In fact, the story of this Copernican Revolution, completed by Kepler’s work on elliptical orbits and, later, Newton’s theory of gravitation,  provides one of the totemic moments in the “classical” understanding of Western history of science.

Yet, overlooked in the primordial urge of historians to find the “zero point” of modern, Western consciousness is the crucial preparatory work carried out by generations of earlier astronomers and mathematicians working in an entirely different intellectual world — that of Islam. The only “original” theorems in Copernicus’s great De Revolutionibis have been traced back to Muslim scholars seeking to correct the deficiencies of classical cosmology.

Dissatisfied with the prevailing Ptolemaic model of an earth-centered universe, Muslim scholars — scientists and philosophers alike — began a systematic critique of Classical cosmology as early as the eleventh century. Averroes, the great jurist and philosopher, summed up the scholarly objections, as follows: “The science of (Ptolemaic) astronomy of our time contains nothing existent, rather the astronomy of our time conforms only to computation and not to existence.”

Astronomers at the observatory at Maragha, in what is today northwest Iran, made a number of breakthroughs to address the shortcomings they had detected in classical cosmology. Nasir al-Din Tusi, the observatory’s director, devised an ingenious way to generate the apparent linear motion of the planets from the uniform, circular motion that Ptolemy demanded from all celestial bodies.  His assistant solved the same problem in a different way, and the two methods were later harmonized by Ibn al-Shatir, timekeeper at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

Ibn al-Shatir died in 1375, 168 years before the achievements of the Maragha astronomers appear in the groundbreaking work of Copernicus, strongly suggesting that the Polish scientist and churchman must have been familiar with the cutting-edge research of his Arab predecessors. However, no known pathway of direct transmission has yet been established, although Copernicus did study in Italy, where Arab science and philosophy still enjoyed serious study.

Neither Ibn al-Shatir nor Tusi ever suggested a heliocentric universe, although other Muslim scholars at least contemplated. But it is worth noting that Ibn al-Shatir had already shown that it was possible for the celestial bodies to be made to rotate in uniform circular motion around a single point. This made Copernicus’s breakthrough much easier by allowing him to establish that point as the sun without having to reinvent an entire planetary model from scratch.

By properly locating Copernicus, whose birthday we celebrate on February 19, along a continuum of world scientific efforts we can break down the artificial history of Western science that has claimed his achievements as its exclusive province. It also serves as a powerful reminder that “Islam” and the “West” are in fact part of a single cultural space, locked in rivalry but hardly as alien from one another than either side likes to claim.

Read more and download the podcast here.

Islam, Violence, and the West: It’s not the Video, Stupid
By Jonathan Lyons

It may be tempting to watch the unrest unfolding in parts of the Muslim world and wonder what real harm could there be in a cheesy “desert saga,” replete with glue-on beards, stilted dialogue, and an over-the-top touch of melodrama? Or perhaps to take some refuge in an absolutist notion of free speech.

But to focus on the short clip, posted online, that portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer, pedophile, and general sex fiend, is largely to miss the point. The true animating cause behind the protests is power, that is, Western power to define the Islamic world in ways that undermine its values, aspirations, identity, and, ultimately, its autonomy and means of self-determination.

The roots of this power date back to Western propaganda that surrounded the First Crusade, in the late eleventh century. Before that, the European experience of Muslims was a largely one of indifference. Arab raiding parties were mostly a nuisance, something akin to the pagan Magyars or Vikings.

With the coming of the Crusades, and the need to mobilize scarce resources to conquer the Holy Lands, the Muslims were framed as an existential threat to Christendom. Despite the many affinities between these two monotheist faiths, Islam’s values were held up as the mirror opposite of Christian ones. A distinctly antithetical portrait of Islam began to take shape in the Western mind.

Thus, Muslim values were conceived as the opposite of self-evident Christian virtues: where Christianity represents love, Islam stands for violence and cruelty; where Christ means truth, Muhammad and the Quran mean falsehood and deception; where Christians are chaste, Muslims are sexually perverse.

Moreover, this Western idea of Islam was established before there had been any significant European contact with the Muslim world and without any reference to what it is Muslims say, or believe, or actually do. As with other essentialist narratives, they tell us more about the speaker than about the subject.

Remarkably, this anti-Islam discourse has persisted largely intact for a millennium, reinforced by Western thinkers and “Islam experts” from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and the heyday of colonial domination of Muslim lands. Its central elements are commonplace today in our political arena, on the Internet, on “talk” radio, in the so-called quality press, and, frequently, in the academy. The question is always, “Are Muslims violent?”—a question loaded in the same interrogatory gun that was loaded in the eleventh century.

Later accretions include the popular sentiment that Islam harbors a jealous rage toward the West, its freedoms, and general way of life, and that Muslims are anti-modern and anti-democratic. Here, too, the Muslim East is placed, uncritically, in direct opposition to the Judeo-Christian West. Throughout, it has told use what can – and what cannot – be said and thought about Islam and the Muslims.

This same discourse maintains a profound and corrosive effect on our understanding of the Muslim world and has left us with little more than a fleeting “idea” of Islam in the place of any meaningful engagement. As a result, Western societies today are intellectually and politically unprepared to respond to some of the greatest challenges of our times – the global rise of Islamist political power, as seen with the so-called Arab Spring; the more narrow emergence of religious violence and terrorism; and tensions between established Western social values and multicultural rights on the part of growing Muslim immigrant populations.

Perhaps the single most powerful element of the Western idea of Islam is that of its inherent violence, and of the associated fanaticism of its followers. This in turn has a number of important knock-on effects, including justification of the West’s own use of force in the Muslim world and the effective delegitimization of Muslim resistance. In today’s world, Muslim civilian deaths are “collateral damage” of the West’s legitimate violence, while its enemies’ use of car bombs, suicide attackers, and the so-called improvised explosive devices, lack any such legitimacy.

In the case of the film protests, this phenomenon obscures from view any Muslim claim to specific rational motivation behind the unrest, whether grounded in historical grievance, political opposition, social dissidence or economic dislocation, or specific readings of religious tradition.

Taken together, then, the 1000-year characterization of an intrinsically violent Islam dismisses the goals, motives, and objectives on the part of Muslims and makes negotiated settlement or other nonviolent resolution to East-West tensions virtually impossible.

Politics, von Clausewitz wrote, is war by other means, giving policymakers two tools: war and politics. Our notion of the Muslim world suggests that their faith predisposes them toward war, precluding war by other means—negotiation, discussion, politics, and peace. This, anyhow, is the story we in the West tell ourselves, and have told ourselves for a millennium.

If the anti-Islam discourse were only a prejudice, unrelated to policy choices, it would be merely prejudicial, but as it is, it has consequences for our peace and prosperity. Consider Mitt Romney’s recent remarks to fundraisers, that negotiated settlement or other nonviolent resolution to the Middle East conflict is pointless.

So, he implied, forget about building peace. Fund Israel’s military. Threaten incursions into Iran. Wait for a new dispensation. The implication here—and it is a frightening one—is that only a world with fewer Muslims in it is capable of true peace.

More than one hundred years ago, the great social theorist Max Weber proposed the figure of Benjamin Franklin as the poster child for what he termed the Protestant “spirit” of Western capitalism. Franklin, wrote Weber, was dedicated to “the making of money and yet more money” to the exclusion of all personal pleasure and purely “as an end in itself.”

Weber relied on a German translation of Franklin’s highly circumscribed and self-serving memoir, and his analyses of both America’s oldest Founding Father and of the spirit of capitalism itself have since been subjected to considerable criticism. Weber would have found himself on firmer footing with the public figure of Mitt Romney, Republican candidate for president.

The Romney campaign’s confusion and waffling over his Massachusetts health program; the Ryan Plan (Romney was against it before he was for it), the auto industry bailout, and other policies reveals the candidate’s core indifference to the issues.

In the world of Mitt, all that matters is success, which he clearly defines as making money and yet more money for its own sake. Who gets hurt, who else benefits, who helped him along the way, and notions such as social justice or the betterment of society are all subordinated to the one true aim of life, to get as rich as possible.

All of Romney’s interactions reflect this. His idea of a side bet is a $10,000 wager. He posed with Bain colleagues with hundred dollar bills stuffed in their clothing. When he appealed for votes among blue-collar NASCAR and baseball fans, he could not help but remind them of his close ties to the rich team owners, that is to other successful people like himself. And a recent campaign stop at an Iowa “farm” was hosted by a real estate mogul and millionaire – hardly the rugged yeoman of American political mythology or campaign photo-ops.

These are Romney’s people and they inhabit a world in which no one asks how or why or why not, but only how much? It is a world in which any moral and ethical accounting is reduced to the dollars and cents of the balance sheet, to figures on the spreadsheet. Of course, Romney is hardly alone in such a world view, but his understanding of his Mormon faith buffers him against any possibilities of self-reflection, empathy, of self-doubt. It is why he appears to obtuse, tone-deaf even, to many of us.

Mormonism grew out of the feverish era of the Second Great Awakening in the early decades of the nineteenth century, a period of social, religious, and political ferment in the life of the new and expanding nation. Like many other sects and movements of the time, it pushed the boundaries of Protestant ideals in new and often radical directions.

As Adam Gopnik’s recent New Yorker review of several books on the subject makes clear, Mormonism eventually cut a deal with mainstream America: it would abandon some of its more controversial tenets, including polygamy, in exchange for begrudging acceptance by the rest of society. Their place now more or less secure, Mormons were free to follow their inclinations to create Zion here on earth, chiefly through making money.

Here, then, Weber’s analysis is on target. The radical Protestantism that runs through Mormon beliefs, as well as Mormonism’s own unique experience, ties worldly success rather than worldly behavior to salvation. In contrast to traditional Christian teachings, there is nothing morally suspect about attaining wealth. Instead, the acquisitive calling becomes, in Weber’s words, “the epitome of a morally laudable conduct of life.”

The Romney campaign has now put these attributes on full display. Good works, social justice, benign intentions must all fall by the wayside, for the real mark of the elect is material achievement – the only sure sign of God’s favor. And given the recurring doubts that plague even the richest denizens of such a world, none of whom are ever assured of salvation, one can apparently never truly have too much money.

“Scholars of international history will benefit from the well-written and well-argued analysis, which will help them to better historicize the ideologies of the clash of civilizations that characterize various social movements in America and Europe, as well as the origins of the “Muslim problem” in European and American intellectual life.”

Cemil Aydin, University of North Carolina

Read the full review here.

Here’s the CUP catalog listing.

And reviews by the Boston Globe and Humanities and Social Sciences Online.

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By the early twentieth century, the institution of veiling had for the most part supplanted the more exotic harem as the focal point of Western attention. Still, the underlying logic of the discourse of Islam and women remains firmly in place today. The end result has been a “sexualization” of the Western view of Islam, one in which the totality of Muslim beliefs and practices and even the entire Islamic civilization are too often reduced to Western perceptions and assessment of the male–female dynamic.
Exhibit A may be found in our obsession with the hijab, or veil, as a barometer of social progress and overall well-being within Islamic societies, to such a degree that it has become a commonplace of Western mass-media coverage, social activism, and political discussion alike.

[...]