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March 1993 marks half a millennium since Christopher Columbus reached the shores of the Iberian peninsula and dispatched to
his royal sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, a detailed account of
the discovery he had made. The Genoese wrote the report, known
as the "Letter of Columbus," in Spanish, and within a few weeks
the document was printed in Barcelona; by May its Latin version
was printed in Rome, and Italian and German translations soon
appeared in other European cities and became an integral part of
the sensational news about the discoveries gathering momentum
beyond the oceans. (l)
Five centuries later, Columbus's voyage has run into stormy
weather of scathing criticism from many quarters, but even the
most damning verdicts do not seem to deny its historical importance. Without taking sides, I would add that the dramatic circumstances of the discovery of America unduly overshadow the
fact that it was an exploit whose time had come: had Columbus
perished on his first voyage, someone else would have discovered
the New World before long; we can even propose the latest date:
22 April 1500, when Pero Alvares Cabral, while en route to India,
(1) See The Columbus papers: The Barcelona letter of 1493, the landfall controversy,
and the Indian Guides: a facsimile edition of the unique copy in the New York Public
Library: by Mauricio Obreg6n, with a new English translation by Lucia Graves;
New York, Toronto, Barcelona, 1991. The Latin translation of this letter published in Rome was followed by at least sixteen more editions between 1493 and 1499;
see Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: the Southern Voyages,
A.D. 1492-1616, New York, 1974, pp. 90-91.
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sighted Brazil and sent one of his fourteen ships back to Portugal
to report the discovery. (2)
Cabral's expedition was a follow-up on another historical first,
Vasco da Gama's voyage around Africa to the Indian Ocean and
India, which the Portuguese
captain reached in May
1498. (3) Nineteen-ninety-eight still lies ahead, and so do the
commemorative celebrations as well as storms of criticism likely to
buffet da Gama's three ships. Again without taking sides,
I would add that the dramatic, almost romantic epic of the
Voyages of Discovery from those launched by Henry the Navigator to those undertaken by Sir Francis Drake obscures the fact
that another and still greater discovery was entering history's center stage and has occupied it ever since: a scientific and technological revolution, man's discovery that he has the potential to understand and even control nature itself, with the prodigious (as well as
terrifying) consequences introduced by this discovery. (4)
(2) J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance, London, 1963, pp. 142, 155.
(3) Parry, op. cit., p. 141-42; idem, The Discovery of the Sea, Berkeley, 1981,
p. 174. Parry questions the veracity of the generally accepted belief that the
famous Arab pilot Ibn Majid steered the Portuguese from the east African port of
Malindi to Calicut in India. Parry bases his doubts on the persuasive argument
that a Muslim of such reputation would hardly have consented to guide the Infidels. On the other hand it is true that navigation in the Indian Ocean was primarily peaceful and commercial, free from the religious confrontation plaguing the
Mediterranean. Ibn Mfjid might not have had the reaction the two Spanish-speaking Tunisian merchants showed when confronted by the Portuguese whom da
Gama sent ashore at Calicut as the first step toward establishing contact with the
"natives." It led to the following exchange: "'Ao diabo que te dou; quem te
trouxe ca?' E preguntaram-lhe o que vinhamos buscar t5o longe. E ele respondeu:
'Vimos buscar cristaos e especiaria.'"
("May the devil take you; what brought you
here?", and they asked him what we had come to look for so far from home. And
he answered: "We've come to look for Christians and spices"). This reply, written
down in Portuguese by da Gama's companion Alvaro Velho, has become the proverbial symbol of Europe's entry into the Indian Ocean. See Alvaro Velho, Roteiro da
Primeira Viagem de Vasco da Gama (1497-1499), ed. by A. Fontoura da Costa, Lisbon, 1969, p. 40; English translation by E. G. Ravenstein, A Journal of the First
Voyage of Vasco da Gama, London, 1898, pp. 48-49.
(4) The history of science is a relatively new discipline, and even newer is the
focus on the rise of modern science; the latter, essentially post-Sartonian, became
established with such works as H. Butterfield's The origins of modern science, 13001800, London, 1949, or A. R. Hall's The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800, London,
1962 (3rd ed. as The Revolution in science, 1500-1750, London, 1983). The field is
experiencing a rapid growth with a proliferation of reappraisals, from T. S. Kuhn's
Structure of scientific revolutions, Chicago, 1970, to I. Bernard Cohen's Revolution in
science, Cambridge-London, 1985, and The Reappraisal of the Scientific Revolution,
ed. D. C. Lindberg and E. S. Westman, Cambridge UP, 1990. All these titles and
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The radical transformation took place in the course of three centuries, and the dates of 1400 and 1700 can serve as schematic but
useful milestones. When we look back on the world of 1400, we
see that its society's basic concepts had not changed since antiquity; whereas in 1700 we see a world possessed of modern
science. Here, however, I feel obliged to inject a third qualification: this modern science was exclusively a creation of Europe and
of Europeans. The rest of manking-the
Muslims, the Chinese,
and all others-was either unaware of the transformation or watched its arrival with incomprehension, indifference, or resistance. Those few individuals who grasped the significance of the
momentous events, or who appeared able to create their own counterparts, were dismissed or ignored. Two such cases are Piri Reis
(d. 1554), an Ottoman Turk from Gallipoli, and Taqi al-Din
(d. 1585), an Ottoman Arab from Damascus. They form the symbolic pivot of my argument.
In 1400, Christian Europe occupied an honorable but equal place
among several leading civilizations around the globe. Those of
Islam and China were comparable in their own unifying denominators (religious, cultural and geographical), as well as in their intellectual and material achievements.
They all had an incomplete
knowledge of the planet they inhabited, and a naive concept of the
cosmological nature of a world in which the motionless Earth, whether flat or spherical, occupied the center of a universe whose Creator came close to flattering man as the justification of His creation;
the natural world functioned according to principles beyond man's
rational comprehension but at the discretion of the Creator's
supreme will(5) or of mysterious supernatural forces. In more
down-to-earth respects, Christians, Muslims, and Chinese shared,
periodizations suggest the discipline's formative nature, but only closer examination reveals their virtually absolute Eurocentrism (dictated by the evidence, and
without deserving the derogatory connotation of the word). The reappraisals differ on a number of points, but they all agree on the fact that we are dealing with a
scientific and technological revolution or revolutions that have ushered in the
modern world. I would suggest a broadening of the concept so as to include the
transormation's philosophical, aesthetic and other related aspects, and call it an
intellectual revolution.
(5) One exception is the mystic's knowledge of the esoteric truth. Although
this experience is routinely believed attainable through any religion-or even independently-, it plays, according to some, a fundamental role in Islam-in fact, it is
the very essence of Islam. This in turn would explain why Islam, despite the fact
that its civilization was perfectly capable of generating a Scientific Revolution of its
own, chose not to do so. This argument will be discussed at the end of my article.
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despite all the differences, comparable modes of travel and transportation, production and trade, education (6) and publishing, politics and law, science and technology, and military strength and
warfare. It was a world that in certain basic respects had not
much changed since classical antiquity: a Greek scholar would
have held his own in disputations with a scholastic Dominican or a
sophisticated Arab munajjim or a Confucian philosopher, just as a
Greek phalanx or war galley would not have been without a chance
when faced with its medieval counterparts; long-distance silk and
spice trade continued, as under the Roman Empire and Han
China, to pass through the Middle East which divided the traders
into two different groups almost ignorant of each other; and the
existence of the New World was as unknown as in antiquity.
By 1700 the Europeans had left this medieval community and
were busy exploring the world with methods of our own time, and
fashioning that world to their own liking. Their cosmological
view of the universe became basically the same as ours, and they
had also gone their own way in all the other respects mentioned
above. Europe's navies had taken control of the oceans around
the world; her merchant marines served a new unified (though
mutually fiercely competitive) type of long distance trade made
more efficient by recently developed companies fostered by their
respective governments; the Americas were appropriated and
began to be settled; and incipient colonies were founded in Africa
and Asia. On the home front, production based on capitalist
modes of investment was beginning to show the tremendous potential of this system, and exports of textiles overseas were one
example of the mercantile approach adopted by the foremost
actors in the coming economic world order; while the continuously
created surplus stimulated the growth of a dynamic urban class
eager for profit from investment in productive manufacture. Again on the home front, the world of information and learning had come close to that of our recent precomputer past: printing was universal, and books, periodicals and budding newspapers
played a seminal role in virtually every aspect of intellectual and
even practical life. Universities had long since emancipated
themselves from the straightjacket of scholasticism, and the quest
(6) Except for the basic and growing divergence between formal higher education in Islam and Christendom, thus between the madrasa and the university, as
I shall try to show below.
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for truth combined with a thirst for knowledge was now the guiding principle of the vanguard scholars.
This, then, was the world in 1700, but it was Europe's world,
and the radical differrence between it and its contemporary Ottoman, Chinese and other contemporaries elicits a host of questions. Why did this stupendous transformation happen in
Europe, but not elsewhere? Was it an anomaly, a freak accident
in history, or can we discern, at its inception, factors that made it
possible, perhaps inevitable in one civilization, but prevented it in
another? Was it perhaps Europe's incipient economic, colonial,
and even cultural aggression that thwarted such evolution elsewhere? Or are there aspects where truth has been perverted by
Orientalism's incurable Eurocentrism, aspects that demand substantial revision, even rejection? And should we consider it our
duty to pronounce or accept severe moral censure aimed at
Europe, as we review this unique historical process?
Let us return to our chosen point of departure, 1400, and glance
at certain salient features in the evolution of the three major civilizations over the next three centuries that might offer some
clues. Although in 1400 Christian Europe, the Islamic Ottoman
Empire, and Confucian China stood at a comparable level of civilization in science and technology, their psychological stance was by
no means identical: each of the three was about to formulate-or
reformulate-its major ideals and goals, and these radically diverged, leading to a process that would eventually create the growing
chasm.
In Europe humanism and the Renaissance appeared, and with
them a shift from the primarily religious and spiritual (or should
we say next-worldly?) to the more this-worldly and experimental. True, in certain respects both humanism and the Renaissance
included decidedly medieval attitudes or had to coexist with lingering medieval ideals: excessive acceptance of classical authority
and the persistent dream of recovering the Holy Sepulchre were
the most striking of such features. Both, however, contained kernels of new and independent elements. His very reliance on Ptolemy's error would facilitate Columbu's discovery of America; the
medieval fanaticism of Henry the Navigator would propel the Portuguese voyages of exploration; and Vesalius's admiration for
Galen would spur him on to correct his Greek mentor's theories
and produce his great book on anatomy, a prerequisite of modern
medicine. Europe's hostility to Islam too was medieval, but not
so her new idea of attacking it from the rear by circumnavigating
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(7) See Abbas Hamdani, "Columbus and the recovery of Jerusalem," Journal of
the American Oriental Society 99 (1979), pp. 39-48; Pauline Moffitt Watts, "Prophecy
and Discovery: on the spiritual origins of Christopher Columbus's 'Enterprise of the
Indies'," American Historical Review 90 (1985), pp. 73-102.
(8) Elizabeth Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of change, Cambridge UP,
1979 (2 vols.). "The first attempt to use the new medium to arouse widespread
mass support was not in connection with Florentine humanism but with a late
medieval crusade, that is, with the war against the Turks" (p. 178); "...Church
officials hailed the new technology as a gift from God-as a providential invention
which proved Western superiority over ignorant infidel forces" (p. 303).
(9) There were recurring and sometimes important exceptions to this, as the
example of the Fondacco dei Turchi in Venice and of other Muslim Turkish colonies
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in Italy shows; cf. Cemal Kafadar, "A death in Venice (1575); Anatolian Muslim
merchants trading in the Serenissima," Raiyyet Rusumi: Essays presented to Halil
Inalcik on his seventieth birthday, Harvard University, 1986, pp. 191-218. In terms
of long-distance trade, especially international maritime trade, however, these colonies remained insignificant and never propelled the Ottoman Empire to launch an
economic expansion comparable to that undertaken by European powers.
(10) Juan Vernet-Ginbs, La cultura hispanodrabe en oriente y occidente, Barcelona,
1978, pp. 114-271; Thomas Goldstein, Dawn of modern science: from the Arabs to
Leonardo da Vinci, Boston, 1980, pp. 92-129.
(11) The process of supplementing the shari'a with governmental decrees went
back to the earliest times of Islam, but it was only under the Ottomans that this
secular branch of legislation acquired massive proportions and reinforced the cen-
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momentum it might have given toward the discovery of the greater circulation was thus stillborn. It is true, though, that here we
dangerously approach the pitfall of faulting a period or milieu for
not living up to the possibilities of a later age. It is no accident
that Colombo's and Harvey's discoveries occurred only after the
publication of Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica (1543) and the
generalization of autopsy; and that all three scholars had studied
at the University of Padua (as had, incidentally, Copernicus and
Galileo; another not quite coincidental though less direct relationship: both Vesalius and Copernicus published their magna
opera-De revolutionibus orbium coeleslium in the latter's case-in
the same year). All that illustrates the catalytic role the European university played in the birth of modern science.
But what about the appearance of Ottoman critics who noticed
that despite the devoutly Islamic structure of their state, serious
flaws had begun to mar its functioning as early as the middle years
of Siileyman the Magnificent's reign-at the conventionally accepted peak of Ottoman might and success, and the evidence that the
empire had the talent and the potential to understand Europe or to
emulate her? The Ottoman critics of Ottoman decline, whom we
can conveniently bracket with the names of the historians Lutfi
Pa?a (d. 1564) and Naima (d. 1716), are discussed in two masterly
studies by Bernard Lewis,(19) who contrasts the apathy of the
Ottoman ruling class with the continuing vigor of their intellectual
life; he cites as examples of the latter, on the one hand, the group
of writers who memorialized on the decline of the Empire, which
they saw so clearly but were powerless to stop, and on the other,
the brilliant school of Ottoman historiography, which reached the
peak of its achievement in the work of Naima; moreover, Lewis
also points to the continuing traditions of poetry, architecture,
miniature, and music. I would add that if the writers saw clearly
the Empire's decline, they gave no sign of truly grasping the kind
of reform it needed-probably an impossible task, given their own
Ottoman formation. As for Naima, the conclusion reached by
Lewis V. Thomas(20) is worth quoting: "...World history is [for
Naima] simply the history of Islam. At this time of crisis, Islam
is the Ottoman state, and every good Muslim should realize this
and act on that fact. Muslim history is the entire frame of refe(19) Lewis, "Ottoman observers of Ottoman decline," Islamic Studies (Karachi),
1 (1958), pp. 71-88; idem, The emergence of modern Turkey, Oxford, 1965, pp. 25-35.
(20) A Study of Naima, ed. N. Itzkowitz, New York, 1972, pp. 121-22.
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rence. Early Muslim history is the idealized golden age when 'justice was pure and equity unmixed.' Islam will inevitably triumph
because it is 'better.' The Ottoman system needs much reworking
and restoration, but it is good and uniquely good and is destined to
endure..." I would also add that B. Lewis's definition of vigorous
intellectual life is valid strictly within this frame of reference; it
was a vigor of the past, however, and not of the modern kind a
society wishing to compete with Europe needed. Moreover,
B. Lewis emphasizes, by not so much as even mentioning it, the
glaring absence of that dimension of intellectual life which gave
scientific
Europe her sudden and overwhelming advantage-the
and technological one (unless we exclude such works as Galileo's
Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, Tolemaico e Copernico, or Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathemalica, or
again the invention and use of the telescope or of tools for celestial
navigation, from the sphere of intellectual history). Finally another perspective on Naima may not be out of place: a comparison
with his older contemporary John Locke (1632-1704), author of the
ground-breaking Essays concerning human understanding, sheds
more light on the nature of the Ottoman crisis: Naima, a spokesman for his society's liberal elite, preaches a return to the values of
the past in order to save the Empire's future, whereas the English
In the
philosopher is a harbinger of the Age of Enlightenment.
last analysis, the innermost core of Turkey's problem was the fact
that her elite lacked any genuine, spontaneous interest in modern
science and thought, independent of such motives as preserving
their empire or saving Islam from the infidel. In contrast, neither
Galileo nor Harvey, Locke, or any other discoverer or thinker formulated his revolutionary theories in order to save a kingdom from
disintegration or Christendom from an external enemy, but
because of an internal need: a drive that may have had no less a
share in the intellectual revolution than such factors as the rise of
It is this psychological dimension that is perhaps the
capitalism.
hardest to account for; it may have something to do with the
above-mentioned mutation through which the human spirit was
set free to use its investigative and critical faculties as the sole and
stimulating arbiter.
In short, the Ottoman observers of Ottoman decline saw the
ailment in the personal corruption of the personnel staffing the
system, but not in the system itself: the remedy they advised was a
return to their society's former virtues, not the thorough reform
the system needed; above all, none seems to have grasped the mea-
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country with a tremendous reservoir of human talent at its disposal. Chinese science had a long tradition, and if it did not quite
measure up to that of Islam or Christendom, that may have been
because of the country's relative isolation from the rest of the
world. Chinese technology, on the other hand, was second to
none, and some of it manifested itself in superb naval architecture:
Chinese merchant ships whose construction still invites our admiration regularly plied the oceans all the way to the Malabar coast
of India. Seaborne trade represented an important exception to
China's otherwise self-centered outlook; it was an ancient tradition
whose roots went at least as far back as the Tang dynasty and its
contemporary Abbasid period, but by a remarkable coincidence
the first three decades of the 15th century witnessed a new type of
massive enterprise at sea. In 1405 an extraordinary expedition
left the ports of southeast China for the Indian Ocean. (26) Led by
the Muslim Chinese eunuch Cheng-ho, it consisted of 62 large ships
and some 37,000 personnel. This sailing was repeated by six
others until 1433, and some ships visited the ports of the Persian
Gulf, Arabia, the Red Sea, and East Africa. The places they called at usually gave them a friendly reception-Mamluk Jidda is an
example-and local rulers, pleased by the gentlemanly behavior of
the guests, appreciated the valuable presents brought by them and
offered theirs in return. Friction was rare, and although the visitors engaged in trade, that does not seem to have been the princiWhat then was it? Neepal goal or activity of the expeditions.
dham gives a composite explanation, with "proto-scientific" as
part of it:(27) for the expeditions brought back whole arrays of
exotic plants, animals, minerals, and other objects of interest, to
be deposited a the Imperial Museum; moreover, detailed reports
(26) The Cambridge History of China, vol. 7 (1988), pp. 232-36; Colin A. Ronan,
The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: an abridgement of Joseph Needham's
original text, vol. 3, Cambridge UP, 1986, pp. 128-59; Ma Huan, Ying-yai sheng-lan,
"The overall survey of the ocean's shores" (1433), tr. Feng Ch'en-chun, Cambridge,
1970.
(27) Ronan, op. cit., p. 148. "Showing the flag," spreading the fame of China's
might and grandeur far and wide is also cited as a probable component of the
If so, it still constituted a remarkably enlightened form
expeditions' motivation.
of doing so. The glaring contrast between the sophisticated presents brought by
the Chinese and the paltry objects brought by the Portuguese (to be followed by the
Dutch and English who brought chiefly their own military superiority), and the
absence of any colonizing or proselytizing goals, complete the contrast between
China's and Europe's discovery voyages.
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were apparently written and then stored in the imperial archives. Chronologically, these expeditions slightly preceded and
then for a time overlapped with those of the Portuguese. They
dwarfed them, however, in size, and differed in most other respects: no recovery of a holy shrine occupied by a religious enemy,
no search for an ally against him, no mission to convert the heathen, no quest for gold or for direct access to spices. In other
words, the seven Chinese expeditions stand out as perhaps the
purest as well as the most impressive example of what a society
intent to expand its horizons is capable of, in fact as something
that never happened before or since (except perhaps for the American space program)-and certainly much more admirable-in scale
and spirit-than anything undertaken by the Europeans. Yet all
that was cut short, and China withdrew into a cocoon for a long
slumber. Not only were the expeditions discontinued: the
accounts of their findings were gathered from the archives and
burned in 1477;(28) and by the 16th century, all major shipping
from the ports of China was forbidden, and any infraction was
treated as a criminal offense. This radical reversal was brought
about by the victory of the conservative Neo-Confucian bureaucratic class, which after the inspired Emperor Yung-lo's death defeated the rival palace-protected party of the Grand Eunuch. From
then on this class not only affected the empire's policies but also
controlled its educational system and thus the mainstream of intellectual life. No less than in the Ottoman Empire, in China too we
witness a deliberate rejection of the discoveries and the Discovery
by a conservative establishment, although only after the country
had demonstrated its potential to rival and quite possibly surpass
Europe-proof that history's course in the sole known direction is
not necessarily inevitable: there can be a plurality of options, and
the role of a personality or the victory of one faction over another
can set a fateful or fatal course. There is of course one important
difference between China's and Turkey's withdrawal or conservatism: in China it was brought about by the victory of a bureaucratic establisment which saw the country's and its own best interest
in a frozen status-quo; whereas in Turkey it was grounded in religion. This raises the question of whether Islam itself ruled out
the Discovery, the birth of modern science.
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the Infinite in the beyond instead of breaking those bounds, whereas the Copernican Revolution profaned an esoteric truth and thereby shattered the iconic aspect of the cosmos. "Anyone acquainted with the structure of Islamic thought can see why such a
process [i.e., a cosmological revolution] could not have taken place
in Islam despite all the available scientific tools and techniques,
which were put to quite different use in the West." (32) At closer
incidentally echoes some
inspection, Nasr's interpretation-which
of the views with which GhazzMll (d. 1111) established the definitive primacy of religious over profane sciences-is not too distant
from my seeing the identification of the spiritual with the temporal
as one of the main reasons for Islam's resistance to change. The
difference lies in the reversal of values: I confess to considering
such identification (or more exactly, a hierarchy where the temporal is subordinated to the spiritual) as a weakness, just as I regard
the resulting "stability" as ultimately self-defeating; whereas Professor Nasr perceives it as subordination of an irrelevant exoteric
to a superior esoteric truth. This is of course a mystic's vision,
and I would not dare to argue with it. And the Persian sufi may
be right: where have the West's Scientific and Technological Revolutions, modern science, progress brought us? Not much closer to
grasping the mystery of Creation, but quite possibly to the threshold of a process that will ultimately bring about the extinction of
life on Earth.
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(Princeton, N.J.)