Sir

In his Commentary on the rise and fall of Islamic science (Nature 448, 131–133; 2007), Ziauddin Sardar's discussion of how modern Muslim societies could be improved by scientific endeavours is encouraging. However, he places most of the blame for the decline of Islamic science on Western colonialism. This is historically inaccurate. Like the tip of an iceberg, colonialism is not the major factor — just the most visible.

It is true that colonialism “displaced meaningful cultural activities from Muslim society,” and caused “the general economic and political deterioration of Muslim society” that led to the ultimate collapse of Islamic science. But it's generally accepted that the golden age of Islamic science stretched from about 800–1400 ad, and its decline started more than a century before Western colonialism began in the late fifteenth century.

A number of devastating blows to Muslim society have been implicated in the decline of Islamic science: military invasions, massacres and infrastructure destruction; a long period of drought beginning around 1250 ad; and a series of plague epidemics between 1347 and 1515. These destructive developments overlap with the main period of decline of Islamic science in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The onset of European colonialism from the late fifteenth century onward merely completed a process that had begun long before.