AHC: Arabian Science Continues

My first POD for this is sparing Baghdad from Helagu. How much of a handwave does this require? Can it be done within reason? Or should I just plop this into the ASB section and heck with it?


A very interesting promise of the plundered potential is the arguable presence of proto-science fiction in 1001 Nights

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1001_Nights#Science_fiction_elements)

and, arguably, that in of itself presents the potential for such hinted-at technology to develop. (If you can imagine it, then the odds of developing same are much higher than if you haven't envisioned it, no? See Jules Verne for any number of potentially useful examples.)


What elements of Arabian tech could be predicted as distinctive to the culture sourcing it? Beyond stylistic...? What was the nature of Arabian science and technological development beforehand, and to what extent can that be projected past this POD?

It's sounds a very interesting POD, and I wish I knew enough to answer the second question.

I think Helagu not looting Baghdad is unlikely, but not impossible. If the Caliph had just died, or was very sick, perhaps his vizier would be conciliatory. But there would still be a heavy tribute to pay, and Baghdad mightn't recover from Mongol overlordship.

Thank you for the link.

Baghdad is probably salvageable, but even if it survives I'm not sure you could stop its decline. (And saving Baghdad causes a mass extinction of butterflies re: Islam's self-image, which are so contingent on Hulegu's post-POD career that it's hard to guess at them.)

What elements of Arabian tech could be predicted as distinctive to the culture sourcing it? Beyond stylistic...? What was the nature of Arabian science and technological development beforehand, and to what extent can that be projected past this POD?

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The standout fields of Islamicate science were mathematics, astronomy and medicine, in no particular order. By the end of the Abbasids OTL, it was pretty clear that the Ptolemaic model was wrong, and there were a bunch of people competing for a better explanation. (Incidentally, the POD directly changes al-Tusi's career, in ways I can't speculate on.) An earlier, Islamicate *Copernican astronomy seems plausible, although I have no idea what the repercussions would be after the death of so many butterflies.

Not sure about mechanical design, though. The Islamicate world didn't really teach mechanics as a set of principles, so inventors were basically mad scientists; there are a bunch of well-attested mechanical marvels (and some automata, apparently) that nobody was ever able to replicate or repair.

Hope that's of some use.

I think a better POD to continue the Islamic golden age would just be to kill off Genghis Khan as a child. That way, Transoxania and Persia are also spared the ravages of the Mongols, and a undevastated Eastern Islamic world could help things quite a lot. The effects on China could also be quite interesting...

This would avoid the rise of the Sufis and the conservative reaction to the Mongols which further raised the power of the Ulema.

Killing off Genghis Khan is one way, but I for one would like to see the Mu'tazili school of thought rise to prominence above the others. It was its ideas that spurred the emergence of Islamic science in a coherent sense anyway, and it was very Aristotelian in terms of its worldview. Silencing the reactionary conservative opposition that emerged against it would be a way to keep it flying high.

Could it just move around? Like Syria, damas, OR Turkey later? Persia?

We are on the moon by 1800 and the Caliphate of Mars is established by 1900

I would say that Islamic science is already moribund by the time Hulegu Khan sacked Baghdad.

There had been a tension between the adherents of Greek reason and Islamic mystics in Islamic civilization. The philosophers believed Koranic revelation and reason were not incompatible and could be combined. The mystics thought reason was unnecessary. By the year 1100, the anti-philosophers had won decisively and Islam turned away from anything resembling science.

In contrast, the Medieval Doctors of the Latin Church embraced Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle, and begun to reconcile faith and reason in Western Christianity (it was more complicated in Orthodox Christianity where mysticism began to win out, but did not do so anywhere near as decisively as what happened in Islam).

make Hadith ‘Utlub il ‘ilma wa law fis-Sin. ( The Prophet (s) said, “Seek knowledge even in China,” ) more popular. And have some islamic scholar in china come back to baghdad with bamboo firearm.

PhilippeO said:

make Hadith ‘Utlub il ‘ilma wa law fis-Sin. ( The Prophet (s) said, “Seek knowledge even in China,” ) more popular. And have some islamic scholar in china come back to baghdad with bamboo firearm.

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Maybe tied to the later 'Hui' chinese ethnical-subgroup(s - they are not an united lot... some descends from mixes of chineses and muslim peoples in the north, in the south, muslim sea traders-born conversions or mixed marriages). The muslim chineses.

Another thing to consider, also, is the centuries of looting by any given Khagan seriously diminished Persia's potential. With Persia mostly spared, it shouldn't be long before many Arab dominions are dominated by a Persian state.

But in this hypothetical Genghis-less world what would happen to Timur? He did almost as much to hurt Persia as Genghis himself had.

NikoZnate said:

Killing off Genghis Khan is one way, but I for one would like to see the Mu'tazili school of thought rise to prominence above the others. It was its ideas that spurred the emergence of Islamic science in a coherent sense anyway, and it was very Aristotelian in terms of its worldview. Silencing the reactionary conservative opposition that emerged against it would be a way to keep it flying high.

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I am inclined toward this and for that you would need a caliph or vizier who is a Grecophile who would be patron to the school of thought. Political preference is the easiest way for beliefs to raise to the top in states.

King of Malta said:

I am inclined toward this and for that you would need a caliph or vizier who is a Grecophile who would be patron to the school of thought. Political preference is the easiest way for beliefs to raise to the top in states.

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The Mu'tazili school actually was the officially promoted school of Islam in the Abbasid Caliphate during the rule of Al-Ma'mun (who was, you guessed it, a Grecophile). The problem was that he had a rather irrational method of promoting rationalism: a sort of anti-mysticist inquisition called the mihna. Butterfly the mihna somehow, and Mu'tazilism's opponents may have less ammunition to use against him, and will have less leverage over his successors.

Keeping the Fatimids alive would also bode well for Islamic science.

The problem is the concept of islamic science. Would you call "christian" today's western science because America's and Europe's culture have their roots in christianity ?

It was in fact greco-arabic science and greco-persian science which pre-existed to Islam mainly in the christian and jewish minorities. And the decline of arabic sciences coincided with the spreading of Islam and the development of rigoristic and intolerant tendancies in Islam.

Matteo said:

The problem is the concept of islamic science. Would you call "christian" today's western science because America's and Europe's culture have their roots in christianity ?

It was in fact greco-arabic science and greco-persian science which pre-existed to Islam mainly in the christian and jewish minorities. And the decline of arabic sciences coincided with the spreading of Islam and the development of rigoristic and intolerant tendancies in Islam.

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I'd call today's science "capitalistic science" and note that Europe just happened to be Western-Catholic/Protestant when it began to develop capitalism in embryo. Thus, if we butterfly away European capitalism and wait however many centuries it takes for some other meta-society to make that transition, the "religious roots" of science will appear to be in whatever religious tradition those people happen to have.

Before capitalism, a flowering of a scientific age is a temporary phenomenon that comes from an unexpected convergence of circumstances, and will eventually stagnate and be encapsulated in tradition.

If we can jigger the rise of Islam so that Islamic society produces capitalistic nations that sustain themselves and grow, those will host a new renaissance of "Islamic" science that might appear to be continuous with the OTL early flowering, or a revival of it.

But what makes science a sustained enterprise in the modern world is its symbiotic relationship with capitalist progress. Scientifically inspired inventions can find a place in the economic life of such a society, and their empirical development and the ongoing transformation of daily life keep opening new doors of scientific enquiry, casting old theories into doubt, and handing the scientists new equipment to push their investigations farther. Capitalist societies tend to support science in one way or another and make room for its disturbing, revolutionary suggestions.

As in the West, this "Islamic" science might well wind up undermining the theological foundations of the religion it happened to emerge in conjunction with. Perhaps a conservative reaction would then quash it, but if the science is in fact working in conjunction with the foundations of economic and political power, such reactions will be restrained, half-hearted and compromised, polarizing society into a fundamentalist fringe sniping at an agnostic mainstream consensus that stumbles on forward.

Matteo said:

It was in fact greco-arabic science and greco-persian science which pre-existed to Islam mainly in the christian and jewish minorities..

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What? The main Arab thinkers people think of when they think of "Muslim science" were all, you know, Muslims.

Since no one answered this: No Genghis, no Timur - unless you go the Age of Miracles route and have an alternate Timur, who may or may not be anything like OTL's in terms of success or destruction.

Also, I'm not sure Islamic capitalism is that far from the direction the Western (measured relative to the center of Eurasia) Muslim world might well take in a world where the Middle East isn't hurt as badly as OTL.