Making copies of the Qur'an has always been a specialised

and highly respected job since the foundation of Islam.

Calligraphy expert Nayef Scaf, who lives in the Syrian capital

Damascus, writes for mosques and in madrasahs all over the country.

These are words he's found himself writing over and over again.

Words of great significance for Muslims.

They're the opening line to each chapter in the Qur'an.

So, what it says is, "Bismi llahi ar-rahman ar-rahim,

which means, "In the name of God

"the most gracious and the most merciful."

HE SPEAKS ARABIC

He's saying that the complexity of Arabic calligraphy

was enforced onto them because of the spread of Islam,

because they were worried that the meaning of the words

in the Qur'an would be lost.

If it was read by people who don't speak Arabic not only would they misinterpret it,

they wouldn't be able to distinguish between letters.

So, not only did they add dots on certain letters,

but also lots of squiggly lines

which change the sound of the vowels.

It was something they put into place to ensure that people were

able to have the right pronunciation when they read the Qur'an.

The consequences for science were immediate.

Scholars from different lands

who previously had no way of communicating

now had a common language.

And it was a language that was specially developed to be precise

and unambiguous, which made it ideal for scientific and technical terms.

What this meant was the summoning into existence

of a vast intellectual community,

where scholars from very different parts of the world

could engage in dialogue, comparison, debate, argument,

often very fierce argument with each other.

It was possible for scholars based in Cordoba in southern Spain

to engage in literary and scientific debate

with scholars from Baghdad or from Samarkand.

But I can tell you that scholars aren't motivated by the love of knowledge alone.

There's nothing like a large hunk of cash to focus the mind.

By the early 800s, the ruling elite of the Islamic empire

were pouring money into a truly ambitious project,

which was global in scale

and which was to have a profound impact on science.

It was to scour the libraries of the world for scientific

and philosophical manuscripts in any language,

Greek, Syriac, Persian and Sanskrit,

bring them to the empire and translate them into Arabic.

This became known as the translation movement.

The effort scholars put into finding ancient texts was astonishing.

And one key reason for this is that bringing a book to the caliph,

which he could add to his library, could be extremely lucrative.

The story goes that the caliph al-Ma'mun was so obsessed

that he'd send his messengers out of Baghdad,

far and wide to distant lands, just to get hold of books

that he didn't possess, for the translation movement.

And anyone who brought him back a book that he didn't have,

he'd repay them its weight in gold.

To give some sense of the extent of the activities between 750 and 950,

somebody called Al Nadim, who wrote a list of the intelligentsia

of the Abbasid era, lists 70 translators,

so it was quite a large cohort of people involved in translations.

And obviously, he only named the well-known translators.

They could get up to 500 gold dinars a month,

which is probably around 24,000.

Which is a huge sum of money for what they were doing.

It was a very prestigious, well-paid, well-patronised activity.

And motivating this global acquisition of knowledge

was a pressing practical concern,

one that rarely crosses our minds today.

This is the new Library at Alexandria, in Egypt.

But fresh in the memory of many in the empire was the story

of the destruction of the original library

at Alexandria centuries earlier,

and the shocking loss of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge.

One of the things that we tend to forget,

because we live in a age of massive information storage

and perfect communication more or less,

is the ever present possibility of total loss.

That was very important for Islamic scholars.

They knew extremely well that writings could be forgotten

or buried or burnt or destroyed, that cities could pass away.

What we see in Baghdad or Cairo or Samarkand

is exactly the gathering together and translation, analysis,

accumulation, storage and preservation of material

which they were well aware could be lost forever.

And if there was one branch of knowledge that everyone from the mighty caliph to the humble trader

wanted to preserve and enhance, it was medicine.

These were, after all, times when few lived to old age.

Writings from the time remind us that what we might consider

a relatively minor infection today could be a death sentence.

Religious teachings then were not just a source of comfort.

They were a constant reminder that we should never give up.

In the Hadith which is the collected sayings of the Prophet Mohammed,

-it says....

-HE READS ARABIC

Which means that God didn't send down a disease

without also sending down a cure.

It's statements like this that lead Muslims, even today, to believe

that cures for all diseases are out there somewhere

and that we need to search to find them.

'To assess how this optimism actually affected Islamic medicine,

'I met up with Dr Peter Pormann in the Syrian capital, Damascus.

'He's a leading expert on Islamic Medicine,

'who spends much of his time researching

'here in the Middle East.'

What people don't realise is that the history

of Islamic medicine is really the history of our medicine,

because our medicine, the university medicine,

we used until the 19th century,

it was based to a large extent on the work of all these Islamic physicians.

Islamic medicine built extensively on the foundations

laid by the ancient Greeks.

The most highly prized and among the first to be translated into Arabic

were the medical manuscripts of the 3rd century Greek physician, Galen.

Galen believed that a healthy body was one in balance.

A balance of four types of fluids called humours,

which circulate through the body

and any one of which, if out of balance,

would cause illness and a change of temperament.

The four humours were yellow bile,

which, if in excess, would cause the patient to become bilious

or bad-tempered and nauseous.

Blood. Too much of which would cause the patient to become sanguine,

or cheerful and flushed.

Black bile, which in excess would cause the patient

to become lethargic or melancholic or even depressed.

And...phlegm, which in excess

would cause the patient to become phlegmatic or apathetic

and emotionally detached.

Galen argued that illnesses are caused by an imbalance

in one of the humours,

so the cure lies in draining the body of some of that humour.

He recommended techniques like cutting to induce bleeding

or using emetics to induce vomiting.

'But Islamic doctors were acutely aware that Galen and Greek medicine

'were only one source of medical knowledge.

'There were other traditions of medicine that they were equally keen

'to incorporate into their understanding of how the body functioned.

'Medieval Arabic texts refer to wise women, folk healers who provided medical drugs.

'This tradition continues today, as I found when I came across one

'for myself in the back streets of Hammamat in Tunisia.

'This is Arafez Nabil.

'She's been running her shop selling medicinal herbs and spices for over 20 years.

'She believes that her remedies can cure

'a wide range of medical ailments.'

'In the backstreets of Tunisia this knowledge is still being used.

'But medieval Islamic doctors were also aware of other traditions of medicine from China and India.

'And yet another tradition of medical guidance came from within Islam itself,

'and takes some of its ideas from the Qur'an

'and some from the collected sayings of the Prophet, the Hadith.

'In a bookshop in Monastir in Tunisia, I found a copy

'of a very popular book available right across the Islamic world.'

This book is called The Prophet's Medicine

and you can see how old it is.

The author was born between 691 and 751 Hijri,

which places him the 14th century.

Here's an interesting bit, where it deals with the plague.

HE READS ARABIC

It says, "If you come across a land where the plague has come down, then do not enter that land.

"And if the plague comes down onto your land and you are there,

"then do not leave your homes in the hope of escaping it."

So that sort of makes a lot of sense.

But here's quite an amusing part.

It deals with epilepsy and it says that the Greeks or Galen believes

that epilepsy originated in the brain, however they were ignorant.

They didn't realise the true cause of epilepsy, which is the possession

of the body by evil spirits.

And it talks about the cure for epilepsy being exorcism.

'Hardly scientific.

'But Islam's most tangible contribution to medicine

'is less in its specific remedies

'and more in its over-arching philosophy.

'It is, after all, a religion whose central idea

'is that we should feel compassion for our fellow humans.

'And accompanied by Dr Peter Pormann,

'I'm going to see a physical, bricks and mortar manifestation

'of medieval Islamic compassion.

'This is the Nur al-Din hospital,

'the leading hospital of the Islamic empire,

'built here in Damascus and now a museum.'

THEY GROAN WITH EXERTION

This was built in the 1150s, 1154, I believe.

One of the ideas which are stipulated in Islam

-is the idea to be charitable and charity.

-Zakat.

Exactly, and it's an obligation to give alms and stuff like that.

So, if you're a ruler or you have a lot of money, what you could do is...

-You could really be charitable.

-..and set up a nice hospital like this one.

And within the hospital, Islam actively encouraged

a high degree of religious tolerance,

something we take for granted in modern secular society.

The hospital was open to all communities,

so you'd have Christians and Jews and Muslims obviously

and maybe other denominations both as patients and also as practitioners.

Like a Christian studies with a Muslim, a Muslim says my best student was a Jew,

and so the medicine which was practised here transcended religion.

Typically, how many physicians would there be?

Well, it depends. For certain hospitals,

-we hear figures of 24 or 28 physicians.

-Wow.

Physicians would do the rounds in the morning.

Do the prescriptions.

Things haven't changed over the ages, yeah.

'As a result of the translation movement

'those physician now became aware of the latest remedies

'from as far away as India and China.

'And as the new drugs filtered in from the rest of the world,

'hospitals started to set up a new kind of facility

'within their walls - the pharmacy.'

So, this notion of a pharmacy in a hospital, is that a new innovation?

The whole package, certainly that's new, and what is interesting,

if you look for innovation on the level of pharmacy,

if you look at Baghdad or even Damascus,

it's at this crossroad of cultures. So loads of new things come in,

like musk, for instance, you have Indian drugs, there's an Indian pill, for instance,

which is good for headaches and bad breath,

but also gives you sexual appetite, and stuff like that.

Cures your headache,

gives you...fresh breath, and gives you...

So it's like toothpaste, Viagra and aspirin.

-That's right. All in one.

-Fantastic.

So, let's walk in here.

'Peter wants to show me perhaps the most ghoulish aspect of Islamic medicine, surgery.'

Here you have a wonderful illustration.

This appears to be the first anatomical illustration in history.

You see it says "adala", which means muscle.

So, these are the different muscles, which move the eyelids.

-So it was understood that the muscles controlled the lens and the eye.

-Absolutely. Yes. Yeah.

Move the eyelid, and stuff like that.

The other thing we have here, which is really nice,

is we have some ophthalmological instruments,

for instance it's a hook,

could be used to pull back your eyelid, that sort of thing.

These instruments were very useful to the doctor.

Although these tools might look crude, eye surgery was one of Islamic medicine's great successes.

One innovation was to improve an older technique for curing cataracts called "couching"

which, in their hands, had a success rate of over 60%.

In a living subject, the cornea would be clear.

Then you'd be able to see the pupil clearly, with the cataract sitting behind the pupil.

'To see how couching stands the test of time, I'm meeting up with eye surgeon Mr Vic Sharma.'

The cataract is the lens inside the eye, which sits behind the pupil.

As with time and age the cataract, the lens gets cloudier and cloudier,

that's what is referred to as a cataract.

'I've brought along a replica of a medieval couching knife

'and a description of the treatment by Albucasis,

'which is the Latin name for the great 10th-century Islamic surgeon Al-Zahrawi.'

He says, "You take the couching needle in your right hand, if it be the left eye..." and so on.

"Then thrust the needle firmly in, at the same time rotating it with your hand

"till it penetrates the white of the eye and you feel the needle has reached something empty."

-So, he's talking about how to dislodge.

-Exactly.

So, maybe you can show me. We've got some eyes here.

Yeah. I'll give it a try.

And what they would have done is attempted to go in

by the white of the eye, at the edge,

where the cornea is, and what they attempted to do was sweep around,

try to break those ligaments of that lens

and get the lens to drop away from the pupil,

to allow more light to enter in through pupil

and to brighten the subject's vision.

-You haven't got the capacity to focus.

-Yeah, you have no lens now. That was a big problem

until people starting compensating for that with specs later on.

Right. What is your feeling about how advanced and successful...?

Well, they were in the general ball park, the right place.

They were trying to remove the cataract away from the visual axis.

They had some understanding of the anatomy of the eye

and that the lens was behind the pupil

and that's what was causing the visual loss.

And so removing that... That general principle is still the same.

There are accounts of it still being used in certain parts of the world presently.

'Looking back at medieval Islamic medicine with modern scientific eyes is frustrating.

'They take as true many things we know to be nonsense,

'but on the other hand, their desire to deal with this vast subject

'logically and systematically is admirable

'and truly marks a break with the past.

'One Islamic scholar, more than any other,

'embodies the synthesis of religion, faith and reason.

'His name was Ibn Sina, or Avicenna, as he's known in the West.

'He was a polymath who clearly thrived in intellectual and courtly circles.

'In 1025, he completed this...

'Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb or the Canon Of Medicine.

'In it Ibn Sina collated and expanded on all

'that had gone before him,

'medical ideas from Greece to India, and turned them into a single work.'

So how would you place this book in an historical context?

Oh, it's hugely important.

There are few books which are as important as the Canon,

because what this encyclopaedia does, it kind of, you know,

sweeps away everything else, it becomes a text book,

it supersedes a lot of other texts.

People even complain, like, it's so good, it's so tightly organised,

so easily accessible that, you know,

people forget to read the Greek sources and the Arabic translations.

This whole first book, this is the first book, it contains what we call the general principal,

so it's all about how the human body works, how diseases work in general.

The second book contains diseases right from tip to toe,

so he starts with the diseases of the head

and then he moves down, like the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth.

And he...normally they end up at the sexual organs.

'At first sight the sheer ambition of the three volumes is hugely impressive.

'Here's an attempt at diagnosis and cure for diseases

'as diverse as depression, meningitis and small pox,

'and there's even detailed chapters on more common problems.'

So, for instance, here you have, like, headaches.

Different kinds of headaches.

HE READS ARABIC

So, headaches caused by pleasant fragrant smells.

-And then he's also got, erm...

-HE READS ARABIC

-So, hangovers.

-DR PORMANN READS ARABIC

-Headaches from sex.

-Is that right?

I mean, it hasn't happened to me yet, but I mean, you know...

Let's see. So the treatment of headache caused by sex.

HE READS ARABIC

So if somebody is befallen by,

suffers from a headache after sex

and he also has a repletion, like, so he has too many superfluidities or something like that...

HE READS ARABIC

He has to first resort to venasection, or blood letting.

HE READS ARABIC Then you should use purging.

In... HE READS ARABIC

For both of them, blood letting and purging are necessary.

A lot of the stuff in here sounds like nonsense,

-because this is not modern medicine.

-No, it's not.

How long was this taken seriously?

Well, the fundamental ideas contained here about how the body works, I mean...

they hadn't changed until the early 19th century.

There was progress on certain levels,

but the essence was the same.

And then came the big break, with the discovery of bacteria and viruses and things like that.

From the second half of the 19th century onwards,

medicine was totally revolutionised.

'Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine is a landmark in the history of the subject.

'Although much of the medical science it espouses we know now to be terribly misguided,

'its value lies in accumulating the best knowledge in the world

'at the time into one accessible, organised text.

'The Canon would give future generations something to rewrite.'

Cataloguing the world's medical knowledge has clear and obvious benefits.

But the Islamic empire's obsession

to uncover the knowledge of the ancients

went beyond practical matters, like medicine.

Many, like the Caliph Al-Mamun,

believed that the people of antiquity

possessed dark, even magical powers.

And, what's more, new evidence is coming to light to show just

how hard Islamic scientists worked to rediscover them.

'To find out about that story, I have to visit the harsh burnt yellow

'of the Sahara desert in Egypt.

'There I am to meet an academic

'who wants to show me how the translation movement

'took the Arabs to Egypt on a quest to break a code,

'which they thought hid the secret of the dark art of alchemy.

'This is Saqqara, a necropolis, or graveyard, of the ancient pharaohs.

'Over a ten-acre site, it's a collection of burial chambers

'and step pyramids that were built

'in the third millennium before Christ.

'These are said to be among the oldest stone buildings in the world.

'Archaeologist Dr Okasha El-Daly is my guide.

'He was about to reveal the most astonishing story of my journey so far.'

Oh! Ho ho. Look at that.

'Like most people, I believed that Egyptian hieroglyphs

'had remained completely undeciphered until the 19th century.

'Then came the chance discovery of the famous Rosetta Stone.

'This stone had the same inscription

'written in both hieroglyphs and Greek.

'It provided the crucial clues,

'which British and French scholars used to decipher

'the writings of ancient Egypt.

'That's the usual story one hears.

'But Dr El-Daly has made a discovery that dramatically alters it.

'He has recently unearthed a number of rare works

'by the Islamic scholar Ibn Wahshiyah.

'What he did was to figure out a correspondence

'between hieroglyphs like these and letters in the Arabic alphabet.'

If you look here, for example, at Ibn Wahshiyah's manuscript, he's giving us the Egyptian hieroglyphic signs...

And Arabic letters underneath.

Yes. And the phonetic value in Arabic underneath.

Look very carefully at this one, says "seen" underneath that seat.

-Yes.

-Now, look at this seat here.

That seat in Egyptian hieroglyphic is used for the sign "S", "seen", which is what you see here, "seen".

That is the name of the god Osiris.

-Osiris.

-Oh, with an "S".

This is the letter "H".

-This one here...

-This is the "hah".

The water wave is the letter "N", or "noon" in Arabic.

-"T" and the letter "F"...

-These are all letters?

-These are all letters.

'But how did he decipher the hieroglyphs?'

The one good thing about the early Arabic scholars is their ability

to link ancient Egyptian language, we call hieroglyphics,

to link it with their own contemporary Coptic.

They realised that Coptic is nothing

but the later stage of ancient Egyptian language.

'They realised this because the translation movement

'had literally placed hundreds of Coptic texts into their hands.

'The scholars could now see a direct link

'between hieroglyphs and Arabic.'

What fraction of these symbols would have been correctly deciphered?

They got about 14 letters. They cracked more than half of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

So, that was a remarkable achievement for people of the 10th century.

Well, that's probably the biggest revelation for me so far on my travels,

that Egyptology didn't begin in the 19th century.

Yet again, it seems that Islamic scholars

actually cracked hieroglyphics and they cracked it for strange reasons.

They cracked it because they were interested in astrology and alchemy.

But here is another example of this amazing translation movement.

They weren't just translating Greek and Indian and Persian texts,

they were translating Egyptian hieroglyphics as well.

Absolutely incredible.

'Unfortunately for the Caliph Al-Mamun,

'the hieroglyphs contained no alchemical secrets.

'But what this story reveals to me is the insatiable curiosity

'Islamic scholars had about the world.

'They were desperate to absorb knowledge

'from all cultures purely on merit,

'with no qualms about the places or religions from which it came.'

Most intellectual traditions, including, if I may say so, our own,

tend to work very hard to keep everybody else out.

Whereas here we have an example of an enterprise which is desperate,

curious, to turn itself into a net importer of intellectual product.

And that's a very important lesson for the history of the sciences.

'I was soon to see just how dramatically

'this fuelled scientific innovation,

'but it's worth remembering that the translation movement

'wasn't just about science and medicine.

'As the capital Baghdad sat in the centre of a vast successful empire,

'it became home to an extraordinary flourishing of all kinds of culture.

'For this is the time described by One Thousand And One Nights,

'of great and generous caliphs, magic carpets, great journeys,

'but also ambitious buildings, music, dance,

-'storytellers, and the arts.'

-HE CHANTS IN ARABIC

CHEERING AND CLAPPING

Baghdad was such a cultured and vibrant city that one traveller

of the time wrote, "There is none more learned than their scholars,

"more cogent than their theologians,

"more poetic than their poets, or more reckless than their rakes!"

It really must have felt like Baghdad and the Arabic Empire

were the world leaders in civilisation and culture.

To be part of that city's growing intellectual elite must have been as exciting as it gets.

It was a new Muslim city.

It only started to be built in 756

so it has that sense of being on the frontier of being new and different.

It was full of courtiers and nouveau riche individuals

who were trying to make their way at the Abbasid court

and it is the sort of place

where innovation is valued and appreciated.

At the heart of the city's intellectual life

was a system called the majlis.

The word "majlis" could perhaps be best translated

as "salon" or "talking house".

In 9th century Baghdad what this meant was that city's ruling elite,

the Caliph, his courtiers, the generals and the aristocracy,

would hold regular meetings,

you might call them seminars or discussions,

during which the city's cleverest men, the philosophers, theologians,

astronomers and magicians,

would gather to discuss and debate their ideas.

It was not the case that people were expected to adhere

to a particular line or adopt a particular religion.

They were allowed to express

their own views and sentiments very freely.

The point was that they should do so in elegant Arabic

and with good logical reasoning.

The effect of the majlis

was to create a heady mix of money and brains,

with the best minds in the empire swapping ideas

while simultaneously engaged in fierce competition for patronage.

'It's at this point my investigation into the first wave of Islamic science

'returns me to the man we first met at the beginning of this story

'in the back streets of Cairo, the great mathematician

'who brought the West the decimal system.'

Out of the very heart of this intellectual whirlwind

came Al-Khwarizmi, mathematician, astronomer, courtier

and favourite of the Caliph al-Mam'un.

He was a product of a his age, an emigre from Eastern Persia

into Baghdad, surrounded by books,

well-versed in learning from Greece, Persia, India and China,

and fearless in his thinking.

'Al-Khwarizmi brought together two very different mathematical

'traditions and synthesised them into something new.'

The capacity to have on your desk simultaneously

two very different kinds of mathematics

presses on models of what counts as calculation,

what counts as measurement,

and I think accelerates the process of intellectual change.

The first of these traditions came from the Greek-speaking world.

Greek mathematics dealt mainly with geometry,

the science of shapes like triangles, circles and polygons,

and how to calculate area and volume.

The other great mathematical tradition

Al-Khwarizmi inherited came from India.

They'd invented the ten-symbol decimal system

which made calculating much simpler.

Thanks to the translation movement,

Al-Khwarizmi was in the astonishingly lucky position

of having access to both Greek and Indian mathematical traditions.

He combined geometrical intuition

with arithmetic precision,

Greek pictures and Indian symbols,

inspiring a new form of mathematical thinking that today we call algebra.

'As a physicist, I've spent much my life doing algebra

'and I can't overstate its importance in science.

'But it is a strange idea.

'I remember being perplexed when my maths teacher first started talking

'about mathematics not using numbers but with symbols like x and y.

'It's an incredibly liberating idea,

'because it allows you to solve problems without getting bogged down

'in messy numerical calculations.'

So we have here this priceless manuscript,

-HE READS ARABIC

-Al-Khwarizmi's book.

'Professor Ian Stewart has studied algebra

'for much of his working life.

'Together we looked at an early copy of the book

'in which the idea really took form.'

I see here, although it's written in the margins, the title of the book.

Al-Jabr w'al-Muqabala, so that's the first time the word Al-Jabr appears.

-Algebra.

-That's where our world algebra comes from.

Now, what I found very early on is that he said,

"I discovered that people require three kinds of numbers,"

-HE READS ARABIC

-So, roots, squares and numbers.

So, what is he trying to do here?

This is what we would now call x and x squared.

This is quadratic equations.

This really is algebra.

So, he's setting you up for a book

about how to solve equations by algebraic methods.

Now, quadratic equations, I thought were around and being solved

long before Al-Khwarizmi back in Babylonian times.

So what's the big deal about this book?

It's the point of view.

He treats root and square as if they were objects in their own right.

They're not just some number

that we are trying to find out,

they are a process you apply.

What Al-Khwarizmi is thinking of

is square means take the root and multiply it by itself.

And that recipe is true, whatever the root might be.

If it's five, it's five times five, it's 25.

If it's three, it's three times three.

He's giving you a general recipe, now called an algorithm.

After him.

R...r...right, algorithm comes from...

Its another world that comes from Al-Khwarizmi.

Now, he talks about this procedure on the next page.

You take the number multiplying the root and then you halve it,

and then you multiply it by itself

Then you add it to the other number and take the square root. That's the algorithm, is it?

That's right and this is where you see the difference,

because previous writers on the subject

would have said things like,

"Take half of 10, which is 5, square that, which is 25."

And then they'd do another problem,

take half of 12, which is 6, and square that, which is 36.

And they'd run you through the same process over and over again with different numbers.

And it would be up to you to infer how to do it on the next problem.

-But he doesn't do that.

-He doesn't do that.

He says, "Take half the root,

"whatever the root is, take half the root."

So half the root is an object.

If the root is an object, so is half the root.

So you don't have to have in your mind what that root stands for.

You can forget about what it stands for.

When you come to square it, you just know to square the thing, I don't care what the thing is.

So, you abandon temporarily this link with specific numbers,

manipulate the new objects according to the rules his book is explaining.

And then the numbers that these objects are represent

in your particular problem will miraculously appear at the end

and you'll end up with x = 3 or whatever it is.

So, how revolutionary do you regard Al-Khwarizmi's work?

He made it possible for algebra to exist as a subject in its own right,

rather than as a technique for finding numbers.

The least interesting bit of an algebraic calculation is when you get to the end and discover that x = 3.

It's the route you take to get there.

But if it was a special route and a different route for each problem,

that wouldn't be interesting either, it would just be a big mess.

There's a beautiful general series of principles,

and if you understand those, then you understand algebra.

What is the true global importance of algebra?

It's been used throughout the ages to solve all sorts of problems.

Let the mass of a cannon ball be 'm', let the distance it has to travel be 'd'.

You use algebra to work out the optimum angle

you have to point your cannon.

That sort of knowledge wins wars.

'Or let's call the speed of light 'c',

'the change in the mass of an atomic nucleus 'm',

'and then calculate the energy released

'with the following algebraic formula, E=mc2.

'Mastery of that information truly is power.

'Algebra has helped create the modern world.

'Our science is unimaginable without it.

'It sums up so much that was remarkable

'about medieval Islamic science,

'taking ideas from Greece and India, combining and enhancing them.

'Similarly, modern medicine owes a considerable debt

'to the work of the Islamic physicians.

'But I think the real story of what happened to science

'in the Islamic world in 8th and 9th centuries

'tells us more than any single discovery.

'What it really tells us

'is about the universal truth of science itself.'

I believe that the first great achievement

of the medieval Islamic scientists was to prove

that science isn't Islamic, or Hindu or Hellenistic,

or Jewish, Buddhist or Christian.

It cannot be claimed by any one culture.

Before Islam, science was spread across the world.

But the scholars of medieval Islam

pieced together this giant scientific jigsaw,

by absorbing knowledge

that had originated from far beyond their own empire's borders.

This great synthesis produced not just new science,

but showed for the first time

that science as an enterprise

transcends political borders and religious affiliations.

It's a body of knowledge that benefits all humans.

That's an idea that's as relevant and as inspiring as ever.

'In the next episode, I investigate how one of the most important ideas

'in the world arose in the Islamic empire.

'I discover how mathematics and experimentation fused together

'as the empire embraced a medieval industrial revolution.

'And in Cairo, I find out how these ideas

'led directly to today's world of science and technology.'

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