Islam and Science

Review: ISLAM AND SCIENCE
Author(s): JOHN WALBRIDGE

Review by: JOHN WALBRIDGE
Source: Islamic Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Autumn 1998), pp. 395-410
Published by: Islamic Research Institute, International Islamic University, Islamabad
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20837006
Accessed: 24-04-2016 03:10 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Islamic Research Institute, International Islamic University, Islamabad is collaborating with

JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Islamic Studies
This content downloaded from 132.77.150.148 on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 03:10:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Islamic Studies 37:3 (1998)
REVIEW ARTICLE
ISLAM AND SCIENCE
JOHN WALBRIDGE*
H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), xviii+662.
Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200
1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xxiii + 816.
Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages:
Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), xiv + 247.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the
Battle for Rationality (London: Zed Books, 1991), xv+157, with a
foreword by Mohammad Abdus Salam.
Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the
West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Roshdi Rashed, ed., in collaboration with Regis Morelon, Encyclopedia
of the History of Arabic Science. 3 vols. (London and New York:
Routledge, 1996), xiv4-vii + vii+1105.
Andrew Ross, ed. Science Wars (Durham: Duke University Press,
1996), vi + 333.
Leif Stenberg, The Islamization of Science: Four Muslim Positions on
Developing an Islamic Modernity (Lund: Lund Studies in History of
Religions 6; Lunds Universitet, Religionshistorika Avdelningen,
1996), 364.
* Associate Professor, Department of Near Eastern Languages, University

of Indiana, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
396 john walbridge/Islam and Science
"After all, it was by no means clear that Europe was 'superior' to

Islam until the Ottomans were held off from taking Vienna in 1683. This
was one of the first skirmishes in which the 'scientific' understanding of
ballistics revealed its practical benefits". (Steve Fuller, "Does Science
Put an End to History or History to Science"? in Ross, Science
Wars, 39.) This, in a nutshell, is why the stakes are so high in the debate
over the nature and claims of science and in its sub-debates over the
relationship between science and Islam. It was the Scientific Revolution
in the Christian West and Europe's subsequent harnessing of scientific
technology for military and economic use that allowed the West to
dominate the world in the twentieth century. Modern Western science is
thus the most successful and prestigious intellectual enterprise in the
contemporary world. This unquestionably European intellectual triumph
raises a whole range of questions about modern and pre-modern Islam:
Why a Scientific Revolution did not take place in the Islamic world, what
should be the proper attitude of Muslims towards modern science, and
how modern science should be treated in contemporary Islamic thought?
In the 1980s science emerged as a major intellectual issue in both
Western scholarship ? the so-called "science wars" ? and the debates
among Muslims about the place of Islam in the modern world. In
addition, Islam is a major issue in the historiography of the origins of
modern science and the Scientific Revolution. The books that I am
reviewing here all deal in one way or another with the question of Islam
and science. Since the arguments about the origins of modern science
provide a background to the more recent debates about the
epistemological status of modern science, I will discuss the historical
debates first, then discuss the "Science Wars" as they apply to Islam, and
finally discuss the Islamic debates about the proper relationship between
Islam and science. I will conclude by discussing what I think is the
significance of the science debates for contemporary Muslims.
ISLAM AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
In the two centuries between 1500 and 1700 science changed

fundamentally in Western Europe. After that, science and its sister,
technology, made solid and increasingly rapid progress and became the
basis of the power of the West. This event is known as the Scientific
Revolution, with capital letters. No similar event happened elsewhere.
But what was the nature of the change in science and of the Scientific
Revolution? And why did this event not happen in the Islamic world,
which had an older scientific tradition and greater economic resources at
least in the sixteenth century? These turn out to be difficult questions. H.
Islamic Studies 37:3 (1998) 397
Floris Cohen in The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry

surveys the answers that have been offered.
Cohen is a historian and museum curator who became interested in
the origins of the phenomenon of worldwide westernization and decided
that the key element in the triumph of the West was modern science, that
is to say, the science that emerged after 1500. When he sought to
investigate the matter further, he found that the mainstream historical
literature virtually ignored the Scientific Revolution and that the
specialized literature on the history of science was full of vigorous and
interesting debates, generally conducted in ignorance of each other. So
as a conscientious curator he set out to collect and summarize these
various debates. The story is fascinating and ought to be known to
anyone interested in the history of science and its place in the modern
world.
For Cohen the great questions are: first, what was new in the
Scientific Revolution; second, how did it happen; third, why did it
happen; and, fourth, why did it not happen elsewhere; for our purposes,
why did it not happen in Islam? He surveys literature published through
1990. Cohen's account, itself the summary of hundreds of books and
articles, is far too complex to summarize here except in the broadest
terms. It is most natural to try to explain the Scientific Revolution as a
change in the modes and techniques of scientific thought. But what sort
of change? The use of mathematics and experiment, we might once have
said, and the rejection of the inherited authority of Aristotle and religion
and the superstitions of the Middle Ages. Yet more careful studies have
shown that the mathematical sciences, physics and astronomy especially
did not use experiments in the way we would have expected whereas the
early modern sciences that did use experiment extensively, chemistry and
medicine, for example, made little use of mathematics. Aristotelian
concepts were critical in early modern physics, and Aristotelian concepts
linger in some corners of biology to this day. Finally, some of the heroes
of early modern science, Bruno and Newton, for example, turn out to
have been heavily influenced by the occult sciences.
Islam enters this debate through two other questions: Did the
Scientific Revolution really mark a discontinuity in European science,
and what were the causes that led to its occurrence? In 1913 Pierre
Duhem proposed that early modern science was a natural evolution from
the science practiced in the medieval European universities. In his
Planets, Stars, and Orbs, Edward Grant surveys the thought of more
than fifty medieval European philosopher-scientists on the structure of
the cosmos, part of the discipline known as natural philosophy. This
398 john WALBRiDGE/lslam and Science
cosmological speculation was based on Arisotle and was almost entirely

theoretical, with little use of mathematics or experiment. Nonetheless, it
was a tradition of intense scientific speculation, and it had been taught
to European university students for four centuries. Grant's hundreds of
pages of careful summaries of these long forgotten debates on the
physical nature of the universe are sufficient evidence that the Scientific
Revolution emerged from soil long prepared. In his Foundations of
Modern Science in the Middle Ages Grant goes on to argue that this
tradition of natural philosophy was the essential pre-condition of the
emergence of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In particular, both Grant and Huff, in his Rise of Early Modern Science,
argue that it was the European university that made modern science
possible. Not only was natural philosophy a central part of the university
curriculum, but the university also provided an autonomous realm within
which scientific issues could be debated and judged by a body of
independent experts. Moreover, the institutional structure of the
university separated natural philosophy from theology, allowing the
young masters of arts who taught most of the courses in natural
philosophy to speculate on the nature of the universe with little
interference from theologians.
Islamic science is the test of this medievalist theory of the
emergence of modern science. Medieval Islam and medieval Europe were
nearly identical civilizations, as a comparison with the quite different
civilizations of China and India shows. They worshipped the same one
God, learned science from the same Greek books, and emerged from the
same Graeco-Roman-Semitic world of the Mediterranean. They differed
mainly in the fact that the Islamic world was more advanced, richer, and
freer. In science Muslims had a four hundred year headstart and
remained ahead of Europe in most major disciplines until the end of the
Middle Ages. So why did the Scientific Revolution happen in Europe?
A number of theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Cohen
records three: extensive destruction due to barbarian invasions that
sapped the cultural resources of Islam, a general failure of science to
engage the interests and commitment of Muslim intellectuals, and a
failure to reconcile science and Islam. Huff and Grant argue that a
combination of ideological and institutional factors tended to suppress
Islamic science. Grant concedes that the rise of modern science was
inconceivable without the scientific resources, Greek and Islamic, that
passed to medieval Europe through translations from Arabic. Huff, and
in less detail Grant, argue that the medieval European university with its
corporate status, standardized curriculum, and degree-granting powers
Islamic Studies 37.3 (1998) 399
provided a unique combination of structure and independence. In Islam,

they claim, science had no place in the madrasah curriculum, and there
were no autonomous corporate bodies to standardize curricula and degree
requirements. Most serious of all, they argue that Islam was hostile to
science and philosophy in a way that Christianity, which was born and
matured within the Graeco-Roman intellectual world, was not.
I have my doubts. The problem with most of the discussions of
Islam and the Scientific Revolution is that they have been conducted by
historians of medieval European science dependent on a very narrow
range of Islamic sources. In this they have not been much aided by
historians of Islamic science, who have been overwhelmed by the number
of unread and unedited medieval Islamic scientific texts and who have
been understandably reluctant to generalize about the larger questions of
the role of science in Islamic civilization and the causes of its ultimate
failure.
Rashed's Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Sciences provides a
good example of the strengths and weaknesses of the current scholarship
on Islamic science. ("Arabic sciences", says the editor, refers to "science
written in Arabic, in the sense that one speaks of Greek science or Latin
science", a usage that is defensible but with which I would differ on
the grounds that it downplays the civilizational aspects and tends to
encourage an Arab-centred view of Islamic history.) The work is a
synthesis of scholarship on Islamic science from about 1950 to 1990. Its
goal, as Rashed defines it, is (la) to give an understanding of the history
of classical science as expressed in the Islamic science of the 9th through
16th centuries, and (2a) to contribute to the general understanding of
Islamic culture. The larger relevance of the project is (2a) to demonstrate
the nature and importance of the links between Islamic science and
European science of the 12th through 17th centuries and (2b) to test
larger ideas about the history of science, such as that of a seventh
century scientific "renaissance". The work consists of thirty-one articles
by various authors, most devoted to a particular science. Thus, in
contrast to most earlier attempts to write the history of Islamic science,
the approach is not biographical but topical and centres on the content of
the disciplines. The first volume deals with astronomy, the second with
mathematics, including sciences like optics and statics, and the third with
technology, alchemy, and life sciences. The coverage is somewhat
uneven, as the editor admits, due to the lack of experts in certain areas.
Still, the very short place given to medicine and alchemy and the lack of
articles on the occult sciences and military technology is startling. In
400 john walbridge/Islam and Science
general, treatment of science is stronger than the treatment of technology

and applied science.
The strength of the volumes is in their exposition about what is
known about various Islamic sciences. There are summaries of major
books, and the mathematical articles bristle with equations. There are
many diagrams, though very few reproductions of miniatures or
photographs of scientific instruments. Occasionally, articles are little
more than lists of books ? Georges Anawati's article on alchemy, for
example ? but in general the reader can find a good introduction to what
the Muslim practitioners of the various sciences in the Middle Ages knew
and could do, with a stress on the things they got right. Articles on the
influence of Islamic science on European science are strong and
systematic.
The editors have thus fulfilled promises (la) and (2a) as much as
can reasonably be expected, given the state of current scholarship. It is
in the other promises ? (lb) to contribute to the understanding of
Islamic culture and (2b) to test larger ideas about the history of science
? that the work is weak. For the most part, the articles do not ask or
answer questions about the place of the various sciences in Islamic
civilization, and the reader not specifically interested in that science is
left to ask: "So they were very clever, but so what?" For example,
Rashed's own detailed article on Islamic algebra says only a few words
about the practical uses to which algebra was put and says nothing about
why the books were written, who used them, who taught them and to
whom, and, in general, what the cultural significance of this branch of
mathematics was. This weakness is built into the structure of the book.
The index contains no entries on patronage, courts, education, or
curriculum. The only systematic discussion of the place of science in
Islamic civilization comes in the next-to-last chapter, Franchise Micheau,
"The Scientific Institutions of the Medieval Near East", which touches
on the social role of science. We would like to know much more about
who did science, why, who wanted to read about it, who paid for it, how
it was taught, and what the scientific institutions were like. The only
articles to do systematic justice to the place of their sciences in society
are those of Andre Miquel on geography and Emilie Savage-Smith on
medicine.
The intellectual context of Islamic science is also neglected. There
is little discussion of the relation between Islamic philosophy and science,
or between Islamic philosophers and Islamic scientists, often the same
people. There is no discussion of the relation between science and
religion ? there are no index entries for religion or Islam either ? and
nothing about religious critiques of science, medieval or modern. Apart

from the rather specific articles on the transmission of Islamic science to
medieval Europe and its influence on specific scientists, there is little or
no discussion of larger issues such as are discussed in the other works
reviewed here and seemingly little awareness that the history of Islamic
science has any relevance to the great debates about the emergence of
modern science ? no index entries on the Scientific Revolution or
historiography-. The problem is made worse by the fact that the book
stops at about the year 1500 (for astronomy, the science studied in most
detail; other articles end earlier, and the article on the classification of
sciences traces its subject only as far as Avicenna.) There is no
discussion on the arrival of modern science in the Islamic world, which
surely would have raised many theoretical questions, nor any discussion
on the place of science in the madrasahs in the later centuries, where
mathematics and astronomy were routinely taught. Finally, the question
of the "decline" of Islamic science is neither raised nor answered.
As I said, most of the scholarship on Islamic science is not much
help to the students of medieval European science struggling to find out
why science in the Islamic world failed to accomplish what European
science did. Huff and Grant lay stress on a set of well-known texts,
especially GhazalT's Deliverer from Error, in which Muslim theologians
condemn science and philosophy. It seems to me, however, that there
were other factors that encouraged science in Islam: the patronage of
science by the Islamic royal courts, the general indifference of Muslims
to the kind of doctrinal issues that so disturbed Christendom, the
willingness of Muslims to tolerate diversity of various kinds, and the
very long period, at least eight centuries, in which science was creatively
practiced in Islam. Had the Scientific Revolution occurred in Islam, we
would have ample factors to explain it. On the other hand, I think that
the growing interest of Islamic philosophers in mysticism after the
twelfth century was a factor drawing them away from physical science.
While European philosophers decided that the answers to the great
questions concerning the nature of the universe were best solved through
mathematics and science, their Muslim counterparts looked to mystical
intuition. Also, it is clear that printing played a major role in the
Scientific Revolution, but printing did not become established in the
Islamic world until the nineteenth century. Just as in Europe, there were
factors encouraging and discouraging science in the Islamic world.
I think that the explanation of the Scientific Revolution is to be
sought in special factors in Europe, particularly the extraordinary
prominence of natural philosophy in the curriculum of the late medieval
universities, and not in some supposed defects of Islamic civilization, but

the matter deserves much more thorough study by scholars of Islamic
civilization.
THE SCIENCE WARS

The "Science Wars" are a debate in Western scholarship about the nature
and authority of modern science. They are, or ought to be, of interest to
Muslim intellectuals because they raise many of the same issues as the
debates about the Islamization of knowledge. Conversely, "Islamic
science" ought to be of interest to the combatants in the Science Wars
because the Islamization of knowledge movement has done what the
practitioners of science studies have often tried to do, i.e. dethrone the
absolute authority of modern science. There are cautionary lessons to be
learned on both sides.
Science studies, although its practitioners come from a variety of
disciplines, is basically a form of the well-established academic discipline
of the history and philosophy of science. What sets it apart is that its
practitioners come from a wide variety of disciplines ? political science,
sociology, and literary criticism among others ? and that they tend to
question the authority of science in a way that more traditional historians
of science and scientists themselves consider unacceptable. Politically it
is associated with the Left, and it is closely linked with the collection of
intellectual movements known as Postmodernism.
Science studies started with two reasonable questions: Why should
science be given the epistemological authority that it claims, and how
does science actually work in a social context? Both questions were
motivated by the obvious fact that science in the post-war period was an
important factor in social and political life and therefore the claim of
scientists to be working in abstracted isolation from real life could not be
accepted. Scientists, in short, had built the atomic bomb and transformed
society, and therefore they needed to answer for the consequences to
the society as a whole and to other intellectuals. The science studies
theorists have argued that science is "socially constructed", a claim that
is responsible for most of the opposition to the movement from scientists.
At its most extreme the debate is between the "scientific realists", those
who hold that science gives us progressive access to the real entities
making up nature, and the science studies theorists who hold a strong
form of the social construction thesis, asserting that science is no more
than the myth of Western rationalist scientists and that other forms of
knowledge ? the humanities, non-Western traditional sciences, the occult
sciences of the New Age movement, and even Christian fundamentalist

Creation Science ? have an equal claim to be taken seriously.
In their extreme forms both theses are nonsense: certainly there is
much human happenstance in how modern science came to be, and there
certainly is knowledge not yet incorporated into the body of modern
science. Indeed, there probably are forms of knowledge that cannot be
made scientific. On the other hand, science is different from other forms
of knowledge in the sense that reliable technology can be based on it as
Richard Dawkins, an opponent of science studies, put it. "Show me a
cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I will show you a hypocrite.
Airplanes built according to scientific principles work". (Cited in Science
Wars, 92.)
While Muslims will find much to sympathize with in the criticisms
made by the practitioners of science studies, they should also take
warning from a notorious incident associated with Ross' Science Wars.
The book originated as a special issue of the journal, Social Text. One
article from that issue does not appear in the book: Alan Sokal on the
social construction of quantum gravity. Sokal is a physicist with
impeccable leftist credentials who had taken alarm at what he considered
poor scholarship in science studies. To show that the field did not have
sound intellectual standards, he submitted a nonsense article ? gravity
is certainly not socially constructed ? couched in all the fashionable
jargon and citing the fashionable theorists. It was published without
question. The day the journal appeared, Sokal held a press conference
announcing the hoax, setting off a debate that reached the front pages of
American newspapers and did much to damage the credibility of science
studies.
SCIENCE AND THE ISLAMIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

The Science Wars have their echoes in Islam. Almost as soon as the
Europeans began to assert hegemony over the Islamic world, the
Muslims realized that European science was a critical ingredient of
Western power. The Middle Eastern reformers of the nineteenth century
popularized contemporary Western scientific ideas in their newspapers
and magazines. The new educational systems stressed Western science
and technology, and French-style polytechnics were the first modern
institutions of higher education sponsored by Middle Eastern
governments. All the serious debates about the predicament of Islam
addressed the question of the attitude of Islam towards Western science
and why it was not the Muslims who invented modern science. Grant and
Huff have argued that there were things wrong in medieval Islam that
prevented modern science from emerging in the Islamic world:

unfavourable institutional settings and religious hostility towards
independent rational investigation of nature. The two remaining books
under review ? Hoodbhoy's Islam and Science and Stenberg's
Islamization of Knowledge ? provide a variety of responses to the
problem of Islam and science.
Hoodbhoy, a distinguished Pakistani physicist, has written an
uneven, angry, and powerful book. His targets for the most part are the
crudest contemporary Islamic responses to modern science. He argues
that by any concrete measure the level of scientific knowledge and
technical achievement in the Islamic world is appallingly low. The
Muslims publish few scientific articles. Their countries mostly export
raw materials to non-Muslim countries and import machinery and
finished products. He cites studies showing that Pakistani 11th class
students are inferior to Japanese 6th class students in their understanding
of science, and that American secondary school students had a better
understanding of science than Pakistani science teachers. Comparisons
with India show that this substandard level of scientific achievements is
not simply a matter of underdevelopment. Hoodbhoy's account of how
this came to be is not particularly good, a simplistic account of how
science thrived in medieval Islam until it was suppressed by the
orthodox; but as a Muslim scientist working in a leading Islamic country
his view of the state of science among contemporary Muslims ought to
give pause to thoughtful Muslim readers. An added poignancy is given
by the book's foreword, written by the Nobel Prize winning Pakistani
physicist, Abdus Salam.
Hoodbhoy's special scorn is reserved for the notions of "Islamic
science" and the "Islamization of knowledge", ideas that he saw applied
in Pakistan in the 1980s. After the coup that brought him to power in
1977, General Zia paid off his Islamic political allies by implementing
a programme of Islamization of society, and particularly of education.
The results in Hoodbhoy's view were disastrous for Pakistani science.
He concludes his book with an hilarious appendix entitled "And
They Call It Islamic Science". It is mainly devoted to the doings at the
1987 International Conference on the Scientific Miracles of the Quran
and Sunnah, co-sponsored by the International Islamic University in
Islamabad and the Organization of Scientific Miracles in Makkah. The
conference represented the most simplistic attempt to reconcile Islam and
modern science, the assertion that the facts and laws of modern science
are stated or presumed in the Quran and the Hadith. The results are
much like those of the so-called "creation science" expounded by
American Christian fundamentalists ? and not all that different from

Sokal's quantum gravity hoax?. The conference featured papers doing
such improbable intellectual exercises as accounting for the Prophet's
mi'raj through Einstein's theory of relativity, determining the chemical
composition of the jinn, and calculating the angle of God. Participants
calculated the numerical values of the hypocrisy of various Western
countries (Western society as a whole has a value of 22, and Spain and
Portugal 14) and the reward earned by praying in congregation. A senior
director of the Pakistani atomic energy agency accounted for the soul's
survival after death by analogy with the passage of electricity through a
wire. Hoodbhoy lays the blame for the propagation of this nonsense at
the feet of cynical politicians, ambitious charlatans, and ? let us be
charitable ? sincere but credulous believers. This would simply be
amusing were it not for the fact that it drained limited resources away
from real science and scientific education in countries that are desperately
poor and that can hardly afford to waste money and intelligence on
barren entrprises.
A less polemical and more scholarly account of contemporary
"Islamic science" is Stenberg's Islamization of Science. The book deals
with four major positions: Ziauddin Sardar and the Ijmalis, Seyyed
Hossein Nasr's sacred science, Ismail Raji al-Faruqi and his programme
of Islamization of knowledge, and Maurice Bucaille's attempts to find
modern science in the Qur'an. Stenberg has gone through stacks of
literature on Islam and science, carefully analyzing these four major
positions and their interrelationships. The result is a thorough survey of
the most influential attempts to give an Islamic response to the
intellectual influence of modern science and to appropriate its prestige for
Islam.
The simplest position is that of Bucaille, a French physician who
presumably converted to Islam. He argues that the Qur'an can be shown
to reflect an accurate knowledge of scientific facts that were not known
in the time of Muhammad, whereas the Bible shows no such awareness.
Bucaille's position is not very sophisticated, relying on an out of context
and often strained reading of certain Qur'anic verses. Nonetheless,
Bucaille has had considerable influence in the Islamic world since he is
an attractive writer and provides an example of a Westerner
acknowledging the intellectual pre-eminence of the Qur'an.
The Ijmalis and the Islamization of knowledge movement are rather
similar attempts to reconstruct Islam. Significantly, both movements are
based in the West and led by Western educated Muslim intellectuals. In
both cases the fundamental premise is that Islam provides the perfect and
all-encompassing system for the government of human life and thought.

Therefore, science must necessarily be remade within an Islamic system.
The textual inspiration for both movements is the Qur'an itself, read
largely without reference to traditional Islamic scholarship. Indeed the
'ulama\ and their sciences are much criticized. The life of the West,
social and intellectual, is seen as fragmented and degenerating. Life and
science must be brought back into wholeness. The historical ideal is
either MadTnah in the Prophet's time or the high classical age of Islam.
(Classical Islamic science of the age of Ibn STna and al-BTrunT is cited as
an ideal by Nasr, Abdus Salam, and Hoodbhoy, as well.) As Stenberg
points out, the pattern in the writings produced in these two movements
is to contrast a highly idealized Islam and Islamic science with actual and
inevitably imperfect Western life and science ? obviously much to the
disadvantage of the latter?.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr is engaged in a rather different enterprise, an
Islamic version of the perennialist philosophy. Unlike the other three
groups, Nasr is a traditional Islamic philosopher, a ShT'ite, and a Sufi.
Like the Ijmalis and the Islamization of knowledge proponents, Nasr sees
modern intellectual life as fragmented, but he seeks to reunite it under
a "traditionalist" philosophy, really a form of the Islamic neoplatonism
of SuhrawardT, Mulla Sadra, and other Iranian philosophers. His
commitment is as much to the Greek tradition as it is to Islam, and thus
he has sometimes been criticized as un-Islamic and "gnostic" by others
writing on Islam and science. His Sufism and Shi4ism also come in for
criticism by other writers on Islam and science. Whereas the other
authors discussed by Stenberg tend to resemble the fundamentalist
Protestant critics of science, Nasr more closely resembles certain
Catholic thinkers.
All of the writers discussed by Stenberg are attempting to break the
monopoly of the 'ulama' on the interpretation of Islam; Nasr by asserting
the primacy of philosophy and mysticism and the rest by a decidedly
Protestant appeal to the direct and unmediated authority of the Holy
Book. Almost all of these writers live in the West, and the rest were
educated there or live in areas like Malaysia on the fringes of the Islamic
world.
What then are we to make of these attempts to deal with modern
Western science from an Islamic point of view? The most striking
common feature is the extraordinary deference given to science, and by
extension to the West. After all, there is no particular reason why science
should be an Islamic problem or of any particular relevance to religion.
Hoodbhoy and Abdus Salam think that science and religion are
independent enterprises, an opinion implicitly shared by the traditional

'ulamd', who mostly ignore science. Obviously, the motive for bringing
science within the realm of Islam is to appropriate the enormous prestige
of science, whether in the simplistic way of Bucaille and the participants
in the Scientific Miracles of the Qur'an and Sunnah conferences or in the
more sophisticated philosophy of Nasr and the cultural critiques of the
Ijmalis and the Islamization of knowledge movement. While all these
writers have gained some support in the Islamic world, they have had no
success in convincing the West that Islam has some unique connection to
science. The only exception has been Nasr, who has had some
philosophical influence in the West as an articulate spokesman for a
philosophical mysticism whose appeal and influence transcends Islam.
Intellectually, the biggest problem with all of the proposals for the
Islamization of science is ignorance of the nature of modern science as
it is actually practiced, ignorance or idealization of the facts of Islamic
history, and indifference to the Islamic intellectual tradition. Obviously,
Muslims can do science and have done so successfully in many times and
places, but they have done so as part of a super-religious scientific
tradition. A perfectly reasonable Islamic theological argument can be
made that Islam encourages the pursuit of science; Ibn Rushd made this
argument eight hundred years ago and many contemporary writers on
Islam and science have repeated it. Obviously also, a Muslim scientist
can be guided in part by Islamic ethics; immoral applications of science
pose ethical challenges to scientists of any or no religion. But can there
be an Islamic science, a science whose essence is distinctively Islamic
rather than a science merely carried on by Muslims or decorated with
Islamic symbols and language? Stenberg has summarized a great many
proposals for Islamic science, but except for some tentative attempts in
the social sciences these remain highly abstract proposals that have firmly
resisted any attempt to turn them into living and successful sciences. The
influence of "Islamic science" in modern times on science in other parts
of the world has been negligible. There is no reason so far to disagree
with Hoodbhoy; there is and can be no such thing as an Islamic science,
and attempts to make science Islamic will simply doom the Islamic world
to backwardness.
Almost all of the Islamic writers on Islam and science, even
Hoodbhoy, make reference to an idealized Islamic golden age in the past
when Islam and science were in proper relation. The historians of
medieval European science, despite the limitations of their knowledge of
Islamic culture, could have warned them. The relationship between
science and Islam was always complex and problematical. In fact,
Islamic history tends to be cited by these writers in a very ad hoc way.

They are usually not exploring the past to find out what lessons it might
really offer but are using it for proof texts to justify their various
positions. There are really lessons in the past for those concerned about
the challenge of science and the West to Islamic culture ? the history of
the transmission of Greek thought to the Islamic world is particularly
instructive ? but the lessons are nuanced and ambiguous, as the lessons
of the past always are.
Finally, almost all the Muslim writers on Islam and science, with
the partial exception of Nasr, are indifferent or hostile to traditional
Islamic religious scholarship. Most of these writers go directly to the
Qur'an. They have little use for the Hadlth or for the rich and complex
tradition of interpretation created by medieyal Islamic scholars. Verses
are quoted out of context, terms are reinterpreted to meet modern needs,
and the materials of classical Islam are selectively mined to support
positions formulated in response to contemporary debates. The motive
for doing so is to break the stranglehold of the old learned tradition so
as to make innovation possible, but without the learned tradition ?
which; though narrow was nuanced, responsible, and deep ? the
interpretation of Islam degenerates into a welter of individual opinion
justified in the name of an ijtihad uncontrolled by traditional canons of
interpretation and legal and theological inference.
SUMMARY
Like their ancestors a thousand years ago, contemporary Muslims face
a dilemma posed by foreign sciences. On the one hand, practical reasons
made it necessary to adopt these sciences ? whether the Greek medicine
of Galen or the computer science of the Americans ? but as medieval
scholars like GhazalT and Ibn Taymiyyah clearly saw, the practice of
foreign sciences requires the adoption of foreign attitudes. The challenge
of modern science to Islam is fundamental, for while Muslims have
traditionally cared less about dogma than Christians have, Islam claims
to be an all-embracing system. The issue is the more urgent for the
modern Islamic world since it is linked to the survival of the Islamic
world in the face of very dangerous economic, political, military, social,
and intellectual challenges from the West. Science is at the heart of this
challenge.
Muslims, of course, are not the only people to feel threatened by
science. In the Christian West religious authorities several times
attempted to bring science under religious authority ? in twelfth century
Paris in response to Aristotle, in renaissance Italy in response to early
modern physics and astronomy, and in modern America in response to

Darwin's biology ? but these attempts always failed. The Science Wars
are motivated in large part by a desire to limit the scope of science in
order to defend the autonomy of other intellectual disciplines. But the
critics of science in the Science Wars have also had little success in
reining the pretensions of science. Science has gone on largely indifferent
to its critics.
Likewise, the critics of science ? Muslim, Christian, and
Postmodern ? have had little success in erecting plausible rivals to
science. The "creation science" of fundamentalist Christians has won few
supporters outside fundamentalist circles (although it has some influence
on Muslim critics of evolution). The Postmodern critiques of science
have not resulted in successful models of reformed science. Likewise,
"Islamic science" has remained abstract and unrealized. The "scientific
miracles of the Qur'an and Sunnah" are unconvincing to those not
already convinced of the truth of Islam and, in any case, imply the
validity of modern science. And we should remember that medieval
Muslims found the quite different "truths" of medieval science in the
Qur'an. The efforts to Islamize knowledge have remained proposals and
have not resulted in living, successful sciences. Only Nasr's traditionalist
philosophy is a fully realized position, but it largely ignores modern
science, staking out a position that is metaphysical rather than scientific.
There is thus no reason to suppose that a distinctively Islamic science is
possible.
It is the historians of medieval and early modern science who have
the most useful lessons to offer. They tell us that the Scientific
Revolution and all the resulting wonders of modern science and
technology originated in the small but free intellectual spaces of the
faculties of arts of the medieval European universities. Since then science
has prospered when it is free from intellectual interference and enjoys
consistent intellectual and material support. Abdus Salam tells us that this
remains true: "Religious orthodoxy and the spirit of intolerance are two
of the major factors responsible for killing the once flourishing enterprise
of science in Islam. Science prospers provided there are sufficient
practitioners to constitute a community which can work with serenity,
with fullest support in terms of the necessary experimental and library
infrastructure, and with the ability to openly criticize each other's work.
These conditions are not satisfied in contemporary Islam. . . Nasr and
Sardar are doing a great disservice to science in Muslim countries if they
are calling for a religiously and not culturally motivated 'Islamic
science', whatever that means. There is only one universal science. . .

There is no such thing as Islamic science just as there is no Hindu
science, no Jewish science, no Confucian science, nor Christian science"
(Hoodbhoy, ix). Muslims who wish to see a free, prosperous, and
intellectually developed Islamic world would do well to listen to him.

Islam and Science

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Islam and Science

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Islam and Science

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Review: ISLAM AND SCIENCE

Author(s): JOHN WALBRIDGE

Islamic Research Institute, International Islamic University, Islamabad is collaborating with

ISLAM AND SCIENCE

H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry

* Associate Professor, Department of Near Eastern Languages, University

"After all, it was by no means clear that Europe was 'superior' to

ISLAM AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

In the two centuries between 1500 and 1700 science changed

Floris Cohen in The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry

cosmological speculation was based on Arisotle and was almost entirely

provided a unique combination of structure and independence. In Islam,

general, treatment of science is stronger than the treatment of technology

nothing about religious critiques of science, medieval or modern. Apart

universities, and not in some supposed defects of Islamic civilization, but

THE SCIENCE WARS

sciences of the New Age movement, and even Christian fundamentalist

SCIENCE AND THE ISLAMIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

prevented modern science from emerging in the Islamic world:

American Christian fundamentalists ? and not all that different from

all-encompassing system for the government of human life and thought.

independent enterprises, an opinion implicitly shared by the traditional

Islamic history tends to be cited by these writers in a very ad hoc way.

modern physics and astronomy, and in modern America in response to

science', whatever that means. There is only one universal science. . .

You might also like