The Dark Age Myth
If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of
Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture
and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure which stems,
I think, from the strait-jacket of history which we have inherited.
HRH Prince Charles in a speech at Oxford University,
27 October 1993
In 410 CE, Alaric, the Germanic king of the Visigoths, swept into Rome and sacked the great city in a three-day rampage. Sixty-six years later, Romulus Augustus, the last Roman emperor of the West, was deposed, and the regalia of empire was rudely despatched to Constantinople. With that, the lights went out on civilisation, and the Western world was plunged into an age of darkness – a night in which there was no scholarship, literacy or even civilised life. Only 1,000 years later did the world finally rediscover classical learning and bring the world’s night of darkness to an end with the bright new dawn of the Renaissance. Or so the story goes.
This is the myth of the Dark Ages, the idea that history and progress pretty much stopped for a millennium after the fall of Rome. The trouble is that the myth is just that, a myth. But it has been a myth so potent that it has thoroughly distorted our understanding of how civilisations emerge and how science and learning progress.
Advances in our understanding of the natural world happen when scientists absorb the latest knowledge in fields such as physics or biology, and then modify or improve it. They work rather like runners in a relay race, passing the baton of learning from one scientist to the next. Modern science, regarded as a hallmark of modern Western civilisation, achieved its place through the passing of many successive batons, which were handed to the scientists of Europe from those of the world’s non-Western cultures. These included those who lived in the cultures of Islam over a period of some 800 years from the 8th to the 16th centuries.
The fact that we know little of this is what Michael Hamilton Morgan of the New Foundation for Peace speaks of as ‘lost history’. The historian Jack Goody goes further and calls it ‘the theft of history’. It is as if the memory of an entire civilisation and its contribution to the sum of knowledge has been virtually wiped from human consciousness. Not simply in the West but in the Islamic world too, the achievements of Islamic scientists were, until recently, largely forgotten or at least neglected, except by a few diligent specialists such as Harvard University’s Abelhamid Sabra, David King, Jamil Ragep and George Saliba.
In mainstream science education in Britain – until very recently – the history of scientific progress has tended to leapfrog from the classical era of Euclid, Aristotle and Archimedes straight to the birth of the Age of Science in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, with only a cursory mention, if any, of the great swathe of Islamic science in between. In some versions of history, the ‘dark age’ only really ends, and the progress of science only really begins, with the famous conflict in the early 17th century in which Galileo confronts the Catholic Church with the assertion that the earth moves around the sun. As the world eventually acknowledges that Galileo is right, this is presented as the world-changing triumph of the light of reason over superstition. Thereafter, from the 17th century onwards, Western Europe’s scientists are set free to unlock the world’s secrets – William Harvey discovers blood circulation, Isaac Newton launches the study of physics, Robert Boyle pioneers the study of chemistry, Michael Faraday, electricity, and so on. And so we move forward into the Age of Reason and the dramatic progress of modern science.
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