Orientalism

The evolution of economies and science as the great leveller

[The cover of my copy of James Poskett’s Horizons, and from within it a picture of the Fakhri Sexant built in the 15th century in Samarkand.]

Published: 2024-11-08

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The World as it Is

Professor Mohammad Marandi is a scholar and lecturer who works at the University of Tehran. His field is "orientalism", a study of racism and other biases which have dominated European and Western thought for centuries. In his recent interviews with Nima Alkhorshid on Dialogue Works he has calmly presented a view of Persian society, Iran's government's policies and national military capabilities which are denied a place in Western dialogue. This denial, or "reframing of reality", is well understood by him. It is his area of study, though that study is more historic than recent.

Before presenting some of his clarifications and illuminations, revisiting the myths embedded in the European "Scientific Revolution" serves as an insightful example of "orientalism". The material is from James Poskett's "Horizons - A Global History of Science". The book was described by British quantum physicist Jim Al-Khalili as "Hugely important".

This treasure trove of a book puts the case persuasively and compellingly that modern science did not develop solely in Europe

Horizons: From Geocentrism to Heliocentrism via Samarkand

The book is global, visiting all of the inhabited continents, examining the interactions between European traders, missionaries, settlers and officials and the non-European peoples they encountered during the European age of "discovery" and colonisation. It was during this period that European science developed its methodologies and published many of its most significant advances.

The period was preceded by the Dark Ages, the Crusades and the Renaissance. The art and studies of the Renaissance were funded by families, like the Medici, from the Italian peninsula. Their wealth was derived from trade on the Mediterranean and some advances, like the fixing of dies using Alum. The Renaissance was a rediscovery of the knowledge of the ancient Greek states and Roman Empire. The knowledge was controlled by the Catholic Church; it trained scholars and scribes. The Church contained and controlled information distribution in centuries when very few people could read. The arrival of the printing press in modern Germany would destroy the Church's information distribution monopoly and be used by the new scientists to disseminate some of their discoveries.

The example of interaction between non-European researchers and the new European scientists described below serves as an example of the exchange which was occurring, rather than some sole European brilliance. It is the transition from the Geocentric to Heliocentric view of the Cosmos. Today, we would frame that not as of the Cosmos, but of "the Solar System". But back in 16th century Europe, there was no Solar System. There was Earth and "the heavens".

The key to the switching of the Earth being at the center of the heavens to the Sun was the irregular movement of the planets. "Planet" is from the Greek, meaning "wanderer". The known planets were Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Excluding the Moon and Sun, all of the stars move in the sky over the year and day but stay fixed relative to one another. The planets move across this moving but relatively fixed background. It is their strange path which evaded a smooth modeling consistent with the "music of the spheres". The ancient Greeks, like so many mathematicians of all ethnicities, were fascinated by the beauty and elegance of pure shapes, like the equilateral triangle, and pure forms like the dodecahedron, a solid formed by twelve pentagons. The two most perfect shapes and forms are the circle and sphere. The circle had to be found in the "music of the spheres" in the heavens.

The astronomical theory of the time had been developed in Egypt by the Greek-Egyptian Ptolemy in around 150 CE. He was almost certainly a descendant of Ptolemy (367 - 282 BCE) who was a General under Alexander the Great who conquered Egypt and much of southwest Asia. General Ptolemy was given rule of Egypt and founded the dynasty of his name.

The Ptolemaic system modeled the heavens with Earth at the center (a geocentric model) with the planets moving in cycles and epicycles around it. These cycles needed constant refinement as observation improved through the construction of larger astronomical observatories. An example of one such more precise observatory is the Fakhri Sextant, built before 1420 in Samarkand (modern day Uzbekistan).

At the center of the observatory stood the 'Fakhri Sextant'. Over 40 metres tall, this was one of the most accurate scientific instruments in the world at the time. Built of brick and limestone the Fakhri Sextant was used to measure the exact position of the stars and planets in the sky.

The Muslim world had need of accurate astronomy, for their religion commanded regular prayer and to be facing Mecca for it. Astronomy provides not only an accurate celestial "calendar" but also an answer to the question "which way is Mecca?" Via detailed astronomical observations made across the Muslim world from west Africa to central Asia irregularities in the movements of the planets from the predictions of the Ptolemaic system were observed.

Europeans were not the only researchers who were examining the work of the ancient Greeks.

By the 12th century, most of the ancient Greek corpus had been translated into Arabic.

This was by way of the "Translation project" undertaken in Baghdad. Any significant text which had not already been translated was purchased, translated and added to the library. Indeed, it is due to this Islamic project that much of what is known of ancient Greek writing arrives to us. During the 15th century, with the Muslim presence in the Iberian peninsula and the fall of Byzantium to Mehmet II, Arabic astronomical texts, both original and incorporated into translations of the Greek, were entering Europe.

Poskett traces a convoluted journey of translations of Ptolemy's "Almagest" (the canonical work on his astronomy) into Europe and summaries of it which incorporated ideas borrowed directly from Muslim scholars. With their detailed observations scholars in the Islamic world had identified and proposed corrections for inadequacies in the Ptolemaic model. The key European work which synthesized the ancient Egyptian/Greek and the Islamic corrections was "Epitome of the Almagest".

In Epitome of the Almagest Regiomontanus [who continued the translation work after its first compiler, Peurbach, died] copied out a diagram from a manuscript Ali Qushji has originally composed back in Samarkand back in the 1420s. The diagram, a complex array of circles, proved that Ptolemy's epicycles could be dispensed with. [...] In short, Ali Qushji argued that the motion of all of the planets could be modeled simply by imagining that the center of their orbits was at a point other than the earth.

Qushji did not propose the Sun for this point. That prize goes to Copernicus. But, Qushji had solved the complexity invoked by Ptolemy's epicycles by the conceptual leap of discarding the idea of the Earth as as being the center of the planetary orbits.

This example of the Geocentric to Heliocentric transition being a combination of both European and non-European scholarship is but one of case after case after case which Poskett presents.

Poskett's purpose is not to denigrate the achievements of European science during the period of colonization, it is to add the rest of the world into it. Exceptionalism of various stripes, be it racial or religious, is not only dangerous but flat out wrong.

Given the support to research, brilliant researchers come from all over the world, from different ethnic groups and cultures, as is demonstrated in today's internationalized science of consortia of researchers.

Persia: a Millennia Old Culture

In 1980 Iraq, using weapons and chemical weapons supplied by the US, began a war against the newly named Islamic Republic of Iran which had emerged a year earlier when it overthrew the Shah and his SAVAK secret police. That monarchist regime was installed in Iran after a CI-6 (CIA + MI-6) coordinated a coup which overthrew democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. In response to the US chemical weapons, might it have been that the religious leadership in Iran actually meant it when then outlawed by fatwa the use of chemical weapons? Perhaps their belief in their God prohibited the use of these horrific indiscriminant weapons?

When Israel delivered US TOW missiles to Iran on 1985-08-20, might Iran not have taken some and pulled them apart to see how they worked? Iran has an effective civilian nuclear program. Their scientists and researchers have demonstrated their technical and engineering capability and their mastery of sub-atomic physics. When they took control of and landed a US surveillance drone, would they not have examined it? Would you not, if you were an engineer or researcher be tempted to build a variant of that drone? What if you were provided funding to do so? What if you knew that just over a thousand kilometers away was a religious and ethno-supremacist, expansionist, imperial state which was fomenting war in your region. And what if that apartheid state was supported by the same state which had overthrown your democratic leader, re-imposed a monarch, and was arming and encouraging a warring neighbour against you? Would you be interested in researching technologies which would help protect your culture and family?

Professor Marandi

One of the points which Prof. Marandi made in his discussion with Alkhorshid behooves us to understand. Iran's military capabilities were not designed to defend Iran against Iraq or Israel, but the US. That is the scale of the national mission.

During the current conflict with Israel, which Israel started by attacking Iran's embassy in Damascus and murdering diplomats and guests, Iran has twice demonstrated its ability to inflict damage on Israel. On both occasions it also demonstrated precision and political control. The attacks were carefully targeted to achieve specific results, avoiding civilian casualties and included gathering very useful intelligence.

Israel's provocation after the settling of accounts for the assassination of a state guest at Iranian President Pezeshkian's inauguration demonstrated that Israel did not even get close to defeating Iran's missile defenses. Israel is small fry for Iran. Its capacity is quantified against the US.

Its defense capability has recently been augmented by systems provided by Russia, which produces the world's best air defense systems, including radar identification possibly being able to unmask US stealth technologies, electronic interference and air, sea and land launched sub, super and hypersonic speed missiles.

During the war between NATO and Russia in Ukraine, Russia is still running its air defense systems. Russia has destroyed most similar capability which was provided to Ukraine by NATO. Russian produced Gerant drones have been flying unmolested over Ukrainian cities and its capital Kiev for weeks.

Another of Marandi's points demonstrates the very difficult position in which the US and its imperial vassals have placed themselves. His point is made in the context of the re-election of former US President Trump. The world today is not the world of 2016, or even 2020. The US, unilateral, coercive, economic measures against Iran created under Obama, extended by Trump and maintained by Biden remain on the books. But, their effect is seriously weakened.

When Russia responded to the provocation of a threatened pogrom by the neo-Nazi militia's integrated into the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Donbas region, the US and its EU vassals responded with economic warfare attempting to limit Russia's energy sales. One of the results of these "sanctions" was that all of a sudden Iran had more customers interested in its energy products. New contracts were able to be signed and those new contracts did not need to include discounts which had previously been required to fund avoid the JCPOA related free trade barriers.

Iran's crude oil monthly export volume hit a 6 year high in April 2024.

Neither Vortexa nor FT provided the sale price. FT merely noted that Iran's "economy [is receiving] a $35bn-a-year boost even as western countries discuss stepping up sanctions".

The bind which the hegemon is caught in is that the price of oil will jump seriously if both Russian and Iranian oil are trade sanctioned out of the Western market. Secondly, countries need oil and they will find a way to obtain it. One can huff and puff, but not deny oil without blowing down the global economy. The "West", or the G7, no longer dominates the world economy. Other nations, represented in the 24 BRICS members and partners, control more of the global economy than the West. The hegemon and its partners might not like this, but reality doesn't care.

Shedding Exceptionalism

The period of technological advantage which enabled the colonial West to fuel its industrial power and wealth from the exploitation of natural resources located in other parts of the world has ended. These non-G7 cultures and nations have been straining to free themselves of colonial domination since the end of WWII. Their investment in technology and sciences, and through them the lifting of populations out of poverty, has leveled some of the gulfs in industrial productivity and standards of living.

The "West" has a choice to drop its cultural exceptionalism, its "orientalism", and work with the now dominant group of developed and developing economies voluntarily. Alternatively, their hubris will drop after their pride falls.

The citizenry of the West have a role to play in this, despite and perhaps because of the authoritarian character developing in Western governments. The denial of reality which Western legacy media attempts to maintain is meeting the reality of well educated voices from all over the world who can easily see through the emotionally manipulative narratives. Those speakers do not bear the exceptionalist baggage used as the fulcrum for the Western reality distortion.

Science is a great leveler

To see what is being achieved take a look at recent advances in space exploration. The Chinese are achieving amazing results because they have the wealth to fund it and the technical skill to achieve the results.

The US is still funding astounding foundational research. The LIGO project confirmed gravitational waves and has opened an entirely new field for astronomical and cosmological research.

PS:

The ratio of the radius of a circle to its circumference is a fixed, irrational number irrespective of what it says in some ancient book or modern newspaper.

The key number is not 3.141592... but 6.283185...

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Sources

Iran oil exports hit 6-year high as west prepares sanctions, Malcolm Moore and Najmeh Bozorgmehr, Financial Times, 2024-04-18

Mobilities of Science: The Era of Translation into Arabic, Scott L. Montgomery (University of Washington), University of Chicago, no publication date (but at least 2018 based on the dates of quotes sources)

Understanding the Iran-Contra Affairs, Brown University

• For specifics on the TOW missiles

Iran–U.S. RQ-170 incident, Wikipedia

NSF’s LIGO Has Detected Gravitational Waves, Francis Reddy, NASA, 2016-02-11

On its first try, China’s Zhurong rover hit a Mars milestone that took NASA decades, Sara Webb (Swinburne University of Technology), The Conversation, 2021-05-18

Fucking with Your Brain, YesXorNo, 2024-11-04

The Tau Manifesto, Michael Hartl, Tau Day, 2010-06-28

Prof. Mohammad Marandi： Trump Wins 2024! Iran & Hezbollah Ready to Unleash Unthinkable Retaliation! [YpwTtM99D5w], Alkhorshid interviews Marandi, Dialogue Works, 2024-11-06

Culture

Bach - Violin Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins (TwoSet, Singapore Symphony Orchestra), Tyler Moore, uploaded 2023-01-12

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