Ibn Al Haytham Quotes

The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them," the first scientist wrote, "but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of of its content, attack it from every side. he should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.

I constantly sought knowledge and truth, and it became my belief that for gaining access to the effulgence and closeness to God, there is no better way than that of searching for truth and knowledge.

It's true. I doubt. I doubt because I seek the truth. Doubt has served me well.

If learning the truth is a scientific's goal, then he must make himself the enemy of all that he reads

While Europe was mired in its dark years of medieval superstition, the work of combining theory and experiment was advanced primarily in the Islamic world. Muslim scientists often also worked as scientific instrument makers, which made them experts at measurements and applying theories. The Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham, known as Alhazen, wrote a seminal text on optics in 1021 that combined observations and experiments to develop a theory of how human vision works, then devised further experiments to test the theory.

Do whatever it takes to avoid fooling yourself into believing that something is true when it is false, or that something is false when it is true. This approach to knowing enjoys taproots in the eleventh century, as expressed by the Arabic scholar Ibn al-Haytham (AD 965–1040), also known as Alhazen. In particular, he cautioned the scientist against bias: “He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.”2 Centuries later, during the European Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci would be in full agreement: “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinion.

Parisa immersed herself in the scrolls from the Islamic golden age, nipping at a half-formed hunch and uncovering that the Arabic astronomer Ibn al-Haytham had observed about optical illusions the same thing Parisa had observed about the human experience in general—namely, that time was an illusion of itself. Nearly every theory of time was rooted in fallacy, and manipulation of it as a concept was actually accomplished through the mechanism of thought or emotion.

What, then, of the achievements of Muslim philosophy in Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Razi, al-Kindi, al- Khawarizmi, and al-Farabi? Reformist thinker Ibrahim Al-Buleihi, a current member of the Saudi Shura Council, responds, “These [achievements] are not of our own making, and those exceptional individuals were not the product of Arab culture, but rather Greek culture. They are outside our cultural mainstream and we treated them as though they were foreign elements. Therefore we don’t deserve to take pride in them since we rejected them and fought their ideas. Conversely, when Europe learned from them it benefited from a body of knowledge which was originally its own because they were an extension of Greek culture, which is the source of the whole of Western civilization.”21

science can be seen as a great ally of faith, because the scientific method, which was pioneered by Muslim physicist Ibn Al-Haytham, helps to unveil the power and wisdom of God that is hidden within the created world, through the God-given intellect of man. However, the intellect of man can only go so far in explaining the world we live in.

In the 4th century BC, Plato argued that we are able to see because light emitted from the eye and that this light seizes objects with it's rays. This was the "extramission" theory of vision, and as bizarrely as it seems to us today, until the 1500s this was the widely held view in Europe of how the eye worked. To his credit Aristotle (384-322BC) was one of the first to reject the extramission theory of vision, arguing in favour of the "intromission" theory, whereby the eye receives light rays rather than projecting light into the world. Sadly, this eminently sensible theory from the ancient world was not embraced. Even Leonardo da Vinci in the 1480s first supported the extramission theory, but after dissecting the eye in the 1490s, he switched to the intromission theory. early observations by Islamic physicians, notably Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, who lived from 965 to 1040 AD and is known in the West as Alhazen, documented that the pupil dilates and contracts in response to different levels of light and that the eye is damaged by strong light. He used these observations to argue correctly that light enters the eye and that light is not emitted from the eye.

-Have you ever thought about determinism? He continued and did not wait to hear the answer: In the past, humans believed that the eye sends a ray of light to bodies and sees them, then the Arab scholar Ibn Al-Haytham asked a logical question: If my eyes send a ray of light, why do I not see in the dark? Then he discovered that the eye is blind in its origin, a receiver and not a transmitter, it only sees when the light is reflected from the objects, so it picks up its reflection and does not send it. We understand determinism as we understand the sense of sight today, we receive it and do not send it, so we see that we are the subject and the deterministic object, we have no power before it, we have to receive it and submit to it, but what if our understanding of it is wrong?! As our understanding of the sense of sight was, while we think we receive determinism, we are in fact sending it. What if determinism had no existence, no reflection, and we were not designed to receive it but rather designed to make and transmit it. The general interpretation of determinism, on which all Muslims and non-Muslims agree, is that every event in the universe, including man’s perception and actions, is subject to a logical sequence of causes within a single continuum. Muslims say that God’s decree and predestination are pre-written and cannot be changed, but they struggle with the eternal question, if this was written for me in advance, then why would God punish me for something that I cannot change? Where is the justice in here! While unbelievers say it was nature, the laws of the universe, that created determinism, and they run into the zero-cause barrier, what is that cause that does not come from any cause? It resulted in the chain that created all causes. Muslims answer them, Cause Zero is neither a cause nor a causative, nor even a result, it is God, he was and will continue to exist, and the understanding of His nature is not within the limits of our mind, for it has no nature at all. The non-believers accuse them, that their inability to understand or know the nature of the Zero cause, made them create the idea of God in their minds, to relieve themselves of the trouble of searching. The entire dispute is based on the zero cause, assuming that determinism is a series written on us, we cannot change it, and we have no authority over it, but what if determinism is actually written on us, and we are the ones who wrote it in the first place, or perhaps we are writing it now.

The seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. Ibn al-Haytham, known in the West as Alhazen,