While he identifies more as an agnostic than an atheist, astrophysicist and science populariser Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a favourite among anti-theist activists and their followers. This is not just because of his advocacy of a scientific world view and general scepticism toward supernatural claims – it is also because he makes occasional forays into history. Tyson presents easily digestible stories on the history of science that, generally, present science and religion in opposition to each other in what are essentially fables upholding the Conflict Thesis: a model of science history that historians have long since rejected. One of these is Tyson’s repeated claim that the Golden Age of Islamic learning was brought to an end by Al-Ghazali, who condemned rationalism and declared mathematics “the work of the devil”. Tyson repeats this tale, despite it being total and complete nonsense.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a story he likes to tell. It is a moral fable, drawing on history, that he uses to teach the valuable lesson that if we turn from reason and science, we can veer into a dark age of superstition. He begins it with some photos of the World Trade Centre in New York that he took on the morning of September 11, 2001, and he talks about the reaction to this attack by US President George W. Bush. This can be seen in this video of one of several times he told this story:

I put these [photos of the World Trade Centre towers] up because a few days after this President Bush – I don’t remember where he said this on the steps of the White House and the Rose Garden or at the Capitol – in an attempt to distinguish “we” from “they” …. he loosely quotes a phrase out of the Bible by saying “Our God is the God who named the stars”. Now this is before I was on his rolodex, okay, because I could have helped them out there. The fact is, of all the stars that have names, two-thirds of them have Arabic names. So this was not … I don’t think [this was] his intent with that message, okay. While the constellations are Greek and Roman, the names are Arabic all right [displays slide with a long list of Arabic star names] and the list just goes on and on and on and on.

(3.37 mins)

The reason Tyson cannot remember where exactly Bush gave this speech and said this foolish thing is the speech never happened and Bush did not say what Tyson claims. Tyson initially tried to insist he had heard this speech in the wake of 9/11 and had made a note of it at the time, but it is clear he misremembered another, quite unremarkable and perfectly reasonable comment Bush made in 2003. This is also why some YouTube videos of Tyson telling his Arabic star names fable omit the Bush anecdote and begin with the star names list part of the story. After displaying this list, Tyson goes on:

How does this happen? How do you get stars named with Arabic names? How does this happen? And it happens because, of course, because …. there was this particularly fertile period that’s three hundred year period [when] the intellectual centre of the world was Baghdad. Baghdad – it was completely open to all visitors, all travellers: Jews, Christians, doubters – which today we might call atheists – they were all there exchanging ideas. Oh, all of them … and it was that period we had the advances in, like, engineering and biology and medicine and mathematics, all right?

(4.47 mins)

In his various versions of this talk Tyson the goes on to note the variety of things we have today that are a result of the Islamic Golden Age he is describing here: algebra, algorithms, astronomical terms like azimuth and horizon and even Arabic numerals (which he always neglects to note the Muslims adopted from the Indians). But he then tells a tale of how this remarkable period came to a terrible and sudden end. “Something happened”, he assures his audiences dramatically. In some versions of his story, such as this one, he gets in a kick against those silly historians, who – unlike Tyson the astrophysicist – apparently do not understand the real story:

Then it all stopped. It ended. It ended. If you’re historian typically you are just …. you focus on history as marked by changes of kings and leaders and wars. That’s the lens through which many historians look at the past, and so if you ask people [they] say “Oh the Mongols sacked Baghdad and so that’s why it all ended.” If that were the only force operating then later, when the Islamic culture rose [again] you would still see this tradition of scientific innovation. But it has not recovered – it has not come back at all compared to what was going on in that 300 years.

(2.05 mins)

That Tyson seriously thinks historians typically view history as “changes of kings and leaders and wars” shows how shallow and facile his grasp of history is. No historian of ideas and the development of science works this way, and (unlike Tyson) none would attribute something so complex to such a simplistic single cause. The reason the sack of Baghdad in 1258 is often referred to in relation to the end of the Islamic Golden Age is that this was a major event in the end of the Abbasid caliphate’s sponsorship of learning, but no historian presents this single event, as disruptive as it was, as the sole cause of the end of this fairly loosely defined period of sponsored scholarship. Tyson, of course, thinks he knows better than these (wholly imaginary) foolish historians. And he has the villain of his story to introduce:

[If] you read the writings of Al-Ghazali, who is a Muslim cleric, and he … he was to Islam what Saint Augustine was to Christianity. What he did was he taught you how to be a good Muslim he taught you how to read the Quran and how to obey the commands that … because back then people were just interpreting it for themselves. He came along … he was a an academic scholar … he interpreted the Quran. He said “this is how you must do it”. First [he] has social influence and then political and cultural influence. And basically his interpretation took over. And in that interpretation it included the perspective that the manipulation of numbers is the work of the Devil. This cuts the kneecaps out of any mathematical advances that would unfold math is the language of the universe. If you take that out of your personal equation, you no longer contribute to the advance of human understanding of that universe.

(3.01 mins)

So, according to Tyson’s fable, the wicked Al-Ghazali singlehandedly brought the scientific wonders of the Islamic Golden Age to an end by declaring mathematics to be the work of Satan. This, in Tyson’s telling, not only ended the Golden Age, but brought about an end to science in the Islamic world from that point on. He tries to demonstrate this claim by leaping a whole 800 years to the present day and noting the backgrounds of Nobel Prize recipients:

Take a look at the Nobel Prize from 1900 to 2010. I can do this do this for the Jews, for example. How many Jews in the world? It’s like fifteen million, tops. Tops. fifteen million out of seven billion people. These are the numbers of Jews who have won the Nobel Prize in the sciences [displays slide]. Twenty-five [per cent] of the Nobel Prizes …. To exhibit this, let’s look at the numbers for Islam. So these are Jews – there are fifteen million Jews … twenty five percent of the Nobel Prizes. There is [sic] 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. These are the numbers [displays slide] … two and a half. Okay I’ll give you three if you really want to include economics as a full number there. Now for me … by the way, you can analyse this in any number of ways … 50 times the number of Nobel Prizes … 180th the population … is 4,000 times the impact.

(4.12 mins)

Well, yes, you certainly can “analyse this any number of ways”. One way would be to also note that Chinese and other east Asian people make up about 21% of the population of the planet, yet just 13 Nobel Prize winners have come from that region. Sub-Saharan Africa represents 23% of the earth’s population, yet just five Nobel science laureates hail from there. Once analysed this way, the better question to ask is “why is Tyson using a clearly Eurocentric and biased metric to measure scientific thinking globally?”

As with much of his rhetoric, Tyson is less concerned with accuracy or even logic, because he has a point to get to. The (actually valid) moral of his fairy tale is that if we let bad, irrational people who think science and mathematics is Satanic have too much influence, the abyss of a dark age will yawn before us. This happened to the Muslims, Tyson assures his audiences, and it could happen to us too!

And the usual suspects are happy to get the message and accept its historical premises unquestioningly. Many of the rabid teenage anti-theists of the /r/atheism subreddit happily accept Tyson’s version of Islamic history. So we see threads with titles like “Neil deGrasse Tyson on how Imam Hamid [sic] al-Ghazali pulled Islam into the dark ages, with a warning to contemporary America” or “An 11th century muslim cleric, Hamid [sic] al-ghazali, helped end the golden age of islam by declaring mathematics to be the work of the devil” or even the delightfully pithy “Fuck you, Al-Ghazali. Fuck you.” And short extracts from Tyson’s claims about al-Ghazali are now circulated by atheist activists on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, giving his claims a whole new lease on online life.

The problem with all this is, of course, that Tyson’s story is nonsense.

Al-Ghazali and Science

Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad aṭ-Ṭūsiyy al-Ġazzālīy (c. 1058-1111) was a Persian Sunni Muslim and influential polymath who was head of the Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad, the most prestigious school in the Islamic world at the time. As a theologian, he was generally aligned with the Ash’arite School, which maintained a combination of scriptural authority and theological rationalism. Asha’arī theology presented a middle path between the Atharī School, which stuck to a more strictly textualist interpretation of the Qur’an and the hadīth, and the Mu’tazila School, with its far more speculative theology that was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. While he was one of the most prominent opponents of the Mutazilites, he did not conform completely to Ash’arite positions. He was the author of over 70 influential works, including his magnum opus Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm ad-dīn (“The Revival of the Religious Sciences”). But the work that is most relevant to the issue of his attitudes to what we would call “science” is the Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (“Incoherence of the Philosophers”).

The Tahāfut followed on from his earlier work the Maqāsid al-Falāsifa (“The Aims of the Philosophers”), in which he summarised and explained fundamental philosophical concepts (e.g. judgement, concept, premise and logic) and gave an account of prominent Islamic schools influenced by Greek philosophy, particularly that of Ibn Sina (980-1037). It was Ibn Sina’s legacy that was the primary target of the Tahāfut, so it is somewhat ironic that it was the Maqāsid that became known in Latin Europe in the Middle Ages, where Al-Ghazali – under the Latinised name “Algazelus” or “Algazel” – was misunderstood as a devoted follower of Ibn Sina, who was in turn highly influential on Medieval Christian philosophy and revered as “Avicenna”. But in the Tahāfut Al-Ghazali detailed the issues he found with the metaphysics of those he called the Falāsifa: Ibn Sina and his followers.

Al-Ghazali’s particular concerns centred on metaphysical ideas that he felt placed limits on the omnipotence and omniscience of God. On the metaphysical key issue of Causation he argued for a generally Occasionalist position which he presented in opposition to Ibn Sina’s view that, given the nature of creatures (e.g. people), there are causally necessitating relations between creaturely causes and their effects such that the creaturely cause necessarily brings about the effect. For Al-Ghazali, if creatures genuinely necessitate their effects, this would seem to imply that even in the face of divine miraculous intervention, the natural effects would have to follow from the cause, which he found theologically unacceptable. He disputed the necessary link between creaturely causes and the observed effects:

The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary, according to us. But [with] any two things, where “this” is not “that” and “that” is not “this” and where neither the affirmation of the one entails the affirmation of the other nor the negation of the one entails negation of the other, it is not a necessity of the existence of the one that the other should exist, and it is not a necessity of the nonexistence of the one that the other should not exist—for example, the quenching of thirst and drinking, satiety and eating, burning and contact with fire, light and the appearance of the sun, death and decapitation […] and so on to [include] all [that is] observable among connected things in medicine, astronomy, arts, and crafts. Their connection is due to the prior decree of God, who creates them side by side, not to its being necessary in itself, incapable of separation.

(Tahāfut al-Falāsifa)

So Al-Ghazali argues that while it is God’s “habit” to allow certain effects to typically follow particular causes, this is not necessitated. He uses the example of cotton catching fire when in contact with a flame:

For we allow the possibility of the occurrence of the contact without the burning, and we allow as possible the occurrence of the cotton’s transformation into burnt ashes without contact with the fire. [The philosophers], however, deny the possibility of this.

(Tahāfut al-Falāsifa)

He goes on to argue that the position of the Falāsifa is actually not logical and so does not conform to their own reliance on logic. Of course, the Falāsifa disagreed and in 1180 Ibn Rushd (known in the Latin West as “Averroes”) wrote a reply to the Tahāfut called the Tahafut al-Tahafut (“The Incoherence of the Incoherence”): a rebuttal of Al-Ghazali’s arguments, though in places he agreed with Al-Ghazali’s critique of Ibn Sina. And all this is further complicated by a debate among modern historians of philosophy as to whether Al-Ghazali’s causation was genuinely Occasionalist or if it was more complicated than that. (See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy‘s article on “Causation in Arabic and Islamic Thought” for useful accounts of these disputes, which I have used as a reference here).

But the key point is that his critiques were very specifically of the metaphysics of Ibn Sina and the Falāsifa and these Falāsifa were very specifically the followers of Ibn Sina and not philosophers and philosophy generally. Tyson appears to have got the idea that Al-Ghazali rejected all Greek philosophy and so rejected all that went with it: the mathematics, geometry and natural philosophy that makes up what we call (as a shorthand term) “Greek science”. But he absolutely did not.

On the contrary, he was very clear that mathematics and natural philosophy were valuable, beneficial and to be encouraged and studied. Most importantly, Al-Ghazali did not say, as Tyson has claimed repeatedly and emphatically, that “mathematics and the manipulation of numbers is the work of the Devil”. He counted mathematics among the sciences that were mahmud (praiseworthy):

Sciences whose knowledge is deemed legally obligatory comprise those sciences which are indispensable for the welfare of this world such as: medicine which is necessary for the life of the body, arithmetic for daily transactions and the division of legacies and inheritances, as well as others besides. These are the sciences which, because of their absence, a community would be reduced to narrow straits.

(Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm ad-dīn)

He goes on to note those sciences which he considers madhmum (blameworthy) including “magic, talismanic science, juggling, trickery and the like”. And it is not just simple arithmetic that he praised. The complex mathematics that underpinned astronomy was also to be admired:

[T]here are those things in which the philosophers believe, and which do not come into conflict with any religious principle. And, therefore, disagreement with the philosophers with respect to those things is not a necessary condition for the faith in the prophets and the apostles (may God bless them all). An example is their theory that the lunar eclipse occurs when the light of the Moon disappears as a consequence of the interposition of the Earth between the Moon and the Sun. ….
We are not interested in refuting such theories either; for the refutation will serve no purpose. He who thinks that it is his religious duty to disbelieve such things is really unjust to religion, and weakens its cause. For these things have been established by astronomical and mathematical evidence which leaves no room for doubt. If you tell a man, who has studied these things— so that he has sifted all the data relating to them, and is, therefore, in a position to forecast when a lunar or a solar eclipse will take place: whether it will be total or partial; and how long it will last —that these things are contrary to religion, your assertion will shake his faith in religion, not in these things. Greater harm is done to religion by an immethodical helper than by an enemy whose actions, however hostile, are yet regular. For, as the proverb goes, a wise enemy is better than an ignorant friend.

(Tahāfut al-Falāsifa)

So not only does Al-Ghazali here note that the science of a lunar eclipse is well established by astronomy and mathematics, but he chides those who would try to dispute this on religious grounds. Not exactly the words of someone who considers “mathematics and the manipulation of numbers is the work of the Devil”. He is similarly full of praise for the study of physics:

The physical sciences are a study of the world of the heavens and their stars and the sublunar world’s simple bodies such as water, air, earth and fire, and composite bodies such as animals, plants and minerals. They also study the causes of their changing and being transformed and mixed …. And just as religion does not require the repudiation of science and medicine, so it does not require the repudiation of the science of physics.

(Al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl -“The Deliverer from Error”)

Here Al-Ghazali is working from the very broad Greek definition of “physics”, though he includes “study of the world of the heavens and their stars” – Tyson’s own field – and is emphatic that this is not to be repudiated by religion, contrary to Tyson’s claims. And if these quotes are not evidence enough that Tyson is completely wrong, Al-Ghazali not only condemns ignorant rejection of science by religious zealots, but declares this plays into the hands of unbelievers:

The greatest thing in which the atheists rejoice is for the defender of religion to declare these [astronomical demonstrations] and their like are contrary to religion thus the [atheists’] path for refuting religion becomes easy if the likes [of this argument defending religion] are rendered a condition [for its truth].

(Tahāfut al-Falāsifa)

So far from being a person who declares things like mathematics and astronomy to be “the work of the Devil”, Al-Ghazali roundly and repeatedly condemns anyone who does this, while upholding mathematics, astronomy and the physical sciences as praiseworthy and good. Tyson has things completely backwards. As one historian sums it up:

Ghazali makes it plain that his purpose is to refute the Islamic philosophers’ metaphysical theories and not their natural science. […] Indeed, the misguided zealot who attacks science in the mistaken belief that he is defending religion, inflicts damage, not on science, but on religion. He inflicts this damage, Ghazali argues, precisely because science is demonstrable and certain. If it does, in fact, contradict religion, then it is the latter that becomes suspect and not science.

(Michael Marmura, “Ghazali and Demonstrative Science.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 3, Number 2, October 1965, pp. 183-204)

Tyson has been called out on this “mathematics is the work of the Devil” claim and his claims about Al-Ghazali generally by blogger Hop David, who has a lengthy list of things Tyson has got completely wrong on a range of subjects, including “Ghazali ‘Math is the work of the devil'”. Tyson responded with a heavily qualified quibbling admission he was, sort of, not entirely right:

As for Al Ghazali, a more accurate representation of his views is that the manipulation of numbers was an earthly rather than a divine pursuit. And it was divine thoughts and conduct that were widely promoted — to the exclusion of earthly conduct. Earthly conduct became associated with being anti-God, which I characterized as the devil. In later speeches (over the past year or so) I leave it as the simple split between earthly and divine pursuits, realizing that I was misleading some people by mentioning the devil at all.

This is still nonsense. As the quotes above show, Al-Ghazali did not denigrate earthly pursuits, rather he said they were praiseworthy and necessary. And he and his attitudes did not see some kind of shift whereby these earthly pursuits, such as mathematics and astronomy somehow became “associated with being anti-God”. Not only is Tyson dead wrong about Al-Ghazali declaring mathematics etc. to be “the work of the Devil”, his whole characterisation of Al-Ghazali and his influence is also wrong. As is his claim that Arabic mathematics and astronomy declined after Al-Ghazali’s time.

Science and Islam after Al-Ghazali

Like most fairy tales, Tyson’ story is quite simple. Before the villainous Al-Ghazali science flourished in the Muslim world. After him, it died out. According to Tyson, the silly historians blame the Mongol sack of Baghdad for this, but he argues that “Islamic culture rose again” after this catastrophe, but “science and engineering discoveries were not a part of it”. He then uses his idiotic Nobel science laureates metric to “show” this. Except, like his claims about Al-Ghazali’s attitude to science and mathematics, this is also complete nonsense.

As already noted, Al-Ghazali’s critique of the Falāsifa was answered in the following generation by Ibn Rushd’s Tahafut al-Tahafut. But as well as dealing with metaphysical philosophy, Ibn Rushd also wrote extensively on medicine, astronomy, physics, psychology and, yes, mathematics. His commentaries on Aristotle had a huge influence on the Latin West and here he wrote on the Greek philosopher’s Physics and On the Heavens as well as books of his own on astronomy and cosmology such as On the Heavenly Sphere and On the Motion of the Sphere. Clearly he did not get the memo that Al-Ghazali had brought study of these things to a sudden end 80 years earlier. Ibn Rushd was one of a number of innovative scholars in Al-Andalus in this period who, together, are referred to as “the Spanish Aristotelians”. The Iberian Peninsula became a new centre of Arabic learning and a number of learned men who pursued the studies that Tyson claims Al-Ghazali ended.

So Ibn Bajja (c. 1085-1138) wrote his Kitāb an-Nabāt (“Book of Plants”), an influential botany manual that correctly identifies that plants have sexes. He also developed an alternative cosmology that consisted of concentric circular orbits without the complication of Ptolemaic epicycles. He disagreed with Aristotle on the nature of the Milky Way, concluding that instead of being a result of “fiery exaltations” in the upper atmosphere, it was the light of many stars far above the lunar region. He is also reported to have observed “two planets as black spots on the face of the Sun”. In physics he developed ideas about kinematics that also diverged from those of Aristotle and influenced later European writers on the subject, where he was read under the Latin name of “Avempace”. Related to his work on botany was his pharmacological treatise  Kitāb al-Tajribatayn ‘alā Adwiyah Ibn Wāfid (“Book of Experiences on Drugs of Ibn Wafid”), which classified plants based on their medicinal uses. Like Ibn Rushd, he does not seem to be aware that Al-Ghazli had completely ended Islamic science.

Similarly unaware was Ibn Tufail (c. 1105-1185), another Spanish Aristotelian. Totally oblivious of Al-Ghazali’s declaration that all Islamic science had ended, he wrote his Raǧaz ṭawīl fī aṭ-Ṭibb (“Long Poem in Rajaz Metre on Medical Science”) as well as works on astronomy that disputed the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian model and influenced Ibn Baija’s alternative cosmology. His work circulated in Europe under the name “Abubacer”.

Also completely oblivious of the fact that Muslim science had ended was Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji (died c. 1204). He was influenced by both Ibn Tufail and Ibn Baija and developed their ideas about an alternative cosmology. In the Kitāb al-Hayʾah (“Book of Astronomy”) his model includes the adoption of ideas about impetus to explain the differing speeds and types of movements of the planets. His book was widely read in Europe under the name “Alpetragius” and Copernicus came to acknowledge him in his De Revolutionibus (1543). A crater on the Moon is named after him, yet Tyson seems unaware that he existed after Al-Ghazali.

I could keep listing astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians in the Islamic world who continued to do high quality and influential work in the centuries following Al-Ghazli and Tyson’s supposed end to Islamic science, but that would be labouring the point. Tyson and some of his defenders have tried to back-track and claim that while these scientific studies did not come to a sudden end, the slow influence of Al-Ghazali’s meant it petered out and was never the same as the previous Golden Age. This too is nonsense. This extensive list of medieval Muslim scientists shows clearly that it continued. Centres of learning changed and disruptions (like the Mongol invasions that Tyson dismisses so blithely) interrupted traditions of learning, but there was no end, sudden or otherwise, of medieval Islamic science. Tyson is simply wrong.

What makes his errors particularly ironic is the fact that many of the stars on the list of Arabic star names he uses to begin his fairy tale version of history were named and recorded well after Al-Ghazali’s time. This is because one of the heydays of pre-Copernican astronomy – Tyson’s own discipline, it should be remembered – came in the thirteenth century thanks to the patronage of the Mongol khan Hulagu. He sponsored the building of a large observatory at Margeheh in the mid-thirteenth century and was the patron of its leading astronomer, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274). Like his Spanish predecessors in Al-Andalus, Al-Tusi pursued a range of scientific studies completely unaware that Islamic science had ended with Al-Ghazali a century earlier. He complied star lists and tables of planetary motion and also came up with alternatives to elements of Ptolemaic cosmology that is thought to have influenced Copernicus. In addition, he wrote on biology, chemistry, engineering and mathematics and is considered by some the inventor of trigonometry.

Equally unaware that he should not exist at all is the fifteenth century Muslim astronomer Ulugh Beg (1394-1449) who worked at another huge observatory in Samarkand which was the pinnacle of the Timurid Renaissance in the arts and the sciences that Tyson seems to think never happened. Despite Tyson not knowing he existed, Ulugh Beg also managed to get a crater on the Moon named after him and also gives his name to a dinosaur: the Ulughbegsaurus, discovered in Uzbekistan. Then there was the disciple of Ulugh Beg, Ali Qushji (1403-1474), another Timurid astronomer who defied the alleged total lack of Islamic science by doing a great deal of science. His work Concerning the Supposed Dependence of Astronomy upon Philosophy established a astronomical physics independent from natural philosophy and set out empirical evidence of the rotation of the earth, foreshadowing Copernicus (though there is no evidence of influence). Considering Tyson is an astrophysicist himself, you would think he would be interested in someone like Ali Qushji, but according to Tyson’s claims Ali Qushji could not have existed. Except, he did.

It should be obvious by now that there is no way Tyson’s claims about Al-Ghazali can be in any way accurate. He did not declare “mathematics and the manipulation of numbers is the work of the Devil” and actually upheld the study of the sciences as worthy and not in contradiction in religion. Therefore he did not have some chilling effect on the study of mathematics and science in the Islamic, as the multiple examples of a continuing and flourishing tradition in the Islamic world in the centuries after his time clearly shows. So where did Tyson get this garbled pseudo historical nonsense?

The Origin of the Myth and its Propagation

In 1798 Napoleon invaded Egypt and began over 150 years of European colonialism and meddling in the Middle East. In doing so he also began a vogue for all things Egyptian, Arabic and exotically “Oriental” which began in France and spread through Europe. Of course, the Republican French saw themselves as liberators not conquerors and saw the culture and history of the Arab world through a thoroughly European lens. The Muslim world, they decided, was well and truly overdue for both a Reformation and an Enlightenment and scholars who took an interest in Islamic history in the nineteenth century tried to force it into a framework that paralleled their conception of how European religious and intellectual history had played out.

French historian of philosophy, Ernest Renan (1823-1892) was one of this period’s most influential Orientalists. His books Averroes et l’averroisme (“Averroes and Averroism” 1852) and L’Islamisme et la science (“Islam and Science” 1883) framed the history of Islamic thought as a parallel to nineteenth century conceptions of the history of Western thought – with freethinking rationalistic scientists battling obscurantist, superstitious religious fanatics. For Renan, Ibn Sina and, particularly, Ibn Rushd represented rationalism and Al-Ghazali was the irrational villain who prevailed over them and dragged the Islamic world into the darkness from which enlightened modern Europeans (like Renan) were, luckily, here to rescue them. Imposing a western European paradigm on Muslim history, Renan assured his readers the twelfth century saw “a war against philosophy” triggered by a “theological reaction similar to the one that followed in the Latin church after the Council of Trent.” To Renan, this reaction warped the whole Islamic world up to his own day:

… [At the age of ten or twelve the Muslim child] turns suddenly fanatic, full of an inane pride of possessing that which he thinks to be absolute truth … This mad pride is the radical vice of the Muslim. … convinced that God gives fortune and power to those who obey him, irrespective of education or personal merit, the Muslim has the most profound contempt for education, science, and everything that makes up the European mind.

(L’Islamisme et la science)

Renan was depending on earlier work on Al-Ghazali by the German Orientalists Salomon Munk (1803~67) and Franz August Schmölders (1809-80) and it was Munk who established the idea that Al-Ghazali’s theory of causality was wholly Occasionalist. But it was Renan who took this and created the grand narrative of the Islamic “war against philosophy” led, successfully, by Al-Ghazali. Under Renan’s influence, this story became one of a war against science; another parallel with European thinking in the nineteenth century, with the enthusiastic adoption of the Draper-White Conflict Thesis.

In the century or so since Renan, Draper and White, our understanding of the history of both philosophy and science has progressed greatly. Historians of philosophy no longer accept Renan’s simplistic Orientalist misreading of Islamic philosophy and theology and historians of science know that, as detailed above, Al-Ghazali did not kill off Islamic science and Draper and White were wrong about science and religion being enemies down the centuries. But these things take much longer to penetrate the popular consciousness, which often lags a century or more behind the historians. Unfortunately, much pop history on the subject of the history of science is not presented by historians, but by scientists. And scientists are often terrible at history.

So in February 2007 the Times Literary Supplement published a review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion by Nobel laureate and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Texas at Austin, Steven Weinberg, titled “A Deadly Certitude”. In it, Weinberg presented Al-Ghazali as an anti-science zealot:

Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.

When correspondents to the TLS objected this was not the case, Weinberg defended his claim in a feisty, but not particularly accurate or convincing counter-letter to the editors, where he tried to dismiss the actually very valid counter examples given and also pretended those were the only counter-examples available (again, see above for the many, many more that show he is completely wrong). And Weinberg, it seems, is the source of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s bungled conception of Al-Ghazali. Weinberg appeared with Tyson at the sixth “Amazing Meeting” – a conference of sceptics sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation held between 2003 and 2015 – that is seen in the first video of Tyson quoted from extensively above. In fact, Tyson refers to earlier remarks by Weinberg in his presentation (5.10 mins) and these can be seen here. In his account, Weinberg is every bit as bald, bold and assured as Tyson:

But then there was a reaction against science in the Islamic world in the twelfth century, and it was not a reaction so much against any one particular conclusion of science as against the very idea of laws of nature. Because it was felt that the laws of nature put God’s hands in chains. This was particularly uh the view of an influential philosopher Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, who wrote a book, “The Incoherence of the Philosophers” – he rejected the idea of the laws of nature.

(i.16 mins)

He goes on to qualify Al-Ghazali’s impact slightly (“whether it was Al-Ghazali’s influence or whatever or perhaps the depression due to military defeats in Spain”) but concludes emphatically that “Islamic science really ended by the end of the twelfth century”. Whether Weinberg is the source of Tyson’s confusions about Al-Ghazali and the history of philosophy and science in the Islamic world or not, both represent the same problem: scientists with high public profiles and a particular ideological bias making grand pronouncements about history and getting them spectacularly wrong.

So, yet again, anti-theist activists need to stop listening to muddle-headed and biased scientists on history and instead pay attention to actual historians.

(Many thanks to Dr Joshua Little and Dr Khalil Andani for their assistance and comments on this article. Islamic history is not my main area of study, so this was greatly appreciated)

Further Reading and Listening

Luke Dunne, Al-Ghazali: Philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age, The Collector, August 5, 2022

Frank Griffel, “The Western Reception of Al-Ghazali’s Cosmology From The Middle Ages To The 21st Century”, Dîvân: Disiplinlerarası Çalışmalar Dergisi, 2011/1, cilt: XVI, sayı: 30, s. 33-62 İngilizce

George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, (MIT Press, 2007, 2011)

“Causation in Arabic and Islamic Thought”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

History of Philosophy Without the Gaps – “Ep. 143: Special Delivery – Al-Ghazali” (29 September, 2013)

History of Philosophy Without the Gaps – “Ep. 144: Miracle Worker – Al-Ghazali Against the Philosophers” (6 October, 2013)

History of Philosophy Without the Gaps – “Ep. 145: Frank Griffel on Al-Ghazali” (13 October, 2013)