Universities were found in the West patterned on the Muslim...

Universities were found in the West patterned on the Muslim universities to assimilate the new knowledge made available by translations of the works in Arabic and, to a lesser extent, of Greek classics which have been superseded by the Muslims. III. Islamic achievements in science. A. Introduction: Unwillingness to recognize Islamic achievements. Many European scholars who approach the subject of Arab contributions to science and philosophy do it with prejudice against the Arabs.

Even some of those who praise them do so grudgingly, Carra de Vaux in his chapter “Astronomy and mathematics’, inLegacy of Islam felt compelled to begin by disparaging the Arabs. He said: “we must not expect to find among the Arabs the same powerful genius, the same gift of scientific imagination, the same “enthusiasm”, the same originality of thought that we have among the Greeks.

The Arabs are before all else the pupils of the Greeks, their science is a continuation of Greek science which it preserves, cultivates, and on a number of points develops and perfects.” This is what Carra de Vaux began by saying on the Arabs but a moment later he elaborated and conceded that: “the Arabs have really achieved great things in science; they taught the use of ciphers (sc.

Arabic numerals), although they did not invent them, and thus became the founders of the arithmetic of every day; they made algebra an exact science and developed it considerably and laid the foundations of analytical geometry; they were indisputably the founders of plane and spherical trigonometry which, properly speaking, did not exist among the Greeks.

In astronomy they made a number of valuable observations.” The Arabs, with a great open mind went through a gigantesque translation movement from Greek, Indian, and Syriac. Al Ma’mum, the Abbassid Khalif, had founded at the beginning of the ninth century “the house of Wisdom” (bayt el Hikmah) especially for translations. The Arabs assimilated these works of the ancient and developed them. Philosophy, Mathematics, Astronomy and Medicine were the first subjects to attract the interest of Muslims.

B. Scientific method and rationalism. The scientific or inductive method of inquiry was the greatest boon the Islamic culture had bestowed upon the West. Muslim thinkers were using the inductive method in their scientific investigation in different fields. AlRazi and Ibn al Haitham expounded particularly this method.