In popular discourse and, unfortunately, in part scholarly, on the history of science and the scientific and technological advancement of the muslim world, somewhat lazy analysts often launch easy answers to the reasons for backwardness and undevelopment. Al-Ghazali’s writings and the destruction of Baghdad by Hulagu Khan in 1258 are the favorite fanfics for these explanations. According to which, since the Khan left with his horse from the Euphrates and destroyed the House of Wisdom, from Andalusia to China Muslims became simply dumb. More stupid in this case, as al-Ghazali’s theological treatise that refuted philosophers around a century earlier, would have already initiated a ‘‘trans-continental Taliban’’.

Don’t get me wrong. the destruction of Baghdad and the loss of Abbasid sponsorship was a severe blow to what had been developed so far, but to say that the geographic space occupied by the Islamic world was simply “delayed” because a single city, although important, was sacked, it is to treat the Islamic empire as Rome with a centralizing capital of all good and knowledge, when this is not the truth in an extremely polarized and distributed Islamic world when it came to intellectuality.

As for the stance of a “lack of love for science” derived from al-Ghazali that would have spread among all Muslims in the world, only those who have not really read his books could have said this, because quotes like: “Great, indeed , is the crime against religion committed by anyone who assumes that Islam must be defended by the denial of these mathematical sciences. The Revealed Law (Sharia) nowhere undertakes to deny or affirm these sciences, and these sciences nowhere address religious questions” (Deliverance From Error, p. 9), show that this man was no enemy of science, but quite the opposite.

The theory of “Islamic backwardness”, in addition to scapegoats, is a lover of historical myopia. I explain. It focuses on specific favorite periods and regions (Middle East and at most Iberian Peninsula from the 10th to the 12th century), neglecting what happened in other areas and times. And nothing better exemplifies this than the completely ignorance about the “Central Asian Renaissance” between the Timurid and Ottoman empires, which shows that centuries after the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols, the Islamic world was still very, very advanced, and already had its own “Copernican Revolution” before Copernicus was born, carried out by figures such as the polymath Ali Qushji.

Born in 1403 in Samarkand in the autonomous Uzbekistan, Ali Qushji or “Ali the Falconer”, was so named due to the profession of his father who was the royal falconer of the great Ulugh Beg, grandson of Timur (Tamerlane), the great Tartar conqueror. Spending his childhood and youth surrounded by an extremely prolific environment in the study of the different sciences, Ali had access to the cutting-edge Islamic technology and education of his time, and like his father, he started to serve Ulugh, but in his section of scientists. His teachers were none other than Ghiyāth al-Dīn Jamshīd Kāshānī, Muin al-Dīn Kashi and the great Qadi Zada al-Rumi, who had come to Samarkand from the Ottoman Empire to work on the advances of the great observatory built by Ulugh Beg, and immortalized by calculating the 1st sine to an accuracy of 10−12.

Samarkand in Ali’s day was a teeming place, bringing together the eastern and western sectors of knowledge in the Islamized world, and caravans carrying goods, polymaths and their manuscripts came from everywhere. As a young man, he moved to Kerman in Persia, where he conducted some research on storms in the Oman sea, writing a book on the topic. He then moved to Herat in Afghanistan and taught astronomy in the region around 1423. After teaching in Herat for a while, he returned to Samarkand, where he was received by the Sultan-scientist Ulugh Beg, who was also conducting his own studies. There he presented his new discoveries to the monarch, who found them so fascinating that he read all the work while standing still. Ulugh Beg appointed him to his immense Observatory as one of its main masters.

Qushji improved Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s planetary model and presented an alternative planetary model for Mercury. Altogether he wrote nine works on astronomy, two of them in Persian and seven in Arabic. A Latin translation of two of Qushji’s works on arithmetic and astronomy was published in a European translation by Greaves in 1650.

The structure housed dozens of mathematicians and astronomers, who were financed by Ulugh in their studies. The building was crowned by a huge quadrant used to observe the stars, and the calculations and texts left by Ulugh Beg himself show that it was extremely accurate for the time.

However, after the death of the sultan murdered by his son Abdul Latif 1449, Samarkand was no longer a place for Ali Qushji who lost his patron, as well as countless scientists. There he left for the Turkish West, where he would once again be a figure of great prestige. Ali Qushji once again returned to Herat, Tashkent and, finally, Tabriz in Persia, where, around 1470, the Turkmen ruler of the Ak Koyunlu, Uzun Hasan, sent him as an emissary to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, the Conqueror, who lived in a Renaissance court that owed nothing to any Sforza or Medici in Italy, and where he continued to train students and build a new research center in a madrasa sponsored by the sultan.

Qushji’s most important astronomical work was his “Concerning the Supposed Dependence of Astronomy upon Philosophy’’. Under the influence of Islamic theologians who opposed Aristotelian interference in astronomy, Qushji rejected Aristotelian physics and completely separated natural philosophy from Islamic astronomy, allowing astronomy to become a purely empirical and mathematical science. This allowed him to explore alternatives to the Aristotelian notion of a stationary Earth, while exploring the idea of ​​a moving Earth. He found empirical evidence for Earth’s rotation through his observation on comets and concluded, based on empirical evidence rather than speculative philosophy, that the theory of Earth in motion is as likely to be true as the theory of stationary Earth.

His predecessor al-Tusi had previously realized that “the monoformity of falling bodies, and the uniformity of celestial motions,” both moved “in a single way” both moved “in one way”, although he still relied on Aristotelian physics to provide “certain principles that only natural philosophers could provide to the astronomer.” Qushji took this concept further and proposed that “the astronomer did not need Aristotelian physics and, in fact, should establish his own physical principles independently of natural philosophers.” Along with his rejection of Aristotle’s concept of a stationary Earth, Qushji suggested that there was no need for astronomers to follow the Aristotelian notion of celestial bodies moving in uniform circular motion.

Qushji’s work was an important step away from Aristotelian physics and towards independent astronomical physics. This is considered a “conceptual revolution” that was unprecedented in European astronomy before the Copernican Revolution in the 16th century, which should actually be called “Qushjian Revolution”. The replacement of the geocentric model by the heliocentric one was very impactful in the formation of global scientific thought, mainly in the West, which would later lead to the Scientific Revolution of Galileo, Kepler and Newton.

Qushji’s view of the Earth’s movement was similar to Nicolaus Copernico’s later views on this matter, although it is uncertain whether the former had any influence on the latter, which was born a year before Qushji’s death in 1474. However, it is likely that both may have reached similar conclusions due to the use of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s earlier work as a basis. This is yet another possibility, considering the remarkable coincidence between a passage on De Revolutionibus and one on adūsī’s Tadhkira in which Copernicus follows Ṭūsī’s objection to Ptolemy’s evidence of the immobility of Earth. However, in one way or another, the Central Asian Renaissance in Ottoman and Timurid lands shows that, even after Baghdad and the Mongols, the Islamic world still had much to offer.

Bibliography

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– Edith Dudley Sylla (2003), “Creation and nature”, in Arthur Stephen McGrade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 178–179,