From Our Heritage: Ibn al-Haytham

Dear reader,

Greetings. I write for this corner because ever since my girlhood I have felt a void within me that I wish I might be given the chance to fill. You remember, when we sat on the benches of secondary school, how we admired foreign literature and sang its poems and its glories. How often we wished that we had men like theirs to be proud of, and to fill that void — or thirst — which in those days haunted our young souls, then at the first kindling of the ember of patriotism, or of self-esteem.

In the first week of last March I was listening to the eloquent addresses delivered at the Conference of Arab Studies at the American University of Beirut. The subject was "Scientific Research: Its Substance and Its Methods," and Dr. Mustafa Nazif, president of Ain Shams University in Cairo, was the last of the speakers. The man who introduced him, Dr. Jabbur, mentioned two works by the speaker on Ibn al-Haytham. When I told the doctor of my desire to learn more about Ibn al-Haytham, he presented me with a lecture he had written about him, and I should like to share with you what I gained from it:

Ibn al-Haytham is mentioned in the history books as one of the geometers of Basra; he lived in the year 965 A.D., in the most brilliant of the ages of Arab civilization — or, more truly, "the most brilliant of the ages of the world." Like every Arab he studied under masters, and he translated and carried over into Arabic from the Greek books. Then he wrote and made original discoveries in physics and geometry, and his works are numerous: on the principles of arithmetic, on geometrical and numerical principles, on geometrical questions in matters of religious law, and so forth. He was renowned as a mathematician and as an engineer of building and surveying. His most important work, however, is a book on the science of "optics," or the science of light as we know it in physics.

The author told us that Bacon, the English scientist, was the first to practice scientific research — the Scientific Method — and to lay down principles for it, which were not sufficient. Yet if you read Ibn al-Haytham's introductions to all his books, you will find that he was using the "modern" scientific method some 800 years before Bacon: induction in forming judgments, then verifying the soundness of their deductive results by experiment, and finally by analogy. Read how he proved that the light of the moon is not the reflection of the sun's light off the earth, and read between the lines the simplicity and clarity of the true scientist. Read of him in the science of light: how the Greeks and those who came after them believed that sight was the extension of something like "antennae" toward the thing seen, and how Ibn al-Haytham brought forward theories that embraced the whole science of light and changed its direction — their effect was like the effect of Newton in the sciences.

I do not wish to weary you with scientific researches — you may be like me, unacquainted with their terminology — but what I want to ask, together with you, is this: is it right that the merits of such a scientist should be blotted out until the twentieth century?

History was written, and it passed lightly over the name of Ibn al-Haytham. The whole of Europe relied on his book "The Treasury of Optics" until the seventeenth century, while the identity of the author remained unknown for a long stretch of time. Some attributed it to "Alhazen" or "al-Hazin" — even the writers of Arabic did not know him, until Wiedemann, the German orientalist, came and found in the library of Leiden a recension of the Book of Optics, and established that this merit belongs to al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham.

How many men like Ibn al-Haytham lie with their memory buried in manuscripts ranged in Arab libraries and houses, which you see displayed in drawing rooms only to show off the wealth of their owner. Before me is a list of names of which I know only the very least, and of which many Arabic speakers know nothing at all: al-Kindi and al-Farabi, al-Khwarizmi, Thabit ibn Qurra, Jabir al-Habbani, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, al-Sufi, al-Nafis, al-Birjani, etc., etc... Would that we directed our children toward the study of these men, and toward reviving a heritage that would fill the void of thirsting souls.

Until we meet again — hoping that you will write to this corner, in the service of the goal for which it was founded.

Yours faithfully,
Anissa