Islam and Science: A journey through history

Introduction:

“And He is the One Who spread out the earth and placed firm mountains and rivers upon it and created fruits of everykind in pairs. He covers the day with night. Surely in this are signs for those who reflect.”

~ Surah Ar-Ra’d (13:3)

This essay narrates the story of the interaction between Islam and science, from the time of Islam’s emergence in the seventh century to the present. Before we embark on this exploration, however, something must be said about Islam itself, for it remains one of the most poorly understood religions in the world. At the dawn of twenty-first century, the word Islam has become commonplace and hardly a day passes without mention of Islam and Muslims in headline news. This enormous attention has, however, not produced an understanding of the religion based on its own sources; extensive journalistic coverage of events has been responsible instead for distortions of the message of Islam.

The Qur’an and the Sunnah are the two primary sources of Islam. For the purpose of this essay, it is important to mention that various branches of learning dealing with these two primary sources emerged in Islamic civilization prior to any other branch of knowledge, and they influenced all other fields. Thus, by the time the study of nature appeared in Islamic civilization as an organized and recognizable enterprise, the religious sciences had already been firmly established; this sequence affected the framework used to explore nature.

The Qur’anic view of nature is characterized by an ontological and morphological continuity with the very concept of God. The Qur’an presents the world of nature to humanity as a sign, it also calls its own verses ayat. As Izutsu has noted,

On this basic level, there is no essential difference between linguistic and non-linguistic Signs; both are equally divine ayat, the meaning of this is that all that we usually call natural phenomena, such as rain, wind, the structure of heaven and the earth, etc., all these would be understood not as simple natural phenomena, but as so many ‘ signs’ or ‘symbols’ pointing to the Divine intervention in human affairs.

(Izutsu, 1946, 142-143)

We need to understand this relationship like that of a mother and a child, in which a particular branch of knowledge, science, emerges from within the greater body of knowledge dealing with the world of existing things. It is a relationship that is inherently inseparable from the well-articulated concept of nature as a Divine Sign.

Social and Institutional contexts:

One of the most repeated assertions in general histories of science is that the rational sciences in Muslim societies were marginalized because of the lack of institutional support. In a classic work on the rise of colleges, George Makdisi contends that the quintessential institutions of learning in Muslim societies, madrasas and their antecedent and cognate institutions, were exclusively devoted to the study of the legal sciences and other ancillary religious and philosophical disciplines and had no room for the rational sciences. He maintains that the struggle for the rational sciences was “uphill”, and that the “godless sciences of the ancient” were effectively excluded from the curricula of the formal institutions of learning.

Scholars of Islamic education mostly agree on the marginalization of the sciences. A notable exception is Sonja Brentjes, who has surveyed social and cultural spaces for the practice of the social sciences in Muslim societies. She argues that education in the exact sciences was a stable aspect if education in Muslim societies, just as education in the religious sciences was. In particular, Brentjes notes the alliances and professional affiliations between several religious and rational sciences after the thirteenth century.

In different regions and periods, countless scholars produced advanced scholarship in such fields as hadith and medicine, Qur’anic exegesis and astronomy, and law and philosophy.

The shifting professional alliances between religious and scientific disciplines provided social prestige and respectability to the rational sciences. Two notable examples of such disciplines are the science of fara’id, which dealt with legal inheritance computations according to Islamic law and was a subfield of algebra, and ‘ilm al-miqat, or timekeeping, which dealt with computations of times and prayer and computations for calendars and was a subfield of practical or applied astronomy. Medicine was taught privately in the homes of individual physicians, but it was also taught systematically in endowed hospitals. The hospital was of the greatest institutional achievements of medieval Islamic societies. Between the ninth and tenth centuries, five hospitals were built in Baghdad alone.

A distinctive result of the reorganization and cross-application of different sciences to one another was the invention of new sciences. Algebra was conceived as a new science with a distinct subject matter technical terminology, methods, and even name. Muslims came up with totally new subjects and mathematical concepts. They did not merely restructure Hellenistic mathematical knowledge but created new mathematical disciplines.

Demonstrably, the culture of science struck deep roots in classic Muslim societies. Various developments contributed to the transformation of science from a peripheral, elitist activity to an institutionalized activity with an unprecedented scale of social support and participation. I underscore this point because so much earlier work on the history of Islamic science accepts that most of the original discoveries and contributions were isolated occurrences or happy guesses that had no impact on their Islamic environment and were appreciated only on Latin Europe.

The mosque, the laboratory, and the market:

Using the conceptual categories inherent in Islamic understanding of knowledge, we can reformulate the question of the Islam and science nexus. Knowledge is ilm in Arabic. Knowledge is considered meritorious; those who know and those who do not know are not equal.

The acquisition of knowledge is virtuous; it ennobles humanity and it serves its needs. This recognition has produced two categories of obligations: personal and communal. It is the personal obligation(fard ‘ayn) of a believer to have a certain amount of knowledge of his or her din, but it is not everyone’s obligation to have expertise in astronomy or mathematics; this is instead the obligation of a community, if the need exists. Therefore, scientific knowledge becomes a “religious” duty incumbent on the whole community, meaning thereby that a certain number of individuals from the community must pursue it with the full financial, logistic, and moral support of the entire community. It is this religious obligation that provides a nexus between Islam and the quest for scientific knowledge.

In this sense, science is a civilizational activity; it fulfils the needs of a given civilization by providing reliable and verifiable knowledge about the physical world. It is pursued by men and women whose understanding of the physical world they explore is directly related to their belief system and worldview. The way a scientist understands the origin and working if the physical world us extremely important to his or her approach to it. It is this understanding of the origin and working of the physical world that forms the matrix from which emerges the relationship between the scientist and science as well as between the scientist and his or her way of being.

All that is being suggested is that Islam views all knowledge, whether scientific or otherwise, through its own unique perspective in which there is a certain unity of knowledge, a certain direction, and certain purpose. As al-Biruni tells us,

“I say, further, that man’s instinct for knowledge has constantly urged him to probe the secrets of the unknown, and to explore in advance what his future conditions may be, so that he can take necessary precautions to ward off with fortitude the dangers and mishaps that may beset him”. (al-Biruni 1967, 5)

Storm in a cup of tea: Islam vs. Science OR Islam for Science?

As far as science is concerned, Islam is definitely a hurdle in its propagation, and it can be said that there is something inherently wrong with Islam that does not allow science to flourish. This is why, in spite of the enormous oil wealth available in the Middle East, no Muslim country is producing science today. Historically speaking, it is true that a large part of Greek scientific texts was translated into Arabic and made available to Muslims, but even this did not produce any original science, and certainly not the kind that emerged in Europe at the time of the Scientific Revolution. It appears that Greek science survived in Islamic civilization not because of Islam, but despite it. Treated as “foreign sciences,” the Greek heritage was always looked upon by Muslim religious authorities with suspicion and hostility, and as soon as they could, they destroyed it. AlGhazali was the man most responsible for this. Despite this vigorous opposition, a few brilliant philosopher-scientists and physicians like al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd left behind a small body of work, mainly commentaries on Aristotle’s natural philosophy, that had a significant impact on Western thought when translated into Latin.

This is how a very large number of general books on science and religion, as well as those dealing with the history of science, depict the eight hundred years of scientific activity in Islamic civilization. When one makes the attempt to find its origin, all roads lead to Ignaz Goldziher, the godfather of the “Islam versus foreign sciences” doctrine. What is fundamentally problematic in Goldziher’s construction is his conception of “orthodoxy” in Islam, as George Makdisi has pointed out:

“The use of the term ‘orthodoxy’ implies the possibility of distinguishing between what is true and what is false. This term implies the existence of an absolute norm as well as an authority which has the power to excommunicate those whose doctrines are found to be false or heretical. Such an authority exists in Christianity. It does not exist in Islam”. (Makdisi 1991, 251)

He was, in this way, a direct heir to the medieval history of hostility towards Islam. Islam was then studied in Europe not as a true religion but an invention of Muhammad (SAW): many works included in their titles the term “Muhammadanism” , which Goldziher used in the title of his major work Muhammedenische studien (1888).

Religion was then seen as an inhibitor of science. This was first seen in reference to Christianity, but soon this initial recasting of the role of Christianity in Europe was enlarged to include all religions, Islam being chosen for its perceived hostility toward rational inquiry. The idea that Islam was inherently against science was thus nourished under specific intellectual circumstances then prevalent in Europe, and it was in this general intellectual background that the first echoes of the “Islam against science” doctrine are heard.

In his 1883 Sorbonne lecture, Renan forcefully claimed that early Islam and the Arabs were hostile to the scientific spirit, and that science entered the Islamic world only from non-Arab sources. Al-Afghani responded by asking rhetorically how Islam differs from other religions in this regard, noting that all religions are intolerant in their own way. He accepted Renan’s hypothesis in general terms, acknowledging that whenever religion has an upper hand, it eliminates philosophy, and that the struggle between dogma and free investigation will continue as long as humanity exists. Al-Afghani expressed his fear that free thought would not triumph because the masses dislike reason and because science does not completely satisfy humanity’s thirst for the ideal. Renan’s condescending rejoinder praised al-Afghani as “an Afghan entirely divorced from the prejudices of Islam” and attributed his rationalism to his Aryan racial origins. Renan conceded that Christianity was no superior to Islam, citing Galileo, but concluded that while Islam did not stop the scientific movement during its first half, it stifled it in the second half.

This is the immediate background to twentieth-century Western literature on Islam and Science. The fatal division on which Goldziher constructed his thesis divides knowledge into “sciences of the ancient” (meaning all works translated from Greeks) and “the sciences of the Arabs” or the “new sciences”. He states that “strict orthodoxy always looked with some mistrust on those who would abandon the science of Shafi and Malik, and elevate the opinion of Empedocles to the level of law in Islam”. (Goldziher 1915, 185-86).

But when one examines the data used by Goldziher to construct his battle lines, one realizes that Goldziher relied on exceptions rather than norms and distorted data by removing quotations from their proper historical context. As proof, Goldziher cited a Hadith in which the Prophet prayed for protection against “useless science,” claiming it was “frequently quoted” to show that pious Muslims were expected to avoid foreign sciences.

However, the footnote contains no evidence of frequent quotations, only a single reference.

Furthermore, the Arabic word used in the Hadith is ‘ilm, which means knowledge in general, not the specific “foreign sciences” Goldziher refers to, making his interpretation highly unlikely.

The decline of Islamic science:

The central question that has preoccupied historians is whether Islam was responsible for the decline of its scientific tradition, though scholars disagree significantly on the timing, with proposed dates ranging from the 10th to the 15th century and even later. Evidence shows that vibrant scientific activity in astronomy, mechanics, and medicine continued well into the 15th century, and high-quality astronomical instruments were still being made in the 18th century. Some extreme views dismiss the tradition entirely, claiming Islamic civilization merely “hosted” Greek science or that scientists were a marginal group with no connection to Islamic society. However, such views are deeply flawed, for the translated sciences were critically integrated into Islamic thought over three centuries, not received as a monolithic body. When it comes to dating the decline, we must examine individual branches and regions separately, as they had different peak periods, and the task is complicated by the thousands of uncatalogued manuscripts and unknown scientists yet to be studied.

The question of why the decline occurred is even more complex, with common explanations including opposition from Islamic orthodoxy, the influence of Al-Ghazali, the Mongol invasion, lack of institutional support, or some inherent flaw in Islam itself. These explanations, however, are repetitive, selective, and anachronistic, reading later European developments back into Islamic history. A significant flaw in such reasoning is that these so-called “internal factors” were present throughout the eight centuries when science has flourished. A more reflective historical approach warns against “Whiggish” views that judge other civilizations solely by their role in creating modern science, insisting instead that we understand Islamic science within its own framework and context. Ultimately, the decline of science cannot be separated from the broader intellectual, economic, and political decline of the Muslim world, marking a shift from an “old discourse” based on an Islamic worldview to a “new discourse” that has fundamentally transformed the debate.

Islam and modern science: The colonial era (1800-1950)

The colonial era represents a watershed moment in the long and complex relationship between Islam and science, marking a fundamental transformation from an organic, internal discourse to a reactive, externally imposed one. To understand this transformation, one must first appreciate the historical backdrop against which it unfolded. The post-Mongol reconfiguration of the Muslim world had given rise to three powerful empires—the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal—which, despite their vast resources and patronage of learning, could not compete with the scientific developments taking place in Europe after the fifteenth century. By the time Muslim rulers realized the enormous military and economic advantages Europeans had reaped through their scientific and technological advancements, it was already too late. European armies equipped with superior weapons were knocking at their doors, and the rapidity with which the situation changed is staggering: at the beginning of the eighteenth century, most of the West Asia, large parts of Africa, the middle belt of Asia, and the Malayan archipelago were under Muslim control, yet by the end of that fateful century, large portions of this territory had come under Russian, British, French, Portuguese, and Dutch influence or direct control. By the middle of the nineteenth century, nothing remained of the power, might, and splendor of the old Muslim world. This sudden collapse created a profound crisis of confidence that fundamentally reshaped how Muslims viewed science and their own intellectual tradition.

One of the most significant changes to take place during this period was the destruction of Arabic as the unifying language of intellectual discourse across the Muslim world. For over a millennium, Arabic had served as the main language of intellectual life, encompassing religion as well as the sciences, and even in lands where it was not the common vernacular, all major works were written in Arabic. This shared language preserved an internal link with traditional religious knowledge and served as a vital connection for social and economic transactions; an Indian Muslim could go to Cairo, Baghdad, or Makkah and freely communicate with scholars there in a language not foreign to either of them, allowing the sharing of traditional terminology, metaphors, and ancestral wisdom. However, colonial rulers replaced Arabic with their own languages in occupied lands, while in the Ottoman Empire, the Turks themselves replaced Arabic as part of a modernization drive. Within a short span of time, where Arabic was not the usual spoken language, it became a foreign language, destroying the means of communication among Muslim scholars and making the Qur’an and the vast corpus of traditional knowledge inaccessible even to the educated classes. This linguistic rupture had an enormous impact on the making of the new Islam and science discourse, as Muslims found themselves cut off from their own intellectual heritage at precisely the moment when they most needed to draw upon it.

The manner in which modern science arrived in Muslim lands during this period is another crucial factor in understanding the transformation of the Islam-science relationship. Unlike in Europe, where modern science emerged as an organic development rooted in the social, economic, and intellectual currents of European civilization, the arrival of modern science in Muslim lands was akin to the transplantation of an imported plant into an artificially created environment. The growth of modern science in Europe was a natural process linked to all aspects of the civilization that gave birth to it, but the growth and even survival of modern science in Muslim lands depended upon the maintenance of an artificial environment under which the implant could survive. This is what makes modern science such an “odd entity” in Muslim lands, an import received while the Muslim world was under colonial occupation. Muslim rulers, desperate to compete with European powers, perceived science primarily as a means of regaining political and military strength, and they set up new schools and training colleges where modern science was taught by foreigners hired for inflated salaries. Yet these measures produced no real science, for the human resources were simply not ready for the kind of science being introduced; pupils recruited for these schools, even when the problem of language was somehow solved, had no idea how to learn a science based on experimental and innovative inquiry, and as one observer noted, memorization of an engineering textbook could not make an engineer. In the end, all that reformers like Muhammad Ali of Egypt could do was rupture old traditions without succeeding in establishing a new system.

The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of two main strands in the new Islam and science discourse, both shaped by the colonial experience. The first and dominant strand saw Islam as a justifier for the acquisition of modern science, arguing that since Islam supports the acquisition of knowledge and modern science is knowledge, Muslims must therefore acquire science, and since science studies the Work of God and the Qur’an is the Word of God, there can be no contradiction between the two. This argument, first used by Muslim reformers in the nineteenth century and constantly promoted thereafter, was driven not by a genuine desire for scientific inquiry but by the urgent need to bring the Muslim world out of its state of dependence and decay. The most influential figure in this approach was Sayyid Ahmad Khan of India, who established a Scientific Society in 1864, founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (which later became Aligarh Muslim University), and dedicated his life Sensitivity: Internalto showing that Islam and modern science were perfectly aligned. Khan was a great admirer of the English, describing the natives of India when contrasted with the English in education, manners, and uprightness as “like a dirty animal is to an able and handsome man,” and he was awarded knighthood and an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh for his loyalty to the British Raj. His zeal to show the agreement between the Word and Work of God, however, earned him the pejorative title of Néchari or naturalist, and his efforts to write a commentary on the Qur’an were severely criticized by religious scholars who pointed out his lack of training in Islamic sciences and his inability to use Arabic sources.

The second strand of the new discourse, representing a minority position, attempted to maintain a closer link with the past and viewed the relationship between Islam and modern science in terms similar to the discourse prior to the nineteenth century. The most important figure in this strand was Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who arrived in India in 1879 and wrote a major rebuttal of Ahmad Khan’s naturalistic ideas, arguing that materialists and deniers of divinity had undermined the very foundations of human society by destroying the “castle of happiness” based on religious beliefs. Al-Afghani enumerated the three qualities that religion has produced in people and nations from the most ancient times—modesty of the soul, trustworthiness, and truthfulness and honesty—and he rejected the materialist ideas of those who attributed all changes in the heavens and earth to “matter, force, and intelligence,” considering these ideas to be corrupt. His refutation, published in Persian in 1881 and later translated into Arabic and Urdu, spread his ideas throughout the Muslim world and established him as the most important Muslim intellectual of the nineteenth century. However, al-Afghani’s response to the challenges of the colonial era, like those of other reformers, was shaped by the same crisis of confidence that had engulfed the Muslim world, and his arguments against Darwinism, for instance, were based on philosophical and religious grounds rather than scientific understanding, reflecting the weakened state of scientific education in the Muslim world at that time.

The colonial era also gave rise to a new genre of Qur’anic exegesis known as al-tafsir al-ilmî, the scientific tafsir, which sought to confirm modern scientific discoveries through Qur’anic verses. This trend, which had no precedent in the pre-seventeenthcentury Islamic scientific tradition, began with the incomplete tafsir of Ahmad Khan and gained momentum through the works of Egyptian physician Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Iskandarani, whose publications in 1880 and 1883 explained verses of the Qur’an to prove the presence of specific scientific inventions. By the early twentieth century, scientific tafsir had carved out a permanent place in the tafsir tradition, culminating in Tantawi Jawhari’s twenty-six-volume work published in 1931 with illustrations, drawings, photographs, and tables, in which he counted 750 “scientific verses” out of 6,616 total verses of the Qur’an. The common feature of all such works was a zealous desire to show that the Qur’an contained modern scientific knowledge that no one could have known in seventh-century Arabia, thereby proving that it was the Word of God. This defensive, reactive theology represented a fundamental departure from the old discourse, where scientists like Ibn Sina and al Biruni had pursued scientific inquiry for its own sake without attempting to validate their findings through Qur’anic verses.

The most radical departure from the traditional relationship between Islam and science occurred in Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who abolished the Caliphate on March 3, 1924, and established a secular republic. For Atatürk and his associates, civilization meant European civilization, and everything related to Islam was perceived as backwardness; they banned traditional dress, declaring the fez “an emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism, and hatred of progress and civilization,” and Atatürk himself declared, “I do not leave any scripture, any dogma, any frozen and ossified rule as my legacy in ideas. My legacy is science and reason.”

This dissociation from Islam was not shared by the masses, but the state had gained enormous powers and ruthlessly curbed any public display of religious loyalties, expunging Islam from the curriculum and importing a large amount of European “science.” Islam was now officially perceived as the greatest enemy of science, which was seen as the only means of progress and civilization, and this perspective was propagated vigorously throughout Turkey. The secularization of Turkey represented the most extreme break with the past and set a precedent for other Muslim-majority states struggling to reconcile their religious heritage with the demands of modernity.

The Darwinism debate that emerged during this period further illustrates the transformed nature of the Islam-science discourse. When Darwin’s ideas arrived in the Muslim world through Christian missionaries and their educational institutions, Muslims encountered Darwinism not as a scientific theory to be studied and evaluated but as an attack on religion from colonizers, and no Muslim was able to produce a scientific response to Darwinism—only philosophical, religious, and emotional ones. The earliest traceable mention of Darwin’s theory in Arabic was a book by Bishara Zalzal published in 1879 from Alexandria, which featured a portrait of Lord Cromer, the de facto ruler of Egypt, a telling sign of the colonial context in which these debates took place. Muslim responses ranged from al-Afghani’s polemical rejection, in which he used the analogy of circumcision to argue that if continuous cutting of dogs’ tails for centuries would produce tailless dogs, then why hadn’t Arabs and Jews been born uncircumcised after thousands of years, to the more accommodating approach of Hussein al-Jisr, who quoted the Qur’anic verse “We made every living thing from water” and concluded that “there is no evidence in the Qur’an to suggest whether all species, each of which exists by the grace of God, were created all at once or gradually.” The secularist Ismail Mazhar, who translated Darwin’s Origin of Species into Arabic, represented yet another response, advocating the adoption of the scientific method in all aspects of life and claiming that Islamic Law was incompatible with modern Arab society. The diversity of these responses, ranging from total rejection to accommodation to enthusiastic acceptance, reflects the confusion and uncertainty that characterized the Muslim encounter with modern science under colonial conditions.

What is most remarkable about the transformation that took place during the colonial era is the total break with the past that it produced. Since their colonization, Muslims have learned to forget the intellectual tradition that produced men like al Khwarizmi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn al-Shatir, a tradition that was violently plucked out of Muslim lands, leaving them bereft of historical depth. Muslim societies have become victim of a cultural schizophrenia in which the past appears as a ghost to be Sensitivity: Internalexorcised, and a modern Muslim scientist is unlikely to find any resonance with the men who were the most learned scholars and scientists of the period from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries. This break with the past was facilitated by the artificial transplantation of modern science, the destruction of Arabic as a shared intellectual language, and the replacement of traditional educational systems with Western-style curricula. The old Islam and science discourse, which had existed from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries, was based on an understanding of science that had emerged from within the Islamic worldview, and even the tensions and debates of that period were reflective of this internal reality. In contrast, the new discourse that emerged in the colonial era was shaped by external pressures, defensive reactions, and the urgent need to respond to European dominance, and it fundamentally altered the basic terms of the discourse in ways that continue to shape the relationship between Islam and science to this day.

The colonial era thus represents not merely a period of decline in scientific output but a fundamental transformation in how Muslims understood science and its place in their civilization, a transformation whose effects are still being felt in contemporary debates about Islam and modernity.

Islam and modern science: contemporary issues (1950 – present)

The contemporary Islam-science discourse remains shaped by the colonial rupture that severed the organic connection between faith and scientific inquiry. In the post-colonial period, Muslim nation-states attempted to build scientific infrastructure by sending thousands of students abroad for doctorates, yet these efforts failed because returning graduates found no laboratories, journals, or industries to sustain research, forcing many to return to the West. The dominant strand of contemporary discourse continues the colonial-era pattern of using Islam to justify science, exemplified by Maurice Bucaille’s popular work and state-sponsored commissions on “scientific miracles” of the Qur’an, which interpret verses to confirm modern discoveries like the Big Bang, a polemical approach that provides little genuine insight into Islam-science relations. More sophisticated perspectives have emerged from Muslim thinkers in the West, including the Islamization of knowledge movement led by Ismail al-Faruqi, which sought to recast modern disciplines according to Islamic values, and the work of Ziauddin Sardar, who emphasized culture-specific science shaped by societal priorities. Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas offered a deeper critique, arguing that modern science implicitly denies God’s reality by treating the universe as a selfsubsistent system.

Meanwhile, advances in biogenetics and reproductive technologies have forced Muslim jurists to apply traditional principles of ijtihad to unprecedented ethical dilemmas, with a pattern of initial opposition followed by de facto acceptance emerging.

Ultimately, contemporary discourse remains fragmented, a reactive and defensive posture inherited from the colonial era, struggling to forge an authentic synthesis between Islamic values and modern scientific inquiry.

In Conclusion:

Islamic perspectives on modern science are intertwined with a host of other political, social, and economic issues. We have examined some of these contributing factors that have shaped the contemporary Islam and science discourse. Two important factors stand out from the rest: Islam’s encounter with modernity and a deep-seated, almost insatiable, hunger for modern science in the Muslim psyche. In the final analysis, modern science is a Western enterprise, with deep roots in the Western civilization. Notwithstanding the claims of the universality of modern science, this enterprise cannot be dissociated from the broader cultural matrix from which it emerged. Seen in this perspective, Muslim scholars have an enormous unfinished agenda at hand: to address what is to be done with a science (and the technologies produced by its application) that has obliterated all other means of investigating nature and that has become the most important enterprise in human history in terms of its effect on the way we now live.

In the post-1950 era a new awareness among a small minority of Muslim scholars has produced penetrating critiques of modern science as well as Muslim attitudes toward it, but this strand of discourse remains peripheral to the official attitudes of Muslim states as well as to the general Muslim response to modern science, both of which see modern science from the point of view of its utility, with an almost total disregard to the wider spiritual, cultural, and social implications of importing modern science and technology. The failure of Muslim states to jumpstart a scientific research in their own countries and the enormous social and cultural dislocations modern technologies have produced in many Muslim countries have not led to any reconsideration of attitudes toward Western science and technologies. For those Muslim states that can afford to pay for the most advanced technology that appears on the horizon, there is never a question of considering its impact on society. This headlong plunge into the ethos of the twenty-first century has contributed to a cultural schizophrenia in these countries, where a large majority of the population remains alien to modernity in its attitudes while a small minority pushes these societies into a fast-track process of modernization through the importation of science and technology.

It must be clear by now that it is not Islam’s attitude toward science that is under consideration in these cases; it is mostly thepsychological complexes of Muslims that have generated this sound and fury in the discourse. As far as Islam is concerned, modern science and technologies based on it cannot be seen as neutral. Brought into the matrix of Islamic metaphysical and moral and ethical principles, modern science and technologies do not remain value-free. As a system of thought as well as one of the most important factors in shaping the way we live, modern science and technologies have to be seen in terms of their impact on society. This impact, let us note, is not merely in terms of certain ethical issues arising out of biogenetics, but are of a much broader nature. A small gadget like the cell phone which fits into one’s pocket can be as disruptive to a way of life as a complicated procedure that transplants a fetus into the womb of a surrogate mother.

A critique of modern science is often considered an “anti–science” attitude, a sign of conservatism, even fundamentalism. Seen in the context of the violent events that have marked the beginning of the twenty-first century, Islam and science discourse is likely to become even more complicated. Yet, almost two centuries of the clamor of reformers asking Muslims to jumpstart the production of science in their societies has clearly shown that this is not possible, no matter how much science and technology is imported. What is needed is a major intellectual revolution in the Muslim world that would recover the lost tradition of scholarship rooted in Islam’s own primary sources. This would lead to the emergence of a new movement helping Muslims to appropriate modern science and technologies like the movement that digested an enormously large amount of scientific and philosophical thought that entered the Islamic tradition during the three centuries of the earlier translation movement. Only such a recasting of modern scientific knowledge has the hope of germinating the seeds of a scientific thinking in the Muslim mind that is not laden with scientism. Only such a revolutionary change in thinking can liberate the Islam and science discourse from its colonized bondage and produce genuine Islamic reflections on the enterprise of modern science—an enterprise that looms large in all spheres of contemporary life and society.

ہم نے مانا کہ تغ یر ہے زمانے کے ل یے

کون ہے جو اپنی مٹ ی سے جدا ہو سکے

References:

Dallal,Ahmed. “Islam, Science, and the challenge of history”. 2010. Yale University Press.

Iqbal,Muzaffar. “Science and Islam”. 2002. Greenwood Press