Episode 11: What a Muslim Scientist discovered through studying nature
What if you had free time in abundance to live your life without worry? You had all of your day-to-day worries taken care of with residual income. All you would have was free time to look at the world around you.
What if you were able to journey to distant locations, observing the lives of plants, animals, and humans? Each one had its own unique qualities. Variations in the plant kingdom - trees with varying colors of leaves, fruits of different hues and tastes, along with vegetables of different sizes and shapes. When you turned your attention to animals, you would immediately see the various breeds of dogs, felines, horses, cattle, and innumerable variations.
You would move among people and hear languages, more than one thousand in number, all communicating their deepest thoughts, greatest fears, and highest aspirations. The cuisine, manners, religions would be so varied that you would be surprised that all of these people could share one planet. In fact, so diverse are people that you could travel from one city to another, the city to the countryside, or one village to another and hear startling differences within the very same language being spoken.
You would be able to look at all of this and see that they are all sharing the very same reality, that reality being creation. But once you witnessed all of this - the varying degrees of imperfection and perfection, qualities of human, animal, and plant - you would start to see under this wide diversity eye-catching similarities. These similarities would then lead you to see that all of these things share a common substance that they are made from, that common substance being matter.
Once you came to realize that this creation was composed of matter, you would see that the strongest, mightiest human shares qualities with the gorilla, the hyena with the wolf, the zebra with the giraffe, and even the tiger with the lion. Further examination into this creation of matter would cause you to ask the following question: Could it be that because all of these creations from matter share so many qualities, characteristics, and similarities, that they are from a common ancestor?
As the gorilla and the human share the same number of digits on each hand and foot, the hyena resembles the wolf, and the lion the tiger, is it not the case that one came from the other? Or is it that, on account of the fact that they resemble one another, this is evidence not of a common ancestor but indeed a common Creator?
It is this conclusion that was reached by the giant, the great scientist and giant of Baghdad, by the name of Abu Hanifa al-Dinawari. Living more than 1,200 years ago in the most advanced civilization of the time, al-Dinawari wrote his seven-volume masterpiece 'The Book of Life,' which explained this interconnectedness of life. That all created things from matter point towards one singular reality, a common creator of all.
This book, the first of its kind in the field that would later be called zoology, examined each animal and human being, grouping them into categories based upon logical and observable data. This data would then be used to examine them in their day-to-day pursuits and come to conclusions about them. These observations would entail things such as stool, urine, and blood samples, along with hefty notes regarding habitat, leisure time, play, dentition, and also characteristics that suited the said creature to its environment.
This work would later be translated into Latin and find itself in Europe during the Renaissance period, only to be condensed by European scientists and then later used without citation to prove the theory of evolution. It is only much later that English speakers would come to know of the great achievements of the scientist, and this would come after many centuries in which this knowledge would be lost to many. Indeed, some from the very city of Baghdad who spoke the same language of Arabic as this giant in science have long forgotten him.
But perhaps by reviving his name, contributions to science, and his monumental work, perhaps this could be the beginning of the revival of the sciences.