The Persian Sciences

Long before the printing press reached the West, Iranian scholars working in Persian, Arabic, and Middle Persian produced a body of scientific literature so vast and so original that medieval Europeans referred to the entire field of medicine as physica arabum — the Arab/Persian art — and to mathematics as the legacy of algorismus, the Latinisation of al-Khwarizmi's name.

The Sasanian Academy of Gundishapur, founded in the 3rd century near today's Ahvaz, was the world's first university hospital combining clinical practice with the translation of Greek, Indian, and Syriac texts. After the 7th-century Arab conquest, this Iranian institutional model migrated to Baghdad as the House of Wisdom, where Persians from Khorasan, Transoxiana, and Fars dominated the scientific staff for three centuries.

Surviving scientific manuscripts catalogued by the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science show a clear bell curve: a rapid 9th-century awakening, a peak in the 11th–13th centuries, and a slow decline after the Timurid period as patronage shifted to court poetry and the Ottoman and Mughal capitals rose.

"The main task of mankind in the ninth, tenth, and first half of the eleventh centuries was accomplished by Muslims — and largely by Persians."

Of the roughly four hundred substantive surviving scientific works attributable to scholars born on the Iranian plateau between the 9th and 15th centuries, astronomy and mathematics together account for more than a third — a reflection of the unbroken Iranian tradition of state-funded observatories from Gundishapur to Maragha to Samarkand.

The standard story of the European Renaissance — Greek wisdom rediscovered after a thousand years in the dark — leaves out the route. Almost every classical text that re-entered the Latin West between 1100 and 1300 had spent the previous three centuries in a Persian or Persian-led library, copied, corrected, glossed and extended. The route ran through three doorways: Sicily under the Normans, Toledo after the Reconquista, and the Levantine ports of the Crusader states.

The scientific tradition did not end with Ulugh Beg. The contemporary Iranian-born scientific diaspora is one of the most accomplished in the world: Maryam Mirzakhani (Stanford), first woman ever to win the Fields Medal in mathematics; Lotfi A. Zadeh (UC Berkeley), founder of fuzzy logic and a corner-stone of modern AI; Cumrun Vafa (Harvard), Dirac-Medal string theorist; Anousheh Ansari, first Iranian and first Muslim woman in space; Pardis Sabeti (Harvard), MacArthur-fellow geneticist who mapped the Ebola outbreak; Firouz Naderi, long-time director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program.