Careers and scientists: a physician and an optics scholar

The expectations ask for a career, the training it needs and the people who built the field. For each person you read about, note what they did for a living, what they worked on and what they left behind.

Read one career through one source. Ibn al-ʿImad's Shadharat al-Dhahab, in its biographies of 687 AH, calls Ibn al-Nafis the shaykh of medicine in Egypt, the one to whom knowledge of medicine ultimately led, and says he also took part in jurisprudence, the principles of law, hadith, Arabic and logic ². Al-Subki said, "There was no one like him on the face of the earth in medicine" ². The entry says he wrote the medical book al-Shamil, whose index suggests that it would run to three hundred volumes ³. He dictated his works from memory and did not need to consult sources, because of his mastery of the field ³. He endowed his properties and his books to the Mansuri hospital ³.

The two sources used here, a biographical dictionary and the Encyclopaedia of Islam, give no statement by either man of why he chose his work. What they show is how each lived. Ibn al-Nafis was the shaykh of medicine in Egypt ². Ibn al-Haytham went to Egypt in the reign of the caliph al-Hakim and tried to regulate the flow of the Nile, and gave up the task when he realised it was impossible ⁴. After the caliph's death he returned to Cairo, where he earned his living by copying scientific manuscripts, particularly mathematical ones ⁴.

Both men reach us through other people's accounts. The record of Ibn al-Nafis rests on a dictionary entry in the biographies of 687 AH ³. For Ibn al-Haytham, the Encyclopaedia of Islam stresses that his biography has numerous gaps ⁴. It gives his death as 430 AH/1039, while TDV discusses differing death reports, including an autograph dated 432 AH/1040, and does not collapse them into a single certain date ^4 5. When two sources disagree, ask which stands closer to the man's own hand.

Suppose a classmate says that Ibn al-Haytham, who earned his living by copying scientific manuscripts ⁴, cannot count as a scientist, while Ibn al-Nafis, the shaykh of medicine in Egypt ², clearly can. Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: what makes a career a science career in these two records, and why?

• Ibn al-Nafis: the biographical entry on his work, his book and his endowment.
• Ibn al-Haytham: his life, how he earned his living, and the gaps in his biography.
• The pulmonary circulation: the account of the blood's route through the lungs in Ibn al-Nafis's commentary.
• Ibn al-Haytham's dark room: the experiments with light and a small hole.