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When
learning about the Muslim scholars of the past, it is easy to be amazed by
their brilliance, accomplishments, and contributions to the modern world. Each
provided a lasting legacy that changed the world in their time and today. One
scientist in particular stands far above the rest. He is Ibn al-Haytham, the
great polymath who lived from 965 to 1040.
He
was born in the Iraqi city of Basra during the Abbasid Caliphate. He came about
100 years after the establishment of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
Undoubtedly the culture of learning and
advancement present in the Muslim world at that time had a great impact on him
from an early age. He studied Islamic sciences and soon became a mayor of the
city of Basra. During this time, he continued to study, focusing on sciences
and other empirical subjects. His big break, however, would come in another
part of the Muslim world.
Ibn
al-Haytham in Egypt
During
his time as mayor of Basra, the Fatimid rival caliph in Egypt al-Hakim (the
Fatimids were Ismaili Shias who rejected the caliphate of the Sunni Abbasids in
Iraq) heard of an idea that Ibn al-Haytham had to dam the Nile. Al-Hakim was a
man of contradictions. Although he was the leader of the heretical Ismaili
branch of Shiism that most scholars of
the day completely rejected, he opened up his domain to anyone who could
benefit it. Al-Hakim invited Ibn al-Haytham to come to Egypt to attempt his
radical idea to dam the Nile. After travelling down the Nile to see where a
potential dam could be built, he realized his plan could not go into effect
with the technology of the day. There happened to be one problem: al-Hakim was
known to be act irrationally ruthless, and acted quite insane on occasion. In order to escape some kind of punishment,
Ibn al-Haytham pretended to be even more insane than al-Hakim himself! This
daring idea saved him from excecution, but placed him under house arrest in
Cairo for the remainder of al-Hakim’s life – 10 years.
Those
10 years didn’t even seem as punishment to the brilliant scientist. During this
time, he got the peace and quiet he wanted to pursue his research. During this
time, he dived into the study of light. He wanted to understand what light is,
how it works, and how humans see objects. Although what he studied and
discovered was truly revolutionary, the way he researched was one of his
biggest contributions.
The
Scientific Method
Today,
it is understood to students of science that everything must be proven. You
cannot make claims about scientific theories based on assumption without
experimentation. Before Ibn al-Haytham, that was not the case. The ancient
Greek philosophies of science still held weight. The Greeks believed that
scientific fact can be discovered through reason, or simply attributed to the
actions of the gods. Ibn al-Haytham knew better. He was the first scientist in
history to insist that everything be proven through a given method for discovering
new information – the scientific method.
Western
textbooks today usually give little information about the history of the
scientific method. Usually the ancient Greek philosophies are mentioned,
followed by the “revolutionary” work of Roger Bacon, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac
Newton. The truth that is forgotten is that those European scholars stood on
the shoulders of Ibn al-Haytham (and other Muslim scientists). Without his
ideas about proving scientific theories, we may still be living in a time when
speculation, superstition, and unproven myths are the basis of science.
The
Book of Optics
Using
his revolutionary scientific method, Ibn al-Haytham takes leaps and bounds into
the field of optics. In his book, The Book of Optics, he was the first to
disprove the ancient Greek idea that light comes out of the eye, bounces off
objects, and comes back to the eye. He delved further into the way the eye
itself works. Using dissections and the knowledge of previous scholars, he was
able to begin to explain how light enters the eye, is focused, and is projected
to the back of the eye.
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The basic way a pinhole camera works
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In
a similar way, he is the first to study the phenomenon of the pinhole camera.
The concept of a pinhole camera is simple: a box with a tiny hole on one side
is able to project an image of whatever is outside onto a side of the box on
the inside. Those familiar with the way modern cameras work will notice that
that is how cameras work in general, but today with the addition of lenses. Ibn
al-Haytham was able to build these pinhole cameras hundreds of years before the
modern development of photography as we know it.
He
also studied the way light is affected when moving through a medium such as
water or gasses. From this, he was able to explain why the sky changes color at
twilight (the sun’s rays hit the atmosphere at an angle, causing refraction).
From this, he was able to calculate the depth of the earth’s atmosphere, 1000
years before it would be proven by spaceflight.
The
translation of The Book of Optics had a huge impact on Europe. From it, later
European scholars were able to build the same devices as he did, and understand
the way light works. From this, such important things as eyeglasses, magnifying
glasses, telescopes, and cameras were developed.
Beyond
Light
As
if revolutionizing the way humanity understands light and leading to the
development of things we can’t live without in the 2000s wasn’t enough, Ibn
al-Haytham also pioneered in other fields.
In
1020s and 1030s, he wrote numerous books on astronomy. He wrote about the
mistakes of the Ptolemaic model of how the stars and planets move and provided
a more realistic view of the way the universe works (although he knew the earth
to be a sphere, he stuck to the ancient Greek idea that the earth was the
center of the universe).
He
completely refuted astrology as a scientific subject. Continuing with his firm
belief scientific ideas needing to be proven, he came to the conclusion that
the ideas of astrology were not rooted in any type of science, but in the
thoughts and feelings of astrologers. He also noted that astrology directly
contradicts one of the main ideas of Islam – that God is the cause of all
things, not astronomical bodies.
He
had a great influence on Isaac Newton, who was aware of Ibn al-Haytham’s works.
He studied the basis of calculus, which would later lead to the engineering
formulas and methods used today. He also wrote about the laws governing the
movement of bodies (later known as Newton’s 3 laws of motion) and the
attraction between two bodies – gravity. It was not, in fact, the apple that
fell from the tree that told Newton about gravity, but the books of Ibn
al-Haytham.
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Newton directly built upon the ideas of Ibn al-Haytham
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Since
he was also trained in the traditional Islamic sciences, he also wrote on how
to use empirical methods to disprove a false prophet, and how to use math to
calculate the prayer direction towards Makkah.
In
a precursor to modern psychology, he researched the effect music therapy can
have on humans and animals.
Legacy
The
list of accomplishments and contributions of Ibn al-Haytham goes on and on. The
truly amazing thing is that he wrote over 200 books, but only around 50 have
survived till today. What he discovered that we do not even know about probably
far outshines even the amazing works that have made it to the present day.
Unfortunately,
his contributions have been overlooked since his death. While he was never
someone who cared for the fame and prestige that came with being a great
scholar, the unawareness today’s world has about his contributions is
unsettling. When his books were translated into Latin as the Spanish conquered
Muslim lands in the Iberian Peninsula, he was not referred to by his name, but
rather as “Alhazen”. The practice of changing the names of great Muslim
scholars to more European sounding names was common in the European
Renaissance, as a means to discredit Muslims and erase their contributions to
Christian Europe.
Regardless,
his brilliant mind inspired countless others who stood on his shoulders. It is
not a stretch to say that without his research, the modern world of science
that we know today would not exist.
Sources:
Morgan,
M. (2007). Lost History. Washington D.C. : National Geographic Society.
Masood,
E. (2006). Science and Islam. Icon Books.
“Ibn
al-Haytham.” The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.. 2012. Retrieved October 01,
2012 from Encyclopedia.com:http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-IbnalHay.html
Steffens,
B. (2007). Ibn al-Haytham : first scientist. Greensboro, N.C. : Morgan Reynolds
Pub.––
Lost Islamic History
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