Eminent Arab Scientists (Part 1)

Eminent Arab Scientists (Part 1)

 

Ibn Khaldun

Abu Zayd Abdur Raḥman ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldun al-Ḥaḍrami was born on 27th May 1332 (732 AH) in Tunis and died on 17 March 1406 (808 AH). The the family’s ancestor was a Hadhrami who shared kinship with Waíl ibn Hujr, a companion of the Hazrat Muhammad (PBUH).

Scientific achievements:

He is universally considered as the father of social sciences:

1. Paul Krugman, a famous Economist described Ibn Khaldun as “a 14th-century Islamic philosopher who basically invented what we would now call the social sciences”.

2. Robert Flint, a 19th century Scottish theologian and philosopher praised him strongly and said that he was superior to Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, and others should not even be mentioned with him.

3. In 1981 U.S. President Ronald Reagan cited Ibn Khaldun as an influence on his supply-side economic policies, also known as Reaganomics. He paraphrased Ibn Khaldun, who said that “in the beginning of the dynasty, great tax revenues were gained from small assessments,” and that “at the end of the dynasty, small tax revenues were gained from large assessments.” Reagan said his goal is “trying to get down to the small assessments and the great revenues.”

4. British historian Arnold J. Toynbee has called Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah “the greatest work of its kind.” Ernest Gellner, once a professor of philosophy and logic at the London School of Economics, considered Khaldun’s definition of government the best in the history of political theory.

Social Ideas:

1. Ibn Khaldun originated the labor theory of value long before Adam Smith and David Ricardo, although Khaldun did not refer to it as either a labor theory of value or theory.
2. Ibn Khaldun also called for the creation of a science to explain society. He states that “Civilization and its well-being, as well as business prosperity, depend on productivity and people’s efforts in all directions in their own interest and profit”.

3. Ibn Khaldun also outlines early theories of division of labor, taxes, scarcity, and economic growth.

4. He argued that poverty was a result of the destruction of morality and human values. He also looked at what factors contribute to wealth, such as consumption, government, and investment. Khaldun also argued that poverty was not necessarily a result of poor financial decision-making but of external consequences and therefore the government should be involved in alleviating poverty. Researchers from Malaysia’s Insaniah University College and Indonesia’s Tazkia University College of Islamic Economics created a dynamics model based upon Ibn Khaldun’s writings to measure poverty in the Muslim nations of South Asia and Southeast Asia.

5. Ibn Khaldun divided science into two different categories, the religious science that regards the sciences of the Qur’an and the non-religious science. He further classified the non-religious sciences into intellectual sciences such as logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, etc. and auxiliary sciences such as language, literature, poetry, etc. He also suggested that possibly more divisions will appear in the future with different societies.

6. Ibn Khaldun believed that too much bureaucracy, such as taxes and legislations, would lead to the decline of a society, since it would constrain the development of more specialized labor (increase in scholars and development of different services). He believed that bureaucrats cannot understand the world of commerce and do not possess the same motivation as a businessman.

7. Another important concept he emphasizes in his work is the mastery of crafts, habits and skills. This takes place after a society is established and according to Ibn Khaldun the level of achievement of a society can be determined by just analyzing these three concepts.

8. He thinks that the most important element of a society would not be land, but the language spoken. He was surprised that many non-Arabs were really successful in the Arabic society, had good jobs and were well received by the community. He believed that the reason why non-Arabs were accepted as part of Arab society was due to their mastery of the Arabic language.

Salient facts of life:

1. Ibn Khaldun’s life is relatively well-documented, as he wrote an autobiography “Presenting Ibn Khaldun and his Journey West and East” in which numerous documents regarding his life are quoted word-for-word.

2. His best-known book, the Muqaddimah (“Introduction”), which he wrote in six months.

3. He was a Hafiz e Quran.

4. At the age of 17, Ibn Khaldūn lost both his parents to the Black Death, an intercontinental epidemic of the plague that hit Tunis in 1348–1349.

5. In 1401, took part in a military campaign against the Mongol conqueror, Timur, who besieged Damascus in 1400. He remained at the besieged city for seven weeks, being lowered over the city wall by ropes to negotiate with Timur, in a historic series of meetings that he reported extensively in his autobiography. Timur questioned him in detail about conditions in the lands of the Maghreb. At his request, Ibn Khaldūn even wrote a long report about it. Timur has also mentioned these meetings in his autobiography.

 

 

Jabar bin Hayyan

 

Jabar bin Hayyan was more commonly known as Abu Musa. His time of birth and early life are shrouded              in mystery. However, it is known that he died in 816 AD.

Scientific achievements:

It is generally accepted that the development of chemistry in Europe can be traced directly to Jabir Ibn                      Hayyan.

He revolutionized the field of chemistry. He is universally accepted as father of organic chemistry.

1. He described procedures for deriving an inorganic compound from organic substances (such as plants, blood, and hair) by chemical means.
2. His works also contain the oldest known systematic classification of chemical substances. He suggested three categories for the natural elements: Spirits, which vaporize on heating; metals like gold, silver, lead, iron and copper; and stones that can be converted to powder. This nomenclature could represent the beginning of more recent classifications of elements.
3. His was also one of the earliest known scientists to put forward sulfur-mercury theory of metals, a mineralogical theory that would remain dominant until the 18th century.
4. Jabir developed basic chemical methods using experimentation and the study of chemical reactions and their principles, thus making chemistry a practical scientific discipline.
5. He is credited with the development of various chemical procedures including crystallization, calcinations, sublimation and evaporation, the synthesis of acids (hydrochloric, nitric citric, acetic and tartaric acids), and distillation using his greatest invention, the alembic (Anbaiq).
6. His other achievements included preparation of various metals, development of steel, dyeing of cloth and tanning of leather, varnishing of water-proof cloth, use of manganese dioxide in glass-making, prevention of rusting, and identification of paints and greases.
7. He also developed aqua regia to dissolve gold.

Books:

There are about 600 Arabic works (collectively known as The Jabirian corpus) attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan that are known by his name, and approximately 215 of which are still existing.  Though some of these are full-length works (e.g., The Great Book on Specific Properties), most of them are relatively short treatises and belong to larger collections (The One Hundred and Twelve Books, The Five Hundred Books, etc.) in which they function rather more like chapters.  When the individual chapters of some full-length works are counted as separate treatises too, the total length of the corpus may be estimated at 3000 treatises/chapters.

 

Ibn Nafees

Alaudin Abu al Hasan known as Ibn al-Nafīs was an Arab polymath whose areas of work included medicine, surgery, physiology, anatomy, biology, Islamic studies, jurisprudence, and philosophy. Ibn al-Nafis was born in 1213 AD to an Arab family probably at a village near Damascus named Karashia. He died in 1288 AD.

Scientific achievements:

1. He is known for being the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of the blood. The work of Ibn al-Nafis regarding the right sided (pulmonary) circulation pre-dates the later work (1628) of William Harvey’s De motu cordis.

2. Ibn al-Nafis was also the first to provide an insight of the coronary circulations. He postulated that nutrients for heart are extracted from the coronary arteries.

3. He was also the first to give a concept of the capillary circulation. He stated that “there must be small communications or pores between the pulmonary artery and vein,” a prediction that preceded the discovery of the capillary system by more than 400 years.

4. Ibn al-Nafis also disagreed with Galen’s theory that the heart’s pulse is created by the arteries’ tunics. He believed that the pulse was a direct result of the heartbeat, even observing that the arteries contracted and expanded at different times depending upon their distance from the heart. He also correctly observed that the arteries contract when the heart expands and expand when the heart contracts.

5. He was also one of the very few physicians at the time, who supported the view that the brain, rather than the heart, was the organ responsible for thinking and sensation.

6. Ibn al-Nafis is also credited with providing the earliest recorded reference for the concept of metabolism. He wrote that both the body and its parts are in a continuous state of dissolution and nourishment, so they are inevitably undergoing permanent change.

7. In his book “Al-Mugiza”, Ibn al-Nafis distinguished the difference between kidney stone and bladder stones. He did this by their pathogenesis and clinical picture. He also discussed the difference between kidney and bladder infections, different types of inflammatory and noninflammatory renal swellings, the conservative management of renal stones and commonly used and well known lithontriptic medicaments.

8. Like Hippocrates, al-Nafïs constructed an outbreak map and both men concluded that Damascus was the origin of the outbreak. This method of locating an outbreak origin was used by John Snow 600 years later, when he constructed his own outbreak map.

Ibn al-Nafis, thus, was one of the few medieval physicians—if not the only one—who contributed noticeably to the science of physiology and tried to push it beyond the hatch of the Greco-Roman tradition.

Books:

1. The number of medical textbooks written by Ibn al-Nafis is estimated at more than 110 volumes.

2. Sharh Tashrih al-Qanun (“Commentary on Anatomy in Books I and II of Ibn Sina’s Kitab al-Qanun”), published when Ibn al-Nafis was only 29 years old, still it is regarded by many as his most famous work.

3. The most voluminous of his books is Al-Shamil fi al-Tibb (The Comprehensive Book on Medicine), which was planned to be an encyclopedia comprising 300 volumes. However, Ibn al-Nafis managed to publish only 80 before his death, and the work was left incomplete. Despite this fact, the work is considered one of the largest medical encyclopedias ever written by one person, and it gave a complete summary of the medical knowledge in the Islamic world at the time.

Salient facts of life:

1. He was appointed as the chief physician at al-Naseri Hospital founded by Sultan Saladin, where he taught and practiced medicine for several years.

2. In 1236, Ibn al-Nafis, along with some of his colleagues, moved to Egypt under the request of the Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil.

3. Ibn al-Nafis lived most of his life in Egypt, and witnessed several pivotal events like the fall of Baghdad and the rise of Mamluks.

4. He was also the personal physician of the Sultan Baibars and other prominent political leaders, thus showcasing himself as an authority among practitioners of medicine.

 

Ibn Rushd

Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd was born on 14 April 1126 (520 AH) in Cordoba. His family was well known in the city for their public service, especially in the legal and religious fields. His grandfather Abu al-Walid Muhammad (d. 1126) was the chief judge (qazi) of Cordoba and the imam of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. His father Abu al-Qasim Ahmad was not as celebrated as his grandfather, but was also chief judge.

Scientific achievements:

Known in Western world as Averroes, he wrote about many subjects, including philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics, psychology, mathematics, Islamic jurisprudence and law, and linguistics.

1. He was probably the first person to recognize that retina was the part of the eye responsible for sensing light, rather than the lens as was commonly thought.

2. He also was the first person to describe stroke. He said that it was produced by the brain and caused by an obstruction of the arteries from the heart to the brain.

3. He was also the first to describe the signs and symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in his Kulliyat, although he did not give the disease a name.

4. In astronomy, he postulated that there are three type of planetary motions; those that can be seen with the naked eye, those that requires instruments to observe and those that can only be known by philosophical reasoning.

Books:

Ibn Rushd was a prolific writer and his works covered a greater variety of subjects than those of any of his predecessors in the East, including philosophy, medicine, jurisprudence or legal theory, and linguistics.

His medical book Al-Kulliyat fi al-Tibb, translated into Latin and known as the Colliget, became a textbook in Europe for centuries.

Most of his writings were commentaries on or paraphrasings of the works of Aristotle that—especially the long ones—often contain his original thoughts.

According to French author Ernest Renan, he wrote at least 67 original works, including 28 works on philosophy, 20 on medicine, 8 on law, 5 on theology, and 4 on grammar, in addition to his commentaries on most of Aristotle’s works and his commentary on Plato’s The Republic.

Many of his works in Arabic did not survive, but their translations into Hebrew or Latin did. For example, of his long commentaries on Aristotle, only “a tiny handful of Arabic manuscript remains”.

 

To be continued