Seeking the Origins of Modern Science?Review Article by George Saliba, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science, Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University. Toby E. Huff. The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pb. ed., 1995. xiv, 409 pp. Hb. ISBN 0 521 43496 3. Pb. 14.95 (US$19.95), ISBN 0 521 49833 3. “It is not altogether easy to break the habit of thinking of history as blindly groping toward a goal that the West alone was clever enough to reach. . . .” A. C. Graham1 The question of the origins of modern science has been debated for years and will continue to be debated as long as the history of science is still written as the history of various scientific traditions modified by cultural labels such as Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Indian and Arabic/ Islamic. And I am sure it is obvious to all that such terminology simply masks a clear ideological, political and, at times, even hegemonic language. For all pre-modern scientific traditions, the classificatory principle of a particular tradition seems to be linguistic in nature, contrary to what is usually done in the case of modern science itself. Yet, while it is easy to understand why a scientific book written in the pre-modern period, whether in Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian or Turkish, may be readily classified as belonging to a particular culture and tradition, it is not quite clear in which language a modern scientific text must be written to allow its affiliation with modern science. As historians of science survey the various scientific traditions, they seem to be constantly prepared to shift the criteria that they use to classify the scientific works which they encounter. No one would dispute the classification of a scientific text written in Chinese or Greek as belonging to the Chinese or Greek cultural spheres respectively. But when it comes to other scientific works, say texts written in Arabic, Persian, Turkish or Urdu, for example, the problem becomes slightly more complicated and those same historians of science drop linguistic classificatory terminology to resort instead to a cultural/religious terminology which designates such works as Islamic. In the case of modern science, both linguistic and cultural/religious designators seem to be dropped and French, English, Italian, German and even Japanese scientific works may be described as modern, with the underlying assumption that all these works must have something in common that is neither linguistic, nor cultural, nor religious, with the vague term Western, as in Western science, used to describe them. A corollary of this methodological chaos is the notion that there is a definable cultural entity out there that can be called the West, with its own independent characteristics, and an equally clearly definable scientific tradition that can be called modern science. In addition, no one seems to question the proposition that the modern scientific tradition made its first appearance in this very ambiguous West and research is ongoing to determine why this phenomenon took place there and nowhere else. Toby E. Huffs The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West is one more work which follows this line of enquiry. Huff is by no means the first person to attempt to explain why modern science arose in the West and not in the context of another culture. People like Joseph Needham, in his famous Grand Titration,2 or Max Weber, in several of his works, have made similar attempts in the past. In the case of Needham, the question gained much more urgency when he managed to demonstrate that, at the time when modern science was supposed to have been born in the Westnamely, during the European Renaissance of the sixteenth centuryboth the Chinese and Islamic civilizations had attained a level of scientific knowledge, especially in natural science, which was superior to that in the West. And yet, modern science was born in the West and not in those other civilizations. Needhams attempt to understand why this happened had the unintended result of making the criteria for modern science, and the vague definitions of it, identical to the criteria and definitions which would be applied to Western science. During that process, another unspoken and rather ill-considered principle also emerged, namely, that one should assess the value and contribution of the sciences of other cultures in terms of the specific aspects of those sciences that were incorporated within the accumulative body of modern science, while passing over other features of those same sciences in total silence. Thus, in the case of Chinese science, the discovery of the geographically-orienting magnet became an acceptable Chinese scientific achievement because it could be translated, through intermediary