‘Crucible of Light’ by Cambridge academic is a tour de force reassessment of Islam and Christianity

Elizabeth Drayson’s Crucible of Light: Islam and the forging of Europe from the 8th to the 21st century is a hugely accomplished evaluation of the dynamics in play between the Muslim and Christian cultures.

Published by Picador Books later this month, it’s a challenging read. Physically, for starters – it’s 621 pages in paperback format.

Crucible of Light also exposes many Western narratives as goal-oriented – that is, designed to show the dynamics between Western and Islamic thought as competitive rather than collaborative, with the West as winners. These narratives do a disservice to both cultures.

This mosaic of immersive historical storytelling, which took three years to write, puts it all in perspective. Thanks then, to the author, an emeritus fellow in Spanish at Murray Edwards College, who has tracked the minutiae of 12 centuries of global history, presented here with dedication and skill, to conclusions far from foregone.

This timely reassessment of the way the Christian world intersects with the Muslim world is, the author suggests, an opportunity for “rethinking the nature of European identity as both Christian and also Islamic”.

And yes it’s challenging but it’s so rewarding! The narrative builds slowly. The Roman and Persian empires of antiquity were “mirror images in terms of military expansion, legal systems, cultural and architectural attainment”. Gradually, the power of Rome waned and that of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) grew stronger.

In 570AD, the story goes up a gear. A man called Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn’ Abd al-Muttalib was born into the Quraysh tribe. In his 20s, Muhammad began calling for submission/surrender to the will of a single, all-knowing God. Less than a century later, the new Islamic empire was thriving under the prophet’s guidance.

“Islam,” we read, “with its one God, had triumphed over paganism in Arabia, as Christianity had 300 years earlier in the pagan Roman Empire.” From central Asia to North Africa, the new caliphate took root. The traditional nomadic life was set aside in the building of this new empire, and conflict with the West – and its own vision of a singular, all-knowing God – moved inexorably closer.”

By the 9th century eastern Christian writers took to talking of Islam as the religion of the Antichrist. It was, of course, propaganda - the early iteration of fake news - designed to ensure that the two empires could not co-mingle.

But co-mingle they did, human nature being what it is, and the results were beneficial for everyone – not least the foremost scholars of Cambridge’s first major foray on the world stage (Crick, Watson and Turing having reinvigorated the intellectual franchise for the modern age).

Building on the knowledge of the ancient civilizations of Greece, India, and Persia, Islamic scholars made significant advancements in algebra, trigonometry, astronomy, and medicine, during the Islamic golden age of the 8th to 13th centuries. Crucible of Light describes how the 13th century Maragha Revolution in Persia advanced the heliocentric view of the solar system – a revolutionary and even seditious view that the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than the other way round.

Maragha, a town north of Tehran, had an observatory in 1259, built by the ruler Hülagü Khan, with Nasir al-Din al-Tusi as its director. Al-Tusi assembled scholars from as far away as China. The team critically examined and revised the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system, the accepted view for centuries. Al-Tusi’s 13th-century diagrams of planetary models are almost exactly the same as those of Copernicus, whose On the Revelations of the Celestial Spheres was published in 1543 – “conclusive evidence”, writes the Dr Drayson, “that Copernicus’ ideas were borrowed from the work of these Islamic scientists”.

Need more proof? How about the very origins of the scientific method upon which human progress is based? The scientific method – the process of objectively establishing facts through testing and experimentation – was first outlined to a European audience by Francis Bacon, he of Trinity College, in his tome New Method, published in 1620. But, as Crucible of Light describes, the Islamic physicist Abu al-Hassan ibn al-Haytham pre-empted him by many centuries. Al-Haytham, who kept meticulous records of his scientific experiments, was born in Basra in 965AD. The records sanctify the process of observation and urge “exercising caution in regard to conclusions”. Practitioners of the new scientific method, said Al-Haytham, should “seek the truth and not be swayed by opinion”. Quite a challenge, because theirs was, as much as ours, an era of fake news and pseudo-magical thinking.

Al-Haytham’s greatest work was Book of Optics (Kitab al-Manathir), published in seven volumes between 1010 and 1021. In his work on the refraction of light with his contemporary Avicenna, al-Haytham suggested that the speed of light was finite, thereby ordering what had previously been open-ended.

Book of Optics “became widely known across Europe”, and indeed “al-Haytham’s pioneering work was the bedrock of Newton’s work on lenses and prisms and his study of the nature of light”, we learn. We learn that Newton, whose Opticks – one of the Scientific Revolution’s most significant works – was published in 1704, was the beneficiary of Muslim scholarship which proposed that light was not instantaneous, but had a measurable speed. There’s a wonderful passage in Crucible of Light in which the author speculates at what Islamic books Newton had on his bookshelf... more than is coventionally admitted to be sure!

Islam also made substantial contributions to Europe’s social life. Coffee – and coffee house culture – were introduced to the West from the Ottoman Empire, along with carpets, public health initiatives and advanced mechanical clocks. For about 200 years, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottoman empire and Europe shared ideas from north Africa to Spain in the west, to Constantinople and any number of European neighbours in the east.

But fault lines opened up. The education system in the Ottoman world became skewed towards the learning of religious doctrine, and the discoveries slowed. The Christian world, meanwhile, stopped being able to tolerate any other type of empire – the Vatican banned the Koran in 1564, at a time when the English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch empires were busy hoovering up new territory across the globe.

The Ottoman empire see-sawed violently between a basic form of democracy and extreme autocratic rule. It gradually ceded territories and, after the Turkish nationalist leadership genocided 1.5 million Armenians in 1915/16, the game was up. The Ottoman empire was declared no more in 1923 – but the mistrust and misunderstandings continued, and still continue, to the detriment of all.

So what are we left with? Yes the Christian gift to Islam was “the technological and scientific development that enabled them to stand with a firm footing in the modern world” – but “Christian Europe has a greater debt”, says the author, because “it owes to Islamic civilisation the knowledge that kickstarted the entire cultural revolution of western Europe in the first place”.

Curious about the author’s intent, I asked Dr Drayson whether she believes a re-evaluation of the history of Western thought is required to include the dance between Islam and Christendom?

“Yes, I do,” she replied. “I think the influence of Islamic science on Copernicus and Newton needs to be given far more prominence, as does that same influence on Renaissance scientific ideas in general. One of the central tenets of the book is the crucial importance of rethinking the nature of European identity as both Christian and also Islamic.”

Is there any chance of the Ottoman empire staging a comeback, for instance through the oil states?

“I imagine President Erdogan would like to think so! Turkey is certainly a country with massive potential and growing influence internationally, but I can’t see the Ottoman empire ever returning as such. The formation of a new combined Islamic power might be possible in the future, though probably not as an empire. It’s an interesting question and could be a great debate topic.”

Meanwhile this ambitious, revisionist book deserves to stand among the very best historical assessments. If it doesn’t become a standard in the tradition of Gibbon’sThe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a severe injustice will have taken place.

- Published by Picador,Crucible of Light: Islam and the forging of Europe from the 8th to the 21st century is on sale from 25 September.