The story of science which we are taught in Anglophone nations usually traces the origins of the scientific method to Europe. European scientists – Bacon, Kepler, Galileo and so on – are regarded as starting a scientific revolution. Along come Copernicus, Newton, Descartes (the latter being a philosopher of science), and here we have the commencement of a global scientific revolution.

We like to place ourselves within a tradition tracing back to Ancient Greece and Rome, something we label western civilisation. The Anglocentric settler nations regard themselves as the inheritors and developers of the Greco-Roman school of science and philosophy.

There was a scientific revolution in Europe as a component part of the cultural movement known as the Renaissance, but it was definitely not global. That story is the way European Christendom discovered the scientific method. The rest of the world, in particular the Islamic empire, was already light years ahead of Europe when it came to the sciences, and the philosophy underpinning the scientific method.

We have all heard of Nicolaus Copernicus and Isaac Newton, but how many of us have heard of Ibn al-Haytham? (c. 965 – c. 1040). The latter lived and worked as a scientist centuries before the heavyweights mentioned above. We will get to Al Haytham in a minute, but first, some observations are in order.

It is a great shame, and an indication of our own prejudices, that the overwhelmingly ubiquitous stereotype of Islam is that of terrorism. We can easily find millions of images, through a Google search, of pictures of bearded men brandishing guns, yelling purportedly Islamic slogans, demanding the death and destruction of infidel societies. The immediate association of Islam with violence, savagery, beheadings and other unspeakable atrocities serves to promote the stereotype of the irrational Muslim, resistant to rational thinking and impervious to scientific enquiry.

We in the English-speaking world believe that it was only in Ancient Greece, or the Renaissance, that vast, philosophically deep scientific intellectual developments occurred. Not so – while Europe was mired in the relative ignorance of the Dark Ages, the Islamic world was developing science, philosophy and technology light years ahead of anything Europe could offer. In fact, Europeans owe a great debt of gratitude for the innovative discoveries and philosophical insights of the Islamic world – scientific outpourings which prefigure the debates of contemporary times.

Remember the Islamic polymath mentioned above, Ibn Al-Haytham? His name is sometimes Latinised as Al-Hazen. He was the first experimental scientist, and the father of the science of optics – no disrespect to Isaac Newton. Al Haytham, born in Basra, Iraq, criticised the theories of Aristotle, specifically that the planets did not move in perfect circles, but in elliptical orbits.

He birthed the scientific method, using experimental evidence to verify (or falsify) hypotheses. He overturned centuries of received wisdom regarding the nature of light and the eye. The ancient Greeks had held that the eye emits rays which bounce off objects, thus forming the basis of vision. Not so, said Al-Haytham. Overturning the emissions theory, as the prevailing view was known, he proposed that light rays enter the eye, the latter acting as a pinhole camera.

As Jim Al Khalili, the physicist and historian of science points out, Al Haytham did not invent the pinhole camera. The latter, known for centuries as the camera obscura, had been developed by numerous civilisations, such as the ancient Chinese. However, Al Haytham was the first to elaborate the mathematics underlying the operation of the pinhole camera, and that the eye possessed a similar structure.

Al Haytham was the first to connect visual perception with the subjective experience. He regarded vision as not only a function of the eye, but as an experience of the brain and mind. He was not alone among the Islamic scholars in exploring what we today would call the mind-body problem. Centuries before René Descartes and Cartesian dualism, Muslim scholar Avicenna (Ibn Sina c. 980 – June 1037) was conducting thought experiments about perception, the individual experience and the nature of mind,

We have all heard the seemingly intelligent observation – Islam did not have an Enlightenment. The cynical implication of this claim is insidious; that Muslims are way behind us in the enlightened English-speaking world, and so require an education in the scientific method. It is true that the Islamic world never had an Enlightenment phase; because they did not need one.

As Sean Ledwith points out, the Abbasid caliphate, which covers the time period of the Golden Age of Islamic science, is distinguished by its deliberate cultivation of state-sponsored Enlightenment. The authorities, having conquered their Persian and Byzantine neighbours, absorbed the cultural achievements of those societies, and proceeded to develop their own scientific and philosophical innovations. Science and the cultivation of knowledge was actively promoted during the Islamic golden age.

They did not require a specific Reformation or Enlightenment period to push back against theological mysticism, as was required in European Christendom. The Islamic world translated the Ancient Greek and Roman texts, but also went on to blaze their own trail of cultural and scientific flourishing.

It is relevant to note here that one thousand years before Charles Darwin, Islamic scholars such as the zoologist Al-Jahiz (c. 776 – 868/69) were discussing evolution. No, they never used the now-familiar expression natural selection. They were discussing competition in the natural world for finite resources, adaptations of characteristics to environmental conditions, and branching speciation. These lines of enquiry are precisely those explored in evolutionary biology today.

Am I suggesting that Islam is a genetically superior system to all other religions? No, I am not. I am suggesting that we re-examine our own anti-immigrant prejudices, especially in the light of the resurgence of far right parties in Europe. Attacking the allegedly ‘barbaric’ outsider may make us feel good about ourselves, but only serves to inhibit cross cultural cooperation and solidarity.