More on the Decline of Islamic Science
Neil Tyson on Islam & Science between 9th & 12th Century
Until the late Middle Ages, the Muslim Middle East was at least as economically developed as Europe. Then, beginning with the rise of the great Italian traders in the 14th century, Europeans pulled ahead, while the Islamic world gradually declined. By the 19th century, European economic influence had translated into political domination of the Middle East.
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What happened?
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Since 1997, Timur Kuran, an economist at the University of Southern California, has been investigating the connection between institutions and the economic decline of the Muslim Middle East. In a paper, ”The Islamic Commercial Crisis: Institutional Roots of the Delay in the Middle East’s Economic Modernization,” he proposes an answer: Islamic partnership law and inheritance law interacted to keep Middle Eastern enterprises small, never allowing the development of corporate forms. (A version of the paper can be downloaded at papers.ssrn.com/abstract_id=276377.)
In the Middle Ages, both Islamic and European law required that a partnership dissolve if one partner died or was incapacitated. That tended to limit the size of such arrangements. The typical partnership would be, say, two financial backers and one trader who brought merchandise to or from a distant locale. The more people involved, the more likely the partnership would have to dissolve in the middle of a venture.
In Europe, the consequences of a partner’s death could be limited. Inheritance law often allowed a person to designate heirs. So a particular son might inherit the partnership share. The partnership would still have to dissolve technically, but it could be immediately reconstituted.
As a result, European partnerships were able to expand over time, allowing more ambitious, better-financed ventures.
Under Islamic law, by contrast, inheritance was prescribed in rigid detail, with all sorts of family members — uncles, cousins, siblings, parents, and so on — getting pieces of the estate. There was no way to limit a stake to a single heir. These prescriptions were rooted in the Koran, which meant they were virtually impossible to alter. The fragmentation produced by inheritance law, combined with the strictures of partnership law, kept Middle Eastern enterprises small. That, in turn, limited the pressure to evolve new economic forms.
”Why did you get the joint stock corporation and the modern corporation in Europe?” Professor Kuran asked. ”Because as these partnerships expanded, they created problems that had to be resolved by putting pressure on the legal system to recognize new institutions.” For instance, partners who wanted to pull out and sell their shares needed a financially graceful way to do so, leading to transferable shares and stock exchanges.
”As these problems arise, the legal system responds,” Professor Kuran said. ”The same thing doesn’t happen in the Islamic world because the partnerships don’t grow.”
That difference did not matter for a long time, because the small partnerships were still extremely successful, and most of their trade was with Africa or Asia. Only in the 18th century, when trade with Europe became a big part of Middle Eastern commerce, did the difference between the systems become important.
At that point, Christians and Jews in Islamic countries also suddenly had a business advantage. As religious minorities, they had been able to choose whether to do business under Islamic law or, with mutual consent, under some other law. Although their own religions also provided laws and courts, they generally relied on Islamic law.
When Europeans started dominating Middle Eastern trade, however, they brought European courts with them. That gave Middle Eastern religious minorities a new option: to use European law.
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Since European institutions had evolved to better suit the scale of modern businesses, in which thousands of people may be involved as investors and employees, Christians and Jews using those laws began to prosper in comparison to their Muslim neighbors. Only in the 19th century did Middle Eastern governments begin adopting secular commercial laws that allowed Muslim-owned enterprises to grow.
Today, Professor Kuran says, Islamic inheritance law poses no problems to large-scale endeavors. The estate simply divides up the securities among the heirs, and the business goes on undisturbed. Secular corporate law lets religious inheritance law work in a modern economy.
”I’m not talking about blanket condemnation of Islamic law,” he said emphatically. ”That is patently false. I don’t believe it and I don’t argue it.”
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”When the inheritance law was put into place, the early Muslims in the seventh century were not thinking about the consequences for commerce with Europe 1,000 years later,” he said. They were addressing inequities in their own day, including the problems of daughters left with no inheritance. ”But in the process,” he said, ”they created another problem 1,000 years down the road.”
Source | NYT
But it is true that while Muslims established fruitful relations with Mongols, Greeks and Hindus, they remained utterly uninterested in the west. The great 14th-century traveller Ibn Battutah journeyed all over the known world, but never visited Europe. His contemporary, Ibn Khaldun, a historian and faylasuf (philosopher), dismisses the rumour that philosophy and science were developing in western Christendom: “God knows best what goes on in those parts.” Why this indifference? It springs, I believe, not from an inherent flaw in “one-text” Islam, but from the kind of superiority that, until recently, caused western people to dismiss Islam with such patrician disdain. In the early 16th century, when Fletcher ends his account, the Ottoman empire was probably the most advanced state in the world, and had no way of knowing that Europe, which had for so long been a backward region, was about to develop a civilisation that was entirely without precedent in world history, and which would have a catastrophic effect on the Muslim world.
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Also this part:
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He calmly and effectively disposes of the popular myth that Islam is an inherently violent and intolerant faith, while at the same time showing that Christians could not be expected to see it in any other way. He shows clearly that far from forcing their subjects to accept their religion at sword-point, Muslim rulers did not initially encourage conversion. There seems to have been much “good-mannered discussion” between Christians and Muslims in the Middle East, where, after centuries of Byzantine oppression, many of the churches flourished as never before.
But in other parts of Christendom, Islam was experienced as a military threat. Constantinople was constantly under attack until, in 762, the Abbasids moved their capital from Damascus to Baghdad, and ceased to harass Byzantium. In north Africa, west of Egypt, the Islamic conquest was more disruptive: Christian leaders seem to have migrated to Italy or France, and churches in the Muslim wild west, which had fewer intellectual resources, gradually died away. Freelance Muslim pirates constantly assailed Italy, and even in Spain, where Muslims, Christians and Jews eventually managed to live together successfully, there was tension in the early days of Muslim occupation.
Nevertheless, as Fletcher shows, there were many fruitful contacts between Muslims and Christians in the Mediterranean region. They traded with one another and shared such technological advances as the invention of the abacus and the production of paper. In the Middle East, Christians played a crucial role in the translation of Greek philosophical, scientific and medical texts into Arabic during the 8th and 9th centuries. Yet Muslims and Christians showed little interest in one another’s religion. Christians contemplated Islam with sullen hostility, while Muslims regarded the Christian faith with disdain.
Source | Karen Armstrong reviewing Fletcher’s book for Guardian
This is the letter sent by Lin Zexu who was the Chinese Commisioner in Canton to advise the British Queen to stop its unfair exploitation of the Chinese people by trading opium in exchange for Chinese goods.
A communication: magnificently our great Emperor soothes and pacifies China and the foreign countries, regarding all with the same kindness. If there is profit, then he shares it with the peoples of the world; if there is harm, then he removes it on behalf of the world. This is because he takes the mind of heaven and earth as his mind.
The kings of your honorable country by a tradition handed down from generation to generation have always been noted for their politeness and submissiveness. We have read your successive tributary memorials saying, “In general our countrymen who go to trade in China have always received His Majesty the Emperor’s gracious treatment and equal justice.” and so on. Privately we are delighted with the way in which the honorable rulers of your country deeply understand the grand principles and are grateful for the Celestial grace. For this reason the Celestial Court in soothing those from afar has redoubled its polite and kind treatment. The profit from trade has been enjoyed by them continuously for two hundred years. This is the source from which your country has become known for its wealth.
But after a long period of commercial intercourse, there appear among the crowd of barbarians both good persons and bad, unevenly. Consequently there are those who smuggle opium to seduce the Chinese people and so cause the spread of the poison to all provinces. Such persons who only care to profit themselves, and disregard their harm to others, are not tolerated by the laws of heaven and are unanimously hated by human beings. His Majesty the Emperor, upon hearing of this, is in a towering rage. He has especially sent me, his commissioner, to come to Kwangtung [Guangdong], and together with the governor-general and governor jointly to investigate and settle this matter.…
Suppose there were people from another country who carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it; certainly your honorable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused. We have heard heretofore that your honorable ruler is kind and benevolent. Naturally you would not wish to give unto others what you yourself do not want. We have also heard that the ships coming to Canton have all had regulations promulgated and given to them in which it is stated that it is not permitted to carry contraband goods. This indicates that the administrative orders of your honorable rule have been originally strict and clear. Only because the trading ships are numerous, heretofore perhaps they have not been examined with care. Now after this communication has been dispatched and you have clearly understood the strictness of the prohibitory laws of the Celestial Court, certainly you will not let your subjects dare again to violate the law.
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Our Celestial Dynasty rules over and supervises the myriad states, and surely possesses unfathomable spiritual dignity. Yet the Emperor cannot bear to execute people without having first tried to reform them by instruction. Therefore he especially promulgates these fixed regulations. The barbarian merchants of your country, if they wish to do business for a prolonged period, are required to obey our statues respectfully and to cut off permanently the source of opium. They must by no means try to test the effectiveness of the law with their lives. May you, O King, check your wicked and sift your wicked people before they come to China, in order to guarantee the peace of your nation, to show further the sincerity of your politeness and submissiveness, and to let the two countries enjoy together the blessings of peace How fortunate, how fortunate indeed! After receiving this dispatch will you immediately give us a prompt reply regarding the details and circumstances of your cutting off the opium traffic. Be sure not to put this off. The above is what has to be communicated.
