AL ASHARI SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY

 *Ibn al-Haytham*

*Name*: Alhazen, Ibn al-Haytham [Latinized as Alhazen or Alhacen]  

*Full Name*: Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham  

*Born*: July 1, 965 CE [354 AH], Basra, Buyid Emirate  

*Died*: March 6, 1040 [age 74] [430 AH], Cairo, Egypt, Fatimid Caliphate  

*Places of Residence*: Basra, Cairo  

Ibn al-Haytham was born in the Iraqi city of Basra during the Abbasid Caliphate. He came about 100 years after the founding of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Undoubtedly, the culture of learning and advancement that existed in the Muslim world at that time greatly influenced him from a young age. He studied Islamic sciences and soon became mayor of the city of Basra. During this time, he continued to study, focusing on science and other empirical subjects. However, his major breakthrough came in another part of the Muslim world.

The list of Ibn al-Haytham’s achievements and contributions goes on and on. What is truly astonishing is that he wrote more than 200 books, but only about 50 have survived to this day. We probably do not even know the full extent of what he discovered, which goes beyond even the amazing works that have survived. Newton directly built on the ideas of Ibn al-Haytham. Unfortunately, his contributions have been overlooked since his death.

*Beyond Light*  

In the 1020s and 1030s he wrote many books on astronomy. He wrote about the errors in the Ptolemaic model of how stars and planets move and provided a more realistic view of how the universe works. Though he knew the Earth was a sphere, he still held to the ancient Greek idea that the Earth was the center of the universe.

He studied how light is affected when passing through a medium such as water or gases. From this, he was able to explain why the color of the sky changes at twilight. The Sun’s rays strike the atmosphere at an angle, causing refraction. From this, he was able to calculate the depth of Earth’s atmosphere, 1000 years before it was proven by space flight.

Similarly, he was the first to study the phenomenon of the pinhole camera. The concept of the pinhole camera is simple: a small box with a hole on one side is able to project an image of whatever is outside onto the inside of the box. Those familiar with how modern cameras work will notice that this is how cameras generally operate, but today with the addition of a lens. Ibn al-Haytham was able to build these pinhole cameras hundreds of years before the modern development of photography as we know it.

*The Book of Optics*  

With his revolutionary scientific experimental method, Ibn al-Haytham made leaps in the field of optics. In his book, _The Book of Optics_, he was the first to reject the ancient Greek idea that light comes out of the eye, bounces off objects, and returns to the eye. He went deeper into how the eye itself works. Through dissection and the knowledge of previous scholars, he was able to begin explaining how light enters the eye, is focused, and is projected onto the back of the eye.

*The Scientific Method*  

Ibn al-Haytham knew better. He was the first scientist in history to insist that every new discovery must be proven through a definite method: the scientific method. 

What has been forgotten is that European scholars stood on the shoulders of Ibn al-Haytham and other Muslim scientists. Without his ideas on proving scientific principles, we might still be living in a time when speculation, superstition, and unproven myths form the basis of science.