Iranian Leviathan by Jason Reza Jorjani

Author:Jason Reza Jorjani [Jorjani, Jason Reza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history of Islam, Zarathustra, Buddha, Iranian history
ISBN: 9781912975402
Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd.
Published: 2019-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

7.2 The Iranian Renaissance

Within the span of two hundred years after the Arabian Conquest, various semi-autonomous Iranian fiefdoms arose, and by about a thousand AD, they had undercut the Arabian Caliphate to the point that they were effectively self-governing and were promulgating an Iranian Renaissance in science and literature. Foremost among these was the Buyid Dynasty (circa 950–1050) who were Shi’ites that originated in Daylam, a mountainous part of the Caspian Sea coastal region of Hyrcania.68 Under the reign of Azod al-Dawla Fanna Khosrow (949–983), the Buyid realm went from being a powerful semi-autonomous fiefdom to becoming a vast Iranian state that encompassed most of contemporary Iran and managed to seize control of Baghdad, the capital of the Caliphate, turning the former Arab master into an Iranian vassal by 975.69 Instead of destroying the Sunni Caliphate, Khosrow decided to use its machinery in order to turn the Sunni Arab majority governed by it into vassals of his Shi’ite Iranian state. Meanwhile, he became the first ruler since the Sassanian period to adopt the title Shâhanshâh of Iran. It is well known that 90% of the scientists of the so-called Islamic “Golden Age” of science and technology were actually Iranians; the Buyid seizure of Baghdad meant that these scientists, who had hitherto been forced to pen their treatises in Arabic under the oppressive “patronage” of the Caliphate, would soon have been able to research in their native Persian.

Musa Khwarizmi (780–850), known in the West as Algoritmi, was a Persian from Khwarazm in the greater Khorasan region (part of present-day Uzbekistan). The historian Al-Tabari gives his full name as Mohammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi al-Majussiyy or “the Magian.” So it seems that, despite the pious forward to his Algebra, necessitated by his being in the court of the Caliph Al-Mamun, Khwarizmi was known to have been an Iranian heathen. He arrived at the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations.

Khwarizmi, the Magian, called one method that he used for this al-Jabr, the source of the word “Algebra.”70 It is “restoration” or adding a number to both sides of an equation in order to consolidate terms.71 For example, x2 = 40x – 4x2 is consolidated into 5x2 = 40x. Another method, al-muqâbala, puts the same type of quantities on the same side of an equation, as in the case where x2 + 14 = x + 5 is elegantly transformed into x2 + 9 = x. Algebra is a unifying theory allowing rational numbers, irrational numbers, and geometric magnitudes (which the Greeks handled separately) to be abstracted as algebraic objects. This is the beginning of the development of equations so elemental that they can define an infinite class of problems, rather than Greek mathematics that begins from a definite set of problems to be solved. But it also had wide practical applicability to problems of trade, surveying, and legal inheritance. “Algorithm” is a term derived from Khwarizmi’s Latinized name.72

Khwarizmi’s Concerning Hindu Numbers popularized the Hindu or “Arabic” numeral system.73 Khwarizmi also revised Ptolemy’s geographical data for the parts of Earth under the Caliphate’s control.

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