essay on islam and modern science 300 words

Islam and Modern Science

A lecture by seyyid hossein nasr.

The following is a lecture by Seyyid Hossein Nasr entitled, ``Islam and Modern Science’’, which was co-sponsored by the Pakistan Study Group, the MIT Muslim Students Association and other groups. Professor Nasr, currently University Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, is a physics and mathematics alumnus of MIT. He received a PhD in the philosophy of science, with emphasis on Islamic science, from Harvard University. From 1958 to 1979, he was a professor of history of science and philosophy at Tehran University and was also the Vice-Chancellor of the University over 1970-71. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Princeton Universities. He has delivered many famous lectures including the Gifford Lecture at Edinburgh University and the Iqbal Lecture at the Punjab University. He is the author of over twenty books including ``Science and Civilization in Islam’’, ``Traditional Islam in the Modern World’’, ``Knowledge and the Sacred’’, and ``Man and Nature: the Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man’’. The verbatim transcript of the lecture was edited to enhance clarity and remove redundancies. We have tried our best to preserve the spirit of what was said. Any errors are solely the responsibility of the Pakistan Study Group. * and ** indicates places where either a phrase or sentence was indecipherable. Words in [ ] were added to improve continuity.

Bismillah hir rahmanir rahim

First of all, let me begin by saying how happy I am to be able to accept an invitation of the MIT Islamic Students Association, and that of other universities and other organizations nearby, to give this lecture here today at my alma mater. I feel very much at home not only at this university, but being the first Muslim student ever to establish a Muslim students’ association at Harvard in 1954, to see that these organizations are now growing, and are becoming culturally significant. I am sure they play a very important role in three ways. Most importantly, in turning the hearts of good Muslims towards God, Allah ta’allah . At a more human level to be able to afford the possibility for Muslims from various countries to have a discourse amongst themselves, and third to represent the views of Muslims on American campuses where there is so much need to understand what is going on at the other side of the world. That world which seems to remain forever the OTHER for the West, no matter what happens. The Otherness, somehow, is not overcome so easily.

Now today, I shall limit my discourse to Islam and its relation to modern science. This is a very touchy and extremely difficult subject to deal with. It is not a subject with any kind of, we might say, dangerous pitfalls or subterfuges under way because it is not a political subject. It does not arouse passions as, let’s say, questions that are being discussed in Madrid, or the great tragedy of Kashmir or other places. But nevertheless, it is of very great consequence because it will affect one way or the other, the future of the Islamic world as a whole.

Many people feel that that in fact there is no such thing as the Islamic problem of science. They say science is science, whatever it happens to be, and Islam has always encouraged knowledge , al-ilm in Arabic, and therefore we should encourage science and what’s the problem? -there’s no problem. But the problem is there because ever since children began to learn Lavoiser’s Law that water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen, in many Islamic countries they came home that evening and stopped saying their prayers. There is no country in the Islamic World which has not been witness in one way or another, to the impact, in fact, of the study of Western Science upon the ideological system of its youth. Parallel with that however, because science is related first of all to prestige, and secondly, to power, and thirdly, without [science] the solution of certain problems within Islamic society [is difficult], from all kinds of political backgrounds and regimes, all the way from revolutionary regimes to monarchies, all [governments] the way from semi-democracies to totalitarian regimes, all spend their money in teaching their young Western science. I see many Muslims in the audience today, many of you, your education is paid for by your parents or your government or some university in order precisely to bring Western science back into the Muslim world. And therefore we are dealing with a subject which is quite central to the concerns of the Islamic world. In the last twenty years [this subject] has begun to attract some of the best minds in the Islamic world to the various dimensions of this problem.

And therefore I want to begin by first of all by expressing for you, (making things easier, categorizing it a bit), three main positions which exist in the Islamic world today as far as the relationship between Islam and modern science is concerned, before delving a bit more deeply into what my own view is. First of all, is the position that many people re-iterate. I am sure many of you in this room, and especially at a place like MIT, who would not have had much of a chance to study the philosophical implications of either your own tradition, that is Islam, nor of Western science, believe that one studies science and then one says prayers, loves God and obeys the laws of the Shariah , and that there is really no problem. This position itself is not something new. It is something that was inculcated in many circles of the Islamic world during the past century and going back historically, it was the position taken up by Jamaluddin Al-Afghani who migrated to Egypt and called himself Al-Afghani. The famous reformer, a rather maverick [figure], of the nineteenth century was at once a philosopher, political figure, Pan-Islamist and anti-Caliphate organizer *. Nobody knows exactly what his political positions were, but he was certainly a very influential person in the nineteenth century, and was responsible, directly, and indirectly, through his student Mohammed Abduh, for the so-called reforms that took place in the 1880’s and 1890’s of the Christian era, that is the beginning of the fourteenth century of the Islamic era, in Eygpt. Jamaluddin has been claimed, interestingly enough, by both modernists and anti-modernists forces like the Ikhwan-ul-Muslameen in Egypt during the early decades of this century.

Jamaluddin was interested in Western science, [though] he had very little knowledge [of it], and he was also very much interested in the revival of the Islamic world. The character of [Jamaluddin’s] argument is absolutely crucial to the understanding of what I am talking about. He came up with view that science per se is what has made the West powerful and great. And the West is dominating over the Islamic world because it has this power in its pocket. And since this is being allowed, this is being done, there must be something very positive about this science, that science itself is good, because it gives power. This was the first part of his argument. Secondly, [he argued], science came from the Islamic world originally and therefore Islamic science is really responsible for the West’s possession of science and the West’s domination of the Islamic world itself. And therefore, all the Muslims have to do is to reclaim this science for themselves in order to reach the glories of their past and become a powerful and great civilization. This is the gist of a rather extensive argument given by Jamaluddin Afghani which equates, in fact, Islamic science with Western science. Secondly, it equates the power of the West with the power of science. To some extent this is true, but not completely so. And thirdly, it believes that acquisition of this science of the West [by the Muslims] is, no more no less, than the Muslims claiming their own property which has somehow been taken over by another continent and [the Muslims] just want back what is really their own. Now this point of view had a great deal of impact upon the Islamic world, upon the modernist circles, and in order to understand what is going on in the Islamic world today it is important to see what consequences flow from this.

I am really addressing my lecture predominantly to Muslims students and scholars and scientists, discussing in a sense family problems. I am sure there are some Christians and non-Christian Western people present which is fine, which is a way to understand another civilization’s struggle to look at the major problems that it has. But my lecture is really tailored to the internal problems of the Islamic world, as far as science is concerned. I hope other people will forgive me, this is not just a formal lecture on the history of science in last century in the Islamic world by any means. * I want to pursue what happened to Jamaluddin’s thesis in the nineteenth century. The modernists in the Islamic world [are] one of three important groups that came into being in the nineteenth century. The other two being those who are now being dubbed as the fundamentalists, a term which I do not like at all but which is now very prevalent, and third, those who believe in some kind of Mahdiism, some kind of apocalyptic interference of God. These two groups I shall not be dealing with at the present moment. The most important group for us to consider are the modernists.

The modernists took on this thesis of Jamaluddin, and during the last century and a half, they have carried the banner of a kind of rationalism within the Islamic world which will accord well with the simple equation of science with Islamic science and with the Islamic idea of knowledge, al-ilm . [Interestingly,] as a consequence of this, the Islamic world during this one hundred and fifty year period produced very few historians of science and very few philosophers of science. It produced a very large number of scientists and engineers, some of whom very brilliant and studying in the best institutions of the world like here, but it produced practically no major philosopher and historian of science until just a few decades ago. This problem [was just left aside] because it was uninteresting and irrelevant, and all the debate that was being carried out in the West itself about the impact of science upon religion, upon the philosophy of science, [about] what this kind of knowing meant, these were circumvented, more or less, in the Islamic educational system.

There were a few exceptions. Kamal Ataturk came into power in Turkey. Though in many ways a brutal [soldier, he] saved Turkey from extinction. We know what he did to Islam in Turkey. But he had a certain intuition, certain visions of things. The first thing that he did was to say that in order for Turkey to stand on its feet as a modern ``secular’’ state, what it has to do is [to] learn about the history of Western science. So when the program for the doctorate degree in the history of science headed by the late George Sarton, scholar and historian of science, was established at Harvard University which was the first program in this country, Ataturk sent the first student to study the history of science anywhere in America, to Harvard. The first person to enter the PhD program in the history of science at Harvard University is a Turk, Aideen Saeeli. He is still alive, [and] is the doyen of the Turkish historians of science.

There were exceptions but by and large, the modernists forces within the Islamic world, decided to neglect and overlook the consequences of Western science, either philosophical or religious and felt that Islam could handle the matter much better than Christianity. [They felt] that there was something wrong with Christianity [as] it buckled under the pressures of modern science and rationalism in the nineteenth century, and this would not happen to Islam. Certain Western thinkers, in fact, followed this trend of thought. One of the most rabidly anti-Christian, [and] anti-religion philosophers of France in the nineteenth century, Ernst Renan, who was known as sort of the grandfather of rationalism in nineteenth century French philosophy, wrote a book which is now a classical book on Averroes, (Ibn-Rushd), [and] which has been reprinted now after 140 years in France, in which he says exactly the same kinds of things. He says that Averroes represents rationalism which led to modern science. [He] represents Arabic Islamic thought and Western theology, [which] simply did not understand this, has always been an impediment to the rise of modern science. So a kind of psychological and, loosely speaking, philosophical alliance was created between Islamic modernist thinkers and anti-religious philosophers in the West. This is something which needs a great deal of analysis later on. Let me just pass it over. It is not central to my subject, but we must take cognizance of it.

And this attitude continued, gradually proliferating from a few centers who sent [people to the] West to the modern education institutions of the Islamic world such as the Darul Fanooni in Iran, the University of Punjab in Punjab, the Foad I University in Cairo, Istanbul University and so forth and so on, and gradually embraced the whole body of the Islamic world. Today, every Thursday evening when you turn on Cairo radio there are one or two very famous lecturers who are, in fact, very devout Muslims, loved by the people of Egypt, [and] the heart of their message is every single verse of the Quran which deals with either Ta’akul or Taffakur , that is intellection or knowledge or observation or mushahida . These [verses] are interpreted ``scientifically’’, that is, as an attempt to preserve Islam through scientific support for the Islamic revelation, for the Quran itself. And this is a very strong position in the Islamic world today. Therefore [the Muslim] thinks in fact there is no problem as far as Islam and modern science are concerned.

Now this position had a reverse. The ulema , religious scholars of the Islamic world opposed the modernist thesis, [which] was also based on the dilution of the Sharia , as you have seen in Turkey, the gradual introduction of Western political and economic institutions in the Islamic world, the rise of modern nationalism, all of these things which I will not go into right now. The religious scholars of Islam whose names paradoxically enough, meant scientists, in fact, disdained science completely. And so you have this dichotomy within the Islamic world, in which the modernists refuse to study the philosophical and religious implications of the introduction of Western science in the Islamic world, and the classical traditional ulema , and this cut across the Islamic world, all refused to have anything to do with modern science. There are again a few exceptions.

This left a major vacuum in the intellectual life of the Islamic community for which every single Muslim sitting in this room suffers in one way or another. Many people think this was all the fault of the ulema . I do not think this was all the fault of the ulema , this is also the fault of the authorities which had economic and political power in their hands, and the two in fact went together. We must add to this a third element [which] is that while science was spreading in the Islamic world, there had been created within the Islamic world, a reformist puritanical movement, especially within Arabia, associated with the name of Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahab, the so-called Wahabi movement, which is still very strong in Saudi Arabia, which in fact gave rise to [the country] with the wedding of Nejd and Hijaz in 1926-27. Its roots [lie] in the eighteenth century when this man lived, and his way of thinking then proliferated into Egypt and Syria.

[Similarly] the Salafia movement in India and other places, [also] wanted to interpret Islam in a very rational and simple manner and was opposed to ``philosophical’’ speculation and was opposed to the whole tradition of Islamic philosophy. [These movements] all but went along with the more quarrelsome and troublesome dimensions of the impact of science upon the faith system and the philosophical world-view of Islam. It is interesting that the Wahabi ulema in the nineteenth century opposed completely any interest in modern science and technology. It is today that Saudi Arabia of course has one of the best programs for the teaching of science and technology in the Islamic world. The centers at Dhahran and other places are really quite amazing but it is a very modern transformation. In the nineteenth century, those very people stood opposed to the modernists, and the traditional Muslim ulema whether they were Shafis or Malikis or anything else, felt that as far as science was concerned, [opposition was justified].

This changed one-hundred and eighty degrees in our time. Today people of that kind of background, again want nothing to do with a discussion of the philosophical implications of science, but very much identify themselves with the Al-Afghani position, that science is al-ilm and let’s get on with it, let’s not bother with its implications. This is a [very important] position which I have traced for you rather extensively, because it is still very much alive in the Islamic world today.

The second position which is held within the Islamic world today, which is now held by a number of very interesting and eminent thinkers, is that, in fact, the problem of the confrontation of modern science with Islam is not at all an intellectual problem but rather an ethical problem. All the problems of modern science, all the way from making possible the dropping of atomic bombs on people’s heads, to the creation of technologies which create the enslavement of those who receive them, the technological star wars of the last year in the Persian Gulf, all of these are not the fault of modern science, but [rather] of the wrong ethical application of modern science. And one must separate modern science from its ethical implications and usages in the West, take it and use it in another ethical system. As if one were to buy a Boeing 747 from California, then take it to Egypt and paint it Egypt Air, and it would become an Egyptian airplane. This is a view which exists and is rather prevalent in many places. Most of the new Islamic universities which have been established throughout the Islamic world, like the Islamic University in Malaysia, the Islamic University in Pakistan, the Umm-ul Quraa University in Makkah, try to emphasize this point of view. For example, in all Saudi universities, students are taught Islamic ethics with the hope that once they begin to learn science and engineering, they will take these and integrate them within this ethical system.

Now we come to the third point of view. This was discussed for a long time by practically no one, except yours truly. But in the last twenty years, it has gained a large number of followers. And that point of view is that science has its own world-view. No science is created in a vacuum. Science arose under particular circumstances in the West with certain philosophical presumptions about the nature of reality. As soon as you say, m, f, v, and a, that is, the simple parameters of classical physics, you have chosen to look at reality from a certain point of view. There is no mass, there is no force out there like that chair or table. These are particularly abstract concepts which grew in the seventeenth century on the basis of a particular concept of space, matter and motion which Newton developed. The historians and philosophers of science in the last twenty [or] thirty years have shown beyond the scepter of doubt that modern science has its own world view. It is not at all value free; nor is it a purely objective science of reality irrespective of the subject you study. It is based upon the imposition of certain categories upon the study of nature, with a remarkable success in the study of certain things, and also a remarkable lack of success [in others], depending on what you are looking at.

Modern science is successful in telling you the weight and chemical structure of a red pine leaf, but it is totally irrelevant to what is the meaning of the turning of this leaf to red. The ``how’’ has been explained in modern science, the ``why’’ is not its concern. If you are a physics student and you ask the question, `what is the force of gravitation?’, the teacher will tell you the formula, but as to what is the nature of this force, he will tell you it is not a subject for physics. So [science] is very successful in certain fields, but leaves other aspects of reality aside.

In the 1950s, and I hate to be autobiographical but just for two minutes because it has to do with the subject at hand, when I was a student here at this University studying physics, the late Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher, gave a series of lectures at MIT. I never forget that when I went to that lecture, he said that modern science has nothing to do with the discovery of the nature of reality, and he gave certain reasons. And I came home, and I couldn’t sleep all night. I thought that I had gone to MIT not because I was rich, or because the Iranian government forced me to go, [but] to learn the nature of reality. And here was one of the famous philosophers of the day [saying this was not to be]. This deviated me from the path of becoming a physicist, and I spent the next few years, parallel with all the other physics and mathematics courses I had to take, [studying] the philosophy of science both here, and at Harvard. It was that which really led me to study the philosophy of science and finally the Islamic philosophy of science and Islamic cosmology, to which I have devoted the last thirty years of my life.

This event turned me to try and discover what is the meaning of another way of looking at nature. And I coined the term, ``Islamic Science’’, as a living and not only historical reality, in the fifties when my book * came out. I tried to deal with Islamic science not as a chapter in the history of Western science, but as an independent way of looking at the work of nature. [This] lead to a great deal of opposition in the West. Had it not been for the noble support of Sir Hamilton Gibb, the famous British Islamicist [read Orientalist] at Harvard University, nobody would ever have allowed me to say such a thing. At that time, [it] was actually blasphemy to speak of Islamic science as an independent way of looking at reality and not simply as a chapter between Aristotle and somebody else in the thirteenth century. But now a lot of water has flown under the bridge. This third point of view, with its humble beginning in books which I wrote in my twenties, has won a lot of support in the Islamic World. And this perspective is based on the idea that Western science is as much related to Western civilization as any Islamic science is related to Islamic civilization. And as science is not a value free activity, it is fruitful and possible for one civilization to learn the science of another civilization but to do that it must be able to abstract and make its own. And the best example of that is exactly what Islam did with Greek science and what Europe did with Islamic science, which is usually called Arabic science but is really Islamic science, done by both Arabs and Persians, and also to some extent by Turks and Indians.

In both of these cases what did the Muslims do? The Muslims did not just take over Greek science and translate it into Arabic and preserve its Greek character. It was totally transformed into the part and parcel of the Islamic intellectual citadel. Any of you who have actually ever studied in depth the text of the great Muslim scientists like Alberuni or Ibn Sina or any Andulusian scientists know that you are living within the Islamic Universe. You’re not living within the Greek Universe. It is true that the particular descriptions might have been taken from the [works] of Aristotle or a particular formula from Euclid’s Elements, but the whole science is totally integrated into the Islamic point of view. The greatest work of Algebra in the pre-modern period is by the Persian poet Omar Khayyam. When we read his book, of course, if when you get [to a] particular formula or equation you could be writing in Chinese or English and could be in any civilization, but the impact that the whole work makes upon you makes you feel that you belong to a total intellectual universe- the Islamic Universe. And this is precisely what the West did to Islamic science. When in Toledo in the 1030’s and the 1040’s the translations of the books from the Arabic into Latin began which really began the scientific changes of the 12th century and again in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries of the West, books were simply being translated from the Arabic into the Latin. The first few decades were very much like what the Islamic world was, or has been, in the last few decades. That is, actual works of, say, Ibn Sina were being read in medicine as if they were in Arabic, but since no one knew Arabic, they were in Latin. They may not have been very good translations but there they were. It only took a century, not longer than that, for the West to make this learning their own. And I always say to Muslims in giving lectures all over the Islamic World, to people in ministries of education, to people who are responsible, that the reason we cannot do this in the Islamic world is that symbolically, and the symbol is important, when the West adopted Islamic science, it even adopted the gown of the Muslim Ulema , * but it never took the turban and put it on its head. The head-dress of the European bishops of the middle ages, * was kept on. Whereas at many Islamic universities today, we have taken both the gown and the cap from the West. We cannot think of ourselves independently. The whole thing has been taken over and has now been made our own. This I am giving as a kind of anecdotal reference but it is symbolic really of the type of processes that are going on.

There are two very good cases: One of Greek science taken over by Muslims, [and the other] of Islamic science taken over by the Latin West and later on the European West. In both cases there was a period of transmission but there was also a period of digestion, ingestion, and integration which always means also rejection. No science has ever been integrated into any civilization without some of it also being rejected. It’s like the body. If we only ate and the body did not reject anything we would die in a few days. Some of the food has to be absorbed, some of the food has to be rejected. You might say what about the case of Japan which is so successful in making Mitsubishis, modern washing machines and so forth, but we haven’t seen the end of the story. Will Zen, Buddhist [and] Shinto Japan be the same centuries from now and at the same time the science totally Western Science [translated into] Japanese or will [Japan] gradually transform the science and technology into something Japanese? We do not know yet.

But the historical cases that we do know- all point to a period of translation, and then digestion and integration and by virtue of integration, the expulsion of something which cannot be accepted, which is not in accord with that particular world view, which is exactly what the Latin West did. The Latin West was not interested in certain aspects of Islamic science which never took hold, which never became central. And some Muslims were not interested in some types of Greek Science which never took hold in Islamic soil. This is also a case which can be proven historically.

Now, all these views which are expressed for you today are not given force in the Islamic world. There are people all the way from Abdus Salam, the only Muslim to have won the Noble Prize in physics, who was asked `what happened to Islamic Science?’ He said `Nothing. Instead what we cultivated in Isfahan and Cordoba is now being cultivated in MIT, Caltech and at Imperial College, London. It’s just a geographical translation of place’. All the way from that position, which is really an echo of what Jamaluddin Afghani [presented in a] new garb by a great physicist, over to the views [of] the so-called ``ajmalis’’ in England who emphasize [the] ethical dimension of Islamic science and who at least realize that modern science is not value-free [and finally], to the position which is held by yours truly and many others in the Islamic world, and which has now given rise to the only institution, Aligarh University in India, which is trying to deal with this subject in a living fashion - I’ll get to that in a moment. As I talk of these three ways of thinking about the relationship between Islam and modern science there are several important phenomena that are going on in the Islamic world which I must describe for you before analyzing them.

First and most powerful, is the continuous flow and absorption of western science and technology into all existing Islamic countries to the extent that [they] can absorb it. ** In every single Islamic country, whatever political regime, whatever economic policy, whatever attitude towards the west [they may espouse], whether they are completely pro-western or have demonstrations in the street against the west, the adoption of western science and technology goes on. Which is a very telling fact for the whole of the Islamic world.

There are some places where some thought is being given to what is the consequence of this. Now there are many questions to ask here. First of all is this [transfer of science and technology] going on successfully? is it not going on successfully? If it is not successful, what is it not going on successfully? And if it is, why? This is a very major issue. The whole question of the transfer of science [is] not really a subject for me to deal with today.

The second phenomenon that is going on [today] is the [gradual] attempt being made to study both the meaning and the history of Islamic science. I think that in this field that Muslims should really be ashamed of themselves to put it mildly. Let me give you some examples. There are now today a billion Muslims in the world. Probably in the first to the second century of the history of Islam, that is the eighth Christian century, no one knows exactly, but there were something like 20-30 million Muslims. Despite that vast [Islamic] empire the numbers were somewhere around there [according to] the demographers. It may be wrong, but [it was] anyway a much smaller number [than the population of Muslims today].

During that 100 year period, more books in quantity, not to speak about the remarkable quality, were translated [about] the basic philosophical and scientific thought of Greek science than has been translated during a comparable 100 year period by all Muslims put together in all Islamic countries. This is really unbelievable. Not to talk about the quality, which is of a very high nature, in the early translations from Greek which made Arabic the most important scientific language in world for 700 years, [whereas today, we have] usually very poor quality translations into modern Islamic languages, oftentimes based on Latin knowledge of classical Arabic.

** Most the history of Islamic science has been written by western scholars including the great *. His one book, Introduction to the History of Science, has lead to at least 500 or 600 books in Urdu, Persian, Malay, Arabic and other Muslim languages which are sold in the streets as Islamic Science because everybody is too lazy to go do his own or her own research. [Typically in such works] one or two pages are just taken and culled and regurgitated and repeated and so forth and so on in a manner that is really sickening. Compared to the other civilizations of Asia, the Chinese and the Japanese and the Indian, the Muslims have not had a very good record in studying their own history of science despite the fact that this field was of great importance religiously, going back to what I said about Jamaluddin and Mohammed Abduh in the later 19th century, the rise of modernism in the Islamic world, and all of these other very powerful forces.

During the last 20-30 years, there has been a change. Gradually Muslim governments are realizing that it’s very important that if you have 100 students that you have 80 of them study science and technology but it’s also very important that the other twenty study the humanities and to train some people in the history of science, [which] although allied to science, is not really science itself. It is historical knowledge, it is linguistic knowledge, [and] it is philosophical knowledge. The Muslims have not yet developed their own historiography of science. This is a very important field. If you look at all the histories of science written in the west, everything ends miraculously in the thirteenth century- [implying] the whole of Islamic civilization came to an end in the thirteenth century. Islamic philosophy, Islamic science, history of astronomy, history of physics, alchemy, biology, anything you study, miraculously comes to an end in the thirteenth century which coincides exactly with the termination of political contact between Islam and the West. Now Muslims always get angry at why this is so, but Western historians are completely right to study Islamic history from their own point of view. And Muslim thinkers are completely wrong in studying their own history from the point of view of western history.

I said once many, many years ago in a statement in Pakistan 30 years ago, which has been repeated not many times, that any individual that stands in a mirror and looks at his or her own image perceives that image from the point of view of the model or the * behind the mirror * but we’re doing this culturally, much of the Islamic world is doing this culturally and that is nothing less than an insane way of looking at themselves. We should be able to look at ourselves directly and to do that we have to develop a historiography of science.

I think for nine-tenths of the students in this room who are probably the most brilliant young students in the field of science - I’m now addressing the Muslim students - if I were to ask you `what do know about the history Islamic medicine in the 17th Christian century’ you’d probably say nothing. Well, that is a very brilliant period in the history of Islamic medicine and the reason you don’t know anything about it is because E.G. Brown didn’t write about it in his book ``Arabian Medicine’’. That’s the only reason. Because [Brown] was [only] interested in Early Islamic medicine [as it] influenced the great physicians in the west.

Now, therefore this [question of] the historiography of Islamic science is far from being a trivial question. And it has created, in fact, a vacuum within which the integration of western science and technology is made doubly difficult in the Islamic world. That is most young Muslim students have this view which has unfortunately been abetted by Arab Nationalism. I have to be very honest here, the nationalisms in the Middle East, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, are now more or less [over], they are ending one way or the other. That is they’re showing their bankruptcy, not completely, there are nations that still exist of course but their grand days are perhaps over.

Arab Nationalism began with a thesis, propagated by small non-Muslim minorities within the Arab world, that the Islamic civilization began to go down when the Arab hegemony over Islamic civilization came to an end. That is with the Abbasids. If you look, for example, at the history of Arabic literature, everybody talks about the Ummayad and the Abbasid period and there is nothing going on for several hundred years until some poet begins to talk about the lamentations of the war in Iraq or the * tragedies in Palestine. That is, of course, very gripping poetry, but what were the Arabs doing for 700 years in between? That is totally overlooked. There must be some Yemenese students here. Where is there a single book on the history of Arabic poetry in Yemen- one of the richest lands in the Islamic world of poetry. We don’t know that there might be some local book published in Sanaa but certainly in Cambridge we know nothing about it. So Arab nationalism had a lot to do with this * of trying to diminish the contribution that Islamic civilization. after the Mongol invasion and the destruction of Baghdad in 1258, which coincided with the downfall of the political hegemony of the Arabs who did not regain the political hegemony, even over themselves, until the 20th century.

Now, the consequence of that is, first of all, the overlooking of 700 years, not 70 years, 700 years, of Islamic intellectual history during which the Muslims were supposed to have done nothing. They were supposed to have been decadent for 700 years. Now how can you revive a patient that has been dead for that long a time? The idea [which] is propagated in the West [is] that Muslims are very brilliant, that they did science and things like that, [and then] suddenly decided to turn the switch off and went to selling beads and playing with their rosaries in the bazaar for the next 700 years till Mossadegh nationalized the oil and they came back on the scene of human history are now living happily again. This, of course, is total nonsense and it brings about a sclerosis, intellectually, which is far from being trivial. ** Over [the] twenty years I have taught at Tehran University, I always felt, [our students] could never overcome this very long historical loss of memory. Somehow it was very difficult for them. They wanted to connect themselves to Al-Biruni and Khawarizmi and people like that, but this hiatus was simply too long. This hiatus has not been created by history itself. It has been created by the study of history from the particular perspective of Western scholarship, which is as I said, perfectly [within] its right in its claim that Islam is interesting only till the moment that it influences the West. The great mistake is when that objective divides the history of Islam [into a period of productivity and one of degeneration]. In the field of history of science, that is a very important element.

This leads me to the third important activity which is now going on in the Islamic World. [We have] studied Islamic science from our own point of view somewhat [though this study is hardly comprehensive for] it will take a long, long time to get all the [relevant] manuscripts. There are over three thousand manuscripts of medicine in India which have never been studied by anybody. This is [only] the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of manuscripts in Yemen which we don’t even know about. There is a new institution being established in London which is being inaugurated at the end of next month, the Al-Furqan Foundation, which will be devoted to assembling Islamic manuscripts from all over the world. and [compiling] original surveys of where the manuscripts are... places like Ethiopia for example, have treasuries of Islamic manuscripts, many of them in the sciences. The process will take a long time, but at least on the basis of what has been begun, [progress can be made].

But in this field, there is now the third step of trying to further science within the Islamic world under the foundation of an Islamic logic of science. Now this is a very difficult and very tall order. It is not going something which is going to be done immediately, but I want to say a few words about what is being done and where. And we can perhaps discuss this with you during the question-answer period. It is interesting that some of the places where a great deal of the intellectual attention is being paid to the subject are not places which have been known historically as the great intellectual centers of Islamic civilization [which] have really always been between Lahore and Tripoli. About nine-tenths of all famous Islamic thinkers have come from that region, Spain being the one great exception. But today, one of the places, for example, where a great deal of the work is being done is Malaysia .Normally one would think of [Malaysia] as a small Islamic country with only a 55% or a 57% Muslim majority. [However] there is, because of the interest of the government, a great deal of effort being spent in trying to understand what is the meaning of Islamic science and how can science be further [explored for] the basis of an Islamic view towards science. Another place is Turkey. One does not usually think of Turkey these days as being significant as a center of Islamic thought because of the secularism brought by Kamal Ataturk. ** But within Turkey, despite all of this, an incredible amount of intellectual activity [has been] going on in the last few decades bringing things as different, as separate, as the Naqshbandia of Istanbul and the Khizisists of Istanbul University together. The most important journal which is being published in Turkey on this issue, called ``Science and Technology’’ is not, in fact, published by secular Turks. It is published by very devout Muslims, who are extremely interested in the Islamicisty of Islamic science, and I think the Turkish will be able to make some major intellectual contributions in the future to this field.

Perhaps most interesting of all these programs is going on in Aligarh University in India. Aligarh University is of course a major Islamic university whose Islamicisty is now very much threatened, by all that is going on in India, [one of] the great tragedies of the last few decades. ** I was in India, exactly a year ago tomorrow, and I was to give the Best Science awards in Aligarh University. People had come from all over India * but I could not go to Aligarh because it was too dangerous, because the government could not guarantee my safety. Everyday, about seven or eight people were killed just on the road. People pull you off of the car and shoot you, and you cannot do anything about it. So I could not go to Aligarh and I feel very sad about that. But I know exactly what is going on in Aligarh University. There is a new association called the ``Muslim Association for the Advancement of Science’’ which now also publishes a journal called the ``MAAS Journal’’. [MAAS] is a unique institution founded by twenty or thirty scientists, almost all of them, scientists, physicists, chemists, biologists, and some of them very brilliant, who want to absorb, first, Islamic science, then to absorb Western science. There is no way of establishing an Islamic science without knowing Western science well. To talk of circumventing what the West has learnt is absurd. But then the next step that has to be taken on the basis of Islamic world view and the view of nature. Whether they will succeed or not, Allah o Aalim , `God knows best’, but I mention it here as one of the most important attempts that is now being made in the Muslim world. Gradually a network is being created among young Muslim scientists who are concerned with religion and are also quite capable of dealing with the humanities. * I think a great deal of positive result will come from this, if the political situation does not get so bad as to destroy the very physical basis for these activities.

Let me conclude with a word about the future. Of course a person should never be too charmed by futuroligists, otherwise you would never say insha’llah . * Three years ago probably companies [were paying] fortunes to [be told] what the future of the Soviet Union was and [yet] nobody guessed what was going to happen. So, let’s take this with a grain of salt. Only God knows. But from the point of a humble scholar of the situation, I believe that the cultural crisis created by the successful introduction of Western science and technology, successful enough to bring about rapid cultural patterns of change, is going to continue to pose major problems for the Islamic world. The best example of that is what happened in Iran. Iran had without doubt, the most advanced program for the teaching of science and technology and the largest per capita number of scientists. It was the only country in the Muslim world where alternative technology was already beginning to be discussed, but the cultural transformation brought about by the very success of the enterprise, besides all the other political problems that were involved * certainly contributed to the outcome of what happened in the late seventies. The government in Iran today, wants [very much] to go back to implement the very scientific programs and technological programs which were put aside during the ten years after the revolution. But I believe that the impact of the absorption of Western science and more than that, the application of technology, for science today, in the minds of Muslim governments is not separated from application of technology, they are not simply interested in pure science. Pure scientists have a lot of trouble finding money for their work; it is the applied aspect which is emphasized. I think this [cultural dislocation] is going to, without doubt, continue until something serious is done.

I remember in 1983 when the Saudi government decided to found a science museum center in Riyadh, they contacted me and I went several times to Saudi Arabia and spoke to all of the leading people involved. I told them at that time, that a science museum could be a time bomb. Do not think that a science museum is simply neutral in its cultural impact. It has a tremendous impact upon those who go into it. If you go into a building in which one room is full of dinosaurs, the next room is full of wires, and the third full of old trains, you are going to have a segmented view of knowledge which is going to have a deep effect upon the young person who goes there, who has been taught about Tawhid , about Unity, about the Unity of knowledge, about the Unity of God, the Unity of the universe. There is going to be a dichotomy created in him. You must be able to integrate knowledge. ** I mention this to you as an example.

The problem [is] that with the increase of success of both the teaching of science and the technology, will bring with it a cultural dislocation [and] philosophical questioning which have to be answered especially at a time when the Islamic world does not want to play the role of a dead duck. There is not a moment in the history of Islam, when the Muslims like the other great civilizations of Asia are trying to play the game of the West. The Islamic world wants to pull its own weight, wants to finds its own identity, and therefore this problem is going to be acute.

Secondly, I believe that [a] very major crisis [is being] set afoot by the very application of modern technology, that is the environmental crisis. [This crisis is] of course global. You cannot say, `I am drawing a boundary around my country, I do not want the hole in the ozone zone, [to make] the sun shine upon my head’. You have no choice in that. Because of that, and because of the fact that Islamic countries, like Buddhist countries, like Hindu countries, will always eat from the bread crumbs of Western technology in the situation of the world today, more of an attempt is made towards the direction of alternative technologies. [This] began in Iran in the seventies, and thank God, is still going on a little, and [in] other places [like] Egypt where a little [attempt] to spend some of the energy of society towards alternative technology [is being made]. [All of] which also means to try to look upon science as the mother of technology in somewhat of a different way.

And finally, I think, the intellectual effort is now being made. What is called by some people, the Islamisation of knowledge and which is now very popular, [and] which goes back to some of my own humble writings in the fifties, and later on, the treatise written by the late Ismail Al-Faruqui who was assassinated in Philadelphia two years back. This little treatise he wrote called, ``The Islamisation of Knowledge’’, is now being discussed in educational conferences throughout the Islamic World, [which] is finally going to bear some fruit. Although it will require much more concerted effort of the most intelligent and gifted members of the Islamic community, who must know Western science in depth, who must know Islamic thought in depth, the cosmological message of the Quran, not only its ethical message, and at the same time have the energy to pursue this through. The task is a very daunting and difficult one. The problem of the partition of science from Islam is a problem that exists unless Islam is willing to give up its claim to being a total way of life. [If that were so], we must suppress not only what we do on Friday noons, * but what we do and think every moment of our daily lives. It is going to preserve an integrated principle that of course * must also be taken into consideration.

Source: MIT MSA

 Edited somewhat by the webmaster.

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The Relationship between Science and Islam: Islamic Perspectives and Frameworks

By Mohd Hazim Shah; Member of Muslim-Science.Com’s Task Force on Science and Islam

1.0          Introduction

In this paper I will deal with the question of science and religion, with reference to Islamic perspectives and frameworks.  The paper will be divided into five sections:

introduction

a critique of the Barbour(Barbour, 2000) typology

a review of the discourse on science and Islam as presented by selected Muslim thinkers, and a characterization of their approaches

the relevance and use of history in the discourse on science and Islam

concluding remarks.

I will begin by briefly looking at the discourse on science and religion in the West, using the typology proposed by Ian Barbour, and suggesting that although it might serve as a useful starting point, its application to the issue of science and religion in the Islamic world is problematic, thus necessitating a different framework.

In section two of the paper, I will review the discourse on science and religion/Islam as presented by several selected Muslim thinkers, namely Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Syed Naguib al-Attas, Ziauddin Sardar, Pervez Hoodbhoy and Ismail Faruqi. Although no systematic framework has been developed in the discourse on science and religion in Islam, contemporary Muslim thinkers have developed their own intellectual responses to the issue of science and Islam which can serve as a useful point of reference.  I will classify their responses into three categories, viz.:

the metaphysical approach: Nasr and Naguib

the value-ethics approach: Ziauddin Sardar

the scientific autonomy approach: Hoodbhoy and Abdus Salam

In section three, I will take up the question of the relevance and use of history (of science) in dealing with the question of science and religion in Islam.  The relationship between science and religion in the Muslim world cannot be understood outside of its historical and cultural context, and therefore reference to history is essential in dealing with the issue. Some of the issues dealt with here are:

misconceptions in the use of history of science in dealing with the question of science and religion

the historical sociology of science in Islam

the influence of colonialism on science in the Muslim world

lessons to be drawn from history, and its relevance to the contemporary world of science in Islam

Finally, I will end the paper with concluding remarks on the following:

the epistemology of science and religion

the use of science and technology for development in Islam

the relevance and use of history

Since the issue is multidimensional, the various salient dimensions as outlined above have to be dealt with, with a view to getting a good grasp of the issues involved in the relationship between science and religion in Islam, and suggesting the way forward.

2.0          Is Ian Barbour’s Typology of the Relationship between Science and Religion Applicable to the Islamic World?

Barbour’s typology, being more sociological rather than historical, cannot be straightforwardly applied to the analysis of the relationship between science and religion in the Islamic world. This is because of the different historical and cultural contexts that existed between science in the western world as compared to science in the Islamic world.  For example, in Barbour’s typology conflict appears as a rather dominant theme; given the history of conflict between Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church in the 17th century, and between Christian theologians and Darwinists in the 19th century, this makes sense. Thus the metaphor of “warfare” and “battle” used to describe the relationship between science and religion in the west, seems appropriate, given such a background.  Also the victory of the scientists over the theologians/religionists in those two episodes, seemed to seal the fate of religion in its battle with science in the West. This, coupled with the history of increasing secularisation of western society, therefore prompted at least two of the categories postulated by Barbour, namely: (i) conflict and (ii) independence.  The victory of science over religion, and the autonomy of science from religious authority, seems to imply ‘conflict’ and ‘independence’.  However, in Islam no such drastic episodes took place in the relationship between Islam and science in its history.  Although this does not necessarily suggest the total compatibility between Islam and science, with there being no conflict at all, either potentially or in actuality, the ‘disagreement’ or ‘incompatibility’ between the two is of a different nature, and should be approached with a more nuanced analysis that is sensitive to the subtleties of Islamic history.  For instance, instead of a direct conflict between science and Islam, it was suggested that science was ‘marginal’ in medieval Islamic culture and education, i.e. the so-called ‘marginality thesis’ put forward by Von Grunebaum (Lindberg, 1992, p. 173).  This marginality did not entail conflict, but only reflects the priorities in Islamic culture, where religious sciences prevail over the natural sciences.  Also, the rise of science in Islamic civilisation was partly attributed to the Muta’zilite Caliphs such as al-Ma’mun, with their rationalist tendencies. Although it is tempting to draw parallels with the influence of Protestantism on science in the west, such a comparison is flawed in view of the fact that the Muta’zilah was not really a separate religious sect in Islam, unlike Protestantism in Christianity.  What this suggests is that “Patronage” was an important factor in the development, rise and fall of science in Islamic culture, where this patronage is connected to ‘religious ideology’.  This ‘power factor’ in determining the fate of science in Islamic society is something which cannot be analysed using Barbour’s typology.  Also, Barbour’s typology, like Merton’s norms, assumes the distinct identity of science as an autonomous form of knowledge which is not ‘socially constructed’.  Recent literature in the history and sociology of science, however, have shown how the development of science was shaped and influenced by its social and cultural contexts.  Thus, my suggestion is that we work from the historical ground upwards, rather than impose neat sociological categories and impose on the (‘mismatched’?) historical realities.

3.0          Existing Views on the Relationship between Science and Islam by Muslim Writers

The relationship between science and religion has been discussed by both Muslim and non-Muslim writers.  Western scholars have discussed the issue mainly through Ian Barbour’s four-fold typology, and drawing on the works of historians, philosophers and sociologists of science.  In the Islamic world, the discourse on science and Islam have been influenced and dominated by the works of a few Muslim intellectuals namely Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Syed Muhammad Naguib al-Attas, Ziauddin Sardar, Pervez Hoodbhoy, and more generally the late Ismail Faruqi (Shah, 2001).  Any attempt to formulate an Islamic approach to the relationship between science and Islam must therefore begin by acknowledging and discussing the contributions made by these thinkers to the question of the relationship between science and Islam. I have selected the thinkers above because apart from their influence in shaping the discourse, they can also be regarded as representing the major positions in contemporary Islamic thought on science and Islam. I will begin by briefly outlining their respective positions, giving brief commentaries on each one of them, and suggesting how the discourse as a whole can be carried further or whether any policy implications can be drawn from them.

3.1          The Metaphysical/Traditionalist Approach: Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Syed Naguib al-Attas

Both Nasr (Nasr, 1981) and Naguib (al-Attas, 1989) priviledge Islamic philosophy and metaphysics when dealing with knowledge, including scientific knowledge.  Nasr is more familiar with modern science compared to Naguib, having been educated in physics and geophysics at Harvard in the 1950s.

However, the epistemological position they took when discussing scientific knowledge, is almost similar. This is because of their commitment to Islamic metaphysics and cosmology, through which they view scientific knowledge. They can be considered as ‘globalists’ in their approach to scientific knowledge because they conduct their analysis mainly at the general epistemological level rather than dealing with specific issues in science, or with any specific scientific theory. Even when Nasr deals with the biological theory of evolution, the arguments made are philosophical rather than scientific, unlike the approach taken by someone like Harun Yahya for instance.  Thus both of them consider science as a ‘lower form of knowledge’ based on rational and empirical sources only, in contrast to the ‘higher forms of knowledge’ accessible through religious intuition, gnosis or Irfan. Therefore, the knowledge of the Prophets and the Saints would be of a higher order compared to that of scientists.

Nasr calls himself a ‘Traditionalist’ on this account because he would not accede to the claim that modern science has advanced beyond religion in giving us ultimate truths about the world, including the natural world. Instead, Nasr sticks to his guns and preserve the authority of the Qur’an and the Hadith (as he interprets them) even in the face of modern challenges from science and technology. His uncompromising and unapologetic position against the theory of evolution in the face of scientific orthodoxy can be understood against this background.  The upshot of their metaphysical approach to knowledge is that they are able to preserve traditional beliefs in the ‘supernatural’ or Unseen worlds such as the world of angels and jinn, which modern science has written off or suspended belief in.  Instead, they returned to traditional sources and traditional interpretations of reality as understood by earlier Muslim thinkers especially the Sufis, instead of ‘going with the times’.  Unlike the approach taken by some writers such as Frithoj Capra (Capra, 1976), who attempted to engage with both modern science (quantum physics) and traditional cosmologies such as Taoism, and in a sense ‘updating’ the traditional cosmology through a modern scientific interpretation, Nasr chose to opt for a ‘Traditionalist’ (Jahanbegloo & Nasr, 2010) approach and avoided such engagements. His own autobiography revealed the conscious decision he took in this matter, when he was a physics student at Harvard.  Now, the question is: is there an unbridgeable gulf between the two or is a rapprochement possible?  For Nasr a rapprochement does not seem possible because science and religion are based on different premises regarding the nature of reality.  In science reality is ultimately physical, and that the only sources of valid knowledge are the rational and the empirical. In western thought, this issue has been more or less clinched by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, when he rejected the possibility of metaphysical knowledge in his Critique of Pure Reason.  Since then, western thought has imposed boundaries on genuine or valid knowledge, more or less along the lines set out by Kant and later revised by the Logical Positivists.  Even when Wittgenstein in his later work, tried to rescue non-scientific discourse from being consigned to the flames and the realm of the ‘meaningless’, he ended up by giving a secular humanistic account in terms of ‘language games’.  In other words, the west has not been able to re-assign the realm of the spiritual back into mainstream intellectual discourse (note the writings of Rorty (1999) for instance), while in the Islamic world following Al-Ghazali, the spiritual and metaphysical realm has remained cognitively respectable even today.

3.2          The Ethical Approach by Ziauddin Sardar

Unlike Nasr and Naguib, who chose to view science through Islamic metaphysics, Sardar (Sardar, 1977) instead looks at science through Islamic ethics.  Familiar with western critiques of science, Sardar adds to the growing dissenting voices against science in the west, but by bringing in his own Islamic background and perspective into the picture.  In the 1970s, critics of science—apart from philosophical critiques by Kuhn, Feyerabend and the Edinburgh School—point to the damage caused by science and technology to the environment though industrial pollution, to human security through the nuclear arms race, and the dangers of a ‘brave new world’ brought about by advances such as ‘human cloning’.

Sardar’s diagnosis is that the ills of modern science results from the fact that it is a by- product of a secular western civilisation that has abandoned religion and religious values in the transition from medievalism to modernity.  The solution therefore, is not to reject science but to envelop it within an Islamic value-system, so that science can be practised according to Islamic values and hence be of benefit to humanity.  Sardar begins by criticising the notion that science and technology are ‘value-free’.  To him, science and technology are not value-free but are infused by values adopted throughout western history and civilisation such as the Enlightenment, Capitalism etc.  These values which are ‘man-made’, in contrast to a divinely-inspired value-system, could not deliver men out of his ills.  Thus despite the promise heralded in the Baconian vison of the 17th century of human salvation on earth through advances in science and technology, and the Enlightenment ideal of a rational approach to life and thought, we have not seen a better world despite advances in scientific knowledge and modern technology.  Sardar’s argument and solution is that since science is not value-free (both in a descriptive and a normative sense), it is best if science is practised according to Islamic ethics which is universal since Islam is a universal religion for the whole of mankind. He outlined several of these ethical principles such as justice, conservation, balance, avoidance of wastage etc, which could act as guiding ethical principles in the practice of science and technology.  The advantage of Sardar’s approach for Muslims is that he does not advocate turning away from modern science and technology, which the metaphysical approach indirectly does.  Although critical of science like his other western colleague, Jerome Ravetz, Sardar still entertains the hope that science re-directed can be harnessed for a better world.

In so doing, his approach also helps Muslims to cope with modernity by accommodating science within the Islamic value-system.  Although Sardar’s approach remains programmatic and lacking in details (eg. ‘what does an Islamic science policy look like?’), it is hopeful in that it allows for the retention of an Islamic identity in the attempt made by Muslim societies to modernise through science and technology. In fact he was quite critical of Nasr’s approach to modern science and technology, which he regarded as not quite useful in practical terms given the backwardness of Muslim countries in science and technology in relation to the West, and how this has hampered the Muslim Ummah and was partly responsible for its history of being colonised.

3.3          The Scientific Autonomy Approach: Pervez Hoodbhoy and Abdus Salam

If Zia Sardar was considered a radical by some, it is more so with Pervez Hoodbhoy (Hoodbhoy, 1992), who in his book Science and Islam, advocated for autonomy of science from control by Islamic religious authority.  Hoodbhoy drew his inspiration from the history of science in western civilisation, although he was equally aware of the history of science in Islamic civilisation.

In the west, science and scientists had to go through a long history of struggle against religious authority, before it finally became independent from religious control. This was symbolised and epitomised by the conflict between Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church in the 17th century. Although this was not the whole story, since religion was also a factor in the rise of modern science in the west as shown in the Merton thesis and in the institutionalisation of science in religiously-controlled medieval European universities, it cannot be denied that the advancement of science took place amidst a secularising European society, where the support from the secular state enabled science to operate quite freely, though now under the control of a secular state authority. In Islam, because of its all-encompassing nature, secularisation has never really taken root in Islamic society.  Thus no sphere of modern life, be it political, economic, legal, educational, or even cultural, can be totally free of religious injunction or authority.

Hoodbhoy himself when writing his book, personally experienced this when there was an attempt to revive “Islamic Science” and to “Islamise” science, when Pakistan was ruled by the Islamist General Zia ul-Haq.  Hoodbhoy regarded any attempt at what he considered as ‘religious interference’ in the development of science, as unwarranted and even detrimental to the Muslim cause.  To him the problem is not that science is “un-Islamic”, or at odds with Islam in certain respects. The problem rather, is contemporary Muslim backwardness in science and technology in relation to the west and other advanced countries such as Japan and South Korea.  This sentiment is shared by his mentor, ironically the rather religious Abdus Salam (Salam, 1984), and I believe most aspiring modern Muslim governments today.  But Hoodbhoy does not want to cut himself off totally from his Islamic roots, citing the pre-eminence of Muslim science in the past in support of the argument that science and Islam are not necessarily incompatible.  However, he was aware of the rationalist ideology of the Mu’tazilah, whom he credited for the support they gave to science in Islamic civilisation that led to its pre-eminence. That same spirit, he believed, should be exercised in our age.

Thus it is not Islam per se that is to be blamed for the decline of science in Islam, but instead the attitude adopted by certain Muslim thinkers and leaders, that have been responsible for the current malaise. What is needed therefore, is an ‘enlightened’ Islamic approach to modernity, including science and technology. It smacks of a ‘missed Protestantism’ in Islamic history, and suggests remedial action along those lines.

4.0          Science and Islam and the Challenge of History: The Social and Cultural Context of Science in Islam

The relationship between science and Islam cannot be properly understood outside of its historical and cultural context (Dallal, 2010).  Even then, the history of science in Islam needs to be properly interpreted in order to draw the right lessons, thus making history relevant for contemporary science policy in the Muslim world.  Science and technology policy in the contemporary world is heavily influenced by western models, such as the OECD models, namely the so-called Oslo and Frascati Manuals, which in turn is based on a different historical experience, and tied to a certain view of economic growth. It is more relevant to western countries that have achieved a high level of economic growth based on the K-Economy with substantial inputs from R&D.  Muslim countries would do well to reflect on their own historical experience in the relation between science and Islam, instead of slavishly imitating the west.

Even if Muslim countries succeed in achieving similar success by adopting those models, it might be at the expense of cultural stability and authenticity based on Islamic values.  Thus it is important for Muslims to understand the historical challenge in charting their own paths towards modernity, through the incorporation or assimilation of science and technology.  In this regard, we cannot strictly separate the thematic from the historical/chronological, the synchronic from the diachronic, because the past is still very much with us. We carry a greater historical and cultural baggage as compared to the west, which has discarded much of that baggage throughout its history.

In trying to draw positive lessons from history, I will first begin by discussing what I construe as the ‘misinterpretations’ of history, or the ‘wrong’ lessons that have sometimes been drawn from history, in thinking about the role of science in contemporary Muslim society.

1)            Firstly, there is the tendency to ‘glorify’ past Muslim achievements in science and technology, perhaps as a reminder of what Muslims were capable of in the past, and thereby act as a psychological motivator in the attempt to revive science and technology in today’s Muslim world.  However, despite its nobility, it conceals more than it reveals.  It conceals the actual status of science in medieval Islam (marginality thesis), and the role played by rationalist Muta’zilah caliphs such as al-Ma’mun in the propagation of science in Muslim society.  Are contemporary Muslims willing to abandon or change some of its conservatism, to promote science and technology?

2)            Secondly, the glory of Islamic science was achieved through the works of individual scientists such as Ibn Sina, Ibn Haytham, Al-Khwarizmi and others (Nasr, 1968).  Science was not institutionalised in Islam, and thus there was no continuity in the development of science after them.  Also, the ‘great individual scientist’ model is no longer appropriate in today’s “Big Science” which is capital-intensive and based on teamwork.  So what works for science in the Muslim world in the past is not necessarily what works today.

3)            Thirdly, the role of colonialism in Islamic history has not been adequately and properly factored in, when considering the relationship between science and Islam.  The effects of colonization are so deep in the Muslim world so that institutions and scientific activities carried out in the Islamic world today is the extension of the colonial heritage rather than the Islamic.  Scientific institutions in most of the developing world today is a legacy of the colonialists. Although in terms of history, we are proud of the glorious days of science in Islamic civilization, but the fact is that scientific institutions as well as various other institutions that we have inherited after independence are a legacy of colonial rule. Although we cannot turn the clock back and resume from where we had left before colonial rule, it does present a challenge if want to rethink the science-Islam relationship.  Colonial influence is not necessarily intrinsically bad, especially since if we realise that western science owes to Islamic civilization in its revival in the 12th century through translation works from Arabic to Latin, via Spain and Sicily.  Science in today’s Muslim world has been subjected more to nationalistic concerns, rather than the Islamic, as a result of post-colonialism.  Therefore in order to relate Islam to science in the present Muslim world in practical terms, this has to be done in the context of nation-states rather than in terms of some abstract “Islamic or Muslim world”.  The OIC can perhaps act as a bridge or starting point in this respect, since it is an organization of nation-states with Muslim majorities.

Thus history has to be properly understood and interpreted in order for it to serve as a guiding light in articulating a genuine and authentic Islamic response and science policy for the contemporary Muslim world.  The social and cultural conditions existing then, and how it contributed to past success in Islamic science, must not be assumed as equally valid in today’s world.  The historical colonial experience and its effect on the Muslim world also has to be understood.  Thus while history might serve as an encouragement for Muslims trying to develop their own science and technology in today’s world, they must also learn to draw the right lessons from history if that success were not to remain purely historical.

5.0          Concluding Remarks

My concluding remarks will refer to the following three major points, namely:

the use of science and technology for development, and

the relevance and use of history.

The epistemology of science and religion.  Broadly speaking, as forms of knowledge, they are based on different assumptions, methodologies, scope, and purpose.  Their overlap, if any, is partial and may or may not result in conflicting claims.  In areas where they do not overlap, for example in the realm of morals and ethics that is mostly the province of religion rather than science, one turns to religion for guidance rather than science.  However, there are cases where the application of religious principles and moral codes would require an understanding of science if it involves technical issues such as reproductive technology (bioethics).  Claims made by religion with respect to the spiritual realm and the Unseen world, are ontological claims, which cannot be verified by or through science.  However, it is belief in these realities that underwrite the moral and social codes of Islamic societies.  To me, it is best to keep an ‘open dialogue’ regarding these issues, rather than make any dogmatic pronouncements. It could be more enlightening as it could open up more vistas of understanding that is hitherto unknown.  In any case, science is ‘fallible knowledge’ (Popper, 1972) and makes no claim to absolute truth.  The history of science has shown that our scientific understanding of the world has changed over the centuries, with there being no ‘ontological convergence’.  In any case, with regard to knowledge regarding the metaphysical world, science can best be looked at as being ‘agnostic’ rather than ‘antagonistic’ regarding such metaphysical knowledge.  One is therefore entitled to believe in both science and religion without there necessarily being any deep or irreconcilable conflict.  The belief in the reality of the spiritual world however, should not be used as an excuse for rejecting the pursuit of scientific knowledge, given that we have delimited the boundaries of science in relation to religion.  Furthermore, Islam encourages its followers to seek knowledge of the world, conceived as God’s creation.  Here one can draw upon the examples of past Muslim scientists who were at home in both science and Islam.

The Use of Science and Technology for Development.  Muslim thinkers such as Zia Sardar (Sardar, Explorations in Islamic Science, 1988), or even government policy makers in Muslim countries, have correctly pointed out that weaknesses in science and technology have been partly responsible for the current ‘backwardness’ of the Muslim Ummah.  In so agreeing, I am not thereby adopting a totally ‘modernist’ perspective with respect to religion and development, but acknowledging contemporary realities.  Islam was successful and respected in the past because of its political, economic, scientific, and military strength, not weakness.  That strength enabled Islam to flourish throughout the world.  Present-day Muslims therefore, cannot afford to ignore modern science and technology, for its own survival as a Muslim Ummah.  The spiritual strength of the Muslim must be supported and accompanied by its material strength acquired through science and technology.  However, the pursuit of modern science and technology must be guided by Islamic values and ethics to ensure that in the long run, science and technology will serve humanity and the Muslim Ummah, and not lead to its eventual destruction, which is a real possibility looking at the way the west is using its science and technology within the framework of Capitalism.  In fact even the capitalistic world had to resort to ‘regulatory measures’ based ultimately on some moral or ethical values, in order to ensure sustainability.

The Relevance and Use of History.  The question of the relationship between science and Islam should not be viewed in an ahistorical manner, because the relationship has been shaped by history which would therefore require a historical understanding in order to suggest the way forward.  History is also important because it gives a sense of Islamic identity in our attempt to relate science and Islam. Otherwise we would be caught up in existing frameworks of analysis, largely emanating from the west who has managed to universalise their own history, and provincialise the rest.  However, in our attempt to utilise history in order to achieve an accurate understanding of the relationship between science and Islam, we must be cautious not to fall into the trap of nostalgia and jingoism.  We should approach history with a sense of realism, and not as a means of psychological cover for our present weakness and inadequacies.  Knowing where we came from (through historical understanding), we would be in a better position to understand the situation we are currently in, which would then make us better informed when thinking of strategies on how to move ahead.  History is also important for another reason; that the past is still very much in our present—even in a modified form—and dealing with history is in a way dealing with an aspect of contemporary reality.  However, we also have to learn how to move on from the past and chart a new future which is somehow reconciled with its past, and for that we need a new creativity and a new energy. The challenge is therefore for us, contemporary Muslim thinkers, to help chart out that new future for the Islamic world.

Al-Attas, S. M. (1989). Islam and the Philosophy of Science. Kuala Lumpur: International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation.

Barbour, I. G. (2000). When Science Meets Religion; Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? New York: Harper Collins.

Capra, F. (1976). The Tao of Physics. Suffolk: Fontana/Collins.

Dallal, A. (2010). Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hoodbhoy, P. (1992). Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality. Kuala Lumpur: S. Abdul Majeed & Co.

Jahanbegloo, R., & Nasr, S. H. (2010). In Search of the Sacred. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger.

Lindberg, D. (1992). The Beginnings of Western Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nasr, S. H. (1968). Science and Civilisation in Islam. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Nasr, S. H. (1981). Knowledge and the Sacred. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Popper, K. (1972). Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Rorty, R. (1999). Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books.

Salam, A. (1984). Ideals and Realities. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing.

Sardar, Z. (1977). Science, Technology, and Development in the Muslim World. London: Croom Helm.

Sardar, Z. (1988). Explorations in Islamic Science. London: Mansell.

Shah, M. H. (2001). Contemporary Muslim Intellectuals and Their Responses to Modern Science and Technology. Studies in Contemporary Islam, 3(2), 1-30.

By Mohd Hazim Shah, Task Force Essay on Islam’s Response to Science’s Big Questions .

Prof. Mohd Hazim Shah began his career as a tutor in History and Philosohy of Science, under the Dean’s Office of the Faculty of Science, University of Malaya in 1977. He is currently the Deputy President of the Malaysian Social Science Association.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge Dr. Osama Athar, Founding Editor and Publisher of Muslim-Science.Com for permitting us to reproduce this very much valuable essay emanating from the Task Force on Islam’s Response to Science’s Big Questions

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By: Mehdi Golshani ; Member of localhost/muslim’s Task Force on Science and Islam

Introduction

• The Problem of Life and Spirit

  According to the Holy Qur’an, human beings have a physical dimension and a spiritual one. The latter comes into being at a later stage in the development of the human body, and has non-material nature. It is a Divine Grace emanated to every human being:

“When your Lord said to the angels, ‘Indeed I am going to create a human out of a dry clay [drawn] from an aging mud. So when I have proportioned him and breathed into him of My spirit, then fall down in prostration before him’.”   (al-Hijr 29)

The idea that human beings have a dual aspect, i.e. physical and spiritual, is an old one and has been a controversial problem since old times. In our time when empiricist philosophy is dominant, the primacy is attributed to matter, and life is considered as a byproduct of physico-chemical processes, leaving no room for the human soul. Francis Crick , who was one the discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule, says this clearly:

The astonishing Hypothesis is that “you,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the  behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (1)

The prevalent outlook restricts reality to what is detectable through physico-chemical processes. But this outlook cannot be derived from science per se ; rather, it is rooted in the naturalistic philosophy ruling over contemporary scientific circles? Roger Trigg describes the matter beautifully:

“ Why should not a transformed science one day even be able to accept the existence of ‘spiritual’ realities? Only a metaphysical decision now that such things cannot exist would suggest that that is impossible. The question is whether we are concerned with the nature of reality, or with the validity of a scientific method tailored to current human capabilities.” (2)

In response to the position of materialists concerning the problem of life and spirit, Muslim philosophers argue that:

(a) In addition to the material dimension, human beings own a spiritual dimension that appears when the conditions for its appearance is fulfilled. In fact, spirit is a special effusion of Allah to each individual human being. The denial of this spiritual dimension by materialists is not a scientific decision; rather it is a metaphysical decision not rooted in empirical science.

Mutahhari , a contemporary Muslim philosopher, describes the Qur’anic position concerning this matter:

“The Qur’an’s logic concerning life is that an effusion [of Allah], at a higher level than the sensible body horizon… This logic is based [on the fact that] sensible matter, by itself, lacks life and that life is an effusion and a light from a higher source” (3)

It is interesting that John Eccles , a Nobel Laureate in Medicine, says the same thing:

Since materialist solutions fail to account for our experienced  uniqueness, I am constrained to attribute the uniqueness of the Self or Soul to a supernatural spiritual creation. To give the explanation in theological terms: each Soul is a new Divine creation which is implanted into the growing foetus at some time between conception and birth. (4)

Neville Mott , a Nobel Laureate in physics, concurs:

“I believe, too, that neither physical science nor psychology can ever ‘explain’ human consciousness … To me, then, human consciousness lies outside science, and it is here that I seek the relationship between God and man.” (5)

Furthermore, a number of eminent contemporary physicists, without any reference to metaphysics, believe that consciousness, which is a manifestation of spirit, is not explainable in terms of physics. For example, Schrödinger says:

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” (6)

Even Richard Dawkins , who believes that science can ultimately explain everything, admits that consciousness is one of the most difficult problems. In an interview from October 2009, he says:

“Consciousness is the biggest puzzle facing biology, facing neurobiology, facing evolutionary biology.  It is a very, very big problem.” (7)

Popper, however , believed that the origin of life will probably remain untestable for ever and that even if scientists create life in a laboratory, they can never be sure that life actually began in the same way. (8)

(b) Physico-chemical processes prepare the ground for life, i.e. they are necessary conditions for the emergence of life. But they are not sufficient conditions. Muslim philosophers do not deny the material ground for life, but they believe that at a certain stage of the physical development of a body, it is through God’s effusion that life is developed in human beings. In Mutahhari ’s words:

“The synthesis, addition, subtraction and combination of the parts of matter are necessary conditions for the appearance of life effects, but they are not sufficient.” (9)

Materialists only see part of the problem, but they claim that they are seeing the whole. A radio is necessary to broadcast the signals sent by a transmitter, but it is not sufficient. There has to be a transmitter.

(c) Even if one day human beings bring about living organisms, theists’ claim for the existence of a spiritual element is not disproved. Because they can claim that when the material ground of life is ready, Allah will effuse life to it, as He is the owner of infinite effusion. As Mutahhari put it:

“If some day human beings discovered the law of creation of living beings … and discovered all conditions and material parts of a living creature … does that creature become a living one or not? The answer is that it certainly becomes a living one, as it is not possible that the conditions for the diffusion becomes available but it is not realized… If some day human beings get this opportunity, what is essentially done is the preparation for the appearance of life, not the creation of life.” (10)

 “In truth, the human spirit is material in creation and action, but it is  immaterial in subsistence and intellection.” (11)    

 After emergence, however, the soul does not depend on the body and survives  the body’s death, i.e. it is immortal. In short, soul has a corporeal ground, but  a spiritual subsistence.

 (2) Creation of the Universe

 Modern cosmology started with Einstein’s 1917 article entitled, “Cosmological  Considerations about General Relativity.” Einstein applied his theory of general relativity (GR) to the whole universe. Einstein’s equations have different solutions, but GR cannot choose a solution by itself. In 1929, Hubble noticed that the spectra of light reaching us from galaxies is red-shifted and this shift is proportional to the distance of that galaxy from ours. This was interpreted in terms of the expansion of the universe, and led to the big bang model of the universe that implies an initial time for the creation of the universe.

In the 1940’s, Fred Hoyle and his collaborators presented the steady-state model of the universe, which claimed that there was no temporal beginning to our universe. The steady-state theory had appeal for some physicists, because they thought that with this theory they can dispense with the idea of a Creator for the universe. Weinberg is very clear about this:

“The idea that universe had no start appeals to many physicists philosophically, because it avoids a supernatural act of creation.” (12)

Similarly, Stephen Hawking:

  “Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.” (13)

The discovery of the microwave background radiation in 1965 gave an impetus to the big bang model of the universe.

In the last three decades, atheist physicists have been after the elimination of the initial moment of time, as they considered this as an indication of the creation of the universe by an external agent. In Hawking’s words,

“So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?” (14)

  But the assumption of no beginning in time, does not make the universe self-explanatory, as Paul Davies explains:

“The fact that the universe might have no origin in time does not explain its existence, or why it  has the form it has. Certainly, it does not explain why nature possesses the relevant fields (such as  the creation field) and physical principles that  establish the steady — state condition.” (15)

Furthermore, as some Muslim and Christian scholars have indicated, creation does not mean creation in time. Rather, it means dependence on God. As Arthur Peacocke put it:

“The principal stress in the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation … is on the dependence and contingency of all entities, and events, other than God himself: it is about a perennial relationship between God and the world and not about the beginning of the Earth, or the whole universe at a point in time.” (16)

Furthermore, in Philip Hefne r’s view:

“ Creation for Christian theology is by no means limited to protology. It is not limited by what happened at the beginning when time was first created. Creation also refers to God’s ongoing sustaining of the world. Every movement of the world’s existence depends on the ongoing grace of God.” (17)

This is similar to the view of Mulla Sadra, an eminent 17 th -century Muslim philosopher, who believed that our world is recreated at every instant. Mulla Sadra, however, considered no beginning for the creation. In his view, the belief in the uninterrupted effusion of Allah requires eternality of creation. The argument, in Mutahhari ’s words, goes as follows:

“They have thought that the theory of eternity of matter is inconsistent with the belief in God. But there is no inherent connection between this theory and the denial of God; rather, theist philosophers believe that belief in God requires belief in the eternity and continuation of His grace and creativeness , which requires the eternity of creation.” (18)

On this basis, Mutahhari concludes that there could have been other worlds before our world:

“On the basis of monotheistic principles we should say that there is no beginning for the universe. If [it turns out] that this universe has a beginning, there should have been another world, [possibly]in different form… In order for the world to have a God, who is inherently all-emanating and eternally graceful, there should have been always creatures  existent”. (19)

Arthur Eddington was hesitant about the Big Bang theory on the same grounds:

“ As a scienti,st I simply do not believe that the present order of things started off with a bang; unscientifically, I feel equally unwilling to accept the implied discontinuity in the divine nature.” (20)

• Does the universe have a purpose?

  In the Qur’anic view, God is the Creator and the Sustainer of the universe. He has created everything in measure and has decreed for it a telos . The creation is in truth, not for sport or vanity, and everything has a definite term:

We did not create them, save in truth. (44:38)   We have not created the heavens and the earth and whatsoever is between them, save in truth and for a definite term. (46:3)   We did not create the heaven and the earth, and whatsoever is between them, as play … (21:16)   We have not created the heavens and the earth, and whatsoever is between them, for vanity … (38:27)

The above verses imply the creation of the universe by God as well as its guidance by Him. In fact, the Qur’an talks of a universal notion of purpose and a direction to the created universe:

[Moses] said: “Our Lord is He Who gave everything its creation, then guided it.” (20:50)

  Imam Fakhr al-Din Razi , in his celebrated commentary on the Holy Qur’an, has elaborated on the distinction between the creation of a thing and its sense of direction. (21) This sense of direction is a mysterious dimension present in everything, directing it toward its proper God-assigned role.

Following the Qur’an, Muslim theologians have never ignored teleological considerations, and the silence of modern science about this point has not affected their view, though it has had a silencing effect on Muslim scientists.

Teleology played an important role in medieval science. For the scientists of that era, every created thing had its especial place in the hierarchy of the created world, because it was created by a God who had designed a telos to the universe. The founders of modern science, who were devoted theists, did not deny the presence of telos to the universe, but they did not consider the job of science to deal with teleological considerations. But the negligence of teleological considerations by the scientists of the last few centuries is partly   due to their heavy involvement with mathematical manipulations and the predictive aspects of science, and partly due to the false assumption that questions of teleological nature hinder further development of science.

With further development of modern science and the dominance of empiricist outlook, teleology was considered as an avenue for theism. Therefore, atheists have been insisting on denying any kind of teleological considerations. In Atkins ’ words:

A gross contamination of the reductionist ethic is the concept of purpose. Science has no need of purpose. All events at the molecular level that lies beneath all our actions, activities, and reflections are purposeless, and are accounted for by the collapse of energy and matter into ever-increasing disorder. (22)

  Similarly, Steven Weinberg sees no visible purpose in the universe:

“The present universe had evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” (23)

In response to Weinberg who denies any purpose in the universe, Paul Davies mentions two important points: if the universe has no purpose, then there would be two problems: (i) scientific effort would be meaningless, and (ii) the more we search nature, the more it seems incomprehensible:

“If [the universe] isn’t about anything, there would be no good reason to embark on the scientific quest in the first place, because we would have no rational basis for believing that we could thereby uncover additional coherent and meaningful facts about the world. So, we might justifiably invert Weinberg’s dictum and say that the more the universe seems pointless, the more it also seems incomprehensible .” (24)

Later on, Weinberg himself qualified his earlier statement about a pointless universe by saying that:

“I believe that there is no point in the universe that can be discovered by the methods of science.” (25)

  But, contrary to what Weinberg says, some scientists and philosophers (both in the Islamic world and in the West) think that there are some clues to the teleological aspects of our universe in modern science. One has to be perceptive to discover such clues. For example the notions of purpose and design of the created universe has recently attracted much attention to the so-called anthropic principle, according to which the physical constants of nature are so-finely tuned that if they were slightly different, carbon-based life could not have developed and we would not be here. Anthropic coincidences call for an explanation, and there have been several explanations. In the monotheistic religions, one can take them as an indication that God planned the universe with human beings in mind. Other explanations carry heavy loads of metaphysical assumptions which, in my view, are much more involved than the explanation in terms of an a priori plan by an intelligent designer. For example, the most serious alternative to the design hypothesis, is the many-worlds hypothesis, in which one postulates infinite universes to explain the fine tuning of fundamental constants. In Stephen Hawking’s words:

“The multiverse concept can explain the fine-tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the universe for our benefit .” (26)

  But, as Paul Davies says, this carries too much baggage and the existence of many worlds is not scientifically disprovable:

“Not everybody is happy with the many-universes theory. To postulate an infinity of unseen and unseeable universes just to explain the one we do see seems like a case of excess baggage carried to the extreme. It is simpler to postulate one unseen God … Scientifically, the many-universes theory is unsatisfactory because it could never be falsified: what discoveries could lead a many-worlder to change her/his mind?” (27)

It is interesting that the idea of the multiverse, which is used by atheists for denouncing God’s existence implied by the entropic principle, is used by both Muslim and Christian scientists and philosophers to secure the idea of everlastingness of God’s grace. In Mutahhari ’s words:

“Maybe they are right that if we go back so many years, the world did not have the present order. But how do we know that there had not been another world before ours with a different order?” (28)

In addition, some theists have asserted that an all-powerful God could have created many worlds, rather than just one world. In the words of George Ellis :

“Does the idea of a multiverse preclude the monotheistic idea of a creator God?… I argue that the answer is no … the ideas can exist together. God could have chosen to operate via creation of multiverses. The multiverse proposal says nothing about ultimate causation (chance, probability, design): All the same anthropic issues arise as for a single universe: Why this multiverse and not another one?” (29)

• Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for Soul (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,1994),p. 3
• Roger Trigg,  https://www.faraday.st-https://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/CIS/trigg_lecture.pdf
• Mortaza Mutahhari, Collected Works , Vol. 13 (Tehran: Sadra Publications, 1975), p. 56
• John Eccles, Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (London: Taylor & Francis, 2005), p. 249
• Neville Mott, Can Scientists Believe? (London: James & James Science Publishers Ltd., 1991) ,p.8
• Erwin Schrodinger, “General Scientific and Popular Papers,” in Collected Papers , Vol. 4 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1984), p. 334
• http://ttbook.org/book/transcript/transcript-steve-paulson-reports-consciousness
• John Horgan, The End of Science (Great Britain: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), p. 38
• Mortaza Mutahhari, Collected Works , Vol. 13 (in Persian), p. 38
• Mortaza Mutahhari, Ibid. , pp. 58-59
• Mulla-Sadra (Ṣadr ad-Din Muḥammad Shirazi), al-Hikmat al-Muta’aliyah fi al-Asfar al-Aqliyyah al-Arba’ah (Beirut: Dar Ihya al-Turath al-Arabi, 1981), Vol. 9 , p. 347
• Steven Weinberg, The New Yorker , 12 June,1997, p. 20
• Stephen Hawking , ABrief History of Time (London: Bantam, 1988), p. 46
• Ibid., p. 141
• Paul Davies, The Mind of God (London: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 56
• Arthur R. Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science: The Bampton Lectures , 1978 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p.78
• Philip Hefner, “The Evolution of the Created Co-Creator” in Cosmos as Creation , ed. by Ted Peters (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), p. 227
• Mortaza Mutahhari, Collected Works , Vol. 1 (Tehran: Sadra Publications, 1995), p. 524
• Ibid., p. 524
• David Layzer, Cosmogenesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.137
• Fakhr al-Din Razi, al-Tafs ī r al-Kab ī r , Vol. 31 (Beirut: Dar’Ihya’ al-Turath al-Arabi), pp. 138-140
• John Cornwell (ed.), Nature’s Imagination (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 127
• Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 154
• Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (Great Britain: The Penguin Press, 2006), p. 16
• http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/wein-frame.html
• Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam, 2010), 165
• Paul Davies, The Mind of God (New York: Touchstone, 1993), p. 190
• Mortaza Mutahhari, Collected Works (in Persian), Vol. 10 (Tehran, Sadra Publications, 1976), p. 405
• George Ellis, “The Multiverse, Ultimate Causation and God”, https://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/resources/George%20Ellis%20Lecture/Ellis-Faraday.pdf

Mehdi Golshani is a contemporary Iranian theoretical physicist and philosopher and Professor of physics at Sharif University of Technology.

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Islam and Science : An Islamic Review on the characteristics of Islamic Sciences

“This article will discuss the importance of knowing precisely between knowledge and science. Regarding this matter, the discussion would like to introduce two different points of view about Universe; from Scientists and Islamic perspective, because from which philosophers and Scientists formulate or synthesized their findings and results of their observations according to the preconscious Ideas. This is a preliminary effort to discuss on how the reality of sciences (haqa’iq al-‘ulum) and the knowledge (al-ma‘rifat) can help mankind knowing, establishing and acknowledging Allah and His present and existence. By knowing these, we could learn the privilege of Islamic fundamentals and requirements for sciences and knowledge. Hence, they should entails upon Muslims especially or Non-Muslim in general into the ultimate truth and justice to the Knowledge and Science & Technology. This is what is supposed to be in scientific and technological application in the worldly lives.”

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Mohammed Mahbboob Hussain Aazaad

Lubna Ahsan

Islamisation of knowledge means practising i.e. discovering, compiling, piecing together, communicating and publishing intellectual activities based on Islamic concept of the universe, life and man. This paper examines the rationale, scope and core issues for Islamisation of knowledge. Finally, we assess the contributions of Muslim scholars in science and technology. The major conclusions drawn from this paper were: there is no doubt that Islam is relevant to all aspect of thinking, living or being. This relevance must be articulated, correctly in each discipline. The textbook used must be rewritten, establishing the discipline on integral aspect of the Islamic vision of reality. Moreover Muslim teachers have to be trained in the use of new textbooks and Muslim Universities, Colleges and Schools transformed in order to resume their pioneering leadership in the world of Islam and history.

Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science

Majid Daneshgar

This introduction provides an overview of the significance of this Symposium on Islam and Science in the Future. Compiling this project began in early 2019 and various articles by philosophers , Islamicists and historians tackle the relationship between Islam and science from different angles. The question of how nature works is one of the oldest, prompting various inquiring minds to engage with it. This question was raised by religious believers as well, whose attempts to answer it were not limited to the mechanism of the universe, but also included how it is displayed in their scriptures. They made an extra effort to show how nature is, in both real and imaginary worlds, touchable by means of religious-based piety. For them, nature was manifested into three states: (1) Self, which was about soul and body; (2) Environment, which was about their surroundings, and (3) Heaven, which connected physical celestial bodies with scripture-based unseen and metaphysical elements of skies. In the believers' eyes, reaching heaven needs piety as much as knowing self and surrounding need it; the better the understanding of one, the better the comprehension of the other. The desire to reach and behold heaven is obvious in Judeo-Christian literature, particularly 3 Baruch (known as "the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch" ["a pseudepigraphical work"]):

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Home — Essay Samples — Religion — Quran — The Quran and Modern Science: The Miracles of Creation

The Quran and Modern Science: The Miracles of Creation

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Published: Jul 17, 2018

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Cambridge Elements

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Elements in Islam and the Sciences is a new platform for the exploration, critical review and concise analysis of Islamic engagements with the sciences: past, present and future. The series will not only assess ideas, arguments and positions but it will also present novel views that push forward the frontiers of the field. Each Element will contain both a systematic reconstruction of the state of knowledge and an evaluative discussion of a given topic. Our intent is to offer the go-to pedagogical site for researchers, students and a broader educated public – as well as a new point of departure for ongoing discussions. ‘The sciences’ are understood here to mean predominantly the natural and applied sciences; but there will be scope too to explore areas and fields that lie somewhat beyond these parameters. The Elements will thus evince strong philosophical, theological, historical, and social dimensions as they address interactions between Islam and a wide range of scientific subjects.

Series Editors: Nidhal Guessoum and Stefano Bigliardi

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Stefano Bigliardi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco.

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Elements in this series

Islam and Environmental Ethics

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Islam's Encounter with Modern Science

Islam and Science

• Nidhal Guessoum , Stefano Bigliardi

Islam and Science

Bucaille, Maurice. “The Qur’an and Modern Science.” The Origin of Man. Jan 2001. 9 Mar 2005. .

Holy Qur’an. Trans. M. H. Shakir. Elmhurst, NY: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, n.d..

Ibrahim, I.A. A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam. 2nd ed. Houston: Darussalam, 1997.

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