The Cruelty of Eros
Sex tips from the Marquise de Pompadour
by Ken Kabab(a pseudonym): January 2007
Some study history for knowledge, others to honor their ancestors, but few, I suspect, do so to improve their sex lives. This is most unfortunate, since buried within the lives of great men are history's compelling stories of romance, and in them useful, practical lessons on how to seduce that special, or even not-so-special, someone. For my own part, I feel a pressing urge to write a few kind words about a certain marquise de Pompadour, best known as Louis XV’s official mistress, and someone who, I think, has much to teach us about seduction and human nature.
That history has ignored the woman who seduced Louis XV is disappointing but not altogether surprising, for to have as your life's principal achievement the seduction of an utter mediocrity, to be, as it were, the Edwina Currie of the ancien régime, inspires more contempt than admiration. Baudelaire wrote no poetry in Pompadour's honor, Camille Paglia passed her over in Sexual Personae, and the nicest thing I could find that anyone interesting has written about Pompadour was, “Elle pensait comme il faut”, which, since it came from the author of Candide, is probably a mark against her. Though not, perhaps, the most significant event in pre-revolutionary French history, Pompadour's seduction of Louis was a remarkable accomplishment in its own right, since only a very special woman is able to seduce the King of France.
Born outside the French nobility—née Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson—the future marquise de Pompadour learned early on that status was earned, not inherited, and that those who carry themselves with dignity and respect, even if born in the middle class, could still achieve a measure of respectability. Eighteenth-century England had absorbed a similar lesson, where the honorific “gentleman” was conferred on those who held no baronetcy, but nevertheless set a good example for the common man. Understanding the subtle distinction between class and status, that the former is intractable, while the latter is not (JAMES II: “I could make him a nobleman, but God Almighty could not make him a gentleman.”), allowed Pompadour to climb the ranks of French society, seducing her way to the very top.
Pompadour was probably a bastard-child, since her mother was a courtesan, and, on her father’s death, which occurred when she was still quite young, a curiously large number of older men offered to pay for her schooling, and generally to assume the responsibilities of fatherhood. Fortunately, and to her credit, Pompadour made the most of these opportunities, immersing herself in French literature and perfecting her riding skills, two traits that, as Dr Johnson would remark to Boswell, were the defining virtues of a well-bred woman.
In 1741, Poisson, as she then was, married up, becoming the wife of Charles-Guillaume le Normant d’Etiolles, a mostly unremarkable man whose saving grace was birth in a good family. The marriage, it seems, was cursed from the beginning: the product of its consummation was stillborn, and another child born several years later died young. The historical record does not relate any details of love or devotion between husband and wife, so perhaps it is somewhat fortunate that the Etiolles produced no other offspring, and that Charles-Guillaume eventually went mad, possibly from syphilis.
In 1745, while attending a masked ball, madame d’Etiolles, as she then was, began her seduction of Louis XV, about whom I should probably write a few words.
Louis XV acceded to the throne on the death of Louis XIV, le roi soleil. At first, he was a popular king, and his people held high hopes for his reign; indeed, the French began referring to him as "Louis Quinze" instead of Louis, in the expectation that his accomplishments would outlast him. Unfortunately, early failures in the conduct of foreign policy in Europe ended Louis's honeymoon with the people, and poisoned the remainder of his reign.
The king soon stopped concerning himself with matters of state, which he found profoundly boring, and began instead to satisfy his baser instincts and indulge in the vice of gambling and cheap thrill of hunting. Louis XV's advisers, seeking to curry favor with the king, would pander to his frivolous desires, which only encouraged Louis to further abdicate his responsibilities, as well as sabotage his chance at greatness.
Here is where the story of Pompadour's trickery and seduction begins. Only after everyone in the kingdom, including Louis himself, knew that his reign would be utterly unremarkable, did Pompadour, still married to Charles-Guillaume, enter the picture. What few details are known about the seduction of Louis XV suggest that it began at a ball to celebrate the marriage of his son, Louis, dauphin de France, who went on to father three future kings of France: Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X.
The seduction continued for several months afterwards, most fruitfully when the king was engaging in a favorite past-time, hunting, on an estate adjacent to the Etiolles's, during which Pompadour would ride nearby in an open carriage. In short order, Louis XV fell madly in love with her, granted her a divorce from her husband, and in 1745 purchased the marquisate of Pompadour for her.
But how exactly did Pompadour seduce Louis XV? And what can this teach us about human nature and romance?
Pompadour did not, it is fair to say, have a romantic conception of love. Indeed, the Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni probably summed up her approach to romance quite nicely when he wrote that "the experience of falling in love originates in extreme depression, an inability to find value in everyday life." From the very beginning, Pompadour acted as though the key to Louis's heart was through exploiting his insecurities as well as his fear of the future. Pompadour's insight into human nature, as I hope shall become clear shortly, is a particularly shrewd one when seduction, and seduction alone, is the overriding goal.
Before she could prey on Louis's insecurities, Pompadour had to reckon with the irksome fact that Louis XV, having long since abandoned any hope of being a great king, was becoming more and more carefree. How do you make someone feel insecure about that which they no longer care about, or to which they remain oblivious?
Pompadour's strategy, which was sheer genius in conception and execution, was to open the wounds of failure, rub salt in them, and then offer Louis the hope of closing them. Basically, since the king had few insecurities, Pompadour had to create them. Pompadour strongly hinted to Louis that the reason for his unpopularity was that the French felt he would not live up to the legacy of his auspicious predecessor, Louis XIV.
This much, I rather suspect, Louis XV already knew deep down; but since most of his advisers, through politeness or sycophancy, avoided making this point directly to the king, Louis XV thought Pompadour's observation particularly novel, and profound, and was impressed that someone could see so deeply inside him. As if meeting a stranger who knew all his stories, Louis began falling for Pompadour's spell.
Preying on his easily ascertainable yet unremarked shortcomings, and passing these off as unique insights into the real Louis XV, Pompadour began her masterful seduction. Having drawn Louis's attention to his own failures, and then nurtured his insecurities so that they could grow malignant and spread, Pompadour became the only person with whom the king felt comfortable discussing his foibles, of which he was, understandably, quite ashamed.
Pompadour shared a special bond with Louis XV: sometimes, Pompadour correctly recognized, there are things one is more comfortable confiding in a stranger than a friend; and so Pompadour used what Louis XV told to her to enhance her status from stranger to close confidant to, eventually, official mistress. But how precisely did she accomplish this successful entrapment?
Pompadour sought to bridge the gap between who Louis was, and what he felt he ought to be. Of course, and she knew this, what Louis ought to be was vastly different than what he was, or even what he could be (Pompadour did not actually believe Louis XV could amount to anything); but the key to her seduction was to convince Louis that this chasm was not as wide as everyone thought, and to make him believe that only she could bridge it. Thus Pompadour became a teacher, a confidant, and someone who made Louis feel good about himself. To Louis, the power she possessed over him was all for the good, and she gradually became indispensable to his sense of self-worth, rather like an addictive drug.
Unlike other members of Louis XV’s inner-circle, who either flattered Louis with pretty words that lacked substance or otherwise approved of his baser instincts and disreputable habits, Pompadour, after destroying Louis by pointing out his weaknesses, then inspired him, offering him a path to follow if he wanted to achieve, how shall I put it, salvation.
Perhaps Pompadour's insight into seduction—discover someone's weaknesses, then exploit them—sounds trite, but its effectiveness when executed correctly, by which I mean subtly, is so rarely remarked on nowadays: Everyone must endure the weight of insecurity, of not believing in themselves, and a person who aspires to something greater than mere ordinariness is especially burdened by this, as well as by, and this is true of the young in particular, uncertainty about what the future will bring, and a sense of powerlessness in shaping it.
Pompadour recognized this, and used it to make Louis XV emotionally dependent on her, and used that dependence, in turn, to enhance her status in the kingdom. By the time of Pompadour's death in 1764, Louis XV is said to have remarked, in tacit acknowledgment of what she had done to him, "La marquise n'aura pas beau temps pour son voyage."
Pompadour taught that effective seduction, because it requires creating something similar to an emotional dependence, cannot be a one-off affair. The seduction must be continuous. In fact, the sheer strength of Pompadour's hold on Louis became known when she, having lost the ability to excite the king in the bedroom, and in any event finding intimacy unbearable because of a painful and chronic leucorrhea, still retained her position as Louis XV's official mistress.
Gradually, Pompadour's responsibilities shifted to the exercise of a political function, where, being aware that Louis was unhappy with his accomplishments as king, she persuaded him to try to leave his mark on French foreign policy by abandoning France's traditional friendship with Prussia in favor of one with Austria. It is I think worth pausing here to note the ease with which Pompadour transitioned from the world of romance to that of politics, for ultimately, Pompadour knew, they both rewarded the same manipulative and mendacious behavior.
Two points should I think be made about Pompadour's seduction of Louis XV. First, and most importantly, Pompadour was able to maintain her dignity throughout. Historians tend to ignore Pompadour and instead celebrate Don Juan, Casanova, and Cleopatra as the apotheosis of the sexual personae. What they fail to consider, however, is that these latter three, when seducing others, demeaned themselves and their gender considerably.
Don Juan and Casanova, in addition to being scofflaws, debased themselves into androgynous figures. The two basically ceased being obtrusively masculine and instead trumpeted their femininity, prefiguring, in many ways, none to their credit, Oscar Wilde's famous prepubescent object of lust, Dorian Gray. This sort of willful and unmanly metrosexualism is unbecoming; doubtless, Don Juan and Casanova were quite happy being the little spoon, too.
Cleopatra, likewise, is hardly a figure we want women to emulate. What in particular is praiseworthy about Cleopatra hiding in a carpet and having her man-servants unfurl it in front of Julius Caesar, making a complete spectacle of herself? The Romans of the period called Cleopatra an “Egyptian whore”, which, on an honest inspection of the list of men who had their way with her, is not an entirely inaccurate charge. Additionally, Cleopatra brought ruin to Caesar and, later, Mark Anthony, probably making wittols of them both.
By contrast, Pompadour's quiet, graceful, and dignified seduction of Louis XV leaves her with nothing to be ashamed of. Surely it is Pompadour's story we should celebrate, and emulate. Yet it is ignored, partly because Pompadour's seduction of Louis XV was deeply, and palpably, unromantic; instead, it was workmanlike, shrewd, manipulative, and entrapping. And effective.
Precisely because the seduction worked, however, it repays close study. By deromanticizing seduction, Pompadour provides us with a handy map to help us obtain what we desire.
Pompadour is, in many respects, the matriarch of the relationship guru, except, unlike today's men and women's magazines, Pompadour's stock-in-trade is not dull platitudes. Pompadour instead offers a subtle lesson into human weakness and insecurity, and how knowledge of these can be used to seduce others. It is dangerous knowledge, but it is knowledge nevertheless.
For Pompadour, a successful seduction can overshadow the means used to obtain it. Now, this is obviously untrue when one is hoping that a seduction will lead to a stable marriage, because manipulation of the kind Pompadour counseled will poison any long-term relationship; Pompadour's advice, however, is quite useful for short-term relationships.
During high school, college, and the early years of one's working life, few men and women are actually seeking out a partner for life. Where Pompadour's advice is helpful is in the pursuit of one-night stands or good-for-now relationships. In these trysts, does it really matter that a certain level of emotional manipulation is involved? I should hope not, for to expect every romantically-inclined young adult to pursue their lust within Kantian constraints is certain to result in an unspeakably sub-optimal number of such relationships. After all, as Pompadour reminds us, it is the cruelty of eros that elevates it above mere pleasure, and makes it sublime.
Ken Kabab is a pseudonym.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=5187&sec_id=5187
The above article was also featured in the prestigious Arts And Letters Daily:
http://www.parislogue.com/travel-tips/seduction-tips-from-madame-de-pompadour.html
Quotes of Ken Kabab, a pseudonym of the actual author, whose real identity can be ascertained by clicking on the original link to the article:
"Some study history for knowledge, others to honor their ancestors, but few, I suspect, do so to improve their sex lives": Ken Kabab(2007)
"Pompadour's seduction of Louis was a remarkable accomplishment in its own right, since only a very special woman is able to seduce the King of France": Ken Kabab(2007)
"Pompadour was probably a bastard-child, since her mother was a courtesan, and, on her father’s death, which occurred when she was still quite young, a curiously large number of older men offered to pay for her schooling, and generally to assume the responsibilities of fatherhood": Ken Kabab(2007)
"Thus Pompadour became a teacher, a confidant, and someone who made Louis feel good about himself. To Louis, the power she possessed over him was all for the good, and she gradually became indispensable to his sense of self-worth, rather like an addictive drug": Ken Kabab(2007)
"In fact, the sheer strength of Pompadour's hold on Louis became known when she, having lost the ability to excite the king in the bedroom, and in any event finding intimacy unbearable because of a painful and chronic leucorrhea, still retained her position as Louis XV's official mistress": Ken Kabab(2007)
"Surely it is Pompadour's story we should celebrate, and emulate. Yet it is ignored, partly because Pompadour's seduction of Louis XV was deeply, and palpably, unromantic; instead, it was workmanlike, shrewd, manipulative, and entrapping. And effective": Ken Kabab(2007)
“It is the cruelty of eros that elevates it above mere pleasure and makes it sublime.”: Ken Kabab(2007)
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
559)Geoffrey Burbidge, Towering Figure In Astronomy, Explained How People And Everything Else Are Made Of The Dust From Stars;Quotes From Blogpost 400
"In Islamic belief, knowledge is two-fold. There is that revealed through the Holy Prophet (s.a.s.) and that which man discovers by virtue of his own intellect. Nor do these two involve any contradiction, provided man remembers that his own mind is itself the creation of God. Without this humility, no balance is possible. With it, there are no barriers. Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)
"Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)
"In fact this world is a book in which you see inscribed the writings of God the Almighty"(Nasir Khusraw, 11th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist-philosopher-poet)
"O brother! You asked: What is the [meaning of] `alam [world] and what is that entity to which this name applies? How should we describe the world in its entirety? And how many worlds are there? Explain so that we may recognize. Know, O brother, that the name `alam is derived from [the word] `ilm(knowledge), because the traces of knowledge are evident in [all] parts of the physical world. Thus, we say that the very constitution (nihad) of the world is based on a profound wisdom"(Nasir Khusraw, 11th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist-philosopher-poet, from his book "Knowledge and Liberation")
"Tarkib' is composition as in the compounding of elements in the process of making more complex things, that is, of adding together two things to form a synthesis, a compound. Soul composes in the sense of 'tarkib'; it is the animating force that combines the physical elements of the natural universe into beings that move and act. Incorporating is an especially apt word in this instance. It means to turn something into a body, as in 'composing'. But it is actually the conversion of an intellectual object, a thought, into a physical thing. Soul acts by incorporating reason into physical objects, the natural matter of the universe and all the things composed of it"(Abu Yakub Al-Sijistani,10th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist, d971CE, from the book, 'Abu Yakub Al-Sijistani: Intellectual Missionary', by Paul Walker)
"Every particle of the Creation has a share of the Command of God, because every creature shares a part of the Command of God through which it has come to be there and by virtue of which it remains in being and the light of the Command ofGod shines in it. Understand this!"(Abu Yakub Al Sijistani, 10th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist, d971, Kashf al-Mahjub("Unveiling of the Hidden"))
Chapter 30, Verse 27: He originates creation; then refashions it - for Him an easy task. His is the most Sublime Symbol in the heavens and the earth(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter 21, Verse 30: Do not the unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together before We clove them asunder, and of water fashioned every thing? Will they not then believe?(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter 51, verse 47: We built the heavens with might, and We expand it wide(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter79, verse 30: And then he gave the earth an oval form(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter 86, verse 11: I swear by the reciprocating heaven.....(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
“Every one of our chemical elements was once inside a star. The same star. You and I are brothers. We came from the same supernova.”(Allan Sandage, Carnegie Observatories)
"We are stardust"(Joni Mitchell)
February 7, 2010
Geoffrey Burbidge, Who Traced Life to Stardust, Is Dead at 84
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Geoffrey Burbidge, an English physicist who became a towering figure in astronomy by helping to explain how people and everything else are made of stardust, died on Jan. 26 in San Diego. He was 84.
His death, at Scripps Memorial Hospital, came after a long illness, said the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Burbidge was a physics professor there for more than four decades and lived in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego.
A large man with an even larger voice, Dr. Burbidge was one of the last surviving giants of the postwar era of astronomy, when big telescopes were sprouting on mountain peaks in the Southwest and peeling back the sky, revealing a universe more diverse and violent than anybody had dreamed: radio galaxies and quasars erupting with gargantuan amounts of energy, pulsars and black holes pinpricking the cosmos, and lacy chains of galaxies rushing endlessly away into eternity.
As the director of Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, Dr. Burbidge pushed to open big telescopes to a larger community of astronomers. As a senior astronomer at the university in San Diego, he was, to the consternation of most of his colleagues, a witty and acerbic critic of the Big Bang theory.
In 1957, in a long, groundbreaking paper in The Reviews of Modern Physics, Dr. Burbidge; his wife, E. Margaret Burbidge; William Fowler of the California Institute of Technology; and Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University — a collaboration noted by their initials B2FH — laid out the way that thermonuclear reactions in stars could slowly seed a universe that was originally pure hydrogen, helium and lithium, the simplest elements in the periodic table, with heavier elements like oxygen, iron, carbon and others from which life is derived.
Stars like the Sun burn hydrogen into helium to generate heat and light for most of their lives, until they run out of fuel and fizzle, or so the story goes. But more massive stars can go on to ignite helium to produce carbon and oxygen and so forth. Eventually the star explodes, tossing the newly minted atoms into space, where they mix with gas and dust and are incorporated into future stars. Successive generations of stars that coalesce from cosmic dust, burn and then explode would thus make the universe ever richer in heavy elements.
Allan Sandage of Carnegie Observatories, an old friend of Dr. Burbidge’s, once explained it this way: “Every one of our chemical elements was once inside a star. The same star. You and I are brothers. We came from the same supernova.”
Or as the singer Joni Mitchell put it, “We are stardust.”
In a recent interview, Dr. Sandage described the B2FH collaboration’s work as “one of the major papers of the century.”
“It changed the whole landscape of the chemical evolution of the universe,” he said.
Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge was born in 1925 in Chipping Norton in England, in the Cotswolds hills halfway between Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon. His father, Leslie, was a builder. His mother, Evelyn, was a milliner. He was an only child and the first of his family to progress beyond grammar school.
He attended the University of Bristol intending to study history, but on discovering he could stay in college longer if he enrolled in physics, he did, and found he liked it. He furthered his studies at University College, London, from which he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1951.
Another turning point for him came when he befriended a recent Ph.D., Margaret Peachey, in a lecture course in London. An assistant director of the university’s observatory at the time, she would become a prominent astronomer in her own right. They married in 1948.
She survives him, along with a daughter, Sarah Burbidge of San Francisco, and a grandson.
It was under his wife’s influence that Dr. Burbidge became interested in the physics of stars, tagging along on observing trips as her assistant. He always joked that he had become an astronomer by marrying one.
On occasion the roles switched. Margaret’s application to observe on Mount Wilson, the mountain overlooking Pasadena, Calif., where modern cosmology began, was turned down on the grounds that there was no separate women’s bathroom. Dr. Burbidge booked the telescope time himself and his wife posed as his assistant, but they had to stay in an unheated cabin on the mountain, away from a dormitory housing other astronomers.
After stops by the Burbidges at Harvard, the University of Chicago and Cambridge University, Dr. Fowler arranged for them and Dr. Hoyle to go to Pasadena to complete the stellar nucleosynthesis work, for which Dr. Fowler was later awarded a Nobel Prize. Margaret Burbidge obtained a post at the California Institute of Technology, while Geoffrey Burbidge got a job at the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories.
The Burbidges landed at the University of California, San Diego, in 1962.
By then astronomers had been riveted by the discovery of quasars: bright pointlike objects that were pouring out radio waves and whose visible light was severely shifted toward longer, redder wavelengths, like the sound of a siren going away, indicating that they were moving away at high velocity. According to the standard interpretation of life in an expanding universe, these redshifts, as they are called, meant that quasars were at great distance.
As a trained physicist, Dr. Burbidge was one of the first astronomers to investigate what could possibly be supplying the energy of such objects. At a meeting in Paris in 1958, he pointed out that the energy requirements for radio galaxies were already bumping up against the limits of known astrophysics.
“That was a very important development,” Dr. Sandage said. In time, that line of thinking would lead to the idea that quasars and radio galaxies were powered by the gravity of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, a widely held notion today.
Dr. Burbidge, however, soon parted ways with his colleagues on quasars and indeed on the Big Bang itself. The great energies required to produce them and their smallness led him to question whether quasars really were at cosmological distances. His doubts were buttressed by observations by Halton C. Arp, now of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich, suggesting that quasars were concentrated around nearby active galaxies and might have been shot out of them.
A debate ensued, and almost all astronomers agree that it was one that Dr. Burbidge and his friends finally lost. The overwhelming consensus among astronomers is that the redshifts are what they appear to be, said Peter Strittmatter, director of the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Burbidge’s skepticism extended to cosmology. In 1990, he and four other astronomers, including Drs. Arp and Hoyle, published a broadside in the journal Nature listing arguments against the Big Bang.
Dr. Burbidge preferred instead a version of Dr. Hoyle’s Steady State theory of an eternal universe. In the new version, small, local big bangs originating in the nuclei of galaxies every 20 billion years or so kept the universe boiling. To his annoyance, most other astronomers ignored this view.
In a memoir in 2007, Dr. Burbidge wrote that this quasi-steady state theory was probably closer to the truth than the Big Bang. But he added that “there is such a heavy bias against any minority point of view in cosmology that it may take a very long time for this to occur.”
Despite his contrarian ways, Dr. Burbidge maintained his credibility in the astronomical establishment, serving as director of Kitt Peak from 1978 to 1984 and editing the prestigious Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics for more than 30 years. He was “a very clear-thinking heretic,” Dr. Strittmatter said.
Dr. Strittmatter recalled that as a young astronomer he was terrified of Dr. Burbidge. “Then I learned that what he liked was a good argument,” he said.
The Kitt Peak observatory had been built with support from the National Science Foundation as a sort of counterweight to the famous observatories in California like Mount Wilson and Palomar, whose giant telescopes were privately owned and available to only a few. Dr. Burbidge believed that Kitt Peak should act more as a service facility for all astronomers.
“His idea was to open up astronomy to all qualified astronomers,” Dr. Sandage said.
Dr. Burbidge never lost what Dr. Strittmatter called a “rebel’s instinct.” Dr. Sandage said Dr. Burbidge had called him up three times a week for 40 years to argue about the Big Bang.
“He delighted in bringing up all the details that didn’t quite fit,” Dr. Sandage said. In recent years, he added, as the evidence for the Big Bang mounted, Dr. Burbidge held his ground.
“I just didn’t understand that,” Dr. Sandage said. “I often wondered if he was just arguing with me to keep on the phone.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/science/space/07burbidge.html?ref=science
Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html
In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
"Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)
"In fact this world is a book in which you see inscribed the writings of God the Almighty"(Nasir Khusraw, 11th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist-philosopher-poet)
"O brother! You asked: What is the [meaning of] `alam [world] and what is that entity to which this name applies? How should we describe the world in its entirety? And how many worlds are there? Explain so that we may recognize. Know, O brother, that the name `alam is derived from [the word] `ilm(knowledge), because the traces of knowledge are evident in [all] parts of the physical world. Thus, we say that the very constitution (nihad) of the world is based on a profound wisdom"(Nasir Khusraw, 11th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist-philosopher-poet, from his book "Knowledge and Liberation")
"Tarkib' is composition as in the compounding of elements in the process of making more complex things, that is, of adding together two things to form a synthesis, a compound. Soul composes in the sense of 'tarkib'; it is the animating force that combines the physical elements of the natural universe into beings that move and act. Incorporating is an especially apt word in this instance. It means to turn something into a body, as in 'composing'. But it is actually the conversion of an intellectual object, a thought, into a physical thing. Soul acts by incorporating reason into physical objects, the natural matter of the universe and all the things composed of it"(Abu Yakub Al-Sijistani,10th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist, d971CE, from the book, 'Abu Yakub Al-Sijistani: Intellectual Missionary', by Paul Walker)
"Every particle of the Creation has a share of the Command of God, because every creature shares a part of the Command of God through which it has come to be there and by virtue of which it remains in being and the light of the Command ofGod shines in it. Understand this!"(Abu Yakub Al Sijistani, 10th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist, d971, Kashf al-Mahjub("Unveiling of the Hidden"))
Chapter 30, Verse 27: He originates creation; then refashions it - for Him an easy task. His is the most Sublime Symbol in the heavens and the earth(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter 21, Verse 30: Do not the unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together before We clove them asunder, and of water fashioned every thing? Will they not then believe?(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter 51, verse 47: We built the heavens with might, and We expand it wide(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter79, verse 30: And then he gave the earth an oval form(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter 86, verse 11: I swear by the reciprocating heaven.....(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
“Every one of our chemical elements was once inside a star. The same star. You and I are brothers. We came from the same supernova.”(Allan Sandage, Carnegie Observatories)
"We are stardust"(Joni Mitchell)
February 7, 2010
Geoffrey Burbidge, Who Traced Life to Stardust, Is Dead at 84
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Geoffrey Burbidge, an English physicist who became a towering figure in astronomy by helping to explain how people and everything else are made of stardust, died on Jan. 26 in San Diego. He was 84.
His death, at Scripps Memorial Hospital, came after a long illness, said the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Burbidge was a physics professor there for more than four decades and lived in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego.
A large man with an even larger voice, Dr. Burbidge was one of the last surviving giants of the postwar era of astronomy, when big telescopes were sprouting on mountain peaks in the Southwest and peeling back the sky, revealing a universe more diverse and violent than anybody had dreamed: radio galaxies and quasars erupting with gargantuan amounts of energy, pulsars and black holes pinpricking the cosmos, and lacy chains of galaxies rushing endlessly away into eternity.
As the director of Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, Dr. Burbidge pushed to open big telescopes to a larger community of astronomers. As a senior astronomer at the university in San Diego, he was, to the consternation of most of his colleagues, a witty and acerbic critic of the Big Bang theory.
In 1957, in a long, groundbreaking paper in The Reviews of Modern Physics, Dr. Burbidge; his wife, E. Margaret Burbidge; William Fowler of the California Institute of Technology; and Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University — a collaboration noted by their initials B2FH — laid out the way that thermonuclear reactions in stars could slowly seed a universe that was originally pure hydrogen, helium and lithium, the simplest elements in the periodic table, with heavier elements like oxygen, iron, carbon and others from which life is derived.
Stars like the Sun burn hydrogen into helium to generate heat and light for most of their lives, until they run out of fuel and fizzle, or so the story goes. But more massive stars can go on to ignite helium to produce carbon and oxygen and so forth. Eventually the star explodes, tossing the newly minted atoms into space, where they mix with gas and dust and are incorporated into future stars. Successive generations of stars that coalesce from cosmic dust, burn and then explode would thus make the universe ever richer in heavy elements.
Allan Sandage of Carnegie Observatories, an old friend of Dr. Burbidge’s, once explained it this way: “Every one of our chemical elements was once inside a star. The same star. You and I are brothers. We came from the same supernova.”
Or as the singer Joni Mitchell put it, “We are stardust.”
In a recent interview, Dr. Sandage described the B2FH collaboration’s work as “one of the major papers of the century.”
“It changed the whole landscape of the chemical evolution of the universe,” he said.
Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge was born in 1925 in Chipping Norton in England, in the Cotswolds hills halfway between Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon. His father, Leslie, was a builder. His mother, Evelyn, was a milliner. He was an only child and the first of his family to progress beyond grammar school.
He attended the University of Bristol intending to study history, but on discovering he could stay in college longer if he enrolled in physics, he did, and found he liked it. He furthered his studies at University College, London, from which he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1951.
Another turning point for him came when he befriended a recent Ph.D., Margaret Peachey, in a lecture course in London. An assistant director of the university’s observatory at the time, she would become a prominent astronomer in her own right. They married in 1948.
She survives him, along with a daughter, Sarah Burbidge of San Francisco, and a grandson.
It was under his wife’s influence that Dr. Burbidge became interested in the physics of stars, tagging along on observing trips as her assistant. He always joked that he had become an astronomer by marrying one.
On occasion the roles switched. Margaret’s application to observe on Mount Wilson, the mountain overlooking Pasadena, Calif., where modern cosmology began, was turned down on the grounds that there was no separate women’s bathroom. Dr. Burbidge booked the telescope time himself and his wife posed as his assistant, but they had to stay in an unheated cabin on the mountain, away from a dormitory housing other astronomers.
After stops by the Burbidges at Harvard, the University of Chicago and Cambridge University, Dr. Fowler arranged for them and Dr. Hoyle to go to Pasadena to complete the stellar nucleosynthesis work, for which Dr. Fowler was later awarded a Nobel Prize. Margaret Burbidge obtained a post at the California Institute of Technology, while Geoffrey Burbidge got a job at the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories.
The Burbidges landed at the University of California, San Diego, in 1962.
By then astronomers had been riveted by the discovery of quasars: bright pointlike objects that were pouring out radio waves and whose visible light was severely shifted toward longer, redder wavelengths, like the sound of a siren going away, indicating that they were moving away at high velocity. According to the standard interpretation of life in an expanding universe, these redshifts, as they are called, meant that quasars were at great distance.
As a trained physicist, Dr. Burbidge was one of the first astronomers to investigate what could possibly be supplying the energy of such objects. At a meeting in Paris in 1958, he pointed out that the energy requirements for radio galaxies were already bumping up against the limits of known astrophysics.
“That was a very important development,” Dr. Sandage said. In time, that line of thinking would lead to the idea that quasars and radio galaxies were powered by the gravity of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, a widely held notion today.
Dr. Burbidge, however, soon parted ways with his colleagues on quasars and indeed on the Big Bang itself. The great energies required to produce them and their smallness led him to question whether quasars really were at cosmological distances. His doubts were buttressed by observations by Halton C. Arp, now of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich, suggesting that quasars were concentrated around nearby active galaxies and might have been shot out of them.
A debate ensued, and almost all astronomers agree that it was one that Dr. Burbidge and his friends finally lost. The overwhelming consensus among astronomers is that the redshifts are what they appear to be, said Peter Strittmatter, director of the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Burbidge’s skepticism extended to cosmology. In 1990, he and four other astronomers, including Drs. Arp and Hoyle, published a broadside in the journal Nature listing arguments against the Big Bang.
Dr. Burbidge preferred instead a version of Dr. Hoyle’s Steady State theory of an eternal universe. In the new version, small, local big bangs originating in the nuclei of galaxies every 20 billion years or so kept the universe boiling. To his annoyance, most other astronomers ignored this view.
In a memoir in 2007, Dr. Burbidge wrote that this quasi-steady state theory was probably closer to the truth than the Big Bang. But he added that “there is such a heavy bias against any minority point of view in cosmology that it may take a very long time for this to occur.”
Despite his contrarian ways, Dr. Burbidge maintained his credibility in the astronomical establishment, serving as director of Kitt Peak from 1978 to 1984 and editing the prestigious Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics for more than 30 years. He was “a very clear-thinking heretic,” Dr. Strittmatter said.
Dr. Strittmatter recalled that as a young astronomer he was terrified of Dr. Burbidge. “Then I learned that what he liked was a good argument,” he said.
The Kitt Peak observatory had been built with support from the National Science Foundation as a sort of counterweight to the famous observatories in California like Mount Wilson and Palomar, whose giant telescopes were privately owned and available to only a few. Dr. Burbidge believed that Kitt Peak should act more as a service facility for all astronomers.
“His idea was to open up astronomy to all qualified astronomers,” Dr. Sandage said.
Dr. Burbidge never lost what Dr. Strittmatter called a “rebel’s instinct.” Dr. Sandage said Dr. Burbidge had called him up three times a week for 40 years to argue about the Big Bang.
“He delighted in bringing up all the details that didn’t quite fit,” Dr. Sandage said. In recent years, he added, as the evidence for the Big Bang mounted, Dr. Burbidge held his ground.
“I just didn’t understand that,” Dr. Sandage said. “I often wondered if he was just arguing with me to keep on the phone.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/science/space/07burbidge.html?ref=science
Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html
In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
Sunday, February 7, 2010
558)Why Light Makes Migraines Worse: Study Traces Pain-Inducing Path From Retina To Brain; Quotes From Blogpost Four Hundred
"Nature is the great daily book of God whose secrets must be found and used for the well-being of humanity"(Aga Khan III, Radio Pakistan, Karachi, Pakistan, February 19th 1950)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Why light makes migraines worse
Study traces pain-inducing path from retina to brain
By Tina Hesman Saey
Web edition : Monday, January 11th, 2010
Crossed wires can be a real headache, especially for people with migraines, a new study shows.
The crisscrossing of nerve fibers in a part of the brain called the thalamus results in increased migraine pain after people are exposed to light, researchers report online January 10 in Nature Neuroscience. The study, which included blind people, reveals that vision isn’t needed for light to spur migraine pain, but that light-sensing cells in the retina do play a role.
Migraines affect about 12 percent of the U.S. population. Light makes the severe headaches even worse in at least 80 percent of migraine sufferers, but until now no one knew how light increased pain.
“There have been no theories as to why light in general makes headache pain worse,” says David Dodick, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz. “That’s what makes this so groundbreaking. It solves a mystery that has been around for many, many, many decades.”
Part of the solution to the mystery came from the study of 20 blind people who regularly suffer from migraines, says Rami Burstein of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Burstein and his colleagues asked the volunteers to rate migraine pain. Six of the volunteers, including Randy Pierce of Nashua, N.H., are completely blind. These volunteers still feel the full power of a migraine, which contrasts with a simple headache. Migraine involves problems with concentration, coordination, speech and, in sighted people, vision.
“A headache is a pain in my head,” Pierce says. “A migraine is a whole body experience…. The entire day afterward is like moving through a fog.”
Loud noises make Pierce’s headaches worse, but he and the other five totally blind participants say being in the light doesn’t make their migraines worse.
But light does affect other blind participants in the study, including Heather Lynn Bird of Rochester, N.Y., who can’t see but can still detect light and dark through light-sensing cells in the retina. On average, these people rated migraine pain in a dark or dim room at 6.2 on a scale from zero to 10. When the lights came on, these people’s pain shot up to an average of 9.2 on the subjective scale, the researchers report.
These findings suggested that nerves in the retina involved in vision were not affecting migraine pain. Instead, non-vision cells in the eye were likely at fault, Burstein says.
Previous work has shown that Pierce and other migraine sufferers have overactive brains and that one particular brain circuit that involves nerve cells in the thalamus gets irritated during migraines. (The details of how the circuit leads to migraines are still unclear.)
The team focused on light-sensing cells known as intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, or melanopsin cells. Unlike the retina’s vision cells, which connect to visual centers in the brain, these melanopsin cells make their way to the thalamus region of the brain, the team found. Melanopsin cells are known for helping set the biological clock that governs daily rhythms, such as sleep. That clock is centered in the hypothalamus.
Burstein and his colleagues traced the nerve fiber wiring from the melanopsin cells in rats’ retinas into the animals’ brains. The team found a neuronal crossroads in the thalamus where the melanopsin fibers sometimes overlap those of cells called dura-sensitive thalamic neurons, which are part of the migraine circuit. Electrical activity occurring in melanopsin cells as they respond to light can stimulate activity in the dura-sensitive cells, the researchers found. The ultimate result is more pain.
Even though the melanopsin and dura-sensitive cells cross, they don’t contact each other directly. The effect the team observed is like having the power cords to the TV and stereo crossed and, when the television is turned on, the stereo comes on too. This type of cross talk between neurons is unusual. Direct contact is normally required for the cells to communicate with each other. More research could uncover molecules released by the melanopsin cells that may be responsible for irritating the migraine-producing circuit.
Similar mechanisms may explain why sounds or smells can trigger migraines or make headache pain worse, says Dodick. The research may also lead to therapies that could reduce light-induced pain, he says.
The study does not show what causes migraines in the first place, says Michael Gold, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh. “From a therapeutic perspective, this is one step further into the brain to discover where migraines originate,” he says. “From a simple clinical perspective, it supports that migraineurs are more than justified for seeking the dark,” he says.
For now, Bird will have to settle for her current method of dealing with light-induced migraine pain. “My best solution at present is to just shut my eyes, keep them shut and hope for the best.”
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/53845/title/Why_light_makes_migraines_worse
Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Why light makes migraines worse
Study traces pain-inducing path from retina to brain
By Tina Hesman Saey
Web edition : Monday, January 11th, 2010
Crossed wires can be a real headache, especially for people with migraines, a new study shows.
The crisscrossing of nerve fibers in a part of the brain called the thalamus results in increased migraine pain after people are exposed to light, researchers report online January 10 in Nature Neuroscience. The study, which included blind people, reveals that vision isn’t needed for light to spur migraine pain, but that light-sensing cells in the retina do play a role.
Migraines affect about 12 percent of the U.S. population. Light makes the severe headaches even worse in at least 80 percent of migraine sufferers, but until now no one knew how light increased pain.
“There have been no theories as to why light in general makes headache pain worse,” says David Dodick, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz. “That’s what makes this so groundbreaking. It solves a mystery that has been around for many, many, many decades.”
Part of the solution to the mystery came from the study of 20 blind people who regularly suffer from migraines, says Rami Burstein of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Burstein and his colleagues asked the volunteers to rate migraine pain. Six of the volunteers, including Randy Pierce of Nashua, N.H., are completely blind. These volunteers still feel the full power of a migraine, which contrasts with a simple headache. Migraine involves problems with concentration, coordination, speech and, in sighted people, vision.
“A headache is a pain in my head,” Pierce says. “A migraine is a whole body experience…. The entire day afterward is like moving through a fog.”
Loud noises make Pierce’s headaches worse, but he and the other five totally blind participants say being in the light doesn’t make their migraines worse.
But light does affect other blind participants in the study, including Heather Lynn Bird of Rochester, N.Y., who can’t see but can still detect light and dark through light-sensing cells in the retina. On average, these people rated migraine pain in a dark or dim room at 6.2 on a scale from zero to 10. When the lights came on, these people’s pain shot up to an average of 9.2 on the subjective scale, the researchers report.
These findings suggested that nerves in the retina involved in vision were not affecting migraine pain. Instead, non-vision cells in the eye were likely at fault, Burstein says.
Previous work has shown that Pierce and other migraine sufferers have overactive brains and that one particular brain circuit that involves nerve cells in the thalamus gets irritated during migraines. (The details of how the circuit leads to migraines are still unclear.)
The team focused on light-sensing cells known as intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, or melanopsin cells. Unlike the retina’s vision cells, which connect to visual centers in the brain, these melanopsin cells make their way to the thalamus region of the brain, the team found. Melanopsin cells are known for helping set the biological clock that governs daily rhythms, such as sleep. That clock is centered in the hypothalamus.
Burstein and his colleagues traced the nerve fiber wiring from the melanopsin cells in rats’ retinas into the animals’ brains. The team found a neuronal crossroads in the thalamus where the melanopsin fibers sometimes overlap those of cells called dura-sensitive thalamic neurons, which are part of the migraine circuit. Electrical activity occurring in melanopsin cells as they respond to light can stimulate activity in the dura-sensitive cells, the researchers found. The ultimate result is more pain.
Even though the melanopsin and dura-sensitive cells cross, they don’t contact each other directly. The effect the team observed is like having the power cords to the TV and stereo crossed and, when the television is turned on, the stereo comes on too. This type of cross talk between neurons is unusual. Direct contact is normally required for the cells to communicate with each other. More research could uncover molecules released by the melanopsin cells that may be responsible for irritating the migraine-producing circuit.
Similar mechanisms may explain why sounds or smells can trigger migraines or make headache pain worse, says Dodick. The research may also lead to therapies that could reduce light-induced pain, he says.
The study does not show what causes migraines in the first place, says Michael Gold, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh. “From a therapeutic perspective, this is one step further into the brain to discover where migraines originate,” he says. “From a simple clinical perspective, it supports that migraineurs are more than justified for seeking the dark,” he says.
For now, Bird will have to settle for her current method of dealing with light-induced migraine pain. “My best solution at present is to just shut my eyes, keep them shut and hope for the best.”
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/53845/title/Why_light_makes_migraines_worse
Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
557)Salim Mansur on free speech as being a crux of western secular democracies; Cannot stand the free speech heat?: Best return to totalitarian bliss.
Quote:
"In protecting Muslims from those who offend them, the West ill-serves Islam and those Muslims who seek its reform. Muslims need untrammelled free speech to awaken to the awareness of how totalitarian and comatose is their culture."
Stifling free speech is not really free
By SALIM MANSUR, QMI Agency
Last Updated: 4th February 2010, 4:14pm
Free speech is not merely an ornamental bauble found in liberal democratic societies. It is the well-fought ground upon which the structures of such societies have been constructed.
It is free speech in practice, or its ideal subscribed to, that has distinguished Europe and western civilization from all others past and present. Its absence or suppression is the main feature of totalitarian culture.
Yet free speech has never been entirely free from siege by special interests.
Except for the United States where free speech is constitutionally protected by the first amendment, the exercise of free speech can still be constrained by the guardians of public interests as we see in the case of the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, indicted and brought to court for offending Muslims in Holland.
The trial of Wilders is as much a step backward from the ideal of free speech as it is indicative of how free people willingly compromise their freedom by forgetting their history.
In indicting Wilders for hate speech, the Dutch, and their Western supporters, have turned their backs to the long line of defenders of free speech as the cornerstone of liberty, from Spinoza and Voltaire to Emile Zola.
Mere footnotes
No modern thinker has written as clearly and forcefully on liberty, and what it means in the most fundamental sense of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, as did John Stuart Mill.
All subsequent writings on the subject are mere footnotes or parenthetical circumlocutions of those who have not abandoned the quest of abridging free speech — even as they present themselves as defenders of freedom — by claiming to protect the rights of others.
Mill contended it would be wrong any time for a government, even if it represented completely the will and opinion of the entire people under its rule, to control or suppress the opinion of an individual. Such coercion, in Mill’s view, was illegitimate.
He wrote: “The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exercised in accordance with public opinion than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
Western societies in general have fallen short of Mill’s expressed ideal of liberty, but any infringement of that ideal has smacked of bad faith. In recent years, multiculturalism was propounded as if to ease the conscience of liberals — those who believe in liberty as Mill wrote about — when they do illiberal things such as penalizing free speech.
Solvent
The irony lost upon those eager to protect others from being offended by the exercise of free speech, particularly when it comes to the subject of religion, is that such offence was the necessary solvent for the reform of Christianity and the church — reforms that contributed to the making of the modern, secular, liberal and democratic West.
In protecting Muslims from those who offend them, the West ill-serves Islam and those Muslims who seek its reform. Muslims need untrammelled free speech to awaken to the awareness of how totalitarian and comatose is their culture.
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2010/02/04/12742651-qmi.html
Related:
Salim Mansur Speaks My Mind With A Clarity That Is Astonishing: "Target The Terrorists, Not The Public"; Quote Of Easy Nash
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/01/541salim-mansur-speaks-my-mind-with.html
Easy Nash
If there are 23,000 jihadist websites and blogsites out there in cyberspace, there is no reason why we should not create 100,000 non-jihadist websites and blogsites: Easy Nash(2007).
If my Blog was a four year undergraduate degree I guess my major would be Science and Religion and my minor would be Politics: Easy Nash(2010).
The mother of all insecurities: 1.6 billion Muslims on the planet and they lather themselves into a dingbatty islamofascist rage if one or two Muslims happen to be pro-zionist: Easy Nash(2010).
"In protecting Muslims from those who offend them, the West ill-serves Islam and those Muslims who seek its reform. Muslims need untrammelled free speech to awaken to the awareness of how totalitarian and comatose is their culture."
Stifling free speech is not really free
By SALIM MANSUR, QMI Agency
Last Updated: 4th February 2010, 4:14pm
Free speech is not merely an ornamental bauble found in liberal democratic societies. It is the well-fought ground upon which the structures of such societies have been constructed.
It is free speech in practice, or its ideal subscribed to, that has distinguished Europe and western civilization from all others past and present. Its absence or suppression is the main feature of totalitarian culture.
Yet free speech has never been entirely free from siege by special interests.
Except for the United States where free speech is constitutionally protected by the first amendment, the exercise of free speech can still be constrained by the guardians of public interests as we see in the case of the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, indicted and brought to court for offending Muslims in Holland.
The trial of Wilders is as much a step backward from the ideal of free speech as it is indicative of how free people willingly compromise their freedom by forgetting their history.
In indicting Wilders for hate speech, the Dutch, and their Western supporters, have turned their backs to the long line of defenders of free speech as the cornerstone of liberty, from Spinoza and Voltaire to Emile Zola.
Mere footnotes
No modern thinker has written as clearly and forcefully on liberty, and what it means in the most fundamental sense of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, as did John Stuart Mill.
All subsequent writings on the subject are mere footnotes or parenthetical circumlocutions of those who have not abandoned the quest of abridging free speech — even as they present themselves as defenders of freedom — by claiming to protect the rights of others.
Mill contended it would be wrong any time for a government, even if it represented completely the will and opinion of the entire people under its rule, to control or suppress the opinion of an individual. Such coercion, in Mill’s view, was illegitimate.
He wrote: “The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exercised in accordance with public opinion than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
Western societies in general have fallen short of Mill’s expressed ideal of liberty, but any infringement of that ideal has smacked of bad faith. In recent years, multiculturalism was propounded as if to ease the conscience of liberals — those who believe in liberty as Mill wrote about — when they do illiberal things such as penalizing free speech.
Solvent
The irony lost upon those eager to protect others from being offended by the exercise of free speech, particularly when it comes to the subject of religion, is that such offence was the necessary solvent for the reform of Christianity and the church — reforms that contributed to the making of the modern, secular, liberal and democratic West.
In protecting Muslims from those who offend them, the West ill-serves Islam and those Muslims who seek its reform. Muslims need untrammelled free speech to awaken to the awareness of how totalitarian and comatose is their culture.
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2010/02/04/12742651-qmi.html
Related:
Salim Mansur Speaks My Mind With A Clarity That Is Astonishing: "Target The Terrorists, Not The Public"; Quote Of Easy Nash
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/01/541salim-mansur-speaks-my-mind-with.html
Easy Nash
If there are 23,000 jihadist websites and blogsites out there in cyberspace, there is no reason why we should not create 100,000 non-jihadist websites and blogsites: Easy Nash(2007).
If my Blog was a four year undergraduate degree I guess my major would be Science and Religion and my minor would be Politics: Easy Nash(2010).
The mother of all insecurities: 1.6 billion Muslims on the planet and they lather themselves into a dingbatty islamofascist rage if one or two Muslims happen to be pro-zionist: Easy Nash(2010).
Friday, February 5, 2010
556)Mathematics vs. Physics: Ibn al-Haytham’s Geometrical Conception of Space and the Refutation of Aristotle’s Physical Definition of Place; from IIS
"....AND SHOULD'NT IB SCIENCE STUDENTS not learn about Ibn al-Haytham, the Muslim scholar who developed modern optics, as well as his predecessors Euclid and Ptolemy, whose ideas he challenged.....The legacy which I am describing actually goes back more than a thousand years, to the time when our forefathers, the Fatimid Imam-Caliphs of Egypt, founded Al-Azhar University and the Academy of Knowledge in Cairo. For many centuries, a commitment to learning was a central element in far-flung Islamic cultures. That commitment has continued in my own Imamat through the founding of the Aga Khan University and the University of Central Asia and through the recent establishment of a new Aga Khan Academies Program."(Aga Khan IV, "The Peterson Lecture" on the International Baccalaureate, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 18 April 2008)
"At the basis of the Muslim religion was the fundamental concept of nature’s unity and the absolute oneness of God.The learning of mathematics was therefore linked to the Muslim religion and developing an understanding of the world, which was helped by knowledge of the Qur’an and vice-versa. The objective was to make students capable of formulating and understanding abstractions and master symbols. Moving from concrete to the abstract, from experience to formulation of ideas and images, and from reality to symbolisation; this preparation was considered essential for improving the understanding of the Universe and its Creator."(Professor Afzal Ahmed, May 2001, Oslo, Norway)
"From the seventh century to the thirteenth century, the Muslim civilizations dominated world culture, accepting, adopting, using and preserving all preceding study of mathematics, philosophy, medicine and astronomy, among other areas of learning. The Islamic field of thought and knowledge included and added to much of the information on which all civilisations are founded. And yet this fact is seldom acknowledged today, be it in the West or in the Muslim world, and this amnesia has left a six hundred year gap in the history of human thought"(Aga Khan IV, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, 1996)
"Education has been important to my family for a long time. My forefathers founded al-Azhar University in Cairo some 1000 years ago, at the time of the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. Discovery of knowledge was seen by those founders as an embodiment of religious faith, and faith as reinforced by knowledge of workings of the Creator's physical world. The form of universities has changed over those 1000 years, but that reciprocity between faith and knowledge remains a source of strength"(Aga Khan IV, 27th May1994, Cambridge, Massachusets, U.S.A.)
"In the great expansion of Muslim culture from the 8th through the 11th century, centres of learning flourished from Persia to Andalusia. I do not have to tell this audience about the glories of Al-Azhar established 1000 years ago by the Fatimids. This audience knows full well about the foresight of al-Ma'mun and the Timurid empire and in taking knowledge from all quarters and using it to benefit their society. As Ibn Khaldun wrote, "the Muslims desired to learn the sciences of foreign nations. They made them their own through translations. They pressed them into the mould of their own views. They took them over into their own language from the non-Arab languages and surpassed the achievements of the non-Arabs in them." (Aga Khan IV at the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Aga Khan University, 1993)
"It is no exaggeration to say that the original Christian universities of Latin West, at Paris, Bologna and Oxford, indeed the whole European renaissance, received a vital influx of new knowledge from Islam -- an influx from which the later western colleges and universities, including those of North Africa, were to benefit in turn"(Aga Khan IV, 16 March 1983, Aga Khan UNiversity, Karachi, Pakistan)
"In Islamic belief, knowledge is two-fold. There is that revealed through the Holy Prophet (s.a.s.) and that which man discovers by virtue of his own intellect. Nor do these two involve any contradiction, provided man remembers that his own mind is itself the creation of God. Without this humility, no balance is possible. With it, there are no barriers. Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Academic Articles
Mathematics vs. Physics: Ibn al-Haytham’s Geometrical Conception of Space and the Refutation of Aristotle’s Physical Definition of Place
Dr Nader El-Bizri
This article was specially written for The Institute of Ismaili Studies website.
AbstractN/A
Download PDF version of the article (116 KB)
Key words
Ibn al-Haytham, Aristotle, Epistemology, Mathematics, Physics, Geometrical conception
Mathematics / Physics
Epistemological reflections on foundational scientific principles become pivotal in the reformative development of specific branches of the sciences. The methodological adjustments that accompany such critical circumstances in the unfolding of scientific knowledge necessitate a reclassification of established concepts by way of accommodating novel theoretical hypotheses or emergent conceptual constructs. Progress within a given scientific discipline depends at times on radical reforms in methodology, which result in rethinking the epistemic models that are shared with other branches in science. To elucidate these dialectical dimensions in the evolution of innovative scientific rationalities, this study considers the phenomenon of ‘the mathematisation of physics’ in the context of history of the exact sciences in classical Islamic civilisation. This line of inquiry is specifically focused on the 11th century geometrical conception of space by the polymath al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen; d. ca. 1041 CE) and his refutation of Aristotle’s physical definition of place.[1]
Mathematical Space
Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrical conception of place (al-makan) as ‘a mathematical spatial extension’ was established in his Discourse on Place (Qawl fi al-makan),[2] which also rested on geometric demonstrations that grounded his rejection of the definition of topos (place) in Book Delta (IV) of Aristotle’s Physics.
Ibn al-Haytham endeavoured to present his geometrical conception of al-makan (place) as a solution to a longstanding problem that remained philosophically unresolved, which, to our knowledge, constituted in its own right the first viable attempt to mathematise ‘place’ in history of science.
Ibn al-Haytham aimed primarily at promoting his geometrical conception of place as ‘spatial extension’ in an attempt to address selected mathematical problems that emerged in reference to unprecedented developments in geometrical transformations (al-naql; like similitude, translation, homothety, affinity), the introduction of motion (al-haraka; kinesis) in geometry, the use of geometric projections in spherics, and the anaclastic properties of conic, cylindrical, and spherical sections; all undertaken within the 9th-10th century prolongations of the Apollonian-Archimedean legacy in mathematics — To mention in this context the research of polymaths of the calibre of the Banu Musa, Thabit ibn Qurra, Ibrahim ibn Sinan, al-Khazin, al-Quhi, al-Sijzi, and Ibn Sahl.
Besides the epistemic tendency to offer mathematical solutions to problems in theoretical philosophy, Ibn al-Haytham’s endeavour in geometrising place was undertaken in view of grounding his own research in mathematical analysis and synthesis (al-tahlil wa-al-tarkib; with implications on the development of infinitesimal mathematics),[3] and in support of his studies on knowable mathematical entities (al-ma'lumat). Ibn al-Haytham also aimed at reorganising most of the notions of geometry and rethinking them anew in terms of motion, and by way of positing an abstract spatial domain that receives geometrical transformations.[4] Consequently, he had to critically reassess the dominant philosophical conceptions of place in his age, which were encumbered by inconclusive theoretical disputes that were principally developed in reaction to Aristotle’s Physics.
Physical Place
Aristotle defined topos (place) as: ‘the innermost primary surface-boundary of the containing body that is at rest, and is in contact with the outermost surface of the mobile contained body’ (Physics, IV, 212a 20-21).[5] The makan of the Aristotelian falasifa or hukama' consisted of a sath muhit or sath hawi (a surrounding surface or a containing enveloping boundary).
In contesting this physical conception of topos, Ibn al-Haytham posited al-makan as a postulated void (khala' mutakhayyal), whose existence is secured in the imagination, like it is the case with invariable geometrical entities. He also held that this ‘postulated void’ consisted of imagined immaterial distances that are between the opposite points of the surfaces surrounding it. He furthermore noted that the imagined distances of a given body, and those of its containing place, get superposed and united in such a way that they become the same distances as mathematical lines having lengths without widths.
Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrical conception of place as a relational extension was ‘ontologically’ neutral.[6] His mathematical notion of al-makan was not simply obtained through a ‘theory of abstraction’ as such, nor was it derived by way of a ‘doctrine of forms’, nor was it grasped as being the (phenomenal) ‘object’ of ‘immediate experience’ or ‘common sense’. Rather, his geometrised place resulted from a mathematical isometric ‘bijection’ function between two sets of relations or distances.[7] Nothing is thus retained of the properties of a body other than extension, which consists of mathematical distances. Accordingly, the makan of a given object is a ‘region of extension’ that is defined by the distances between its points, on which the distances of that object can be applied ‘bijectively’.[8]
It is worth noting here that Aristotle’s definition of place received bold classical critiques in the commentaries on his work, including the objections raised by Philoponus in defence of the conception of topos as interval (diastasis; diastema).[9] However, what primarily distinguishes Ibn al-Haytham from his predecessors is that his critique of Aristotle was mathematical, and, that it was partly auxiliary to his own response to the epistemic need to geometrise place, while those who came before him restricted their objections to the Aristotelian notion of topos within the domain of philosophical deliberations in classical physics.
Geometrical Demonstrations
To offer some highlights of Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrical demonstrations in rejecting Aristotle’s definition of topos, let us consider the case of a parallelepiped (mutawazi al-sutuh; a geometric solid bound by six parallelograms) that occupies a given place delimited by the surfaces enclosing it. If that parallelepiped were to be divided into two parts by a plane that is parallel to one of its surfaces, and is then recomposed, the cumulative size of the parts resulting from its partition would be equal to the magnitude of that parallelepiped prior to being divided, while the total sum of the surface areas of the parts would be greater than that of the parallelepiped prior to its division. Following the Aristotelian definition, and in reference to this partitioned parallelepiped, one would conclude that: an object divided into two parts occupies a place that is larger than the one it occupied prior to its division. Hence, ‘the place of a given body increases while that body does not, and an object of a given magnitude is contained in unequal places’; which is an untenable proposition.[10]
Likewise, if we consider the case of a parallelepiped that we carve with carefully selected geometrical shapes, we would diminish its bodily magnitude while the total sum of its surface areas would increase. Following the Aristotelian definition, and in reference to this carved parallelepiped, one would conclude that: ‘an object that diminishes in size occupies a larger place prior to its diminution in magnitude’; which constitutes an indefensible thesis. Moreover, using mathematical demonstrations, in reference to geometrical solids of equal surface-areas, which are based on studies conducted on figures that are of equal perimeters, Ibn al-Haytham demonstrated that ‘the sphere is the largest in size with respect to all other solids that have equal areas of their enveloping surfaces’ (al-kura a'zam al-ashkal al-lati ihatatuha mutasawiya). Ultimately, the volumetric magnitude of geometric solids remains the same despite changes in their shape (like when modelling a given piece of wax into the shape of a sphere, and then giving it the form of a cylinder, the quantifications of its material volume and the magnitude of its spatial extension remain the same, while its total surface area diminishes when it is transformed from a spherical shape into a cylindrical one).
The geometrical place of a given object is posited as a ‘metric’ of a region of ‘mathematical space’, which is occupied by a given body that is conceived extensionally, and corresponds with its own geometrical place by way of ‘isometric bijection’. The epistemological and historical validity of Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrisation of place was ultimately confirmed in the maturation of mathematics and science in the 17th century conceptions of extension qua space; particularly in reference to the works of Descartes and Leibniz.[11] Furthermore, the prolongations of Euclidean geometry benefited from the geometrisation of place, which among other developments resulted in the emergence of what came to be known in periods following Ibn al-Haytham’s age as: ‘Euclidean space’; namely, an appellation that is coined in relatively modern times, and describes a notion that is historically posterior to the geometry of figures as embodied in Euclid’s Elements (Kitab Uqlidis fi al-usul).[12] After all, the term deployed by Euclid that is closest to a notion of ‘space’ (espace; Raum), as expressed in the Greek appellation: ‘Khora’, is: ‘Khorion’ (Data, Prop. 55; Elements VI, Prop. 25), which designates ‘an area enclosed within the perimeter of a specific geometric abstract figure’.[13]
Philosophical Critique
Ibn al-Haytham’s conception of place was eventually criticised by the Aristotelian philosopher 'Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (fl. 13th cent.) in a treatise titled: Fi al-radd 'ala Ibn al-Haytham fi al-makan (which consisted of an attempted refutation of Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrical definition of place).[14]
Baghdadi argued that Ibn al-Haytham did not logically account for a correspondence/concomitance between a given object and its ‘place’ (qua ‘enveloping surfaces’) as both being subject to change.[15] If a given object changes by way of division/partition and/or diminution in size, its place changes as well, due to the transformation of its shape and its associated surface areas. To explore this proposition, let us reconsider the case of the parallelepiped which was divided and/or carved; in both instances it has been transformed in its shape and associated surfaces, hence its place changed as well. If a divided object becomes two distinct entities, then its shape is likewise transformed into two separate shapes, and its original place is transmuted into two different places with distinct surface areas. The fact that the parallelepiped is divided or carved entails that it is no longer the same entity that it was prior to its division or carving; and so is the case with its place, shape and the total sum of its surface areas, which get transformed into something else. According to Baghdadi, Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrical proofs neglected the fact that a change in a given object leads to a transformation in its shape, the total sum of its surface areas, and the place it occupies. Failing to recognise that the parallelepiped becomes something other than itself, when partitioned or carved, results in neglecting the fact that its shape, place, and the total sum of its surface areas are also transformed. It is hence valid to say that an object occupies a different place when it is divided and/or carved, given that it is no longer the same object per se, but is rather transformed into another sort of entity.
In all of this, Baghdadi presupposed philosophical accounts of the individuation of bodies as a modality by virtue of which he attempted to offer counterexamples to Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrical demonstrations, while also erroneously assuming that the latter’s propositions were reducible to one and the same type of arguments. Moreover, Baghdadi wondered how the actual distances (bi-al-fi'l) of a given body are superposed and united with the imagined potential distances (bi-al-quwwa) of its place. He was unsure whether Ibn al-Haytham considered the distances of a body and those of its place as being potentialities and not actualities; hence positing them as non-existents. He furthermore rejected the claim that the presumably ‘superposed distances’ (al-ab'ad al-mutatabiqa) can be actual existents, since this implies a co-penetration of material entities;[16] hence failing to recognise the epistemic entailments of Ibn al-Haytham’s mathematisation of place as geometric extension.
Baghdadi asserted also that the mathematician judges distances insofar that they are imagined in the mind as being abstracted from matter (mutakhayyala fi al-dhihn), while the physicist grasps them as existing externally (mawjuda fi al-kharij). Yet, the difference between the research of the physicist and that of the mathematician did not only reflect a binary contrast between an Aristotelian metaphysics/physics and a Platonist theory of forms, it rather pointed also to a ‘third’ classical tradition that was ‘Archimedean’, which was not satisfied with the mere philosophical cognition of ‘natural phenomena’, but essentially aimed at investigating them mathematically. It is this third epistemic pathway that inspired Ibn al-Haytham’s ‘geometrisation of place’ and embodied his scientific reform in ‘mathematising physics’.
NOTES
[1] This essay rests on some of my earlier publications, including the following articles: Nader El-Bizri, ‘Epistolary Prolegomena: On Arithmetic and Geometry’, in Epistles of the Brethren of Purity. The Ikhwan al-Safa' and their Rasa'il: An Introduction, ed. Nader El-Bizri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2008), pp. 180-213; Nader El-Bizri, ‘Le problème de l’espace: Approches optique, géométrique et phénoménologique’, in Oggetto e spazio. Fenomenologia dell'oggetto, forma e cosa dai secoli XIII-XIV ai post-cartesiani, ed. Graziella Federici Vescovini and Orsola Rignani, Micrologus Library 24 (Firenze: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008), pp. 59-70; Nader El-Bizri, ‘In Defence of the Sovereignty of Philosophy: al-Baghdadi’s Critique of Ibn al-Haytham’s Geometrisation of Place’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, Vol. 17, Issue 1 (2007), pp. 57-80; Nader El-Bizri, ‘A Philosophical Perspective on Alhazen’s Optics’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, Vol. 15, Issue 2 (2005), pp. 189-218; Nader El-Bizri, ‘La perception de la profondeur: Alhazen, Berkeley et Merleau-Ponty’, Oriens-Occidens: sciences, mathématiques et philosophie de l’antiquité à l’âge classique (Cahiers du Centre d’Histoire des Sciences et des Philosophies Arabes et Médiévales, CNRS), Vol. 5 (2004), pp. 171-184.
[2] For the Arabic critical edition and annotated French translation of this treatise (Fi al-makan; Traité sur le lieu) see: Roshdi Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales du IXe au XIe siècle, Volume IV: Ibn al-Haytham, méthodes géométriques, transformations ponctuelles et philosophie des mathématiques Vol. 4 (London: al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2002), pp. 666-685.
[3] For the Arabic critical edition and annotated French translation of this treatise (Fi al-tahlil wa-al-tarkib; L’Analyse et la synthèse) see: Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 230-391.
[4] For the Arabic critical edition and annotated French translation of this treatise (Fi al-ma'lumat; Les connus) see: Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 444-583.
[5] Aristotle, Physics, ed. W. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936).
[6] I have investigated this ontological question elsewhere in the following articles: Nader El-Bizri, ‘ON KAI KH³RA: Situating Heidegger between the Sophist and the Timaeus’, Studia Phaenomenologica, Vol. IV, Issue 1-2 (2004), pp. 73-98; Nader El-Bizri, ‘Ontopoiesis and the Interpretation of Plato’s Khora’, Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXXXIII (2004), pp. 25-45; Nader El-Bizri, ‘A Phenomenological Account of the Ontological Problem of Space’, Existentia Meletai-Sophias, Vol. XII, Issue 3-4 (2002), pp. 345-364; Nader El-Bizri, ‘Qui-etes vous Khora? Receiving Plato’s Timaeus’, Existentia Meletai-Sophias, Vol. XI, Issue 3-4 (2001), pp. 473-490.
[7] ‘Bijectivity’ describes a mathematical ‘one-to-one correspondence’ function (f ) that is from a given set X to a given set Y such as for every y in Y, there is exactly one x in X such as f(x) = y.
[8] Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 658, 901.
[9] Simplicii in Aristotelis Physicorum Libros Quattuor Priores Commentaria, ed. H. Diels in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, Vol. IX (Berlin, 1882); Simplicius, Corollaries on Place and Time, trans. J. O. Urmson (London: Duckworth, 1992); 601,25-611,10; 604,5-11. See also: Simplicius, On Aristotle, Physics 4.1-5, 10-14, trans. J. O. Urmson (London: Duckworth, 1992); Philoponus, Corollaries on Place and Void, and: Simplicius, Against Philoponus on the Eternity of the World, trans. D. Furley and C. Wildberg (London: Duckworth, 1991).
[10] Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 670-673.
[11] René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, in Œuvres de Descartes, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1965), Vol. 6, p. 36; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, La Caractéristique géométrique, ed. Javier Echeverria, trans. Marc Parmentier (Paris: Vrin, 1995), p. 235.
[12] Euclid, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, vols. 1-3, translated with introduction and commentary by Thomas L. Heath (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 2nd edition. The Greek edition of Euclid’s Elements is preserved in the Teubner Classical Library, 8 vols. with a supplement, titled: Euclides opera omnia, eds. J. L. Heiberg and H. Menge (Leipzig, 1883-1916).
[13] As for instance noted in Euclid’s Data (Dedomena; al-Mu'tayat) Prop. 55 (related to: Elements, VI, Prop. 25): ‘if an area [Khorion] be given in form and in magnitude, its sides will also be given in magnitude’.
[14] For the Arabic edition and annotated French translation of this treatise (Fi al-radd 'ala Ibn al-Haytham fi al-makan; La réfutation du lieu d’Ibn al-Haytham) see: Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 908-953.
[15] Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 914-915.
[16] Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 916-917.
http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=111063
Related:
One mega-post, encompassing five regular posts, on the pioneering 9th century Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham or Alhazen(965CE to 1039CE).
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/296one-mega-post-encompassing-four.html
Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
"At the basis of the Muslim religion was the fundamental concept of nature’s unity and the absolute oneness of God.The learning of mathematics was therefore linked to the Muslim religion and developing an understanding of the world, which was helped by knowledge of the Qur’an and vice-versa. The objective was to make students capable of formulating and understanding abstractions and master symbols. Moving from concrete to the abstract, from experience to formulation of ideas and images, and from reality to symbolisation; this preparation was considered essential for improving the understanding of the Universe and its Creator."(Professor Afzal Ahmed, May 2001, Oslo, Norway)
"From the seventh century to the thirteenth century, the Muslim civilizations dominated world culture, accepting, adopting, using and preserving all preceding study of mathematics, philosophy, medicine and astronomy, among other areas of learning. The Islamic field of thought and knowledge included and added to much of the information on which all civilisations are founded. And yet this fact is seldom acknowledged today, be it in the West or in the Muslim world, and this amnesia has left a six hundred year gap in the history of human thought"(Aga Khan IV, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, 1996)
"Education has been important to my family for a long time. My forefathers founded al-Azhar University in Cairo some 1000 years ago, at the time of the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. Discovery of knowledge was seen by those founders as an embodiment of religious faith, and faith as reinforced by knowledge of workings of the Creator's physical world. The form of universities has changed over those 1000 years, but that reciprocity between faith and knowledge remains a source of strength"(Aga Khan IV, 27th May1994, Cambridge, Massachusets, U.S.A.)
"In the great expansion of Muslim culture from the 8th through the 11th century, centres of learning flourished from Persia to Andalusia. I do not have to tell this audience about the glories of Al-Azhar established 1000 years ago by the Fatimids. This audience knows full well about the foresight of al-Ma'mun and the Timurid empire and in taking knowledge from all quarters and using it to benefit their society. As Ibn Khaldun wrote, "the Muslims desired to learn the sciences of foreign nations. They made them their own through translations. They pressed them into the mould of their own views. They took them over into their own language from the non-Arab languages and surpassed the achievements of the non-Arabs in them." (Aga Khan IV at the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Aga Khan University, 1993)
"It is no exaggeration to say that the original Christian universities of Latin West, at Paris, Bologna and Oxford, indeed the whole European renaissance, received a vital influx of new knowledge from Islam -- an influx from which the later western colleges and universities, including those of North Africa, were to benefit in turn"(Aga Khan IV, 16 March 1983, Aga Khan UNiversity, Karachi, Pakistan)
"In Islamic belief, knowledge is two-fold. There is that revealed through the Holy Prophet (s.a.s.) and that which man discovers by virtue of his own intellect. Nor do these two involve any contradiction, provided man remembers that his own mind is itself the creation of God. Without this humility, no balance is possible. With it, there are no barriers. Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Academic Articles
Mathematics vs. Physics: Ibn al-Haytham’s Geometrical Conception of Space and the Refutation of Aristotle’s Physical Definition of Place
Dr Nader El-Bizri
This article was specially written for The Institute of Ismaili Studies website.
AbstractN/A
Download PDF version of the article (116 KB)
Key words
Ibn al-Haytham, Aristotle, Epistemology, Mathematics, Physics, Geometrical conception
Mathematics / Physics
Epistemological reflections on foundational scientific principles become pivotal in the reformative development of specific branches of the sciences. The methodological adjustments that accompany such critical circumstances in the unfolding of scientific knowledge necessitate a reclassification of established concepts by way of accommodating novel theoretical hypotheses or emergent conceptual constructs. Progress within a given scientific discipline depends at times on radical reforms in methodology, which result in rethinking the epistemic models that are shared with other branches in science. To elucidate these dialectical dimensions in the evolution of innovative scientific rationalities, this study considers the phenomenon of ‘the mathematisation of physics’ in the context of history of the exact sciences in classical Islamic civilisation. This line of inquiry is specifically focused on the 11th century geometrical conception of space by the polymath al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen; d. ca. 1041 CE) and his refutation of Aristotle’s physical definition of place.[1]
Mathematical Space
Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrical conception of place (al-makan) as ‘a mathematical spatial extension’ was established in his Discourse on Place (Qawl fi al-makan),[2] which also rested on geometric demonstrations that grounded his rejection of the definition of topos (place) in Book Delta (IV) of Aristotle’s Physics.
Ibn al-Haytham endeavoured to present his geometrical conception of al-makan (place) as a solution to a longstanding problem that remained philosophically unresolved, which, to our knowledge, constituted in its own right the first viable attempt to mathematise ‘place’ in history of science.
Ibn al-Haytham aimed primarily at promoting his geometrical conception of place as ‘spatial extension’ in an attempt to address selected mathematical problems that emerged in reference to unprecedented developments in geometrical transformations (al-naql; like similitude, translation, homothety, affinity), the introduction of motion (al-haraka; kinesis) in geometry, the use of geometric projections in spherics, and the anaclastic properties of conic, cylindrical, and spherical sections; all undertaken within the 9th-10th century prolongations of the Apollonian-Archimedean legacy in mathematics — To mention in this context the research of polymaths of the calibre of the Banu Musa, Thabit ibn Qurra, Ibrahim ibn Sinan, al-Khazin, al-Quhi, al-Sijzi, and Ibn Sahl.
Besides the epistemic tendency to offer mathematical solutions to problems in theoretical philosophy, Ibn al-Haytham’s endeavour in geometrising place was undertaken in view of grounding his own research in mathematical analysis and synthesis (al-tahlil wa-al-tarkib; with implications on the development of infinitesimal mathematics),[3] and in support of his studies on knowable mathematical entities (al-ma'lumat). Ibn al-Haytham also aimed at reorganising most of the notions of geometry and rethinking them anew in terms of motion, and by way of positing an abstract spatial domain that receives geometrical transformations.[4] Consequently, he had to critically reassess the dominant philosophical conceptions of place in his age, which were encumbered by inconclusive theoretical disputes that were principally developed in reaction to Aristotle’s Physics.
Physical Place
Aristotle defined topos (place) as: ‘the innermost primary surface-boundary of the containing body that is at rest, and is in contact with the outermost surface of the mobile contained body’ (Physics, IV, 212a 20-21).[5] The makan of the Aristotelian falasifa or hukama' consisted of a sath muhit or sath hawi (a surrounding surface or a containing enveloping boundary).
In contesting this physical conception of topos, Ibn al-Haytham posited al-makan as a postulated void (khala' mutakhayyal), whose existence is secured in the imagination, like it is the case with invariable geometrical entities. He also held that this ‘postulated void’ consisted of imagined immaterial distances that are between the opposite points of the surfaces surrounding it. He furthermore noted that the imagined distances of a given body, and those of its containing place, get superposed and united in such a way that they become the same distances as mathematical lines having lengths without widths.
Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrical conception of place as a relational extension was ‘ontologically’ neutral.[6] His mathematical notion of al-makan was not simply obtained through a ‘theory of abstraction’ as such, nor was it derived by way of a ‘doctrine of forms’, nor was it grasped as being the (phenomenal) ‘object’ of ‘immediate experience’ or ‘common sense’. Rather, his geometrised place resulted from a mathematical isometric ‘bijection’ function between two sets of relations or distances.[7] Nothing is thus retained of the properties of a body other than extension, which consists of mathematical distances. Accordingly, the makan of a given object is a ‘region of extension’ that is defined by the distances between its points, on which the distances of that object can be applied ‘bijectively’.[8]
It is worth noting here that Aristotle’s definition of place received bold classical critiques in the commentaries on his work, including the objections raised by Philoponus in defence of the conception of topos as interval (diastasis; diastema).[9] However, what primarily distinguishes Ibn al-Haytham from his predecessors is that his critique of Aristotle was mathematical, and, that it was partly auxiliary to his own response to the epistemic need to geometrise place, while those who came before him restricted their objections to the Aristotelian notion of topos within the domain of philosophical deliberations in classical physics.
Geometrical Demonstrations
To offer some highlights of Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrical demonstrations in rejecting Aristotle’s definition of topos, let us consider the case of a parallelepiped (mutawazi al-sutuh; a geometric solid bound by six parallelograms) that occupies a given place delimited by the surfaces enclosing it. If that parallelepiped were to be divided into two parts by a plane that is parallel to one of its surfaces, and is then recomposed, the cumulative size of the parts resulting from its partition would be equal to the magnitude of that parallelepiped prior to being divided, while the total sum of the surface areas of the parts would be greater than that of the parallelepiped prior to its division. Following the Aristotelian definition, and in reference to this partitioned parallelepiped, one would conclude that: an object divided into two parts occupies a place that is larger than the one it occupied prior to its division. Hence, ‘the place of a given body increases while that body does not, and an object of a given magnitude is contained in unequal places’; which is an untenable proposition.[10]
Likewise, if we consider the case of a parallelepiped that we carve with carefully selected geometrical shapes, we would diminish its bodily magnitude while the total sum of its surface areas would increase. Following the Aristotelian definition, and in reference to this carved parallelepiped, one would conclude that: ‘an object that diminishes in size occupies a larger place prior to its diminution in magnitude’; which constitutes an indefensible thesis. Moreover, using mathematical demonstrations, in reference to geometrical solids of equal surface-areas, which are based on studies conducted on figures that are of equal perimeters, Ibn al-Haytham demonstrated that ‘the sphere is the largest in size with respect to all other solids that have equal areas of their enveloping surfaces’ (al-kura a'zam al-ashkal al-lati ihatatuha mutasawiya). Ultimately, the volumetric magnitude of geometric solids remains the same despite changes in their shape (like when modelling a given piece of wax into the shape of a sphere, and then giving it the form of a cylinder, the quantifications of its material volume and the magnitude of its spatial extension remain the same, while its total surface area diminishes when it is transformed from a spherical shape into a cylindrical one).
The geometrical place of a given object is posited as a ‘metric’ of a region of ‘mathematical space’, which is occupied by a given body that is conceived extensionally, and corresponds with its own geometrical place by way of ‘isometric bijection’. The epistemological and historical validity of Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrisation of place was ultimately confirmed in the maturation of mathematics and science in the 17th century conceptions of extension qua space; particularly in reference to the works of Descartes and Leibniz.[11] Furthermore, the prolongations of Euclidean geometry benefited from the geometrisation of place, which among other developments resulted in the emergence of what came to be known in periods following Ibn al-Haytham’s age as: ‘Euclidean space’; namely, an appellation that is coined in relatively modern times, and describes a notion that is historically posterior to the geometry of figures as embodied in Euclid’s Elements (Kitab Uqlidis fi al-usul).[12] After all, the term deployed by Euclid that is closest to a notion of ‘space’ (espace; Raum), as expressed in the Greek appellation: ‘Khora’, is: ‘Khorion’ (Data, Prop. 55; Elements VI, Prop. 25), which designates ‘an area enclosed within the perimeter of a specific geometric abstract figure’.[13]
Philosophical Critique
Ibn al-Haytham’s conception of place was eventually criticised by the Aristotelian philosopher 'Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (fl. 13th cent.) in a treatise titled: Fi al-radd 'ala Ibn al-Haytham fi al-makan (which consisted of an attempted refutation of Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrical definition of place).[14]
Baghdadi argued that Ibn al-Haytham did not logically account for a correspondence/concomitance between a given object and its ‘place’ (qua ‘enveloping surfaces’) as both being subject to change.[15] If a given object changes by way of division/partition and/or diminution in size, its place changes as well, due to the transformation of its shape and its associated surface areas. To explore this proposition, let us reconsider the case of the parallelepiped which was divided and/or carved; in both instances it has been transformed in its shape and associated surfaces, hence its place changed as well. If a divided object becomes two distinct entities, then its shape is likewise transformed into two separate shapes, and its original place is transmuted into two different places with distinct surface areas. The fact that the parallelepiped is divided or carved entails that it is no longer the same entity that it was prior to its division or carving; and so is the case with its place, shape and the total sum of its surface areas, which get transformed into something else. According to Baghdadi, Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrical proofs neglected the fact that a change in a given object leads to a transformation in its shape, the total sum of its surface areas, and the place it occupies. Failing to recognise that the parallelepiped becomes something other than itself, when partitioned or carved, results in neglecting the fact that its shape, place, and the total sum of its surface areas are also transformed. It is hence valid to say that an object occupies a different place when it is divided and/or carved, given that it is no longer the same object per se, but is rather transformed into another sort of entity.
In all of this, Baghdadi presupposed philosophical accounts of the individuation of bodies as a modality by virtue of which he attempted to offer counterexamples to Ibn al-Haytham’s geometrical demonstrations, while also erroneously assuming that the latter’s propositions were reducible to one and the same type of arguments. Moreover, Baghdadi wondered how the actual distances (bi-al-fi'l) of a given body are superposed and united with the imagined potential distances (bi-al-quwwa) of its place. He was unsure whether Ibn al-Haytham considered the distances of a body and those of its place as being potentialities and not actualities; hence positing them as non-existents. He furthermore rejected the claim that the presumably ‘superposed distances’ (al-ab'ad al-mutatabiqa) can be actual existents, since this implies a co-penetration of material entities;[16] hence failing to recognise the epistemic entailments of Ibn al-Haytham’s mathematisation of place as geometric extension.
Baghdadi asserted also that the mathematician judges distances insofar that they are imagined in the mind as being abstracted from matter (mutakhayyala fi al-dhihn), while the physicist grasps them as existing externally (mawjuda fi al-kharij). Yet, the difference between the research of the physicist and that of the mathematician did not only reflect a binary contrast between an Aristotelian metaphysics/physics and a Platonist theory of forms, it rather pointed also to a ‘third’ classical tradition that was ‘Archimedean’, which was not satisfied with the mere philosophical cognition of ‘natural phenomena’, but essentially aimed at investigating them mathematically. It is this third epistemic pathway that inspired Ibn al-Haytham’s ‘geometrisation of place’ and embodied his scientific reform in ‘mathematising physics’.
NOTES
[1] This essay rests on some of my earlier publications, including the following articles: Nader El-Bizri, ‘Epistolary Prolegomena: On Arithmetic and Geometry’, in Epistles of the Brethren of Purity. The Ikhwan al-Safa' and their Rasa'il: An Introduction, ed. Nader El-Bizri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2008), pp. 180-213; Nader El-Bizri, ‘Le problème de l’espace: Approches optique, géométrique et phénoménologique’, in Oggetto e spazio. Fenomenologia dell'oggetto, forma e cosa dai secoli XIII-XIV ai post-cartesiani, ed. Graziella Federici Vescovini and Orsola Rignani, Micrologus Library 24 (Firenze: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008), pp. 59-70; Nader El-Bizri, ‘In Defence of the Sovereignty of Philosophy: al-Baghdadi’s Critique of Ibn al-Haytham’s Geometrisation of Place’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, Vol. 17, Issue 1 (2007), pp. 57-80; Nader El-Bizri, ‘A Philosophical Perspective on Alhazen’s Optics’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, Vol. 15, Issue 2 (2005), pp. 189-218; Nader El-Bizri, ‘La perception de la profondeur: Alhazen, Berkeley et Merleau-Ponty’, Oriens-Occidens: sciences, mathématiques et philosophie de l’antiquité à l’âge classique (Cahiers du Centre d’Histoire des Sciences et des Philosophies Arabes et Médiévales, CNRS), Vol. 5 (2004), pp. 171-184.
[2] For the Arabic critical edition and annotated French translation of this treatise (Fi al-makan; Traité sur le lieu) see: Roshdi Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales du IXe au XIe siècle, Volume IV: Ibn al-Haytham, méthodes géométriques, transformations ponctuelles et philosophie des mathématiques Vol. 4 (London: al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2002), pp. 666-685.
[3] For the Arabic critical edition and annotated French translation of this treatise (Fi al-tahlil wa-al-tarkib; L’Analyse et la synthèse) see: Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 230-391.
[4] For the Arabic critical edition and annotated French translation of this treatise (Fi al-ma'lumat; Les connus) see: Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 444-583.
[5] Aristotle, Physics, ed. W. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936).
[6] I have investigated this ontological question elsewhere in the following articles: Nader El-Bizri, ‘ON KAI KH³RA: Situating Heidegger between the Sophist and the Timaeus’, Studia Phaenomenologica, Vol. IV, Issue 1-2 (2004), pp. 73-98; Nader El-Bizri, ‘Ontopoiesis and the Interpretation of Plato’s Khora’, Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXXXIII (2004), pp. 25-45; Nader El-Bizri, ‘A Phenomenological Account of the Ontological Problem of Space’, Existentia Meletai-Sophias, Vol. XII, Issue 3-4 (2002), pp. 345-364; Nader El-Bizri, ‘Qui-etes vous Khora? Receiving Plato’s Timaeus’, Existentia Meletai-Sophias, Vol. XI, Issue 3-4 (2001), pp. 473-490.
[7] ‘Bijectivity’ describes a mathematical ‘one-to-one correspondence’ function (f ) that is from a given set X to a given set Y such as for every y in Y, there is exactly one x in X such as f(x) = y.
[8] Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 658, 901.
[9] Simplicii in Aristotelis Physicorum Libros Quattuor Priores Commentaria, ed. H. Diels in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, Vol. IX (Berlin, 1882); Simplicius, Corollaries on Place and Time, trans. J. O. Urmson (London: Duckworth, 1992); 601,25-611,10; 604,5-11. See also: Simplicius, On Aristotle, Physics 4.1-5, 10-14, trans. J. O. Urmson (London: Duckworth, 1992); Philoponus, Corollaries on Place and Void, and: Simplicius, Against Philoponus on the Eternity of the World, trans. D. Furley and C. Wildberg (London: Duckworth, 1991).
[10] Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 670-673.
[11] René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, in Œuvres de Descartes, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1965), Vol. 6, p. 36; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, La Caractéristique géométrique, ed. Javier Echeverria, trans. Marc Parmentier (Paris: Vrin, 1995), p. 235.
[12] Euclid, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, vols. 1-3, translated with introduction and commentary by Thomas L. Heath (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 2nd edition. The Greek edition of Euclid’s Elements is preserved in the Teubner Classical Library, 8 vols. with a supplement, titled: Euclides opera omnia, eds. J. L. Heiberg and H. Menge (Leipzig, 1883-1916).
[13] As for instance noted in Euclid’s Data (Dedomena; al-Mu'tayat) Prop. 55 (related to: Elements, VI, Prop. 25): ‘if an area [Khorion] be given in form and in magnitude, its sides will also be given in magnitude’.
[14] For the Arabic edition and annotated French translation of this treatise (Fi al-radd 'ala Ibn al-Haytham fi al-makan; La réfutation du lieu d’Ibn al-Haytham) see: Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 908-953.
[15] Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 914-915.
[16] Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales, Vol. 4 (2002), pp. 916-917.
http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=111063
Related:
One mega-post, encompassing five regular posts, on the pioneering 9th century Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham or Alhazen(965CE to 1039CE).
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/296one-mega-post-encompassing-four.html
Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
555)Recommended Reading Lists On Various Subjects From The Institute Of Ismaili Studies, London, UK; Quotes From Blogpost Four Hundred.
"THE FIRST IS THE CENTRALITY of quality education as an element in the Islamic tradition. It is appropriate that I highlight this matter today, for Bangladesh is the first Muslim country in which we have laid a new Academy foundation stone...........World and faith are inseparable in Islam. Faith and learning are also profoundly interconnected. The Holy Qur’an sees the discovery of knowledge as a spiritual responsibility, enabling us to better understand and more ably serve God’s creation. Our traditional teachings remind us of our individual obligation to seek knowledge unto the ends of the earth - and of our social obligation to honor and nurture the full potential of every human life...........The beauty of Creation is a function of its variety. A fully homogenized world would be far less attractive and interesting."(Aga Khan IV, May 2oth 2008, Dhaka, Bangladesh)
"....AND SHOULD'NT IB SCIENCE STUDENTS not learn about Ibn al-Haytham, the Muslim scholar who developed modern optics, as well as his predecessors Euclid and Ptolemy, whose ideas he challenged.....The legacy which I am describing actually goes back more than a thousand years, to the time when our forefathers, the Fatimid Imam-Caliphs of Egypt, founded Al-Azhar University and the Academy of Knowledge in Cairo. For many centuries, a commitment to learning was a central element in far-flung Islamic cultures. That commitment has continued in my own Imamat through the founding of the Aga Khan University and the University of Central Asia and through the recent establishment of a new Aga Khan Academies Program."(Aga Khan IV, "The Peterson Lecture" on the International Baccalaureate, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 18 April 2008)
"The second great historical lesson to be learnt is that the Muslim world has always been wide open to every aspect of human existence. The sciences, society, art, the oceans, the environment and the cosmos have all contributed to the great moments in the history of Muslim civilisations. The Qur’an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God’s creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)
“Parts of the Ummah are concerned about the relationship between Muslims and the contemporary knowledge society, which is now principally rooted in the West. It is my deepest conviction, my deepest conviction, that we must make that knowledge society our own, in keeping with the Alid tradition towards the intellect, but always doing so within the ethics of our faith. Thus, I have sought from my Jamat your Nazrana of time and knowledge.”(Aga Khan IV, Paris, France, July 11th 2007)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
These reading lists are always useful for those who wish to delve into various subjects more deeply:
Reading List: Muslim Contributions to Science
Burnett, C. Scientific Weather Forecasting in the Middle Ages: The Writings of Al-Kindi. London, 2000
Burnett, C., Hogendijk, J. P., Plofker, K., and Yano, M. (eds.), Studies in the History of the Exact Sciences in Honour of David Pingree. Leiden: Brill, 2004
Dallal, A. An Islamic Response to Greek Astronomy. Leiden: Brill, 1995
Dhanani, A. The Physical Theory of Kalam: Atoms, Space and Void in Basrian Mu’tazili Cosmology. Leiden: Brill, 1994
Freudenthal, G. Science in Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Traditions. Aldershot: Variorum, 2005
Hogendijk, J. P. Ibn al-Haytham's Completion of the Conics. New York - Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1985
Langermann, Y. T. Ibn al-Haytham's On the Configuration of the World. New York, 1990
Morrison, R. G. Islam and Science: The Intellectual Career of Nizam al-Din al-Nisaburi. London – New York: Routledge, 2007
Nasr, S. H. An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993
Ragep, J. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s Memoir on Astronomy, 2 vols. - Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences. New York - Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1993
Rashed, R. Les Mathématiques infinitésimales du IXe au XIe siècle, 5 vols. London: al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1993-2006
Rashed, R. The Development of Arabic Mathematics: Between Arithmetic and Algebra - Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 156. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.
Rashed, R. and Morelon, R. (eds.), Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, 3 vols. London-New York: Routledge, 1996, rep. 2000
Rashed, R. Omar Khayyam the Mathematician. New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2000.
Rashed, R. Geometry and Dioptrics in Classical Islam. London: al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2005
Sabra, A. I. (ed. trans.). The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham, 2 vols. London: Warburg Institute, 1989
Sabra, A. I. Optics, Astronomy and Logic: Studies in Arabic Science and Philosophy. Aldershot: Variorum, 1994
Sabra, A.I., and Hogendijk, J. P. (eds.), The enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003
Saliba, G. Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007
Saliba, G. A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories During the Golden Age of Islam. New York: New York University Press, 1994
Savage-Smith, E. and Edson, E. Medieval Views of the Cosmos. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2004
Savage-Smith, E. and Pormann, P. Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007
Sezgin, F. (ed.). Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 12 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1967-2000
Syed, M. H. Islam and Science. New Delhi: Anmol Publications PVT. Ltd., 2005
Turner, H. R. Science in Medieval Islam. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995
Reading List: Intellectual Traditions in Islam
a) Islamic Philosophy and Theology
Ess, Josef van. The Flowering of Muslim Theology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Mutahhari, Murtada. Understanding Islamic Sciences, Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism. London: Islamic College for Advanced Studies Publications, 2002.
Nasr, Sayyid Hussein. Knowledge and the Sacred. New York: State University of New York Press, 1989.
____ . Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present. New York: State University of New York Press, 2006.
____ and Oliver Leaman. History of Islamic Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2001.
____ . An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines. New York: State University of New York, 1993.
____ . Classification of Knowledge in Islam: A Study in Islamic Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Islamic Texts Society, 1999.
____ . Three Muslim Sages. Oxford: Caravan Books, 1964. Izutsu, Toshihiko. The Concept and Reality of Existence. Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, 1971.
b) Islamic Philosophy
Adamson, P. and R. C. Taylor, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
____ . Al-Kindi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Belo, C. Chance and Determinism in Avicenna and Averroes. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
de Callataÿ, G. Ikhwan al-Safa’: A Brotherhood of Idealists on the Fringe of Orthodox Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005.
Druart, T.-A. Arabic Philosophy, East and West: Continuity and Interaction. Washington DC: Center for Contemporary Arabic Studies, 1988.
El-Bizri, Nader. The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger. Binghamton, New York: Global Publications, SUNY at Binghamton, 2000.
Goodman, L. E. Islamic Humanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
____ . Avicenna. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Gutas, D. Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works. Leiden: Brill, 1988.
____ . Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1998; repr. 2002.
____ , ed. Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism in Medieval Islam. Aldershot: Variorum, 2005.
Kemal, S. The Philosophical Poetics of Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes: The Aristotelian Reception. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Khalidi, M. A., ed. Medieval Islamic Philosophical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Khalidi, T. Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Kennedy-Day, Kiki. Books on Definition in Islamic Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Mahdi, M. Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Marmura, M. Probing in Islamic Philosophy: Studies in the Philosophies of Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali and Other Major Muslim Thinkers. Binghamton, New York: Global Publications, SUNY at Binghamton, 2005.
McGinnis, J. and Reisman, D. C., ed. Interpreting Avicenna: Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islam. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Montgomery, J. E., ed. Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy from the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank. Leuven: Peeters, 2006.
Moosa, Ebrahim. Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Nasr, S. H. and O. Leaman, ed. History of Islamic Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
Netton, I. R. Allah Transcendent: Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Cosmology. Richmond: Curzon Press, 1989; repr. 1994.
____ . Muslim Neoplatonists. An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Reisman, D. C. Making the Avicennan Tradition: The Transmission, Contexts, and Structures of Ibn Sina’s al-Mubahathat. The Discussions. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
Shehadi, F. Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam. Leiden: Brill, 1995.
Stone, G. B. Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
van Ess, J. The Flowering of Muslim Theology, tr. J. M. Todd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Wisnovsky, R. Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Yazdi, M. H. The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992.
c) Mysticism and the Esoteric Tradition
Abun-Nasr, Jamil M. Muslim Communities of Grace: The Sufi Brotherhoods in Islamic Religious Life. London: C. Hurst, 2007.
Addas, Claude and David Streight. Ibn ‘Arabi: The Voyage of No Return. Islamic Texts Society, 2000.
Afifi, Abu al-‘Ala. The Mystical Philosophy of Ibn Arabi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939.
Amuli, Sayyid Haydar. Inner Secrets of the Path, tr. from Arabic by Asadullah al-Dhaakir Yate. Zahra publications, 1989.
Arberry, Arthur J. The Doctrine of the Sufis: Kitab al-Ta’arruf li-madhab ahl al-tasawwuf, translated from the Arabic of Abu Bakr al-Kalabadhi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935.
____. The Book of Truthfulness. Kitab al-sidq, by Abu Sa’id al-Kharraz, ed. and tr. from the Istanbul unicum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937.
____. The Mawaqif and Mukhatabat of Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd‘l-Jabbar al-Niffari. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.
____, tr. Muslim Saints and Mystics: Episodes from the ‘Tadhkirat al-Auliya’ (Memorial of the Saints) by Farid al-Din Attar.
Baldic, Julian. Mystical Islam: An Introduction to Sufism, London: I.B.Tauris, 1989.
Chittick, William. Sufism: A Beginner’s Guide. One World Publications, 2007.
Corbin, Henry and Ralph Manheim. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. Bollingen Series, 1998.
____ . Temple and Contemplation, tr. Philip Sherard. London: Kegan Paul, 1986.
____. The Man Of Light In Iranian Sufism. Omega Publications, 1994.
Ernst, Carl W. Teachings of Sufism. Boston MA: Shambala, 1999.
Ernst, Carl W. The Shambhala Guide to Sufism. Boston: Shambhala, 1997.
Fakhry, Majid. A Short Introduction to Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism. Oneworld Publications, 1977.
Ibn Arabi, Muhiyddin. Meccan Revelations, tr. Cyrille Chodkiewicz, Denis Gril and David Streight, ed. Michel Chodkiewicz.
Izutsu, Toshihiko. Creation and the Timeless Order: Essays in Islamic Mystical Philosophy. White Cloud Press, 1994.
Knysh, Alexander D. Islamic Mysticism: A Short History. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
Meier, Fritz. Essays on Islamic Piety and Mysticism, tr. John O’Kane, ed. Bernd Radtke. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
Morewedge, Parviz. Essays in Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Mysticism. Global Scholarly Publications, 2003.
Nasr, Sayyid Hossein. Living Sufism. Mandala Publishers, 1980.
____. The Pilgrimage of Life and the Wisdom of Rumi. Foundation for Traditional Studies, 2007.
Nicholson, R. A. Studies in Islamic Mysticism. London: Routledge, 2001.
____. ‘Kitab al-Luma’ fi al-tasawwuf’ by Abu Nas al-Sarraj, with critical notes and abstracts. Kessinger Publishing, 2007.
Papan-Matin, Firoozeh and Michael Fishbein. The Unveiling of Secrets. Kashf Al-Asrar: The Visionary Autobiography of Ruzbihan al-Baqli, 1128-1209 AD. Leiden: Brill, 2005.
al-Qushayri, Abu’l-Qasim. Epistle on Sufism: al-Risala alqushayriyya fi ‘ilm al-tasawwuf, tr. Alexander Knysh and Mohammad Isa. Great Books of Islamic Civilization. Reading: Garnet Publishing Limited, 2007.
Radtke, Bernd and John O’Kane. The Concept of Sainthood in Early Islamic Mysticism: Two Works by al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi. London: Routledge, 1996.
Ritter, Hellmut and John O’Kane: The Ocean of the Soul: Men, the World and God in the Stories of Farid Al-Din ‘Attar. Handbook of Oriental Studies: Section 1, the Near and Middle East. 2003.
Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimension of Islam, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.
Sells, Michael A. Early Islamic Mysticism. Classics of Western Spirituality, Paulist Press, 1995.
al-Sulami, al-Hussayn. The Way of Sufi Chivalry, tr. Toscun Bayrak al-Jerrahi. Inner Traditions, 1991.
For these and other lists see under August 2009:
Reading lists on the Approaches to the Study of Islam , General Works on Islam and Muslims , History , Modern Period , Shi'i Islam , Intellectual Traditions in Islam , Qur'an and its Interpretation , Law in Muslim Context , Muslim Rituals and Practices , Arts and Architecture in the Muslim World , Muslim Contributions to Science and Civil Society in a Muslim Context .
http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=109162&l=en
Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
"....AND SHOULD'NT IB SCIENCE STUDENTS not learn about Ibn al-Haytham, the Muslim scholar who developed modern optics, as well as his predecessors Euclid and Ptolemy, whose ideas he challenged.....The legacy which I am describing actually goes back more than a thousand years, to the time when our forefathers, the Fatimid Imam-Caliphs of Egypt, founded Al-Azhar University and the Academy of Knowledge in Cairo. For many centuries, a commitment to learning was a central element in far-flung Islamic cultures. That commitment has continued in my own Imamat through the founding of the Aga Khan University and the University of Central Asia and through the recent establishment of a new Aga Khan Academies Program."(Aga Khan IV, "The Peterson Lecture" on the International Baccalaureate, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 18 April 2008)
"The second great historical lesson to be learnt is that the Muslim world has always been wide open to every aspect of human existence. The sciences, society, art, the oceans, the environment and the cosmos have all contributed to the great moments in the history of Muslim civilisations. The Qur’an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God’s creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)
“Parts of the Ummah are concerned about the relationship between Muslims and the contemporary knowledge society, which is now principally rooted in the West. It is my deepest conviction, my deepest conviction, that we must make that knowledge society our own, in keeping with the Alid tradition towards the intellect, but always doing so within the ethics of our faith. Thus, I have sought from my Jamat your Nazrana of time and knowledge.”(Aga Khan IV, Paris, France, July 11th 2007)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
These reading lists are always useful for those who wish to delve into various subjects more deeply:
Reading List: Muslim Contributions to Science
Burnett, C. Scientific Weather Forecasting in the Middle Ages: The Writings of Al-Kindi. London, 2000
Burnett, C., Hogendijk, J. P., Plofker, K., and Yano, M. (eds.), Studies in the History of the Exact Sciences in Honour of David Pingree. Leiden: Brill, 2004
Dallal, A. An Islamic Response to Greek Astronomy. Leiden: Brill, 1995
Dhanani, A. The Physical Theory of Kalam: Atoms, Space and Void in Basrian Mu’tazili Cosmology. Leiden: Brill, 1994
Freudenthal, G. Science in Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Traditions. Aldershot: Variorum, 2005
Hogendijk, J. P. Ibn al-Haytham's Completion of the Conics. New York - Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1985
Langermann, Y. T. Ibn al-Haytham's On the Configuration of the World. New York, 1990
Morrison, R. G. Islam and Science: The Intellectual Career of Nizam al-Din al-Nisaburi. London – New York: Routledge, 2007
Nasr, S. H. An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993
Ragep, J. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s Memoir on Astronomy, 2 vols. - Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences. New York - Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1993
Rashed, R. Les Mathématiques infinitésimales du IXe au XIe siècle, 5 vols. London: al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1993-2006
Rashed, R. The Development of Arabic Mathematics: Between Arithmetic and Algebra - Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 156. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.
Rashed, R. and Morelon, R. (eds.), Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, 3 vols. London-New York: Routledge, 1996, rep. 2000
Rashed, R. Omar Khayyam the Mathematician. New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2000.
Rashed, R. Geometry and Dioptrics in Classical Islam. London: al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2005
Sabra, A. I. (ed. trans.). The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham, 2 vols. London: Warburg Institute, 1989
Sabra, A. I. Optics, Astronomy and Logic: Studies in Arabic Science and Philosophy. Aldershot: Variorum, 1994
Sabra, A.I., and Hogendijk, J. P. (eds.), The enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003
Saliba, G. Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007
Saliba, G. A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories During the Golden Age of Islam. New York: New York University Press, 1994
Savage-Smith, E. and Edson, E. Medieval Views of the Cosmos. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2004
Savage-Smith, E. and Pormann, P. Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007
Sezgin, F. (ed.). Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 12 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1967-2000
Syed, M. H. Islam and Science. New Delhi: Anmol Publications PVT. Ltd., 2005
Turner, H. R. Science in Medieval Islam. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995
Reading List: Intellectual Traditions in Islam
a) Islamic Philosophy and Theology
Ess, Josef van. The Flowering of Muslim Theology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Mutahhari, Murtada. Understanding Islamic Sciences, Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism. London: Islamic College for Advanced Studies Publications, 2002.
Nasr, Sayyid Hussein. Knowledge and the Sacred. New York: State University of New York Press, 1989.
____ . Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present. New York: State University of New York Press, 2006.
____ and Oliver Leaman. History of Islamic Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2001.
____ . An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines. New York: State University of New York, 1993.
____ . Classification of Knowledge in Islam: A Study in Islamic Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Islamic Texts Society, 1999.
____ . Three Muslim Sages. Oxford: Caravan Books, 1964. Izutsu, Toshihiko. The Concept and Reality of Existence. Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, 1971.
b) Islamic Philosophy
Adamson, P. and R. C. Taylor, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
____ . Al-Kindi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Belo, C. Chance and Determinism in Avicenna and Averroes. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
de Callataÿ, G. Ikhwan al-Safa’: A Brotherhood of Idealists on the Fringe of Orthodox Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005.
Druart, T.-A. Arabic Philosophy, East and West: Continuity and Interaction. Washington DC: Center for Contemporary Arabic Studies, 1988.
El-Bizri, Nader. The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger. Binghamton, New York: Global Publications, SUNY at Binghamton, 2000.
Goodman, L. E. Islamic Humanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
____ . Avicenna. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Gutas, D. Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works. Leiden: Brill, 1988.
____ . Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1998; repr. 2002.
____ , ed. Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism in Medieval Islam. Aldershot: Variorum, 2005.
Kemal, S. The Philosophical Poetics of Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes: The Aristotelian Reception. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Khalidi, M. A., ed. Medieval Islamic Philosophical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Khalidi, T. Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Kennedy-Day, Kiki. Books on Definition in Islamic Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Mahdi, M. Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Marmura, M. Probing in Islamic Philosophy: Studies in the Philosophies of Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali and Other Major Muslim Thinkers. Binghamton, New York: Global Publications, SUNY at Binghamton, 2005.
McGinnis, J. and Reisman, D. C., ed. Interpreting Avicenna: Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islam. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Montgomery, J. E., ed. Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy from the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank. Leuven: Peeters, 2006.
Moosa, Ebrahim. Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Nasr, S. H. and O. Leaman, ed. History of Islamic Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
Netton, I. R. Allah Transcendent: Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Cosmology. Richmond: Curzon Press, 1989; repr. 1994.
____ . Muslim Neoplatonists. An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Reisman, D. C. Making the Avicennan Tradition: The Transmission, Contexts, and Structures of Ibn Sina’s al-Mubahathat. The Discussions. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
Shehadi, F. Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam. Leiden: Brill, 1995.
Stone, G. B. Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
van Ess, J. The Flowering of Muslim Theology, tr. J. M. Todd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Wisnovsky, R. Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Yazdi, M. H. The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992.
c) Mysticism and the Esoteric Tradition
Abun-Nasr, Jamil M. Muslim Communities of Grace: The Sufi Brotherhoods in Islamic Religious Life. London: C. Hurst, 2007.
Addas, Claude and David Streight. Ibn ‘Arabi: The Voyage of No Return. Islamic Texts Society, 2000.
Afifi, Abu al-‘Ala. The Mystical Philosophy of Ibn Arabi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939.
Amuli, Sayyid Haydar. Inner Secrets of the Path, tr. from Arabic by Asadullah al-Dhaakir Yate. Zahra publications, 1989.
Arberry, Arthur J. The Doctrine of the Sufis: Kitab al-Ta’arruf li-madhab ahl al-tasawwuf, translated from the Arabic of Abu Bakr al-Kalabadhi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935.
____. The Book of Truthfulness. Kitab al-sidq, by Abu Sa’id al-Kharraz, ed. and tr. from the Istanbul unicum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937.
____. The Mawaqif and Mukhatabat of Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd‘l-Jabbar al-Niffari. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.
____, tr. Muslim Saints and Mystics: Episodes from the ‘Tadhkirat al-Auliya’ (Memorial of the Saints) by Farid al-Din Attar.
Baldic, Julian. Mystical Islam: An Introduction to Sufism, London: I.B.Tauris, 1989.
Chittick, William. Sufism: A Beginner’s Guide. One World Publications, 2007.
Corbin, Henry and Ralph Manheim. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. Bollingen Series, 1998.
____ . Temple and Contemplation, tr. Philip Sherard. London: Kegan Paul, 1986.
____. The Man Of Light In Iranian Sufism. Omega Publications, 1994.
Ernst, Carl W. Teachings of Sufism. Boston MA: Shambala, 1999.
Ernst, Carl W. The Shambhala Guide to Sufism. Boston: Shambhala, 1997.
Fakhry, Majid. A Short Introduction to Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism. Oneworld Publications, 1977.
Ibn Arabi, Muhiyddin. Meccan Revelations, tr. Cyrille Chodkiewicz, Denis Gril and David Streight, ed. Michel Chodkiewicz.
Izutsu, Toshihiko. Creation and the Timeless Order: Essays in Islamic Mystical Philosophy. White Cloud Press, 1994.
Knysh, Alexander D. Islamic Mysticism: A Short History. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
Meier, Fritz. Essays on Islamic Piety and Mysticism, tr. John O’Kane, ed. Bernd Radtke. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
Morewedge, Parviz. Essays in Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Mysticism. Global Scholarly Publications, 2003.
Nasr, Sayyid Hossein. Living Sufism. Mandala Publishers, 1980.
____. The Pilgrimage of Life and the Wisdom of Rumi. Foundation for Traditional Studies, 2007.
Nicholson, R. A. Studies in Islamic Mysticism. London: Routledge, 2001.
____. ‘Kitab al-Luma’ fi al-tasawwuf’ by Abu Nas al-Sarraj, with critical notes and abstracts. Kessinger Publishing, 2007.
Papan-Matin, Firoozeh and Michael Fishbein. The Unveiling of Secrets. Kashf Al-Asrar: The Visionary Autobiography of Ruzbihan al-Baqli, 1128-1209 AD. Leiden: Brill, 2005.
al-Qushayri, Abu’l-Qasim. Epistle on Sufism: al-Risala alqushayriyya fi ‘ilm al-tasawwuf, tr. Alexander Knysh and Mohammad Isa. Great Books of Islamic Civilization. Reading: Garnet Publishing Limited, 2007.
Radtke, Bernd and John O’Kane. The Concept of Sainthood in Early Islamic Mysticism: Two Works by al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi. London: Routledge, 1996.
Ritter, Hellmut and John O’Kane: The Ocean of the Soul: Men, the World and God in the Stories of Farid Al-Din ‘Attar. Handbook of Oriental Studies: Section 1, the Near and Middle East. 2003.
Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimension of Islam, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.
Sells, Michael A. Early Islamic Mysticism. Classics of Western Spirituality, Paulist Press, 1995.
al-Sulami, al-Hussayn. The Way of Sufi Chivalry, tr. Toscun Bayrak al-Jerrahi. Inner Traditions, 1991.
For these and other lists see under August 2009:
Reading lists on the Approaches to the Study of Islam , General Works on Islam and Muslims , History , Modern Period , Shi'i Islam , Intellectual Traditions in Islam , Qur'an and its Interpretation , Law in Muslim Context , Muslim Rituals and Practices , Arts and Architecture in the Muslim World , Muslim Contributions to Science and Civil Society in a Muslim Context .
http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=109162&l=en
Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
554)No 10, Ayats(Signs) In The Universe Series:Marine Animal Steals Marine Plant's Photosynthetic Genes Then Kicks Back With No Need To Feed;Chor Salo
"The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being"(Aga Khan III, April 4th 1952, Karachi, Pakistan)
"And the more we discover, the more we know, the more we penetrate just below the surface of our normal lives - the more our imagination staggers.........What we feel, even as we learn, is an ever-renewed sense of wonder, indeed, a powerful sense of awe – and of Divine inspiration.....the Power and the Mystery of Allah as the Lord of Creation"(Aga Khan IV, Ottawa, Canada, December 6th 2008)
"......The Quran tells us that signs of Allah’s Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation - in the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the clouds and the seas, the winds and the waters...."(Aga Khan IV, Kampala, Uganda, August 22 2007)
"Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain which Allah sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which they Trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth; (Here) indeed are Signs for the people of intellect"(Noble Quran)
"Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain which Allah sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which they Trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth; (Here) indeed are Signs for the people of intellect"(Noble Quran)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Text Size 
SEA SLUG STEALS GENES FOR GREENS, MAKES CHLOROPHYLL LIKE A PLANT
Animal shown to manufacture a key photosynthetic compound
By Susan Milius
February 13th, 2010; Vol.177 #4 (p. 10)
Text Size
STOLEN GREENThe kleptomaniac sea slugElysia chlorotica feeds on algae by sucking out the innards of filaments. The slug takes in the little algal organelles for photosynthesizing and, researchers now say, can also manufacture the compound, chlorophyll a.Nicholas E. Curtis and Ray Martinez
SEATTLE — It’s easy being green for a sea slug that has stolen enough genes to become the first animal shown to make chlorophyll like a plant.
Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.
The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.
“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.
Microbes swap genes readily, but Zardus said he couldn’t think of another natural example of genes flowing between multicellular kingdoms.
Pierce emphasized that this green slug goes far beyond animals such as corals that host live-in microbes that share the bounties of their photosynthesis. Most of those hosts tuck in the partner cells whole in crevices or pockets among host cells. Pierce’s slug, however, takes just parts of cells, the little green photosynthetic organelles called chloroplasts, from the algae it eats. The slug’s highly branched gut network engulfs these stolen bits and holds them inside slug cells.
Some related slugs also engulf chloroplasts but E. chlorotica alone preserves the organelles in working order for a whole slug lifetime of nearly a year. The slug readily sucks the innards out of algal filaments whenever they’re available, but in good light, multiple meals aren’t essential. Scientists have shown that once a young slug has slurped its first chloroplast meal from one of its few favored species of Vaucheria algae, the slug does not have to eat again for the rest of its life. All it has to do is sunbathe.
But the chloroplasts need a continuous supply of chlorophyll and other compounds that get used up during photosynthesis. Back in their native algal cells, chloroplasts depended on algal cell nuclei for the fresh supplies. To function so long in exile, “chloroplasts might have taken a go-cup with them when they left the algae,” Pierce said.
There have been previous hints, however, that the chloroplasts in the slug don’t run on stored-up supplies alone. Starting in 2007, Pierce and his colleagues, as well as another team, found several photosynthesis-related genes in the slugs apparently lifted directly from the algae. Even unhatched sea slugs, which have never encountered algae, carry “algal” photosynthetic genes.
At the meeting, Pierce described finding more borrowed algal genes in the slug genome for enzymes in a chlorophyll-synthesizing pathway. Assembling the whole compound requires some 16 enzymes and the cooperation of multiple cell components. To see whether the slug could actually make new chlorophyll a to resupply the chloroplasts, Pierce and his colleagues turned to slugs that hadn’t fed for at least five months and had stopped releasing any digestive waste. The slugs still contained chloroplasts stripped from the algae, but any other part of the hairy algal mats should have been long digested, he said.
After giving the slugs an amino acid labeled with radioactive carbon, Pierce and his colleagues identified a radioactive product as chlorophyll a. The radioactively tagged compound appeared after a session of slug sunbathing but not after letting slugs sit in the dark. A paper with details of the work is scheduled to appear in the journal Symbiosis.
Zardus, who says that he tries to maintain healthy skepticism as a matter of principle, would like to hear more about how the team controlled for algal contamination. The possibilities for the borrowed photosynthesis are intriguing though, he says. Mixing the genomes of algae and animals could certainly complicate tracing out evolutionary history. In the tree of life, he said, the green sea slug “raises the possibility of branch tips touching.”
“Bizarre,” said Gary Martin, a crustacean biologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “Steps in evolution can be more creative than I ever imagined.”
Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/
In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
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