DOCUMENTARY

BROADCAST ON BBC FOUR DURING JAN 2009
RUNNING TIME: 3 X 60 MIN EPISODES

Professor Jim Al-Khalili – a half-Iraqi half-English nuclear physicist – has delivered yet another stunningly produced science documentary, this time exploring the relationship between science and the religion of Islam. Khalili has a distinguished background, having excelled in academia in the field of Physics, as well as in the growing field of science communication. Numerous popular science books and TV programmes bear his name, culminating in this most recent BBC Four series Science and Islam (2009).

Though he is an academic he does not approach this subject with the dryness of an academic study. But neither is he a jingoistic presenter full of rhetoric about how Islam was so much greater than Europe in the past, a trap many Muslims fall into when discussing this subject. Like a true scientist, Khalili objectively looks at the historical   evidence regarding science in the  various Muslim empires between the 9th and 12th centuries, and assesses it against high standards, before coming to his own individual conclusion.

In the first episode Khalili highlights the translation movement during the Abbasid Caliphate, which centred around the new library and educational institute called Bait Al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) in Baghdad. But Khalili convincingly argues that it wasn’t just religious factors like the Hadith of the Prophet (pbuh) saying “Seek knowledge even unto China” which initiated the golden age of learning, but economic and political factors as well. Desiring new medical, military and communication technology to help expanding their empire, the ruling elite offered financial rewards to people who would bring Greek, Syriac and Persian books from around the world to Baghdad for their translation into Arabic. This had the additional benefit of cementing their political power as Arabic would become the common language of the empire.

Towards the end of the third and final episode, Khalili addresses the very perplexing question of why, having been so advanced in the past, is science in the Islamic world today so weak. Many Muslims would simply give colonialism as the excuse, that once the Caliphate disintegrated and the Muslims were disunited, our scientific prowess went down the pan too. Khalili partly accepts this, explaining that the influx of gold to Spain and Britain after Columbus discovered the New World in 1492 allowed them to become powerful rival empires.

1982 Iraqi dinar with portrait of Basra-born Muslim scholar Ibn Al-Haythem (956-1030 AD), highlighted in Jim Al-Khalili’s series as the first true scientist

But Khalili’s main theory is that the Arabic language is to blame. Where once it was a strength as it allowed Muslim scholars from all over the  empire to communicate, the syntax of joining letters according to their position in a word made it difficult to adopt the printing press which was invented in Europe in the 1400s. Thus the Islamic empire missed out on the chance to accelerate its knowledge in the same way that Latin books printed en masse in Europe accelerated the Renaissance. Such an idea makes sense when the logic is followed through, but it just seems too simplistic and other factors must have existed that prevented the Muslims at the time from accepting the printing press.

All in all Khalili does an impressive job highlighting the achievements of Muslim scholars, and consequently puts forward a strong argument that men like Ibn Al-Haytham and Al-Khwarizmi truly deserve to be  spoken of in the same breath has  Galileo, Newton and Einstein. His next documentary for the BBC, entitled “Beyond Chaos”, is already in the works and is eagerly anticipated