The Islamic/Arabic Background of the Western Scientific Tradition

Presented by Dr. George Saliba – Professor of History of Islamic Science at Columbia University

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Dr. Saliba is the leading world expert on the history of Arabic and Islamic Science. He is the author of Islamic Science and the Making of European Renaissance published by MIT Press, and has worked as an advisor to the “1001 Inventions” Exhibition. He is professor of Arabic and Islamic Science at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University.

In this presentation, Dr. Saliba discussed the historical rise and decline of the Arabic World’s influence on the realm of scientific discovery, especially in the field of medicine and astronomy. He captivated the audience with his detailed examples illustrating how many of the Western world’s greatest scientific scholars, such as Copernicus and Galileo, built their ideas on knowledge that had been established hundreds of years earlier by scholars in the Islamic world, such as Abu al-Barakat al-Baghdadi and Ibn Sina. Many listeners were intrigued by Dr. Saliba’s explanations for the Arabic/Islamic world’s decline in important contributions to the sciences, and together they discussed whether it was now possible to reverse this trend and how one might best promote the further development of new scientific knowledge.