Ahead Of Their Time

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Like other medieval scholars, Arabs believed that astrology was just as much a science as astronomy, and were convinced that the movement of stars and planets influenced an individual's life from birth. One of the small wonders of the show is a richly detailed horoscope, dating from 14th century Baghdad, designed for someone born under the signs of Venus and Taurus. In the middle of the paper fragment, Venus is depicted playing a lute and sitting on a bull, Taurus; along the bottom border Mars is shown as a warrior, Saturn as an old man, Jupiter as a judge and Mercury as a scribe. Another manuscript illustration from 17th century India, Astrologers Working on a Nativity, shows a procession of musicmakers and gift bearers wending their way through palace walls toward a newborn who would grow up to be the 14th century warrior Tamerlane. In the midst of the busy scene, seven astrologers consult their texts and instruments.

Although many of the era's intellectual and religious leaders didn't fully accept the tenets of astronomy, for example, they did allow Arab thinkers to pursue such expressions of free thought. The ruling Muslim caliphs financed scientific endeavors to enhance their own power and prestige. At first, scholars used the support to translate scientific classics from China, Greece, India and Mesopotamia. Soon, however, Muslim intellectuals were not content just to reproduce others' works, and began to elaborate on them, making their own important discoveries and innovations.

Muslim mathematicians took principles developed in Greece, such as Euclid's theories of numbers and geometry, and the Indian concept of zero, as the basis for developing such new disciplines as calculus and trigonometry. Of the early math books on view, the illustrated Treatise on Geometry is significant for its author, the Muslim king of Saragossa, Spain, and its date of 1080. Similarly, Arabs absorbed the theoretical concepts of Greek medicine, adding to them the idea of scientifically monitoring patients in a special place — a hospital. One page in a Treatise on Anatomy, written in Persia in 1411, details digestive organs, veins and arteries outlined on a human body. And a 1632 copy of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine delineates the basic skeletal system.

The curators have put together an imaginative collection of some 200 artifacts, lent by 33 mainly Western museums, including books, maps, quadrants, globes, musical instruments, tiles, paintings and weapons. But many of the Age's great achievements no longer exist, and can only be appreciated through images. Though the Arabs lived in a desert world, they contributed to the science of hydraulics, as recorded in miniatures, a video and a reproduction of a water-pumping system. The clever automatons they built to amuse the aristocracy are seen only in paintings. One of these, from the early 14th century, limns an elaborate drinking cup topped by a bird that rotates and whistles as the liquid is poured into the base.

The show ends with a room of Islamic ceramics traced with elegant calligraphy based on mathematical principles of proportion, and gilded and enameled glassware that required sophisticated technology to keep the brilliant colors from running together. Yet for all its treasures, the show never solves the modern puzzle of Arab science: What happened to the openness to ideas, the intellectual ferment, the spirit of innovation that created all these wonderful objects? Perhaps one day soon the Institute of the Arab World can mount a new exhibition that will help provide the answer.