During Caliph al-Muqtadir’s reign, there were significant scientific advances. Here’s a round-up of the major names.
Ishaq ibn Hunayn, from a family of translators, translated Euclid’s Elements and Ptolemy’s Almagest into Arabic. This turned out to matter tremendously when Greek manuscripts were destroyed in fires. Our English texts are as much reconstructed from Arabic as from the Greek fragments. I remember seeing lots of footnotes about Arabic when I was studying Euclid and Ptolemy.
Ptolemy’s Almagest summarized the astronomy collected from not only Greek, but also Egyptian and Babylonian, sources. Babylonian sources, of course, take us right back to Iraq, where the Arabic translation could aid Muslim astronomers. Al-Battani was known as the Ptolemy of the Arabs.
Al-Battani was born in Harran to a father who made scientific instruments. The son was certainly trained in this skill too. He lived in Raqqa, the Syrian town beloved by Umayyad Caliphs—and in our time, hijacked by ISIS for a few years. The chief work of an astronomer was recording many careful observations of all changes in the sky, and he did this for his whole life, as well as working on a lot of advanced mathematics.
Al-Battani is credited as the first person to make an accurate measurement of the solar year; he was only two minutes off, by modern measuring methods. He also measured the distance between the earth and sun, which changed constantly. He reasoned that since solar eclipses happened when the sun was farthest from the earth, it must be the moon that was blocking the sun. (Flat Earth believers, take note that this was figured out by 900 without any help from NASA.)
Al-Battani’s mathematical treatise presented trigonometric relationships, including use of sine and tangent. He used trigonometry to show how direction to Mecca could be calculated; it wasn’t good enough to work it out accurately in a distant place, but it was a mathematical achievement.
Al-Razi, who lived in the city of Rayy, Iran, was a medical doctor, alchemist and philosopher. He is certainly one of history’s greatest intellects, though most Westerners have not heard of him. He got his medical training at a hospital in Baghdad, then returned to Iran.
He ran experiments that others didn’t think of, for example, when he was given the commission to build a large hospital (in Rayy, I think), he chose the location by hanging raw meat in various places and seeing where it rotted the slowest. He divided his patients with meningitis into two groups, one to have blood let and the other as a control group. He raised questions about the medical doctrine being passed down from the past, such as the works of Galen, the great Roman physician. He devoted a whole book to Doubts About Galen, in fact.
Al-Razi wrote the first book specifically on diseases of children, and later the first book of home medical advice for the poor. He also wrote a treatise on smallpox and measles, carefully differentiating them. Like many scientists of his time, he also wrote books on philosophy and grammar, too.
If this weren’t enough, he had two other major advances. One was in pharmacy, which he standardized to some extent. He also developed its tools to better standards: he invented lab equipment, we might say. Then, perhaps related to pharmacy, he advanced alchemy, the early form of chemistry. He wasted much time trying to turn lead into gold, but he concluded it probably wasn’t possible. And while doing those things, he also began classifying chemical substances. He counted eleven salts, seven borates (such as natron), seven vitriols (sulfates), seven bodies (we’d call them metals, like tin, gold and zinc), thirteen stones (malachite, mica, lapis lazuli, etc.), and four spirits, which included mercury. It wasn’t the Periodic Table of Elements, but for its time, it was a big step forward.
Al-Farabi was probably born in the east (perhaps Kazakhstan), but spent his career in Baghdad, with trips to Syria and Egypt. He worked in alchemy, logic, physics, philosophy, psychology and music, and wrote about a hundred books. Many Greek manuscripts were lost in library fires, so any copies and commentaries help us reconstruct them, and al-Farabi wrote commentaries on every text by Aristotle. Philosophy isn’t as fun to write about as medicine and chemistry, so my comments are shorter than his relative importance would demand.
Last but not least, al-Tabari was the main historian of the period, and we owe so much to his History of the Prophets and Kings. Al-Tabari was another easterner, but he was also a child prodigy. He was qualified as a prayer leader at the mosque at only eight years old. Leaving home at age 12 to begin post-graduate studies, he lived in Rayy, Baghdad, Basra, Syria, Egypt, and even India.
Al-Tabari’s main purpose was to know everything that could be known about the schools of Islamic law, but this project led him to meet every elderly leading scholar in all of the main cities. Clearly, this led to his becoming a scholar of history. He wrote his major history book late in life, adding contemporary accounts of Caliphs Mutadid, Muktafi, and Muqtadir as events happened. I would have little to write about, without al-Tabari.
Al-Tabari criticized the popular Hanbali school of law, saying that Ibn Hanbal was nothing but a hadith collector. As he grew older and more respected, Hanbali disciples held this criticism against him. By the time he was very old, they were gathering in crowds to throw rocks at his house. He lived under police protection in Baghdad, where he finally died and was buried.