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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Islam and Science: Muslim Responses to Science's Big Questions

2016, Muslim World Science Initiative

The ‘Big Question’ that the Task Force sought to address is: Is a reconciliation between Islam and Science desirable or possible? How do Muslim responses to Science’s Big Questions help bring about such a reconciliation? The Task Force has sought to address issues like: Is there room for reconciliation between science and Islam? Is such a reconciliation desirable? It is necessary? What are the implications of such a reconciliation (or lack of it) on science, theology, and practical life in the Muslim World? In particular, specific questions addressed include: 1) The Science & Religion debate – What do Science and Islam say to each other since both are concerned with the search for truth attained through motivated belief? What Islamic perspectives and frameworks can underpin this conversation within the Islamic World? 2) Has Science Killed God? – What are the informed Muslim responses to atheist arguments based on Science (e.g. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris etc.)? Can Muslim Scientists remain people of faith? Addressing, in particular: A. Allah as Creator: Fine tuning, design, the anthropic principle and the multiverse. B. Miracles: Does God tear up the natural, scientific order to enable miracles, or are there naturalistic explanations of miracles? 3) God, Creation & Biological Evolution – From Origins of Life to Human Evolution; how are these understood through faith in the Divine? 4) Soul, spirit, consciousness & free will – modern understandings of Ruh and Nafs 5) Policy and Ethical Implications – What are implications of this well-informed science-religion reconciliation on practical life - policy and societal ethics? The Report includes the "Istanbul Declaration on Islam and Science" consisting of 14 conclusions.

Related Papers

Shoaib A . Malik

We warmly welcome you to the ‘Relating Islam and Science’ conference, a forum bringing together a range of international scholars and practitioners with an interest in the development of Islam and science. The aim of the event is to re-engage with the question of how Islam and science could, should and do relate to one another. By addressing both theoretical ‘big questions’ in the Islam and science framework, and more practical social and community applications of Islam to science, we hope to generate rich and engaging discussion around the themes of the conference.

Islam & Science

Osman Bakar

Formulation of the relationship between Islam and science has been confused because of misuse and misunderstanding of key terms and their precise context. Which Islam? Which science? If we are aiming at a science molded in the crucible of Islam, we need to approach science as a theoretical construct with four components: a body of knowledge, basic premises, methods of study and goals, all of which must be fully informed by the domain of iman and understood at the level of ihsan. This paper establishes a philosophical framework for the harmonious relationship between epistemological dimensions of science and the Islamic worldview as well as between ethical and societal dimensions of science and Shari'ah. Keywords: Islam; science; context; normative teachings; theoretical structure; hierarchy of values; conceptual goals; epistemological; ethical; practical application; holistic; Shari'ah.

GIC Proceeding

radtria alkaf

This research aims to analyze the Western and Islamic perspectives on science. From a Western perspective, science is often viewed as the outcome of objective scientific methods and empirical research. This approach emphasizes the use of reason and logic in developing knowledge. On the other hand, the Islamic perspective acknowledges the importance of scientific methods in acquiring knowledge but also emphasizes the spiritual and revelatory dimensions in understanding reality. In this study, we conducted a comparative analysis of these perspectives, examining the similarities and differences in the conceptions of science from both viewpoints. Literature studies and religious references were utilized to gain a comprehensive understanding of these perspectives. The research reveals that while there are differences between the Western and Islamic views on science, there are also significant points of convergence. The analysis results show that the Western perspective tends to lean towa...

Questions and my answers for a panel discussion on Islam and modern science, Michigan State University, September 12, 2016.

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"]):

International Journal of Science Education

This paper critically examines four versions of Islamic science. Of these, only one can be regarded as a viable fusion between Islam and science. Far from being a threat to civilization, Islamic science addresses concerns that are severely lacking in Western science and thus has much to offer to humanity. In contrast to Western science with its lack of moral fibre and the inordinate emphasis given to reductionism, Islamic science takes upon a more holistic human-centred approach that is grounded in values that promote social justice, public welfare and responsibility towards the environment. The only limitation of Islamic science is that it does not adequately resolve the issue of control in the conduct of science. A truly humanistic science should not be regulated solely by members of the scientific community or the clergy but by all members of society through democratic participation.

Asudi Hamdun

“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.”

Theology and Science

This is an introduction to the special issue. It provides the historical context of Islam and Science that then leads to the theme of the issue. This special issue is the proceedings of a conference at Cambridge Muslim College that was held in December 2022.

Thomas Shelley

Those who study English language translations of the Holy Quran should be struck by the importance accorded to the acquisition of knowledge. As a result, early Muslim scholars made many very important discoveries in science and engineering. However, it is now time to again look closely at what the Quran says and how this is supported by some of the most recent discoveries made by Western Science and vice versa. One particularly important message in which the Quran and most moden scientists agree is that there is an urgent need to protect the Earth's environment. The results of failure to do so could well be the extinction of the human race and its replacement by some other species.

Science and Public Policy

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Encyclopedia of the History of Science

Science and islam in modernity.

• Daniel A. Stolz – University of Wisconsin-Madison

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, one of the most sensational court cases in the Islamic Republic of Iran concerned the fate of Mohammed ‘Ali Taheri. An engineer by training, Taheri was the founder of a therapeutic movement called Interuniversalism, also known as Cosmic Mysticism. Trained practitioners of Interuniversalism connect to the Universal Unconscious and apply “defensive radiation” to expel “inorganic beings” or “viruses” from bodies that need healing, particularly from undesired thoughts and behaviors. The system has roots in both Islamic and esoteric knowledge traditions, while employing a technoscientific vocabulary. The criminal charges against Taheri ranged from blasphemy to medical charlatanism: in other words, his movement violated the established lines of both religious and scientific authority in Iran. Of course, Cosmic Mysticism would not have attracted such scrutiny if it did not enjoy broad appeal, with tens of thousands of books sold and practitioners to be found in well-nigh every Iranian city, and across the Iranian diaspora.

As the anthropologist Alireza Doostdar has shown, the popularity of Cosmic Mysticism points to a late modern appetite for practices that are understood in terms both metaphysical and empirical. 1 In what sense was Cosmic Mysticism, whose closest relatives are arguably to be found in movements such as Theosophy and Spiritism, an Islamic practice? Clearly, the official interpreters of Islam in Iran regarded it as nothing of the sort. Yet the movement undeniably tapped into Sufi ways of knowing that run powerfully through Iranian Shiism. At the same time, while much of Iran’s medical establishment might regard the movement’s practitioners as quacks, it is impossible to account for the success of Cosmic Mysticism absent the prestige of biomedicine in Iranian society.

The case of Cosmic Mysticism is a useful point of departure for this essay, because it points to the fact that modern science and modern Islam have been mutually constitutive. Even as Islamic debate has guided the interpretation and practice of science, new sciences have played a crucial role in defining modern Islam for many of its adherents. Given such constant interplay between science and Islam, it would be futile to ask simply how Islam has adapted to modern science, or vice versa. The very categories—what is considered Islam, and what is science—are precisely what have changed, most radically, in recent centuries. 2 This essay therefore seeks to show how modern science and modern Islam have emerged in conversation with each other.

The essay comprises three thematic sections, followed by two sections that develop these themes through more-detailed investigation of specific controversies. The first thematic section introduces transformations in governance as a key context for the emergence of new debates about Islam and science in the nineteenth century. The second section explores technology and the changing materiality of Islamic life in modernity. The third thematic section considers new relations of authority that arose from efforts to craft Islam as a “scientific” religion. The discussion of specific controversies surveys Islamic debates on creation and evolution, and briefly introduces the emergence of Islamic bioethics with reference to transplant medicine and assisted reproductive technology.

Throughout, the essay’s focus is on the Middle East and South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essay begins in the nineteenth century because it was then that the relationship of science to Islam began to constitute a defining problematic of modernity for many Muslims. Three developments brought the relation of Islam and science to the fore in new ways in the nineteenth century: an intensifying linkage of science to governance; an increasingly globalized material culture; and new relations of authority, as growing middle classes—not only scholars—participated heavily in an emerging public sphere. Together, these transformations made Islam and science a topic of debate that was broadly understood to be central to the future of society.

To begin in the nineteenth century does not mean that earlier centuries witnessed no transformation of the sciences in Islamic societies or debate over the relationship of Islam to natural inquiry. In fact, modern debates have often revived vocabulary and concepts that emerged in the ninth through twelfth centuries, when Muslim scholars first sought to justify (or contest) the Islamic appropriation of Hellenic sciences. The early modern period, too, was crucial for the emergence of new kinds of knowledge in many Islamic societies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ottoman society (to take one example) experienced novel forms of literacy and authorship, as well as innovation in fields including logic, timekeeping, and the adaptation of Paracelsian medicine and post-Copernican cosmology. 3 In the early eighteenth century, the Mughal ruler Muhammad Shah patronized a renaissance of astronomy at the court of Jai Singh II, who built a network of observatories centered on his capital at Jaipur. 4 To understand the origin of modern sciences in the Islamic world would require a longer chronological scope than this essay offers. Instead, this essay seeks to explain some of the major debates and contexts in which Muslims have defined modern Islam and science in relation to each other.

The world of Islam is vast, of course, and it is not possible to do justice to its breadth and diversity. This essay’s emphasis on the Middle East and South Asia reflects the focus of existing scholarship, but it is not to say that modern science has been of less interest to Muslim communities in other regions. However, the themes identified below, though derived from Middle East and South Asian history, should prove useful as a framework for analyzing other regions. Transformations in governance, material culture, and authority are essential to consider anywhere in the nineteenth- or twentieth-century world, even if the way in which these processes played out differed by region as well as within regions.

Islam has long occupied an important space in the historiography of science. George Sarton, who helped to found the discipline of history of science, devoted a significant part of his career to the great flourishing of scientific activity under the early Islamic empires. 5 Over the course of the twentieth century, scholars such as A.I. Sabra helped to establish a narrative in which medieval Muslim scholars (along with Jewish and Christian scholars working under the patronage of Muslim rulers) translated, extended, and revamped the sciences of antiquity, preparing the way for the European Renaissance. 6 Until quite recently, however, scholarly interest in Islam and science has mostly been limited to this early period of Islamic history, after which—according to a conventional view—Muslims neglected the sciences as part of a broader, post-twelfth-century decline. On this view, the modern history of science in Islamic lands was scarcely worth attention. If it was not a history of neglect or outright opposition, it was at best a history of the reception of “western” disciplines.

This view, which confined Islam’s significance in the history of science to a kind of bridge between antiquity and the Renaissance, has recently been revised by two veins of scholarship. In one vein, historical studies have convincingly shown—often through highly technical analysis—how both the Persianate and Ottoman worlds of post-twelfth-century Islam continued to witness innovative work, particularly in mathematical astronomy and instrumentation. 7 In a different vein, scholars working on modern contexts have used methods from science and technology studies (STS) to reveal the great diversity of ways in which Muslims have incorporated science, technology, and medicine into their lives over the last two centuries. 8 It remains difficult to connect the dots between these two bodies of scholarship, in part because the latter literature has yet to take up questions of scientific practice in a systematic way. The overall trend, however, is toward a view of Islamic history in which science was a continuous, dynamic phenomenon, rather than a distinctive feature of a limited “golden age.” Of course, continuity does not mean that the sciences were understood or practiced similarly in every period. The meaning of “science” in Islam changed with social and political circumstances, and with the emergence and evolution of new disciplines. 9

Figure 1: A table for the correction of mechanical timepieces, composed by a Muslim scholar in eighteenth-century Cairo. Source: Ramadan ibn Salih al-Khawaniki, Kitab al-Manhaj al-Aqrab li-Tashih Mawdiʻ al-ʻAqrab , Isl. Ms. 808,1, p. 43, University of Michigan Library (Special Collections Research Center), Ann Arbor, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015078570259

Islam, Empires, and Knowledge Circulation in the Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century was a crucial period for the emergence of many new scientific disciplines and institutions. Not coincidentally, it was also a time when colonial powers and modernizing empires—including those with Muslim rulers and majorities—waged a global contest for land and markets. Islamic empires had come into conflict with European rivals for centuries, from the Catholic conquest of Iberia to the Ottoman-Portuguese struggle for the Indian Ocean. 10 In the nineteenth century, however, the acceleration of European colonization and Russian imperial expansion, coupled with intensifying efforts by Muslim rulers to respond, meant that this struggle affected more and more of the world’s Muslims. Moreover, imperial rivalry increasingly turned on new technical capacities, in fields ranging from irrigation to navigation and from medicine to metallurgy. In this context, science was often linked with new efforts to manage population, extract value, and wage war.

The growing importance of the sciences to political domination was certainly visible to Muslims who came under European colonial rule in the nineteenth century, whether in French Algeria (beginning in 1830), British India (formally governed by the Crown after 1857), or British Egypt (occupied in 1882). Colonial powers often pointed to science and technology as proof of their civilizational superiority, and of the salutary consequences of their rule. 11

Yet the linkage of science and political power was also intensifying in the large regions that remained outside European colonization. In the Ottoman Empire, proponents of the New Order reforms at the end of the eighteenth century renewed the Empire’s investment in nautical sciences and military engineering, sponsoring new technical schools and translations which they saw as crucial to the Empire’s defense. 12 In the nineteenth century, the Ottomans deployed the telegraph and railroad to consolidate Istanbul’s rule in its provinces, and to participate in African colonization. 13 Meanwhile, anxiety over population loss in the Empire’s costly wars led pronatalist bureaucrats in Istanbul to promote new standards and schools for licensing midwives, working to bring reproduction under the eye of the state. 14 Such efforts were significant, in part, because they brought new techniques into the lives of ordinary people, who began to refer to the new sciences to articulate new conceptions of justice and rights—such as the idea that postmortem dissection could be demanded in cases of suspected homicide. 15

The linkage of science to state power was also significant because it engendered new kinds of resistance. In Egypt, the Ottoman governor Mehmed Ali Pasha faced backlash for imposing quarantines in response to bubonic plague outbreaks in the 1830s. The confinement of plague-stricken individuals, and the forced removal of the dead, prompted protest from the urban population, including Muslim scholars (ulama). These protests expressed concerns about removing the sick from the care of family, and for the ability of quarantined families to maintain their livelihood. 16 Resistance to quarantine was not, as it was sometimes portrayed by authorities at the time (and since), the result of a timeless, “fatalistic” opposition to public health measures by Muslim scholars, who in fact had a long and complex history of debating the proper response to epidemic disease. 17

Though Muslim rulers were as eager as any to deploy the new sciences and technology, the dominant position of Russia and the western European powers in the nineteenth century bore heavily on the political implications of debating science publicly. Consider, for example, the most commonly cited Islamic discussion of science from the nineteenth century, the Refutation of the Materialists , by Sayyid Jamal al-Din “al-Afghani” (d. 1897). 18 Afghani was a Persian-born intellectual and activist. During an itinerant career that took him through Ottoman and British-Indian lands, he sought to rally Muslims against British imperialism. In the Refutation , Afghani critiqued evolutionary thinking as the latest iteration of the ancient materialist philosophy that was well known to Islamic philosophy ( falsafa ). However, in a later exchange with the French orientalist Ernst Renan, Afghani deployed an evolutionary argument of his own: Islam, being relatively young, simply had yet to reach the stage of development that Christianity had attained in its relationship to science. 19 This exchange with Renan came in an argument with European intellectuals on the status of Islam in modernity. By contrast, the Refutation had expressed Afghani’s views on a debate among Muslims in British India on how to proceed after the brutal suppression of the 1857 rebellion. In this latter context, the alleged “materialists” whom Afghani denounced were the followers of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, an Indian Muslim reformist whose program closely linked new sciences with an accommodating stance toward the British Empire. 20 In earlier centuries, Muslims had debated how to adopt the knowledge of cultures that Islam had absorbed. In modern times, the relationship of Islam and science has more often been wrapped up in the politics of how Muslims should respond to the ascent of non-Muslims powers.

The imperial and colonial contexts also shaped a rapidly changing landscape of schooling. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, many Muslim societies saw the growth of new sites of learning. These included new imperial military and civil academies, such as in the Ottoman and Russian Empires; colonial schools, such as in British India; and the schools of foreign religious organizations, including Jesuits, Protestant missionaries, and the French-Jewish Alliance Israélite Universelle. Such schools were training grounds for a new class of people—mostly male—who not only could read, but could do so in multiple languages, often including French or English. Many went on to new technical careers in the military, agriculture, or medicine, and they contributed to the growth of Islamic print culture as both producers and consumers.

In this context, the school became an important site for developing—and contesting—new visions for what constituted Islamic knowledge. 21 Some religious reformists believed a new educational model was necessary to reinvigorate Islamic learning and equip the community to meet the challenges of the nineteenth century. In India, Sayyid Ahmad Khan founded the Anglo-Mohammedan College, which aimed “to form a class of persons, Muhammedan in religion, Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, and in intellect.” 22 (The school is now called Aligarh Muslim University.) To be sure, not all reformists shared Sayyid Ahmad’s belief that his community stood to learn and benefit from their British colonizers. But the idea that Islamic learning should conform to modern norms, including standardized curricula, accreditation by exam, and a greater emphasis on topics such as mathematics and geography, gained wide purchase. In the Ottoman Empire, prominent early examples included the Dar’ul-Fünun in Istanbul, Husayn al-Jisr’s patriotic school ( al-Madrasa al-Waṭaniyya ) in Syria, and repeated efforts to introduce exams and new curricula at Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque, one of the great hubs of Sunni Islamic learning. 23

Although the new literate class was still a small and overwhelmingly male minority in most societies, it wielded political and cultural influence in a burgeoning sphere of print publishing. This was the audience to which Muslim thinkers began to preach the compatibility of Islam with modern science. Often, they framed this effort in terms of revival. Thus, both Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the late Ottoman thinker and journalist İzmirli İsmail Hakkı called for a “new theology” ( yeni ilm-i kalam ), citing classical Muslim theologians as authority for the principle that Islamic belief should adapt to the knowledge of the age. 24 For thinkers such as Sayyid Ahmad Khan and İsmail Hakkı, science was to be contrasted not with Islam proper, but rather with a mass of beliefs (now “superstitions”) which had crept into Islam over the centuries. On this view, to be scientifically educated was also to be properly Muslim. 25

Despite their overlapping rhetoric, however, the purpose of such “new theology” in British India differed from its aim in an Ottoman context. For Sayyid Ahmad, a new theology was necessary because it would fortify the faith of Muslims demoralized by the scientific prowess of their colonial rulers. For İsmail Hakkı, the new theology would serve as an alternative to the radical materialism espoused by a small but influential coterie of late Ottoman intellectuals. 26

The political circumstances of the nineteenth century also shaped crucial debates over the language of science. Many modern sciences entered Islamic debate via translation. But translation raised thorny questions: for example, did Arabic (or Turkish, Persian, Urdu, etc.) already have words for modern scientific concepts? And if not, should translators use neologisms to capture the meaning of new terms, or simply transliterate foreign words?

Typically, translation efforts began with the premise that existing vocabulary, often in Arabic, provided ample resources to adapt new theories and techniques. In the late Ottoman Empire, eighteenth-century translators treated French astronomical texts as simply the latest examples of the kind of astronomical handbooks that had been developed for centuries in Arabic and Persian. 27 This tendency reflected the fact that such early translators often belonged to the old scholarly class of ulama, or, in the Ottoman case, to existing imperial “offices” such as the müneccimbaşı (chief astronomer-astrologer).

In many languages, however, a shift occurred around the early twentieth century, such that transliteration of European terms—or outright use of European languages—became the norm in scientific writing and pedagogy. The timing and nuances of this shift varied by place. In Egypt, for example, a move toward transliterated French and English terms occurred during the British occupation (1882-1923). 28 In the Turkish Republic, by contrast, state-led language reform was part of the promotion of Turkish nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. In the latter context, Arabic and Persian roots were replaced with Turkish equivalents as much as possible, but an increasing number of western terms entered the language as well, especially in scientific terminology. 29 In the long term, such national trends converged with a global shift toward English as the dominant language of scientific communication after the world wars. 30

Scholars of translation have long recognized that the process of “carrying over” meaning from one language into another is creative, rather than simply mimetic. Thus, to translate Freud’s “unconscious” into Arabic as al-lā shu’ūr invoked a history of Sufi Islamic discourses on subjectivity and the soul. 31 More than simply referencing such discourses, the project of translation itself gave rise to intense debate over the relationship between Islamic disciplines and contemporary knowledge. For example, in the controversy over whether the theory of evolution constituted a form of “materialism,” Muslim authors sometimes used māddiyya (from the Arabic mādda, matter) as a direct rendering of the English term, or of the German materialismus . But another option was dahriyya , a term borrowed from a thousand-year-old debate in Islamic philosophy over Aristotelian causality. The latter translation implied that the “new” science was already well known within an existing, Islamic discursive tradition. Similarly, despite relying on a neologism, the late nineteenth-century coinage taṭawwur for “evolution” invoked the Qur’an: “we have created the human being in stages” ( a ṭwār an ). 32 Translators thus helped define the degree to which science was understood to be continuous or discontinuous with existing Islamic vocabulary and discourse. But in most places, translators made their choices under political circumstances that tended, over time, to favor the use of transliterated terms from European languages.

Most scholarship on modern Islam and science has focused on Islamic appropriations and debates about new sciences. Emerging literature, however, has begun to show how the globalization of modern sciences was itself shaped by the longstanding cultivation of knowledge among Muslim scholars, healers, prognosticators, midwives, market inspectors, and more—in fields from the astral to the alchemical. To take just one example, this was the era when state observatories proliferated and began to participate in global observational programs. In many Muslim societies, from North Africa to India, the establishment of such specialized sites was understood as part of a thousand-year tradition of astral knowledge. 33 Scholars trained in the Islamic discipline of astronomical timekeeping ( mīqāt ) became crucial translators and teachers of new mathematical models and instruments. The practices of these scholars, such as studying the sun’s position for knowing the times of prayer, retained an important place in the new observatories and in the broader society. 34

It is sometimes claimed that the association of science and technology with European military might in the nineteenth century inspired Muslim intellectuals to deem their scholarly traditions obsolete. As this section has shown, however, an enthusiasm for new ideas did not at all imply a lack of regard for the old. In fact, interest in new sciences stimulated novel engagement with historical Islamic discourses ranging from philosophy and theology to the study of health and illness, the nature of the soul, and the theory of language. A similar dynamic can be seen in the relationship between technology and the changing material culture of Islamic life.

Islamic Things: Technology and the Materiality of Religious Life

The rise of industrialized production and the reduction of trade duties transformed the material culture of daily life for much of the nineteenth-century world. A flood of new products opened new possibilities for dress, travel, communication, consumption, and leisure. 35 Muslim societies were as engaged as any in the onset of modern globalization. While forging specifically Islamic uses for the new technologies and goods, they also changed the way that Islam itself was practiced, materially, in the world.

With the advent of modern globalization, Muslims had to decide whether and how to incorporate a raft of new consumer products into their everyday lives. The pages of the Islamic press in the early twentieth century were awash in conversations about new objects, from the gramophone to the synthetic toothbrush. In general, the most vocal Muslim authorities tended to approve the use of such novelties, on the logic that the Muslim community should make use of beneficial technologies unless there was a specific reason for prohibition. One scholar has described this tendency as “laissez-faire Salafism,” referring to the tendency of such thinkers to appeal to the earliest sources of Islam ( al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ ) for justification. 36

For a powerful illustration of the dynamic relationship between Islamic practice and new technology, we need look no further than the basic Islamic duty of pilgrimage (hajj) and the iconic innovation of the industrial age, the steam engine. Hajj provided an important market for the growth of steamer lines in the Mediterranean and, especially, the Indian Ocean. As these lines increased the speed and scale of travel, the experience of hajj began to change. Pilgrimage became more of a mass phenomenon, and it attracted more scrutiny: both from the Ottoman government, which maintained sovereignty over the pilgrimage cities in western Arabia; and from other imperial powers, who regarded the steam-powered hajj as a breeding ground for the spread of political and medical hazards. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in the wake of several global cholera outbreaks, Muslim pilgrims navigated a system of paperwork and quarantines that spanned the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. 37 As the Ottoman government embraced the industrialization and medicalization of hajj, the sultan’s longstanding claim to custodianship of the holy precincts materialized in a new rail line to western Arabia, new infrastructure for water provisioning, and even a technical assessment of the sanitary virtues of the well of Zamzam, which many pilgrims drink from during the hajj. 38

Even as hajj and steamship travel fed off each other’s growth and transformed each other, so too did more-local forms of pilgrimage enjoy an industrial-age renaissance. In Egypt, for example, the rail network that took shape beginning in the 1850s was specifically laid out to service major religious festivals, particularly the mūlid of Sayyid al-Badawi in Tanta. The coming of rail service allowed for the modern scale of such festivals, but also transformed them in subtler ways, such as by encouraging temporal standardization. 39 Given this close relationship between pilgrimage and steam, perhaps it is not surprising that the engine itself was sometimes understood to possess healing powers. 40

Another new technological mediation of Islam in the nineteenth century was the use of the telegraph to communicate the sighting of the new moon, and thus to determine the beginning and end of the Islamic months. With the spread of telegraphy and print media across Asia and North Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century, Muslim authorities frequently debated whether and how to coordinate the calendar across cities and even across empires. On the one hand, the new information technologies challenged evidentiary norms in Islamic jurisprudence, including the long-privileged role of oral testimony in establishing matters of fact. 41 On the other hand, the telegraph and print media offered tempting possibilities for realizing the ideal of a global community of all Muslims ( umma ). Thus, while some jurists worried that a globally coordinated calendar would place a new scientific elite above ordinary believers, others seized upon the new technologies to promote the reform of Islam as a set of uniform practices. In the twentieth century, with the demise of the imperial order and the emergence of nation-states, a kind of middle ground was reached, with the regulation of the Islamic ( hijrī ) calendar typically falling to national authorities. 42

Pilgrimage and the sighting of the new moon were already very old Islamic practices when they came to be mediated through new technologies in the nineteenth century. In other cases, new technology allowed for experimental articulations of Islam and material goods. In Iran, for example, the global vogue of spiritism in the early twentieth century inspired practitioners to use hypnotism and talking boards to communicate with holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad. Typically, a young woman served as medium in these seances. 43

In the long term, the key significance of modern technology in Islam was not the use (or prohibition) of a specific object, but rather the way in which a dynamic material culture stimulated the growth of what we might call public Islamic reasoning. The fatwā (responsum) is one genre that has acquired special prominence in connection with debates over new technologies since the late nineteenth century. Previously, the giving of responsa ( iftā’ ) occurred in a relationship between an individual jurist ( muftī ) and those who consulted them; prominent jurists might also record their fatwā s in compendia to be read by other scholars. 44 In the context of emerging mass media, however, debates over new technologies and material culture stimulated the growth of Islamic discourse in magazine sections, and eventually on cassette tapes, TV, and the internet. 45 New technologies thus provided both the medium and an important part of the subject matter for new public debates that defined the meaning of modern Islam.

Scientific Islam: New Relations of Authority

A final key theme in the interplay of modern Islam and science has been the emergence of new relations of authority, within which Muslims determine what is Islamic. Scholars of religion have identified the “fragmentation of authority” as a characteristic feature of modern society, pointing to the rise of lay activism and mass media. 46 But this emphasis on “laypeople” sometimes overlooks the extent to which new assertions of authority have been linked specifically to new technical professions and their social prestige. It is perhaps more accurate to speak of a redistribution of authority. As “what is Islamic” has come to be understood increasingly in connection with “what is scientific,” new professions and institutions have come to share in defining religious norms.

Consider, for example, the emergence of forensic medicine as a form of evidence. In the mid-nineteenth century, modernizing states began to document the deaths of their subjects in new ways, sometimes including forensic reports. In Egypt, the Arabic term for the new position of police doctor, ṭabīb al-siyāsa , reveals the incorporation of such evidence into the Islamic legal domain of siyāsa , the law generated by public authorities (as opposed to fiqh, the jurisprudence of Muslim scholars). The credibility of the ṭabīb al-siyāsa , not only among state elites but also among ordinary people seeking justice, prompted the growth of the siyāsa court as a site of knowledge production. Like telegraphy, the new medicine contributed to greater reliance on textual evidence, rather than oral testimony. Similarly, new sites of chemical knowledge—textbooks and laboratories—filtered into the longstanding Islamic practice of marketplace inspection ( ḥisba ). Justice was still construed in specifically Islamic terms, but the knowledge claims that undergirded the pursuit of justice were increasingly generated by members of new technical professions. 47

Just as evidence of wrongdoing came to be produced by the new, bureaucratic figure of the forensic doctor or chemist, worshippers increasingly looked to state observatories to know the times of sunrise and sunset, which define the schedule of daily prayers; and to determine the appearance of the new lunar crescent, which defines the start (and end) of an Islamic month, including the holy month of Ramadan. Widespread reliance on modern observatory techniques represented an epistemological shift, in which the recorded representation of a phenomenon—a telescopic image, or even (according to some) a calculation of the moon’s position—was understood to be equivalent to the phenomenon itself. 48 But it was also a social shift. Scholars of the astral sciences had long played a role in timekeeping in many Muslim communities. 49 With the rise of modern scientific professions and institutions, however, such scholars increasingly acquired distinct disciplinary identities, and were often in the employ of the imperial or national state. From doctors and chemists to astronomers, the ability of such actors to shape religious norms derived, in part, from the rising social prestige of the scientific professions. It also followed from the efforts of certain early twentieth-century activists, such as the journalist Muhammad Rashid Rida, who believed that the ability of modern scientific institutions to produce broad consensus could serve the project of producing a more globally uniform Islam. 50

The desire, in some quarters, to understand Islam as a scientific religion gave rise to a new Islamic genre, “scientific exegesis” (Arabic: tafsīr ‘ilmī ). This novel type of Qur’an commentary sought to show that the revelation to Muhammad in the seventh century anticipated modern scientific findings. 51 Thus, in a work of scientific exegesis, the Qur’anic account of the creation of the human being “from a clot” (Surat al-‘Alaq) might be understood to refer to embryological development. The genre’s first vogue came in the early twentieth century. Between 1908 and 1911, readers of the emblematic journal of Islamic reform, Cairo’s al-Manar , could read Muhammad Tawfiq Sidqi’s articles on the Qur’an and a variety of scientific fields; the essays were later collected and published as a textbook for Egyptian schoolchildren. 52 In the 1920s, the Azharite scholar Tantawi Jawhari composed a multi-volume, complete Qur’an commentary, which consists entirely of scientific interpretations, while the Iraqi Shiite scholar, Muhammad ibn Mahdi al-Khalisi, theorized the entirety of sharī’a in terms of medical rationales. 53 Interestingly, the efforts of such authors were augmented, in the late twentieth century, by a small number of European and North American scientists and physicians, some of whom were not Muslim (or not known to be Muslim). The French doctor Maurice Bucaille’s The Qur’an and Modern Science has been widely translated and can often be found in Islamic bookshops, where it is common for the Qur’an commentary section to include a shelf dedicated to such scientific works.

The genre of scientific commentary provides yet another illustration of how modern science has mobilized and given new meaning to old ideas. In the most immediate sense, scientific commentary on the Qur’an grew out of nineteenth-century efforts to argue that the Qur’an does not contradict science. But the shift toward arguing that the Qur’an anticipates modern science deployed one of the oldest Islamic theories of revelation, the “inimitability of the Qur’an” ( i’jāz al-Qur’ān ). The concept of i'jāz, which developed beginning in the ninth century, held that it is demonstrably impossible for the words of the Qur’an to be of human composition. The classical versions of this argument centered on the Qur’an’s rhetorical qualities. In this sense, the belief that the Qur’an predicted modern science is merely a contemporary take on one of the oldest ways of conceptualizing the revelation to Muhammad. Yet reading the Qur’an specifically through modern science also accomplishes something new. By appealing to the social prestige of the sciences, and to the fact that modern readers are often more familiar with basic physics than with classical exegetical techniques, scientific commentary has allowed Qur’anic interpretation to appeal to audiences whom it might not otherwise reach. 54

Scientific exegesis incurred criticism from prominent Muslim thinkers almost from its beginning, in part because of questions that it raised about who has the authority to decide what the Qur’an means. To be sure, some critics felt that to focus on scientific meaning in the Qur’an was simply to miss the point: Muhammad’s message is about submission to God, not about geological strata or the germ theory of disease. But other critics worried, more specifically, that the new interpretation placed the meaning of the Qur’an at the mercy of knowledge that lacked the epistemological status of revelation, and which sometimes changed notably within the span of a human lifetime. Despite such critiques, the proliferation of scientific commentary on the Qur’an, both in print and on TV, suggests that the project of harnessing the cultural authority of modern science to the message of the Qur’an remained relevant and compelling for a large audience at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The interpretation of Islam as a modern scientific religion was not a one-way effort, simply fashioning Islam in the image of science. Among some members of the technical professions, it became just as important to understand science as an Islamic pursuit. Perhaps the most explicit articulation of this sentiment came from the “Islamization of Knowledge” movement that emerged, transnationally, in the 1970s. 55 The advocates of “Islamization of Knowledge,” who included prominent Muslim European and American voices, organized international professional groups for Muslim scientists (including social scientists), and promoted the publication of articles, books, and curricula that sought to bridge contemporary scientific training and Islamic education. The goal was to foster the growth of scientific communities—from physicians and hydrologists to sociologists and economists—who worked in the critical academic tradition of the contemporary research university, but from an explicitly Muslim perspective. Organizations associated with the movement included the Association of Muslim Social Scientists, the Association of Muslim Scientists and Engineers, the Islamic Medical Association, the American Islamic College, the International Islamic University of Malaysia, and the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

The focus on creating an associational life for Muslim scientists and physicians was evidently meant to serve the growing number of Muslims who practiced technical professions in a postcolonial context, often as part of a minority community. Ismail al-Faruqi—a key figure in many of these organizations—was a Palestinian-American who taught for many years in the Department of Religion at Temple University. His career as an activist was partly inspired by his work with one of the early chapters of the Muslim Students Association. Faruqi co-authored the manifesto, Islamization of Knowledge: General Principles and Workplan , with the Saudi-born scholar Abdul Hamid AbuSulayman, who had a PhD in international relations from Pennsylvanian University. Another early figure in the movement, Syed Naquib al-Attas, was a British-educated Malaysian philosopher. Although “Islamization of Knowledge” had ties to the Middle East (and enjoyed controversial funding from Saudi backers), it flourished in places like North America and postcolonial South Asia, where some Muslim scientists felt particularly called upon to define what was Islamic about their professional work.

In its effort to infuse the research university with an explicitly Islamic ethos, the Islamization of Knowledge movement overlapped with the work of the Iranian-born philosopher Syed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933). Nasr, too, had an eclectic education, completing a PhD in the history of science from Harvard but also studying with leading Iranian Shiite scholars, especially in the Sufi tradition. A prolific author and public lecturer, Nasr’s oeuvre centers on the idea that modern science is defined by the fundamental error of pursuing knowledge absent a philosophical and spiritual framework whose aim is the cultivation of the good. 56 Whereas the Islamization of Knowledge exponents saw the secularization of science as a problem for Muslims, Nasr saw it as the universal crisis of modernity. In this sense, his work partakes also in non-Muslim projects of post-Enlightenment, especially environmentalist, critique. 57

Having established a thematic framework for analyzing modern Islam and science in terms of colonial and postcolonial context, material culture, and relations of authority, the final sections of this essay turn to further exploration of specific controversies.

Evolution and Creation

Evolution and creation have been major topics of Islamic debate since the late nineteenth century. Sometimes these Islamic debates have closely resembled their counterparts in other traditions; at other times, the Islamic debates have diverged significantly. To a limited degree, such differences can be understood in terms of scriptural or theological particularities of Islam. But they have also been closely tied to the social and political circumstances in which Islamic evolutionary thought—as well as anti-evolutionism—has developed.

Muslim authors and readers came to the evolution debates of the late nineteenth century with enthusiasm. Vigorous discussion of “Darwin’s school” ( madhhab Darwin ) played out across the Middle East and South Asia as early as the 1870s. 58 While Darwin’s name was used as shorthand for evolution, these debates often centered in other areas of the large field of evolutionary ideas, especially Spencerism, which were widely discussed in the late nineteenth century. Even the most radical evolutionary philosophies attracted enthusiastic, if limited, Muslim readership, such as the late Ottoman dissidents who embraced Feuerbachian materialism and laid the intellectual foundations for the revolutionary ideology of the early Turkish Republic. 59

In other words, like most fin-de-siècle intellectuals, Darwin’s early Muslim readers understood evolution as social theory. At a time when “social Darwinism” had yet to be singled out for opprobrium because of its relationship to the eugenics movement and fascism, few in fact distinguished between evolution as an account of origins and evolution as social theory. Thus, evolution underwrote a new conception of Islam as a “civilization,” with a specific place in the history of human progress. 60

A crucial context of these early Darwinian debates was the sense that the appeal of new schools—whether imperial, missionary, or colonial—threatened to marginalize the Islamic disciplines, and with them the Muslim scholarly class of ulama. 61 In this context, a variety of leading Muslim intellectuals endorsed key elements of evolutionary theory. In India, Sayyid Ahmad Khan accepted the evolution of humans from animals, not because he was a “materialist” (as Afghani charged), but rather to argue that the Qur’an and science agreed with each other. 62 Likewise, the Egyptian mufti and influential teacher Muhammad ‘Abduh saw evolution as an opportunity to assert Islam’s agreement with modern ideas. 63

Of course, not all nineteenth-century Muslim thinkers accepted Darwinism without qualification. The Ottoman-Syrian scholar Husayn al-Jisr gained fame for defending the argument from design in his Hamidian Treatise (which he named for the reigning sultan). Interestingly, al-Jisr’s arguments, though steeped in Islamic scholarship, also drew on tropes of Anglophone natural theology such as the watchmaker analogy. 64 Perhaps the larger point, in this context, is not the split between Darwinists and their critics, but rather the way in which “Darwinism”—like the new material culture of the period—prompted a vigorous and very public reengagement with Islamic discursive traditions. 65

In contrast to the United States, where organized anti-evolutionism arose in the early twentieth century, the growth of organized Islamic anti-evolutionism came as part of what scholars have identified as a global creationist revival in the late twentieth century. 66 Religious movements, often lay-led, seized upon the evolution-creation issue as a site for contesting what they saw as the failed policies of a secular political establishment. In doing so, the anti-evolutionists of the late twentieth century tended to make scientific arguments, often rooted in a critique of uniformitarian geology. This “scientific creationism” reflected, on the one hand, the cultural hegemony of science in late modernity, such that anti-evolutionist arguments on purely scriptural or theological grounds had lost their appeal. 67 On the other hand, the attack on evolutionary science also reflected the growing vulnerability of scientific consensus to anti-establishment politics.

An exemplar of these trends is the internationally famous Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar, whose pen name is Harun Yahya. As a design student in the 1980s, Oktar, like many Turks at that time, embraced religious revival as an antidote to the secularist left and right, whose rivalry had brought political violence to Turkey and culminated in the authoritarian crackdown of the 1980 coup. Oktar founded the Scientific Research Institute (BAV in Turkish) in 1990, and quickly became known for his strident critiques of Darwinism, which he identified as the moral rot at the core of contemporary society. With opaque funding, Oktar and the BAV produced dozens of publications, such as The Evolution Deceit and Atlas of Creation , which they translated into numerous languages and distributed around the world, often free of charge. Oktar’s fame grew with his enthusiastic and colorful embrace of TV programming, where he was known for appearing with a group of women he called his “kittens.” 68 In 2021, a Turkish court convicted Oktar and associates of perpetrating years of systematic sexual abuse and financial crimes; the verdict was overturned on appeal but he was expected to face retrial as of mid-2022. Regardless of Oktar’s personal fate, however, his career helped to marginalize evolution in Turkish schools, during a period that saw a broader resurgence of religion in public life.

In part, the growth of Islamic creationist movements reflected a late twentieth-century shift toward transnational activism by Anglo-American creationists. As a series of judicial defeats closed the door on their initiatives in the United States, American creationists in particular devoted a growing share of their energies to forging connections abroad. Thus, in Oktar’s case, the Science Research Institute enjoyed early ties to the Institute for Creation Research (in California), and a former associate of Oktar’s testified on behalf of the Intelligent Design case in front of the Kansas State Board of Education in 2005. 69

Islamic creationism drew inspiration from its Anglo-American cousins in the late twentieth century, but it was not the same thing. One significant difference was that Muslim creationists tended not to adopt the radical, young-earth interpretation of creation that had become prevalent in Anglophone contexts. Thus, Oktar’s work endorses the conventional, geological age of fossils. Rather than questioning the age of the earth, the focus is on disputing the evolutionary hypothesis, in particular the evolutionary origin of humans. This difference may be traced, in part, to the Qur’anic account of creation, which references six days but is less detailed than the Genesis narrative. Perhaps more to the point, however, the six-day creation did not play as prominent a role in the history of Islamic scriptural interpretation ( tafsīr ) as it did in Christian, especially Protestant, exegesis. This circumstance, added to the relative decentralization of religious authority for much of Islamic history, has contributed to a sense that there is no single prevailing Islamic view on evolution. 70 The same could be said of any religion, of course. However, the field of creationism studies was for many decades defined by work on American Christianity, and is only beginning to acquire a more global perspective. 71 Given the dearth of studies on Islamic creationism, our understanding of Islam’s diversity in this area is only just emerging, and requires further research. 72

Wherever they may be found, Muslim creationists are part of local as well as transnational contexts. For example, despite the scarcity of young-earth creationism among Muslims in general, one place where it did catch on in the late twentieth century was North America. The relative popularity of the young-earth position among Canadian Muslims, in particular, is best understood in light of how Christian activists defined what it meant to be “creationist” in that time and place. 73 Meanwhile, Oktar’s allegation that the spread of Darwinism is the result of a malevolent plot plays on the trope of conspiracy in Turkish political discourse. (Oktar has also denied the Holocaust.)

Despite the growth of organized anti-evolutionism as an Islamic phenomenon in the late twentieth century, evolutionary science did not come to a halt in Muslim-majority countries. In fact, the very places that saw the loudest public denunciations of evolution also played host, quietly, to expanding communities of evolutionary biologists. This apparent contradiction was less a matter of cognitive dissonance than of divergent audiences. In the wealthy states of the Arabian peninsula, for example, while some Muslim authorities took even a hint of evolution as a chance to denounce westernization, nearby scientists taught evolution on Anglophone campuses and contributed evolutionary research (in English) to international journals. 74

Modern Islam and Science Embodied: Some Examples in the Development of Islamic Bioethics

The development of Islamic bioethics merits its own treatment, and is the subject of a growing body of scholarship. 75 However, given that some of the great public debates on science have centered on the new possibilities of the body in the age of biomedicine, I provide here an introductory discussion of two issues that have been especially generative for Islamic bioethical discourse: transplant medicine, and assisted reproductive technology.

The development of transplant medicine in the late twentieth century occasioned a variety of Islamic responses. Two divergent cases illustrate some of the issues at stake. In Egypt, organ transplants faced widespread resistance, with many potential donors and recipients hesitating to embrace the procedure because “the body belongs to God.” 76 In Iran, by contrast, the Islamic Republic not only approved transplant procedures, but authorized the world’s only formal system to provide monetary compensation for organs. These divergent cases demonstrate the crucial role of social and political context in defining what is at stake in controversies of “science and religion.”

Despite having pioneered transplant medicine in the Middle East in the 1970s, Egypt experienced one of the most divisive and inconclusive debates over the permissibility of the practice from an Islamic perspective. In general, the state’s “official” voices of Islam, including a series of chief muftis, ruled in favor of transplants as a life-preserving tool. But many Muslim activists, as well as doctors, patients, and family members, articulated concerns about the risk to donors and the equity of care. As the medical anthropologist Sherine Hamdy has shown, these concerns were rooted in the neoliberal political economy of the Mubarak era, which saw chronic underinvestment in public institutions, including hospitals. In theory, the buying and selling of organs was illegal, but it was an open secret that the fastest way to obtain a kidney was to pay for one in a private clinic. Transplant medicine thus became one more area in which Egyptian society was stratified by the degree of private services one could afford, and it was in this context that ethical critiques of the practice arose. Moreover, whereas patients had once relied on the figure of the “doctor of confidence”—a person trustworthy in moral as well as medical terms—the collapse of public confidence in state institutions in Egypt since the 1970s eroded the credibility of the medical professions as well as of the state’s Islamic offices, such as the chief mufti. 77 Absent public trust, neither doctors nor “official” Muslim authorities could persuasively counter concerns that transplant medicine, in practice, exploited donors for the sake of dubious benefit to recipients.

By contrast, the relatively orderly regulation of transplant medicine in Iran reflects the very different history of Islamic authority in that country, yielding a different politics of scientific and medical controversy. Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in the wake of the 1979 Revolution, and with the subsequent consolidation of religious authority in the hands of the Supreme Leader and a small number of jurists, the Iranian state has enjoyed broad latitude to define an Islamic public policy. In this context, the permission given to organ transplants, and even to provide monetary compensation in exchange for kidneys, took shape amid several factors: a long history in Iranian society, going back to the early twentieth century, of linking the biomedical professions with social progress; a close alignment between the regime, leading surgeons, and patient advocate organizations; and an acute need for transplant operations as a result of the Iran-Iraq war. 78 Facilitating transplant medicine also helped the regime promote the notion that Iranian Shiism, under the stewardship of the Islamic Republic, was distinctly harmonious with modern science (the putative contrast being both to other Islamic contexts and to other religions). The Iranian system has enjoyed notable success in reducing the wait time for kidney recipients, which has prompted reconsideration of the compensation issue among international bioethical circles. However, inequities in access to care persist, as has the stigma attached to selling an organ, even when it is legal. It is not uncommon for Iranian patients to refuse to participate on the receiving end of such transplants. 79

The importance of the nation-state as a context for embodied practices of Islam and science in the late twentieth century can also be seen in the case of assisted reproductive technologies (ART). 80 Despite their vast ideological differences, the Iranian and Turkish governments both articulated strong support for the new reproductive techniques of the late twentieth century. In both cases, pronatalism linked reproduction with the nation-building project. 81 In Turkey’s case, this connection was framed in the secular terms that underwrote Turkish state discourse for most of the post-Ottoman era, whereas in the Iranian case, Shiite clerics legitimated ART in a series of nuanced fatwas. 82 Yet in both cases, the sanction given to assisted reproduction emphasized that it take place within the institution of heterosexual marriage. Both countries also placed limits on third-party gamete donation, due to concerns about sexual contact between unmarried partners, as well as the potential for third-party donors to trouble Islamic norms of kinship, which are rooted in biological relations. However, these limitations have tended to erode over time, with some Iranian authorities, for example, authorizing third-party gamete donation on the logic that the donor transfers their kinship claim when they confer ownership of the gamete to the recipient. 83 It is likely no coincidence that such novel formulations of technology and kinship arose specifically in Iran and Lebanon, 84 both of which had strong institutions of religious authority (the Shiite clergy), and both of which experienced bloody and socially disruptive conflicts in the late twentieth century.

An eminent historian of science and Islamic thought, Ahmad Dallal, once lamented that the centering of modern scientific research outside of Muslim-majority countries has created a rupture, in histories of Islam and science, between eras prior to the nineteenth century and more recent periods. “In the absence of a living scientific culture in the modern Muslim world, we can discuss discourses on science, not science itself,” Dallal wrote. 85 This characterization is problematic, inasmuch as it understates the extent to which scientific practices, which had long been a part of many Islamic societies, continued well into the modern era and shared in the making of the modern sciences. Moreover, an absolute distinction between science and “discourses on science” is questionable to begin with, given the extent to which public debate has shaped the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Whether in terms of practice or “discourse,” and notwithstanding the very real deficits in research infrastructure and academic freedom in some Muslim-majority countries, Islamic societies have certainly sustained a “living scientific culture” in modernity.

Yet Dallal’s lament also contains a crucial insight. The rise of “discourses on science” has indeed been a characteristic feature of modernity. These discourses have not conformed to any one pattern or set of outcomes. There is no single “Islamic position” on creation and evolution, just as there is no one “Islamic position” on assisted reproduction, or on how to define the beginning of the month, or on any of the thousands of new technologies that have been incorporated into, or excluded from, Muslim life in the last two centuries. The importance of dynamic social context is key to unravelling the complexity of these discourses. How is science Islamic? How is Islam scientific? What was at stake in answering these questions changed over time, and changed again: as the prestige of technical professions rose; as imperial rivalry and reform gave way to nationalism, and colonization morphed into the postcolonial; and as revivalist movements advanced diverse visions of an Islamic polity. Throughout, however, efforts to define the relations of science and Islam have been crucial to the emergence of both modern Islam and science.

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Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals , 145-54. ↩

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Sajdi, The Barber of Damascus ; El-Rouayheb, Relational Syllogisms and the History of Arabic Logic ; El-Rouayheb, “Opening the Gate of Verification”; Brentjes, Travellers from Europe in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires ; Ben- Zaken, “The Heavens of the Sky and the Heavens of the Heart”; Stolz, “Positioning the Watch Hand”; Küçük, Science without Leisure , 143-48. ↩

Raina, “Circulation and Cosmopolitanism in 18th Century Jaipur,” 23-26. ↩

See the first two volumes of Sarton’s magnum opus, Introduction to the History of Science. ↩

For a concise synthesis, see Sabra, “Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization.” ↩

F.J. Ragep and Sally P. Ragep, Tradition, Transmission, Transformation ; Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance ; Brentjes, Teaching and Learning the Sciences in Islamicate Societies ; Morrison, Islam and Science ; Şen, “Reading the Stars at the Ottoman Court”; Umut, “Theoretical Astronomy in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire.” For a recent and reliable overview of the state of this field, see the first three chapters in Dallal, Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History . ↩

Many of these studies are cited below, but for a concise entry into this literature, see the essay by Noah Salomon, “Science and the Soul—An Introduction,” The Immanent Frame , https://tif.ssrc.org/2018/09/27/science-and-the-soul-introduction/ , published online September 27, 2018. Accessed July 22, 2022. ↩

For a reliable overview of the development of scientific disciplines in Islam through the early modern period, see Brentjes and Morrison, “The Sciences in Islamic Societies.” ↩

Casale, Age of Exploration , especially 53-83. ↩

Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men . ↩

Yaycioglu, “Guarding Traditions and Laws.” ↩

Minawi, “Telegraphs and Temporality in Ottoman Africa and Arabia during the Age of High Imperialism”: 567-87. ↩

Balsoy, Politics of Reproduction . ↩

Fahmy, In Quest of Justice , 74-77. ↩

Fahmy, In Quest of Justice , 57-62. ↩

Stearns, Infectious Ideas . ↩

Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism , 73. ↩

Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism , 87. ↩

Qidwai, “Reexamining Complexity.” ↩

Hefner, “Introduction,” in Hefner and Zaman, Schooling Islam , especially 14-17; see also Fortna, Imperial Classroom . ↩

Sayyid Ahmad was invoking Lord Macaulay’s 1835 argument in favor of providing English-language education in India. Quoted in Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation , 207. ↩

Yalçınkaya, Learned Patriots ; 141-44; Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic ; 134-35; Gesink, Islamic Conservatism and Revival . ↩

Sayyid Ahmad Khan, “Lecture on Islam,” in Kurzman, Modernist Islam , 291-96. Özervarlı, “Alternative Approaches to Modernization in the Late Ottoman Period,” 87. ↩

Yalçınkaya, Learned Patriots , 119. ↩

Özervarlı, “Alternative Approaches to Modernization in the Late Ottoman Period,” 87-88. ↩

Stolz, The Lighthouse and the Observatory , 151. ↩

Crozet, Sciences modernes , 368-70. ↩

Karaman, “Ataturk and the Turkish terminology reform.” ↩

Gordin, Scientific Babel . ↩

El Shakry, The Arabic Freud , especially chapter 2. ↩

Elshakry, “Knowedge in Motion,” 715. ↩

Stolz, The Lighthouse and the Observatory ; Schaffer, “Asiatic Enlightenments.” ↩

Stolz, The Lighthouse and the Observatory , chapter 6; Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca , 178-82. ↩

Bayly, Birth of the Modern World . ↩

Halevi, Modern Things on Trial , 9. ↩

Huber, Channelling Mobilities ; Echenberg, Plague Ports ; Tagliacozzo, “Hajj in the Time of Cholera,” Stolz, “The Voyage of the Samannud.” ↩

Low, “Ottoman Infrastructures of the Saudi Hydro-State.” ↩

Barak, On Time , chapter 3. ↩

Barak, On Time , 116. ↩

Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam , 87. ↩

Moosa, “Shaykh Ahmad Shakir and the Adoption of a Scientifically-Based Lunar Calendar”; Stolz, The Lighthouse and the Observatory , chapter 7. ↩

Doostdar, “Empirical Spirits,” 329. ↩

Masud, Messick, and Powers, Islamic Legal Interpretation . ↩

Halevi, Modern Things on Trial ; Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape ; Simon, Media of the Masses ; Bunt, iMuslims ; Rock-Singer, Practicing Islam . ↩

Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim Politics , 70. ↩

Fahmy, In Quest of Justice . ↩

Quadri, Transformations of Tradition , 161. ↩

King, In Synchrony with the Heavens ; Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca . ↩

Stolz, The Lighthouse and the Observatory , chapter 6. ↩

Dallal, “Science and the Qur’an”; Elshakry, “The Exegesis of Science.” ↩

Jansen, Interpretation of the Koran , 44. ↩

Fuchs, “Failing Transnationally,” 450. ↩

Telliel, “Miraculous Evidence.” ↩

Stenberg, Islamization of Science . ↩

Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred . ↩

Qadir, Traditional Islamic Environmentalism . For broader perspective, see Gade, Muslim Environmentalisms . ↩

Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic ; Riexinger, “Responses of South Asian Muslims to the Theory of Evolution.” ↩

Hanioğlu, “Blueprints for a Future Society.” ↩

Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic , 183. ↩

Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic , 135. ↩

Qidwai, “Reexamining Complexity,” 58-60. ↩

Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic , 177-78. ↩

Ebert, Religion und Reform ; Stolz, “By Virtue of Your Knowledge,” 230-31. ↩

Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic , 131-59. ↩

Numbers, The Creationists , 399-431; Blancke et al, “Creationism in Europe.” ↩

Toumey, “Modern Creationism and Scientific Authority.” ↩

Oktar’s large and multilingual media presence does not mean that his work has a wide following in every community where it has been distributed, as Moran argues in the British case. Moran, “Harun Yahya’s Influence in Muslim Minority Contexts,” 837-56. ↩

Numbers, The Creationists , 421-22. ↩

Hameed, “Evolution and Creationism in the Islamic World,” 134-35 and 139. ↩

Blancke et al., “Creationism in Europe”; Numbers, The Creationists . ↩

Chang, “Creationism,” D3. ↩

Determann, Researching Biology . ↩

For overviews: Ten Have and Ghaly, eds., Global Bioethics: Transnational Experiences and Islamic Bioethics ; Brockopp and Eich, eds., Muslim Medical Ethics . ↩

Hamdy, Our Bodies Belong to God . ↩

Hamdy, Our Bodies Belong to God , 49, 56. ↩

Mireshghi, Kidneys on Sale ; Fry-Revere, The Kidney Sellers . On Iran and medical modernity, see Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong . ↩

Mireshghi, Kidneys on Sale . ↩

Inhorn and Tremayne, eds., Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives . ↩

Gürtin, “Patriarchal Pronatalism.” ↩

Tremayne and Akhondi, “Conceiving IVF in Iran.” ↩

Tremayne and Akhondi, “Conceiving IVF,” 68. ↩

Clarke, Islam and New Kinship . ↩

Dallal, Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History , 175. ↩

Daniel Stolz, "Science and Islam in Modernity," Encyclopedia of the History of Science (November 2022), accessed 16 September 2024. https://doi.org/10.34758/sj2f-d525 .

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5 Islam And Science

Seyyed Hossein Nasr is University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University.

• Published: 02 September 2009
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The issue of Islam and modern science, along with its progeny, modern technology, continues today as one of the most crucial faced by the Islamic community. It has been, and continues to be, addressed by numerous scholars and thinkers, covering nearly the whole gamut of the spectrum of Islamic intellectual activity since the last century. This article analyses modern science and subjects it to an in-depth criticism from the Islamic point of view, drawing from the Islamic intellectual tradition. It holds that any science that could legitimately be called Islamic science, and not be disruptive of the whole Islamic order, must be one that remains aware of the ‘vertical cause’ of all things, along with the horizontal, a science that issues from and returns to the Real (al-Haqq), who is the cause of all things.

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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

This task force initiative, launched by Muslim-Science.Com (an online platform and portal dedicated to a revival of science and scientific culture in the Islamic World), seeks to jumpstart dialogue, discourse, and debate on critical issues and big questions at the intersection of science and religion within the Islamic world.

The list of the Task Force members with their credentials can be found here

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Facts vs. Interpretations: Understanding Islam & Evolution

Published: August 31, 2018 • Updated: July 22, 2024

Author : Dr. Yamina Bouguenaya ,

بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

For more on this topic, see Evolution in the Scales of Scripture

Key Principles

Faith is not blind, interpreting the qur'an, what is ‘science’, the qur'an invites us to observe and reflect, the qur'an calls us to reflect on the here and now, the theory of evolution and the qur'an, the weakest point of the theory of evolution, why is it that  proponents of the theory do not see its contradictions  , a note on methodological naturalism, a note on politics, appendix: reflections from a biologist trained in qur'anic approach by dr. ilhan akan, 1.     survival of the fittest, 2. why does my heart beat ironic “trade-offs” and “rules” of evolution, 3.  who is digesting my food challenge of self-sacrifice and interdependence, 4. virus es: a major problem for evolution, 5.  mothers challenge the theory, 6.  beautiful leaves: shapes and beauty as a problem for evolution, 7. apples: another example of interdependence and cooperation in nature, 8.  dna, 9. w e are destined to die, 10.  y chromosom e.

1  There are many Qur'anic passages that call for reflecting on the universe. For a more detailed discussion of  the  Qur'anic approach to evidence as well as Qur'anic interpretation discussed in this section, see Yamina Bouguenaya,  Living with Genuine Tawhid: Witnessing the Signs of God through Qur'anic Guidance , Receiving Nur Publications, 2017. Throughout this article, we gratefully acknowledge our indebtedness to Said Nursi’s works,  Risale-i Nur  [Epistles of Light]. Its major volumes have been translated by Sukran Vahide into English and  are  also available in electronic format at  www.saidnur.com/english . See also the forthcoming  Living the Qur'an: Selections on Tawhid from Said Nursi’s Epistles of Light   (Gorgias Press, 2019).

2  For instance, if it is my boss who tells me ‘you are fired,’ it will have a grave consequence, whereas if it is my friend, it might be just a tease. Even in the context of such a simple human utterance, the meaning of the sentence changes depending on by whom and for what purpose it is being said. In understanding the Qur'an, we need even more awareness of its purposes.

3   In the famous parable, a group of blind men encountering an elephant come to different conclusions about the animal, the one touching its trunk presumes it to be a snake, the one touching its ear presumes it to be a fan, the one touching its leg presumes it be a tree trunk, and so on. Originating from India, this parable was cited by Muslim scholars like Abu Hamid al-Ghazali in  Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-din   and Jalal al-Din al-Rumi in his  Mathnavi .

4  For a detailed discussion of principles of Qur'anic interpretation, see: Yamina Bouguenaya and Isra Yazicioglu, “Said Nursi’s Qur’anic Hermeneutics, ”in  The Companion to Said Nursi Studies , ed. by Ian Markham & Z. Sayilgan, Pickwick Publications, 2017, 51-66.

5   Whether implicitly or explicitly, metaphysics is and has been part of science and it can and does contribute to the advancement of science. For instance, in the case of Muslim scientists, science historian Rom Landau wrote: “ The Muslims who believed that God reveals Himself in this world at every moment of existence and that this world is constantly created by Him, regarded the universe not as finite, not as being, but as becoming. In Mathematics, it was al-Biruni, the great eleventh-century mathematician, who finally expressed that conviction by elevating numbers to the status of elements of function. Function, however, implies movement, dynamism… Al Biruni, by treating numbers as elements of function, divorced them from their static and purely spatial character, and linked them to time…The change from the Greek conception of a static universe to a new dynamic one was initiated by al Khwarizmi (780-850), the creator of modern algebra, the first mathematician to make algebra an exact  science .”   Rom Landau,  Arab Contribution to Civilization   (California: American Academy of Asian Studies, 1958), 31.

6  Yazicioglu, “Perhaps their Harmony is not that Simple: Said Nursi on the Qur’an and Modern Science,” Theology and Science, (2013), 11:4, [339–355], 346. See also Yamina Bouguenaya, “The Hermeneutical Dimension of Science,” in The Muslim World, Vol. LXXXIX, No. 3-4, July-October 1999.  For a helpful and accessible overview of Islam and science, see Yamina Bouguenaya, “Islamic Philosophy of Science,” accessible at  https://www.receivingnur.org/islamic-philosophy-of-science.html

7  See, for instance, Qur'an, 2:264, 7:107–8, 13:3, 16:65ff., 21:22; 22:73; 29:42; 30:20ff.; 31:28; 56:57-70. Indeed, the Qur'an calls us to question our mistaken interpretations of reality. We often think that things happen on their own. Or we think insentient and lifeless thing s , such as water, produce intricate life in a plant, simply due to its proximity to it. The Qur'an encourages us to question these, by making us ask: “ C an this thing be really the maker of life? Can this ignorant substance, water, really be source of intricate design and beauty and benefit in this plant? Does it have the qualities of knowledge, creativity, wisdom, power, to be its creator?”

8   For a more detailed Qur'anic reflection on nature through this verse on the fly, see Receiving Nur animation: “The Miracle of the Fly & How It Glorifies its Maker”   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0xrevmZUN0

9   For further details, we recommend Said Nursi’s works, such as 22 nd  Word, 33 rd  Word in  Words  and 23 rd  Flash, in  Flashes,  tr. by Sukran Vahide. Also  relevant   is Nursi,  The Supreme Sign: The Observations of a Traveller Questioning the Universe ,  tr. by Hamid Algar.

10   Such a claim ignores the  fact  of immense cooperation and harmony within nature.   Also, attributing “selfishness” and “concern for survival” to a chemical structure like the DNA is not a factual statement ,  nor does it not become scientific simply because it is claimed by a biologist such as Richard Dawkins.

11  For a brief but strong refutation of the view of chance explained in accessible language, see Said Nursi’s “Treatise on Nature,” ( Flashes , 23 rd  Flash, 232-254, tr. by Sukran Vahide); see esp. pp. 235-236.

12  For instance, let us just reflect on one event: the union of an egg and a sperm. Sperm released from the father race toward the egg in the mother. Once a sperm enters the egg, the egg membrane becomes impermeable to further sperm. This set of facts alone indicates comprehensive knowledge and purpose at work. Someone/something clearly knows 1) the way each sperm and egg is formed: that each contains half of a set of DNA; 2) that only one sperm should unite with an egg in order to constitute a full set of DNA; 3) that the sperm should be equipped to travel to the egg; 4) once one sperm enters the egg, no other sperm should enter it so that there is no excess DNA, and so on. How reasonable is it to presume that the sperm or egg know all this? Is it at all possible that somehow through mistakes in the genetic code, a sperm is equipped to go toward the egg and egg closes its membrane purposely and wisely? Just this one event shows how things are interrelated and harmonized with each other. The events are so interconnected that it is impossible to claim that some random events or things could work together to produce this outcome. Furthermore, there are countless other interrelated events happening within the womb, and in the human body, let alone in all other species, all of which indicate immense comprehensive knowledge and purposefulness that rejects the possibility of things complementing each other by chance.  

13  To be sure, such intention applies to only some of the scientists, especially to those who are leading in defending the theory. Other scientists follow their lead without questioning, and their inability to see the contradiction stems from having  no   intention to judge the theory on its merits.

14  Nursi offers  simple metaphors to clarify how one’s intentionality can make the impossible look possible. See the moon example noted in  Words , 144.

15  For instance, one motivation may be to feel good about rejecting religion. Another motivation may be to make up for excesses committed by some religious people, like the medieval Catholic Church censoring Galileo (though we should also keep in mind that the clash between religion and science even in the Western context has been exaggerated for Christianity has supported scientific study more often than it challenged it). The political benefits of the theory in the colonial period was also a reason; the European colonialists invoked the theory of evolution to wipe out native populations, such as in Australia, claiming that the people they killed had not yet evolved to become fully human.

16  Jeffrey Koperski,  The   Physics of Theism: God, Physics and the Philosophy of Science  (Blackwell, 2015), 212, (italics added.)

17  In other words, the questions we ask shape the answers we find. To give a simplified example, say a person, a few centuries ago, was presented with a laptop and asked to investigate it; how would he have proceeded? How revealing would his questions be, if he had no idea what a computer was and no clue about the purpose for which it had been assembled? Unless he were given some hints, could he ask meaningful questions to discover the reality of the object before him? How far could his experiments take him? For instance, through experiments, he could show that the laptop works quite well as a tray. Could he then say that he knows the truth about this object? The situation of this man claiming to understand the laptop is like the situation of a scientist who assumes naturalism (i.e., that nothing beyond nature is real) and believes that he is in no need of any cues beyond to understand nature. How do they know they are not missing crucial aspects of the object of inquiry? What if there are 'things' that they’re totally unaware of and they don’t even know that they don’t know?

18   For instance, because this claim of chance is so unreasonable, in popular definitions and school textbooks the term “random” or “chance” is often evaded in explaining the theory of evolution. They even introduced a new term, “non-random,” in a desperate attempt to discourage critical thinking of the theory. Richard Dawkins, for instance, vehemently claims that “natural selection” is a “non-random” process and claims the theory does not reduce all life to random chance. What do they mean by “non-random”? Does “non-random” mean “purposeful”? No, not at all. Does it mean a consistent phenomenon that is observed regularly? No, not at all. But by throwing in this term “non-random,” they blur the vision of the common person who can otherwise see that the emperor has no clothes.  And, even if we were to grant Dawkins’ claim that “natural selection” (which is also a vague term) is “non-random,” he can only invoke it as merely a subtractive phenomenon, eliminating organisms of lesser reproductive fitness; it cannot generate organs or organisms. The generative mechanism invoked in the theory of evolution is that of random mutations. As Lenski and Mittler admit, “A fundamental tenet of evolutionary biology is that mutations are random events” (Lenski RE, Mittler JE. 1993. The directed mutation controversy and neo-Darwinism. Science 259: 188–94). Moreover, the notion of abiogenesis which asserts the emergence of complex cellular life from random interactions of atoms and molecules in a primordial soup also entails reducing all life ultimately to chance.  

19  For instance, Harvard faculty Douglas Dewar, the author of  TTransformistIllusion ,   and molecular biologist Michael Behe, the author of  Darwin’s Black Box .  Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “On Biological Origins,” in  Islam, Science, Muslims, and Technology   ed. by Muzaffar Iqbal, Dost Publications, 2009, (147–172); pp. 155-156. Nasr also discusses other scientific dissents in Europe as well as logical and mathematical problems with the theory (pp. 147-160).

20  See Nasr, 159-160. Similarly, Philip E. Johnson, a professor of law who wrote  Darwin on Trial , explains how the theory of evolution functions as a foundational story for naturalistic ideology that rejects God. See “Introduction,” in  his  Reason in the Balance: The Case against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education ,  (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Press, 1995), 7-17. Johnson also offers a noteworthy discussion of the dissonance between scientific evidence and the presentation of the theory to the public in an interview entitled “Philip E. Johnson on Darwinism”, accessible at: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww6T8xjp9Vo >

21  See their work at their website < http://www.intelligentdesign.org >

22  Yamina Bouguenaya “Islamization of Knowledge: A Paradigm Shift,” in  Muslim Education Quarterly , 12 (4), pp. 4-29.  According to Nursi, the universe reflects glimpses of various divine laws, such as “ the law of mercy, law of wisdom, law of justice, law of beauty ( kanun al-rahma, kanun al-karam, kanun al- ‘adl, kanun al- jamal )” and so on. If we could have such a paradigm shift, science could become a venue for discovering such laws that point us to the One indicated by the beautiful names. (See Nursi,  Words , “30th Word, 2nd Aim on ‘Transformation of Particles,’ 3rd Point, ” tr. by S. Vahide, pp.  578-582 )

23  He gratefully acknowledges the perspective he gained through Qur'anic study through Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s exegesis, the  Risale-i Nur , which he studied with Dr. Ali Mermer, a scholar of Islam and university chaplain in New York. Dr. Mermer is also the founder of  Islam from Within  YouTube channel and one of the main contributors of www.Ha-mim.org with many essays, discussions, and audio recordings.

24 Research continues to identify and hypothesize new roles for what was formerly considered “junk.” For instance, see: Jagannathan M, Yamashita YM. Function of junk: pericentromeric satellite DNA in chromosome maintenance. Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology. 2018:034504. Also see Erika Check Hayden “ Human genome at ten: Life is complicated,”  Nature  464 , 664-667 (2010).

Disclaimer: The views, opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in these papers and articles are strictly those of the authors. Furthermore, Yaqeen does not endorse any of the personal views of the authors on any platform. Our team is diverse on all fronts, allowing for constant, enriching dialogue that helps us produce high-quality research.

Human Origins - Part 2: Evolution and the Failures of Naturalism

Human Origins - Part 1: Theological Conclusions and Empirical Limitations

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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Islam and Science

It sounds quite simple indeed. Unfortunately, one must admit that what actually happens is far from these principles. Of course, everybody would agree that there is a gap between principles and realities, between what religion should be and what the members of this religion make of it, between the realm of spiritual tenets and the vicissitudes of history.

But is there a specific issue with Islam? Many voices are heard that put the Islamic faith on trial. It is a fact that, in contrast with other cultural zones, the Islamic world seems to participate very little in the scientific pursuit of today, and to be struck by recurrent social and political disorders. Several authors have attributed these two facts to the same cause: the presumed inability of the Islamic faith to establish a sound relationship with the practice of reason, and consequently to enforce reasonable behaviors in societies. Islam is blamed for the following crime: it seemingly includes in its very principles the germs of its own, violent deviation.

Here comes the point I would like to address, with your permission, in this lecture, from the specific viewpoint of a Western Muslim, who happens to be a professional scientist. Does Islam, because of its very principles, face an insuperable difficulty with the methods and results of science? Has it a specific problem with the practice of reason that would entail the impossibility for Muslims to adopt reasonable behaviors in modern societies? In a single sentence, is it possible to be a coherent Muslim and to participate constructively in the endeavors of our common world, and, first of all, in science? I would like to hereafter argue that, although ignorance, hate and violence unfortunately exist in the Islamic world, the spiritual tenets and intellectual resources of the Islamic faith actually prompt Muslims to search for knowledge, love and peace.

My lecture will be divided into three parts: First I will summarize the basic principles of the Islamic faith that appear relevant to understanding the nature of knowledge in the Islamic perspective. Second, I will briefly review a few historical and contemporary positions about the relation between faith and reason, and between religion and science. Third, I will try to defend a viewpoint in which faith although it does not say anything about the specific content of science, offers a broad metaphysical background that helps me, as a scientist, find purpose and meaning in its discoveries. Finally, I will conclude by a new examination of the above‐mentioned issue: the organization of societies and the dialogue of faiths and cultures. It turns out that this metaphysical background also helps us find purpose and meaning in the diversity of faiths, as well as it gives us guidelines for a peaceful coexistence in this world.

The principles of Islamic faith

The presumed difficulty that Islam faces in its relationship with reason, was recently summarized, with great talent and large impact, by the famous lecture given by Pope Benedict XVI in Regensburg, on September the 18th, 2006, in front of an audience of  “representatives of science” — the detail has its importance for the issue we are addressing here. In an attempt to propose a new vision to secularized Europe, the Holy Father explained what he considered the specific feature of Christianity. For him, it is not surprising that modern science and reasonable behaviors developed in countries where Christianity was predominant. As a matter of fact, this lecture triggered strong reactions in the Islamic world because Islam was used as a sort of counter‐example, a religion in which the absence of reason and the presence of violence are interwoven.

According to the Pope, “For Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” After this Regensburg lecture, there were exchanges between the Islamic world and the Holy See, requests for apologies on one side, and statements that the lecture was misunderstood on the other side. Here, I would like to address the issue raised by the Holy Father very much where he left it, and to answer positively to the calls for dialogue that were eventually heard on both sides.

As a matter of fact, I think the issue stems from the idea we have about God. When the Pope writes, after many other authors, “for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent”, he understands this sentence in the following way: “For Muslims, God is only transcendent”. Is the God of Islam different from the God of Christianity? It is not the Muslims’ opinion. For them, Allah, a word that etymologically means “The God”, is not the name of the Muslims’ God. It is the Arabic name of the One God, the God of all humanity, worshiped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

For Islam, as much as for Judaism and Christianity, God is absolutely transcendent and He is perfectly immanent too. It means that He cannot be known by any of our categories, and simultaneously, He is close to us, He acts in the world, He knows and loves us, He lets Him be known and be loved by us. As the Koran says, “Nothing is similar to Him, and He is the One who perfectly hears and knows.” God gathers aspects that are contradictory: “He is the First and the Last, the Apparent and the Hidden.” And “He is closer to us than our jugular vein.” This coexistence of these two aspects is necessary, in a monotheistic religion, to prevent our idea about God from becoming an idol. In Islamic terms, one would say that the tawhid, the statement of the Oneness of God, simultaneously requires the tanzih, the statement that God is like nothing else, and the tanshbih, the comparison of names, attributes and actions of God with those of the world. A God who is only transcendent is an abstract concept, and a God who is only immanent is nothing else than a form of cosmic energy.

One can readily understand that the issue of the intelligibility of God’s attributes and actions, and the extension of the domain where reason can apply to know religion and to know science, strongly depend on the balance between transcendence and immanence. It is true that extreme standpoints did exist in the Islamic thinking, in one direction or another. However, the main stream defended the simultaneous existence of these two aspects, and the fact that, immanence is possible because God is so transcendent that His transcendence is unaffected by His presence in the world, close to us.

God created the world. This sentence means that the world is not self‐sufficient. The world may not have been there. But it actually is there, and the explanation provided by religions is that the being of the world is given by another Being, who is not “a being” like the others, but rather the action of being itself. God also revealed Himself in the world through specific moments in which infinity gets in contact with the finite, eternity with the temporal. These moments give birth to new religions that, in the Islamic perspective, are only new adaptations of the same universal truth to new peoples (and to the “languages” of these peoples). And God has a specific contact with each of the human beings, whom he cares after, and inspires.

Islam is the third come of the monotheistic religions in the wake of the promise made to Abraham by God, after Judaism and Christianity. Remember this story of the Book of Genesis, when Abraham obeys God’s order and leaves his wife Hagar and his son Ishmael in the desert. For Muslims, the place where Hagar and Ishmael were left is the valley of Bakka, where a temple that was given by God to Adam after the Fall from Eden, used to be located before the Deluge. Later, Abraham and Ishmael rebuilt the temple, a small cubic building covered by a black veil, now in the great mosque of Makka. This building is empty, and only inhabited by the sakina, a mysterious and sacred presence of God, which is quite paradoxical, because God is everywhere, and still he specifically manifests in some places.

Islam brings the renewal of this Abrahamic faith, through a new revelation, that is, an initial miracle that founds a new relation of a part of the human kind with God. This initial miracle is the revelation of a text, the Holy Koran, to a human being, Prophet Muhammad, who was born in Makka at the end of the 6th century. The revelation started during the Night of Destiny, and lasted twenty years till the Prophet’s death in 632. What exactly is this miracle? For Muslims, the miracle is the fact that not only the meanings of the Holy Koran come from God, but also the choice of the words, sentences, and chapters, in a given human language, the Arabic language, in such a way that the divine speech can be heard, pronounced, and understood by the human. As a faithful messenger, Muhammad did not add nor cut a single word of the Holy Reading or Proclamation (the meaning of the word Koran) that subsequently became a Book, and acquired its final appearance under Uthman’s caliphate (644—656). Of course, the Arabic language almost breaks down under the weight of the divine speech. There are subtleties, the use of an uncommon vocabulary, separated letters that may convey mysterious information. The Arabic words frequently have several meanings, and the task of the commentators is to highlight the richness of the teachings that a single verse can bring forth. The Prophet himself mentioned the multiplicity of the meanings of the Koran by saying that “each verse has an outer meaning and an inner meaning, a juridical meaning and a place of ascension”, that is, a direct spiritual influence on the reader. This plurality of meanings makes the task of the translator quite uneasy, because this plurality does not transfer directly into other languages, and especially into European languages. Another fascinating aspect of the Koran is the fact that it gathers messages about the divine names, attributes and actions, prescriptions and prohibitions from God, stories of the prophets, descriptions of this lower world and of the hereafter, ethical advice, and chronicles of the life of the first Islamic community around the Prophet. But all these chains are more or less mixed up, or interlaced, in each of the 114 chapters, in such a way that the internal coherence can be found only after reading and re‐reading the text, which progressively sheds light on itself.

The miracle of the descent of the Koran reproduces the miracle of creation. God creates things though His speech, with His order: “Be! (kun)” The creatures receive their existence from God through this ontological order. God subsequently unveils hidden knowledge, again though His speech, with another of His orders: “Read! (iqra’)”, the first word of the Koran given to Prophet Muhammad. This instruction speaks to the reader, the human being who uses its intelligence to understand the Holy Text. As a consequence, the Koran is like a second creation, a book where God shows his signs or verses (âyât), very much as we contemplate God’s signs (âyât) in the entities and phenomena of the first creation. God unveiled the Book of Religion (kitâb at‐tadwîn) very much as He created the Book of Existence (kitâb at‐takwîn). The issue of the relationship of faith with science specifically deals with the coherence between the first and the second book. This topic of the Liber Scripturae and the Liber mundi is expressed in similar terms in other faiths.

Islam manifests itself as the renewal of the faith of Abraham, as a new adaptation of the same universal truth that was given to Adam, first human being, first sinner, first repentant, first forgiven human, and first prophet. Muhammad comes as the last prophet, after a long chain that includes many prophets of the Bible, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Moses, David and Solomon, as well as John the Baptist and Jesus. The Koran also includes stories about other prophets that are not known by the biblical tradition, and were sent to the Arabs, or maybe to other peoples in Asia. Hence the fundamental formula of Islam, the so‐called profession of faith, or shahada that is the first of the five pillars of Islam: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s messenger”. The message is the Koran, a message from God that prompts the Muslims to be faithful to their own spiritual vocation. The second pillar of Islam is the canonical prayer performed five times a day, at specific moments linked to cosmic events: before sunrise, after noon, in the middle of the afternoon, after sunset and when night is dark. The third pillar is alms‐giving on accumulated wealth. The fourth pillar is ritual fasting during the month of Ramadan (the month during which the first verses of the Koran were revealed), from the first light of the day to sunset. And finally, the fifth and last pillar is the pilgrimage to the House of God, the kaaba, and some places around Makka. These five pillars constitute reference points for the actions of worship. This is the most important part of the religious law, or sharî’a. The sharî’a also includes a description of many aspects of the social life. There are only few Koranic verses that actually deal with social organization, but, in the time of the first Islamic community, the presence of the Prophet allowed it to solve all issues. Later, when Islam became the religion of a vast empire, it became necessary to have a more complete codification of the religious law, and the so‐called classical sharî’a was slowly constituted. Muslims now need to re‐examine this issue in a context that is much more complex, in societies which are shaped by science and technology, globalization, exchanges of people and information, and the presence of many minorities. It is a great challenge, and a strong “effort of interpretation” or ijtihâd, is necessary.

Jews and Christians were present in Arabia during the time of the Koranic revelation, and the Koran alludes to the exchanges that they had with Prophet Muhammad. It turned out that these exchanges had the following outcome: The majority of the Jews and Christians did not acknowledge Prophet Muhammad, and Islam became a religion clearly and completely separated from Judaism and Christianity. The main difference with Judaism is the fact that Islam, like Christianity, is a religion that is explicitly universal. Its message speaks to all the human kind, whereas Judaism is linked to a given people. The main difference with Christianity is the disagreement about the nature of Jesus. Jesus is present in the Koran as an “Islamic prophet” who came to bring the message on the Oneness of God. But he is a very unusual Prophet. He was born miraculously from Maria the Virgin, who herself was protected against any sin. The angel Gabriel announced Jesus’ birth to Maria. For Muslims, Jesus is the Christ, al‐Masîh, the anointed by the Lord. He spoke out with wisdom just after his birth, and made miracles with God’s permission. He miraculously escaped from death and he is still alive, beside God. Muslims say that Jesus is a Spirit of God (Ruh Allah) and a Word from God (Kalimat Allah), but they do not say that Jesus is God’s son. If they were to say so, they would be Christians, and Islam would be only one more Christian church. As a consequence, for Islam, there is no incarnation, no Trinity, no crucifixion and no redemption (and in any case, no primeval sin that would make redemption of the human kind necessary). It is true that Jews differ from Christians also about the figure of Jesus. Apart from this central figure, the three monotheistic religions have a lot in common: the One God, the creation of the world, the creation of the human being “according to God’s image and likeness” (we Muslims say: “according to the form of the Merciful”), the call for spiritual life, for helping the poor, and the belief that the human being, despite his sins, can improve and be saved. Finally, it is fair to say that, even if Jesus currently separates Jews, Christians and Muslims, he will eventually reunite them, in a horizon that is at the end of times. Muslims consider that Jesus is “the sign of the ultimate hour”, and that he will come to gather the believers of all religions. As a matter of fact, Christians say the same thing about Jesus, and Jews wait for the Messiah. It is a great mystery that these believers who say things that are so different about the Messiah will eventually recognize and follow him.

According to the constant teaching of the Islamic tradition, and because of the specific status of the Holy Text of Islam as the fundamental axis of revelation, faith is intimately linked to knowledge. A famous Koranic verse prescribes: “worship your Lord till certainty” (Koran 15:99), and many Prophetic sayings strongly recommend the pursuit of knowledge as a religious duty “incumbent to all Muslims”. The Prophet himself used to say: “ My Lord, increase my knowledge”. Of course, this knowledge consists in knowing God through revelation. But it is clear too that all sorts of knowledge that can be in some way connected to God, and that help the religious and mundane life of society, are good and have to be pursued. Clearly, when the Prophet recommended that his companions search for knowledge as far as China, he did not alluded primarily to religious knowledge.

Human beings have a “faculty of knowing” that is described in the Koran according to a three‐fold aspect: “And it is God who brought you forth from your mothers’ wombs, and He appointed you for hearing, sight, and inner vision” (Koran 16:78). Hearing is our faculty of accepting and obeying the textual indication, that is the Koran and the Prophetic tradition which are the two primary sources of religious knowledge; sight is our ability to ponder and reflect upon the phenomena, and is closely related to the rational pursuit of knowledge; and the inner vision symbolically located in the heart is the possibility of receiving knowledge directly from God, through spiritual unveiling. As a consequence of these three facets, the nature of knowledge is also three‐fold: It is religious through the study of the Holy Scriptures and the submission to their prescriptions and prohibitions, rational through the investigation of the world and reflection upon it, and mystical through inner enlightenment directly granted by God to whom ever He wishes among His servants.

Moreover, there is a well‐known story about the independence of natural rules with respect to religious teaching. Farmers who used to grow date palms asked the Prophet whether it was necessary to graft these date palms. The Prophet answered “no”, and they followed his advice. They then complained that the date crops were very bad. The Prophet answered that he was only a human like them. He said “You are more knowledgeable than I in the best interests of this world of yours”. This is a very important story. There is a domain in which religion simply has nothing to say, a domain that is neutral with respect to the ritual end ethical teachings of revelation. However, because Islam does not separate the intellectual aspects of life from ethical concerns, the only knowledge that should be avoided is useless knowledge, which, in this Islamic prospect, is this type of knowledge that closes our eyes to the treasures of our own spiritual vocation.

To summarize, the descent of the Koran, in which God unveils His transcendence and His immanence, provides the Muslims with a way to celebrate God’s mystery as well as to approach His intelligibility. This intelligibility requires the use of reason encapsulated in a broader perspective of knowledge. Through His explanations and promises, God chooses to be partly bound by the categories of reason, out of His Mercy and Love for the world. But reason itself is unable to approach all the Truth, because Truth is not only conceptual. It also involves all the being. In the Islamic perspective, the “intellect” precisely includes the practice of reason, and the lucidity to understand where reason ceases to be efficient in this quest. The question of the exact extension of the domain of reason has been debated, and I will now try to illustrate the type of debates that took place in Islamic thinking.

Islamic perspectives on faith and reason

After the extension of the Islamic empire, during the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, the Islamic thought met Greek science and philosophy. At that time, it became necessary to define more accurately the place of rational knowledge in the religious pursuit, by marking the field that we can validly explore with our own reason. The great thinker al‐Ghazali (1058—1111), known in the West as Algazel, examined the relation between science and philosophy on the one hand, religion on the other. As all his predecessors, he had the strong belief that there is only one truth, and that well‐guided reason cannot be in contradiction with textual indications given by the Koran and Prophetic tradition. In his intellectual and spiritual autobiography “The Deliverer from Error” (al‐Munqidh min al‐dalâl), he enumerated the list of sciences practiced by Islamic philosophers (al‐falâsafah) in the wake of Plato's and Aristotle's works. Among these sciences, “arithmetic, geometry and astronomy have no relationship whatsoever, positive or negative, with religious matters. They rather deal with issues submitted to proof, which cannot be refuted once they are known and understood.” However, al‐Ghazali writes, there is a “double risk” in their practice. On the one hand, because these scientists are too proud with themselves, they often adventure beyond the field where reason can validly apply, and they make metaphysical or theological statements about God and religious issues that happen to contradict textual indications. On the other hand, the common believers, after seeing the excesses of these scientists, are led to reject all sciences indiscriminately. Al‐Ghazali condemned “those who believe they defend Islam by rejecting the philosophical sciences”, and “actually cause much damage to it.” Now, providing there is only one Truth, how to deal with possible contradictions between science and Koranic verses? The situation is clear: Wherever science apparently contradicts textual indications, it is the fault of the scientists who surely have made errors in their scientific works, as far as they have been led to conclusions which are at odd with revealed truth. In his book “The Incoherence of the Philosophers” (Tahâfut al‐falâsafah), al‐Ghazali attempted to revisit the proofs given by philosophers, and to demonstrate logically and scientifically where their errors come from.

In his book “The Decisive Treatise which establishes the Connection between Religion and Wisdom” (Kitâb fasli‐l‐maqâl wa taqrîr ma bayna‐sh‐sharî’ah wa‐l‐hikmah mina‐l‐ittisâl), Ibn Rushd (1026‐‐1098), known in the West as Averroes, examines again the issue addressed by al‐Ghazali. Ibn Rushd was a judge (qâdî) and his text is indeed a juridical pronouncement (fatwa) to establish “whether the study of Philosophy and Logic is allowed by the revealed Law, or condemned by it, or prescribed, either as recommended or as mandatory.” Ibn Rushd quoted some of the many Koranic verses that prompt the reader to ponder upon Creation: “Will they not ponder upon the kingdom of the heavens and the earth, and all that God created?” As the enforcement of the revealed Law requires the use of the juridical syllogism (qiyâs shar’î ) in Islamic jurisprudence, knowing Creation and meditating upon it require the use of the rational syllogism (qiyâs ‘aqlî ), that is, the philosophers’ works. Now, Ibn Rushd wrote, “since this revelation [i.e. the Koran] is true and prompts to practicing rational examination (nazhar) which leads to the knowledge of truth, we Muslims know with certainty that rational examination will never contradict the teachings of the revealed text: because truth cannot contradict truth, but agrees with it and supports it.” As a consequence, Ibn Rushd explains that wherever the results of rational examination contradict the textual indications, this contradiction is only apparent and the text has to be submitted to allegorical interpretation (ta’wîl).

The Islamic world met modern science during the 19th century, as a double challenge, a material one and an intellectual one. The defense of the Ottoman empire in front of the military invasion brought by Western countries, and the success of colonization, have made the acquisition of Western technology necessary, and also of Western science which is the foundation of the latter. The West appears as the model of progress that has to be reached, or at least followed, by a constant effort of training engineers and technicians, and by transferring the technology that is required to develop third‐world countries. But the encounter between Islam and modern science also gave birth to a reflection, and even a controversy, the nature of which is philosophical and doctrinal.

To cut a long story short, the Islamic world now has a great interest for science, but a lot of disagreement about what science is, or has to be, to be fully incorporated in Islamic societies by being made “Islamic”. For the modernist stream, “Islamic science” is only universal science practiced by scientists who happen to be Muslims. For the reconstruction stream, “Islamic science” has to be “rebuilt” from Islamic principles, in the prospect of the needs of Islamic societies. For the traditional stream, “Islamic science” is the ancient, symbolic science that has to be recovered, in a prospect that is more respectful of nature and of the spiritual pursuit of the scientists. The various streams of the contemporary Islamic thought show an intense activity on the relationship between science and religion. All of them have to identify pitfalls on their path. The main issue is that they are conceptions that are elaborated a priori, as mental representations of the activity of Muslim scientists, and may have little to do with the actual practice in laboratories. If I were to comment on these streams, I would say that each of them seizes, and emphasizes, a part of the situation. Yes, it is true that science, in its methods and philosophy, is largely universal, and the common property of the human kind. Yes, it is true that science cannot be decoupled from the society in which it develops, and that the way it is organized, the topics that are highlighted, the ethic that is practiced, are influenced by the worldview of the scientists. Yes, it is true that, even if science describes the material cosmos, the issue of meaning and purpose, and the inclusion of the scientific pursuit in a broader quest for knowledge, have to be considered by scientists who are believers.

As a matter of fact, most of the debates between science and religion in the Islamic perspective simply forget a fundamental starting point, that is, the nature of the knowledge brought forth by the Koranic revelation. As it is explained already in the first verses that descended on Prophet Muhammad during the Night of Destiny, God speaks to the human to teach it what it does not know: “Read in the name of your Lord who created. He created the human from a clot of blood. Read, and your Lord is the most Bountiful, who taught the use of the pen, and taught the human that which he knew not.” The teachings of the Koran primarily consist in highlighting the spiritual vocation of the human being, the purpose of creation, and the mysteries of the hereafter. They speak mostly of what to do to act righteously, and to hope to be saved. These teachings are proposed under the veils of myths and symbols. Here, we must give these words a strong meaning. Myths and symbols in holy texts are not simple allegories. The language of the muthos conveys meanings that cannot be expressed otherwise, that is, in the language of the logos, the language of articulated and clear demonstration. Myths, and symbols are just like fingers that point to realities that would be otherwise beyond our attention. They just call for the meaning they allude to, to knowledge that is obtained by an intuition in relationship and resonance with the contemplation of the symbols. In some sense, all ritual actions are like “symbols” that bring spiritual influence. With this view, it is possible to avoid a literalistic reading of the text, and to focus on spiritual realities. The verses on heavens do not speak of astronomy, but of the upper levels of being inhabited by intellectual realities, as much as the chronicles on the wars and struggles that the first Muslims had with the pagans do not speak of general rules for the relation of Muslims with non‐Muslims, but of the symbols of the “greatest effort”, which is the struggle against our own passions that darken our souls.

Faith as a matrix for purpose

Let me now propose a view on how the articulation between modern science and religion can be addressed in the Islamic tradition. I would like to suggest that the theological and metaphysical corpus of the Islamic thought is rich enough to help the Muslim scientist find a meaning in the world as it is described by the current scientific inquiry. Of course, I am not going to propose a new form of parallelism. I will rather speak in terms of convergence. Reality uncovered by modern science can fit in a broader metaphysical stage. I will only give four examples on how this convergence can take place.

(1) The intelligibility of the world

The fundamental mystery that subtends physics and cosmology is the fact that the world is intelligible. For the Islamic tradition, this intelligibility is part of the divine plans for the world, since God, who knows everything, created both the world and the human from His Intelligence. Then He put intelligence in the human. By looking at the cosmos, our intelligence constantly meets His Intelligence. The fact that God is One, guarantees the unity of the human and the cosmos, and the adequacy of our intelligence to understanding at least part of the world.

The Koran mentions the regularities that are present in the world: “you will find no change in God's custom”. Therefore “there is no change in God's creation.” Clearly this does not mean that Creation is immutable, since in many verses the Koran emphasizes the changes we see in the sky and on earth. These verses mean that there is “stability” in Creation reflecting God's immutability. Moreover, these regularities that are a consequence of God's Will can be qualified as “mathematical regularities”. Several verses draw the reader's attention to the numerical order that is present in the cosmos: “The Sun and the Moon [are ordered] according to an exact computation (husbân).”

(2) God’s action in creation

How does God act in His Creation? According to the mainstream Islamic theology, God does not act by fixing the laws of physics and the initial conditions and letting the world evolve mechanistically. As a matter of fact, the “secondary causes” simply vanish, because God, as the “primary Cause”, does not cease to create the world again and again. “Each day some task engages Him.” In this continuous renewal of creation (tajdîd al‐khalq), the atoms and their accidents are created anew at each time. This is the reason why “the accident does not remain for two moments.” The regularities that are observed in the world are not due to causal connection, but to a constant conjunction between the phenomena, which is a habit or custom established by God's Will.

The examination of causality by the Islamic tradition emphasizes the metaphysical mystery of the continuous validity of the laws. “All that dwells upon the earth is evanescent”, and should fall back into nothingness. But the (relative) permanence of cosmic phenomena is rooted in God's (absolute) immutability (samadiyyah). This is the reason why “you will not see a flaw in the Merciful's creation. Turn up your eyes: can you detect a single fissure?”

In any case, the metaphysical criticism of causality by Islam did not hamper the development of the Islamic science at the same epoch. On the contrary, the criticism of the Aristotelian conception of the causes as mere conditions for effects to occur necessarily and immediately opened the way to a deeper examination of the world to determine what the “habit” or “custom” proposed by God actually was. Deductive thinking that goes from causes to effects cannot be used a priori in the realm of nature. One has to observe what is actually happening. The development of science in Isla during the great classical period was closely linked to the will to look at phenomena.

(3) God praises and loves diversity

One fundamental element of the Islamic doctrine is the fact the God praises and loves diversity: “Among his signs: the diversity of your languages and of your colors.” As a matter of fact, God never ceases to create, because of His love, or rahma, a word that etymologically alludes to the maternal womb. The mother’s love for her children is the best symbol of this divine love on earth, according to a Prophetic teaching which says that God created one hundred parts of this rahma, and He kept ninety‐nine parts of it with Him, while letting one part descend on earth. It is with this part on earth that all mothers care after their children. This divine love reaches the diversity of creatures, physical phenomena, plants and animals, as well as the human diversity of ethnical types, languages and cultures, and extends to the diversity of religions, according to this well‐known verse: “And if God had wanted, He could surely have made you all one single community. But He willed otherwise in order to test you by means of what He has given to you. Vie, then, with one another in doing good works. Unto God you all must return; and then He will make you truly understand all that on which you are differing.”

A Muslim scientist can easily appreciate this love of diversity in the meditation on the results of modern science. Thanks to the technical means of exploration, modern cosmology has discovered a spectacular view of the universe of galaxies, one hundred billions galaxies in the observable universe. Each galaxy consists in typically one to one thousand billion stars. And it is very likely that each of these stars is surrounded by     several planets, which themselves may have satellites. This makes an incredible number of planets, to which one must connect the fact that differential evolution gives each planet a specific identity that does not resemble to the others. Of course, we do not know how much of these planets actually harbor life forms, but astrophysicists cannot contemplate these large numbers without thinking that life probably exists elsewhere is the universe. Only on earth, there are millions of living species. Can one imagine what the observable universe is? And the patch of the universe where it is expected that the laws of physics (and galaxies, stars and planets) are similar to the ones we know, is probably much larger than the observable universe, by a factor of many billions. And this patch of the universe may be encapsulated in an infinite multiverse in which the laws of physics and the properties of the outcomes greatly vary from patch to patch. What is the meaning of that all? A believer can read the creativity and love of God in this landscape. Love is the explanation of creation, according to the tradition where God says, “I was a hidden treasure. I loved to be known, so I created the creatures to be known by them.”

(4) Science cannot be separated from ethic

According to the Islamic doctrine, the human being is created from clay and from God’s spirit, to become “God’s vice‐regent of earth”. The human being is the only creature that is able to know God through all His names and attributes, and it is put on earth as a garden‐keeper in the garden. Our relationship with other living creatures on earth is not that from the upper to the lower level, with the concomitant possibility to exploit all “inferior” beings”, but that from the central to the peripheral. The “central” position of the garden‐keeper on earth is the position of the watchman who equally cares after all the inhabitants of the garden. This implies a sense of accountability for all creation, and should lead to humility, not to arrogance. As a consequence, we can eat the fruits of the garden, but we have no right to uproot the trees, which do not belong to us. The power that science has given to us must be accompanied by a greater sense of the ethic that is necessary to use this power with discrimination and intelligence. To say the things in a few words, we must not do all what we can do, very much as Adam was not allowed to touch one specific tree in the garden. This prohibition makes us free, because freedom requires the possibility of a choice. This symbol of the garden keeper in the garden has a strong echo today, with the current debates on how to deal with global warming, the share of natural resources in a sustainable way, or the preservation of biodiversity.

Unity and diversity: a key for the century to come

The Islamic tradition has a considerable spiritual and intellectual legacy that should make it contribute to the building of the 21st century. We do hope that the human kind will find a paradigm for its diversity within a strong sense of its unity. Unfortunately, there are also forces of darkness and ignorance that operate in our world. Instead of diversity, we see fragmentation. Instead of unity, we see uniformity. The believers have their share of responsibility in this tragedy, because they do not promote a genuine sense of the religious truth.

What has the debate between science and religion to do with that? I think that the idea that God wrote two books, the Book of Creation and the Book of Scriptures, with the certainty that these books are in fundamental agreement in spite of apparent discrepancies, can prepare us to the idea that God has written, or revealed “many Books of Scriptures”, that are also in fundamental agreement in spite of apparent discrepancies. As far as the solution of these discrepancies is concerned, we must leave with some tension, while praising the Lord for the marvelous diversity He created and revealed.

In conclusion, let me address this issue of ultimate truth, and tell you a brief and profound story that illustrates the mystery of the human condition. We have to go back to the past, and look again at Ibn Rushd. Around 1180, Ibn Rushd was informed that a young man, called Muhyî‐d-dîn Ibn 'Arabî, aged about 15, was granted spiritual openings during his retreats. Ibn Rush, who was the greater philosopher of his time, invited this youngster to meet with him. Later, Ibn 'Arabi, who then was considered the Greater Master of Islamic mysticism, wrote about the story of the meeting in the introduction of his major book, The Meccan Openings, a 4000‐page treatise that unveils the content of his spiritual intuitions. I just let Ibn 'Arabi speak. “When I entered in upon [Ibn Rushd], he stood up out of love and respect. He embraced me and said, “Yes”. I said, “Yes.” His joy increased because I had understood him. Then I realized why he had rejoiced at that, so I said, “No.” His joy disappeared and his color changed, and he doubted what he possessed in himself.” Then Ibn 'Arabi gives us the key of these strange exchanges, in which answers come before questions. Ibn Rushd addresses the central topic of our lecture of this evening: “How did you find the situation in unveiling and divine effusion? Is it what rational consideration gives to us?” Ibn 'Arabi replied, “Yes no. Between the yes and the no spirits fly from their matter and heads from their bodies.” Ibn 'Arabi reports Ibn Rushd’s reaction to these words: “His color turned pale and he began to tremble. He sat reciting, ‘There is no power and no strength but in God, since he has understood my allusion.”

As a matter of fact, Ibn 'Arabi alluded to eschatology, by recalling that even if reason can go very far to capture reality, no one has been intimately changed by scientific knowledge. Knowing Gödel’s theorem, quantum physics of the Standard Hot Big Bang Model changes our worldview, and maybe the way our minds work, but it does not change our hearts. Of course, these discoveries are fundamental milestones in intellectual history. They can produce strong feelings in those who dedicate their lives to such studies. But revelation speaks of another degree, or intensity, of Truth that changes our very being, and prepares it for the mystery of the afterlife. The teaching of religions is that we shall have to leave this world and enter another level of being to pursue our quest for knowledge in a broader locus more fitted to contemplating God than our narrow, physical world. Our reason fails to conceive how it is possible. It is a matter of faith in the promises of our Holy Scriptures. At that time, it is better to stop speaking, because, as the poet and mystic Jalal‐ad‐Din Rumi used to say, “the pen, when it reaches this point, just breaks.”

( Source: University of St. Andrews ) 

Dr. Bruno Abd al Haqq Guiderdoni is an astrophysicist and French convert to Islam. A specialist in galaxy formation and evolution, he has published more than 140 papers and organized several conferences on these subjects. Dr. Guiderdoni serves as Director of the Observatory of Lyon. Besides his extensive writings on science, he has also published around 60 papers on Islamic theology and mysticism and is now Director of the Islamic Institute for Advanced Studies.

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Faith and Reason: Islam and Modern Science

by Professor Abdelhaq M. Hamza

Roger Penrose, in a series of three lectures delivered at Princeton University in October of 2003 under the title “Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe,” was very likely one of the first scientists to start describing the crisis modern physics has been going through. Criticizing the string theory fashion, suggesting faith in quantum theory, and fantasizing about theoretical modeling, were the themes of Penrose’s lectures, which in many ways constitute the building blocks of a scientific creed; a creed that can no longer be held because the solutions proposed by this very science violate the very essence of this science.

It is firmly believed in scientific circles that modern science is facing a deep crisis, an epistemological as well as an ontological one. Modern ‘western’ science can no longer sustain the claim that it is centered on the discovery of facts, for “facts are theory-laden” as the postmodernists would argue.  Over the past century, theories have come to play a central role when it comes to determining what is and what is not recognized as fact. Indeed, in the West, one can trace  the role played by ‘theory’ and the definition of ‘fact’ to treatises by Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. To illustrate the role of theory in the establishment of facts we use the recent discovery of the Higgs-like boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva in the summer of 2013. The Standard Model (SM) provides the theoretical framework through which predictions can be put forward to be tested experimentally; it is within the paradigm of the SM that the Higgs-like boson has become a fact. A paradigm is, according to the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, first and foremost, an object of consensus; it can therefore be discarded and replaced by a new paradigm whenever a crisis occurs. Modern science is stuck within its paradigm, just like thought never gets “outside language” according to Wittgenstein.

In a recent article published by Paul Wells in Maclean’s, Niel Turok, the director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, and one of the proponents of the ekpyrotic model of the universe, describes in his welcome speech to the 2013 Perimeter Scholars International the crisis in modern physics as follows:

Theoretical physics is at the crossroads right now …In a sense we’ve entered a very deep crisis… You may have heard of some of these models … there’ve been grand unified models, there’ve been super-symmetric models, super-string models, loop quantum gravity models … Well, nature turns out to be simpler than all these models. If you ask most theorists working on particle physics, there’re in a state of confusion. The extensions of the standard model, like grand unified theories, they were supposed to simplify, but in fact they made it more complicated. The number of parameters in the standard model is about 18. The number in grand unified theories is typically 100. In super-symmetric theories, the minimum is 120. And as you may have heard, string theory seems to predict 10 to the power of 1,000 different possible laws of physics. It’s called the multiverse. It’s the ultimate catastrophe: that theoretical physics has led to this crazy situation where the physicists are utterly confused and seem not to have any predictions at all.

In fact the technical literature available through the Internet is like a Pandora’s box where one can easily witness the emergence of science trends and science cults; from blog discussions to formal technical lectures, all is available for the critical mind to evaluate. The message is loud and clear: Physics has reached a state of confusion; a crisis has been diagnosed and a remedy is nowhere to be found.

In a very recent paper published in Nature, and following the premature announcements of the BICEP2 experiment, Paul Steinhardt, an expert on inflation theory from Princeton University writes:

The BICEP2 incident has revealed a truth about inflationary theory. The common view is that it is a highly predictive theory. If that was the case and the detection of gravitational waves the ‘smoking gun’ proof of inflation, one would think that non-detection means that the theory fails. Such is the nature of normal science. Yet some proponents of inflation who celebrated the BICEP2 announcement already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected. How is this possible? The answer given by proponents is alarming: the inflationary paradigm is so flexible that it is immune to experimental and observational tests. First, inflation is driven by a hypothetical scalar field, the inflaton, which has properties that can be adjusted to produce effectively any outcome. Second, inflation does not end with a universe with uniform properties, but almost inevitably leads to a universe with an infinite number of bubbles, in which the cosmic and physical properties vary from bubble to bubble. Scanning over all possible bubbles in the multiverse, everything that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times. No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable … Taking this into account, it is clear that the inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable, and hence scientifically meaningless. Cosmology is an extraordinary science at an extraordinary time. Advances, including the search for gravitational waves, will continue to be made and it will be exciting to see what is discovered in the coming years. With these future results in hand, the challenge for theorists will be to identify a truly explanatory and predictive scientific paradigm describing the origin, evolution and future of the Universe.

What Steinhardt seems to omit is the fact that, even the ‘truly explanatory scientific paradigm’ that he anticipates will have to stand the test of falsifiability in the Popperian sense, if one accepts the general and philosophical principle of falsifiability, and henceforth to no end. This goes a long way to showing the depth of the crisis that modern science in general and cosmology in particular are facing.

So where do we stand as Muslims in general, and as Muslim scientists in particular, with respect to this modern science that wants to sweep away a traditional heritage that has survived the waves of materialism for more than four centuries. As an active theoretical physicist, I should point out that I have no problem with asking questions and working out problems defined within a given framework knowing that physics, as a physical science, operates within the limited horizontal plane of the material. Frithjof Schuon, in one of his letters described concisely the limitations of modern science when he wrote:

Modern science is only partially wrong on the plane of physical facts; on the other hand it is totally wrong on higher planes and in its principles. It is wrong in its negations and in the false principles derived from them, then in the erroneous, hypotheses deduced from these principles, and finally in the monstrous effects this science produces as a result of its initial Prometheanism. But it is right about many physical data and even about some psychological facts, and indeed it is impossible for this not to be so, given the law of compensations; in other words it is impossible for modern men not be right on certain points where ancient men were wrong; this is even part of the mechanism of degeneration. What is decisive in favour of the ancients or traditional men in general, is that they are right about all the spiritual essential points.

And in Understanding Islam, Schuon also writes:

Imagine a radiant summer sky and imagine simple folk who gaze at it projecting into it their dream of the beyond; now suppose that it were possible to transport these simple folk into the dark and freezing abyss of the galaxies and nebulae with its overwhelming silence. In this abyss all too many of them lose their faith, and this is precisely what happens as a result of modern science both to the learned and to the victims of popularization … But what we would chiefly emphasize here is the error of believing that by the mere fact of its objective content ‘science’ possesses the power and the right to destroy myths and religions and that it is some kind of higher experience, which kills gods and beliefs; in reality it is human incapacity to understand unexpected phenomena or to resolve certain seeming antinomies which is smothering truth and dehumanizing the world.

In the aphorisms of one the most influential scholars of the 13th century, Ibn Ata Allah, we read:

The Cosmos is all darkness. It is illuminated only by the manifestation of God in it. Whoever sees the cosmos and does not contemplate Him in it or by it or before it or after it is in need of light, and is veiled from the sun of gnosis by the clouds of created things.

We have witnessed over the past decade the emergence of a new ‘breed of Muslim neo-modernists’ like N. Guessoum, Z. Sardar, P. Hoodboy, S. Hameed, U. Hassan and E. Abouheif, to name a few, who have challenged the traditional Muslim worldview; modern science is their creed. The members of this group, who have followed in the steps of their forefathers and inundated the net with pseudo-scientific and pseudo-journalistic pieces, which reflect but the lack of erudition and scholarship, propose no reform and reject some of the basic pillars of the Islamic belief system; they do not believe in miracles and claim that the Qura’n is a book of metaphors. These pseudo-modernists of the twenty first century have hijacked and monopolized the electronic pulpit in order to mesmerize a generation that has been pacified by a tap on a tablet or a twit on the net, a virtual action, a new acquired reflex, which persists and tries to fold the sacred dimension of learning. This emerging modern Sandman phenomenon has been beautifully captured in an essay by Dorothy Bishop, a professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at Oxford University, where she lays down six golden rules to follow in order to become a celebrity scientist: the trade of the day for some, non-Muslims and Muslims alike, indeed. The neo-modernists are in fact following the steps, and are carrying the moulds of their western Christian colleagues who have been facing the waves of scientism for more than four centuries, and who have had to address a wave of new atheism more recently (see John Lennox, for a thorough analysis of the problems faced by Christians in the debate on Science and religion and a thundering response to people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris to name a few). In fact, the arguments used by the Muslim neo-modernists in the ‘Science and Islam’ dialogue are homomorphic to those used by the Christians in what they have initiated as the ‘Science and Religion’ debate when it should have clearly been called the ‘Science and Christianity’ dialogue. This is as if Muslims have to rub themselves with the Christian ointment in order to be baptized into the Science and Religion dialogue.  Indeed, it is interesting to read in an article published by Guessoum in Zygon, where he spills the beans of his worldview, the cut and paste arguments he put forth, which coincide exactly with the point just made.

In a paper I wrote few years ago, which appeared in French in a collective book, I wrote:

Physics belong to the small family of “hard core” sciences, which have enjoyed an unprecedented level of empirical accuracy, and which have unveiled unconceivable levels of details of the world we live in. The impact, these sciences have had, expressed in the language of these very sciences, is clearly measurable. What we call today basic technologies could have easily been described as miracles in a past not too distant; they provide a validity check for the proponents of these ‘hard-core’ sciences, which have made these very technologies possible. These sciences have cultivated the culture of certainty and authority, a culture where exotic quasars and clusters of galaxies, quark-gluon plasmas and black hole singularities, mathematically elegant superstrings, branes in hidden dimensions are undeniable mathematical facts, which must be reckoned with.

However, it is important to point out that facts alone do not constitute a reality and do not reflect any truth unless interpreted within a philosophical framework. In other words, built into modern science are empirical techniques as well as a hidden philosophy that addresses the fundamental questions of being and knowledge, i.e., ontology and epistemology. We have been brainwashed by a process of quantification with many empirical layers each veiling the one before. And when these layers fail to hold together and slip, empiricism is exposed and the philosophical framework that sustains it crumbles. Yet one is reminded that philosophy is not subject to empiricism. Moreover, modern scientists have not been trained to question empiricism and have had very little exposure to the philosophical framework through which interpretations are put forward.  As John Haught of Georgetown University pointed out, “Some of the most prominent scientists are literally unable to separate science from their materialist metaphysics.” This reminds me of the ‘arrogant’ comment made by Lawrence Krauss at a panel discussion held at Arizona State University in 2010 when he denigrated philosophy and claimed that in the sciences we only look at literature that is one year old and ignore the rest, and that scientists have no reason to pay attention to what was said five hundred years ago, and who cares about what Hume said. The reply from the expert on Hume, and Cambridge University philosopher Simon Blackburn, a member on the panel, was clear: “Lawrence Kraus is probably right, he should not read Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Aristotle or Hume or Darwin, as these are all over a century old, and of course they have absolutely nothing to tell us about life!!! …” He then mentioned the moral philosopher Bernard Williams and said: “There is a holy grail that some people have, to find the “argument that will stop them on their tracks when they come to take you away,” Hume thought there was no such argument. I believe you can know as much sciences as could be found out, you will still not find the argument that will stop them when they come to take you away … that is the argument you cannot derive morals from reason”.

Malek Bennabi writes in “Le Phenomene Coranique”: “Let it be known that we are not trying to compare two sciences, but rather two faiths: one that venerates matter while the other brings forth God. … It is only epochs of social trouble and moral disequilibrium that oppose science to religion …” In a recent book entitled "Programming the Universe" Seth Llyod writes (pp76):

This book contains a few million bits of information. The millions of books in the Library of Congress contain some million million of bits. All the computers of the world at present contain some billion billion bits. All the bits of information generated in written or electronic form by the human species as a whole still falls short of the amount of information registered by the atoms of Helium in a balloon.

What profane science has accumulated, in terms of knowledge, does not even come close to the amount of water sipped by the bird in the story of prophet Moussa (Moses (AS)) and el-Khider (AS) on their journey on the boat. The Muslim neo-modernists ought to understand that modern science does not provide the “argument” as suggested by Bernard Williams, and it is not with veiling science with a theistic mantle that we will become enlightened, as suggested by Guessoum.

I will close this paper by citing a story told by Djamshid Mortazavi in which he relates one of the fundamental pillars of the Muslim creed:

Le cheikh Abou Sai’d Abul Khayr raconte: “Un jour que je me trouvais aupres du cheikh Abul Abbas Qassab, il me dit: “Ce que l’on peut dire de l’unicite divine n’est que la designation. En fait, la realite de l’Etre ne peut etre expliquee ni definie.” Puis il ajouta: “Si quelqu’un te demande: “Connais tu Dieu?” ne reonds pas: “Je le connais,” car ce serait du Shirk (associer quelque chose a Dieu), et ne dis pas: “Je ne le connais pas,” car ce serait de l’incroyance, mais dit: “Dieu nous a fait connaitre Son Existence et Sa Divinite, par Sa Grace.”” (“What we can say about divine unicity is but a designation. In fact, the reality of Being can neither be explained nor defined.” Then he added: “if someone asks you: “Do you know God?” do not answer: “I know Him,” for it would be association (associating something to God), and do not answer: “I do not know Him,” for it would be unbelief, but say: “God has made us realize His Existence and His Divinity, through His Grace.””

Wa Allah ‘Aa’llam.

Fredericton, NB

11/13-modified-08/14

— Professor Abdelhaq M. Hamza

University of New Brunswick

August 2014

Physics, Science in Islam

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Physics is taught as part of the curriculum in schools, colleges, and universities in all 48 Muslim-majority countries. The content is, for the most part, fairly standard. In some countries, there is often an extended attempt to show the consistency of science with Islamic principles and to stress the achievements of ancient Muslim scientists. Specific Muslim responses to major scientific developments such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, big bang cosmology, or chaos are hard to find. Only a few little-known Muslim writers have argued that these major ideas of science are in conflict with Quranic teachings. They have essentially echoed criticisms common in the last century in the West wherein, for example, Einsteinian relativity was taken to imply moral relativism and quantum mechanical uncertainty was criticized for limiting God’s power to know. However, these are isolated examples, and the majority...

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Physics Department, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan

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Hoodbhoy, P. (2013). Physics, Science in Islam. In: Runehov, A.L.C., Oviedo, L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8_2

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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.

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Essay On Islam And Science

Essay on islam and science 200 words.

Islam and science have a long-standing relationship, with religion promoting the pursuit of knowledge and scientific inquiry. Islam has a rich history of scientific achievements, with scholars making significant contributions in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and physics.

Islam views science as a means of understanding the creation of God and promoting human welfare. The Quran encourages the study of the natural world and pursuing knowledge, stating that  “Are those who know equal to those who do not know?”(Quran 39:9).

Muslim scholars in the medieval period made significant contributions to the development of science, translating and preserving ancient Greek and Roman texts and conducting original research. Among these scholars were Al-Khwarizmi, who developed algebra, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), who wrote extensively on medicine; and Al-Zahrawi, considered the father of modern surgery.

Today, Muslim scientists continue to make essential contributions in various fields. However, there are ongoing debates about how science fits into Islamic theology, with some arguing that specific scientific theories conflict with religious beliefs.

In conclusion, Islam and science have a complex and intertwined relationship, with religion promoting scientific inquiry and scholarship. Muslim scientists have made significant contributions throughout history, and this tradition continues today. However, debates continue about how science fits into Islamic theology, and these discussions will likely continue.

Essay On Islam And Science 500 words

Islam and science are two concepts often viewed as mutually exclusive by many people. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Islam and science have a long and rich history of coexistence and collaboration, with many Muslim scholars and scientists making groundbreaking contributions to various fields of science.

Islam is a religion that places great emphasis on knowledge and learning. The Quran, the holy book of Islam, repeatedly urges Muslims to seek knowledge and to use their faculties of reasoning and observation to better understand the world around them. This emphasis on knowledge has led many Muslims to pursue scientific inquiry, and the contributions of Muslim scientists have been significant in fields such as mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and optics.

One of the earliest Muslim scholars to make significant contributions to science was Al-Kindi, who lived in the 9th century. He was a polymath who significantly contributed to mathematics, medicine, and philosophy. He was also one of the first Muslim scholars to translate Greek texts into Arabic, which helped to preserve and disseminate the knowledge of ancient Greece.

Another important figure in the history of Islam and science is Ibn Sina, better known in the West as Avicenna. He was a physician and philosopher who lived in the 11th century and significantly contributed to fields such as medicine, astronomy, and philosophy. His most famous work, “The Canon of Medicine,” was a standard medical text in Europe for hundreds of years.

Muslim scholars also made significant contributions to the field of mathematics. One of the most famous Muslim mathematicians was Al-Khwarizmi, who lived in the 9th century. He is credited with developing the concept of algebra and is known as the “father of algebra.” Other Muslim mathematicians, such as Al-Biruni and Omar Khayyam, contributed significantly to the field.

In the field of astronomy, Muslim scholars made significant discoveries and advancements. The astrolabe, an instrument used for astronomical calculations, was invented by Muslim astronomers. They also made important observations of the stars and planets and developed new theories about the universe.

The contributions of Muslim scientists were not limited to the sciences themselves but also significantly impacted the development of science in the West. During the Middle Ages, Muslim scholars translated many Greek texts into Arabic, and this knowledge was then transmitted to Europe through the Islamic world. This helped to spark the Scientific Revolution in Europe and paved the way for many of the scientific advancements of the modern era.

In conclusion, Islam and science have a long and rich history of coexistence and collaboration. Muslim scholars and scientists have made significant contributions to fields such as mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and optics, and their knowledge and discoveries helped to shape the modern world. It is essential to recognize and celebrate the contributions of Muslim scientists, as they serve as a reminder of the importance of knowledge, inquiry, and collaboration in advancing human understanding.

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By: Mohd Hazim Shah;  Member of localhost/muslim’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.

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 17 th century, and between Christian theologians and Darwinists in the 19 th 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.

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 18 th 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 17 th 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 17 th 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 12 th 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.

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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.

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