Islam & Science

• Science and Islam - A History
• Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History  
• The History and Philosophy of Islamic Science
• Science and Civilization in Islam 

Page Last Updated : 21st February 2012

Science and Islam - A History    

Paperback - 256 pages                                                                              by Ehsan Masood

The official tie-in to the BBC television series, Science and Islam tells the story of one of history’s most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science: the extraordinary Islamic scientific revolution between 700 and 1400 AD (Common Era). It charts a religious empire’s scientific heyday, its decline, and the many debates that now surround it.

Between the 8th and 15th centuries, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy to new heights.  

Review
Accompanying the BBC television series, ... Ehsan Masood‘s Science & Islam, a History is a readable popular-science-history book and a great introduction to what lies behind the veil of the mythical Dark Ages - a period of scientific and philosophical vacuum. Behind the curtain of Western Europe’s descent into superstition and ignorance lies a largely untold story – that of the scientific achievements of the Islamic peoples.--- Paul Raven  

 
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Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History 

Hardback - 256 pages                                                                                     by Ahmad Dallal

In this wide-ranging and masterful work, Ahmad Dallal examines the significance of scientific knowledge and situates the culture of science in relation to other cultural forces in Muslim societies. He traces the ways in which the realms of scientific knowledge and religious authority were delineated historically. For example, the emergence of new mathematical methods revealed that many mosques built in the early period of Islamic expansion were misaligned relative to the Ka'ba in Mecca; this misalignment was critical because Muslims must face Mecca during their five daily prayers.

The realization of a discrepancy between tradition and science often led to demolition and rebuilding and, most important, to questioning whether scientific knowledge should take precedence over religious authority in a matter where their realms clearly overlap. Dallal frames his inquiry around three concerns: what cultural forces provided the conditions for debate over the primacy of religion or science; how did these debates emerge? And how were they sustained; and, his primary objectives are to study science in Muslim societies within its larger cultural context and to trace the epistemological distinctions between science and philosophy, on the one hand, and science and religion, on the other. He looks at religious and scientific texts and situates them in the contexts of religion, philosophy and science. Finally, Dallal describes the relationship negotiated in the classical (medieval) period between the religious, scientific and philosophical systems of knowledge that is central to the Islamic scientific tradition and shows how this relationship has changed radically in modern times.  

 
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The History and Philosophy of Islamic Science

Paperback - x + 266 = Total 276 pages                                                        by Osman Bakar

The essays presented in The History and Philosophy of Islamic Science discuss the principles behind the different sciences cultivated in the Islamic world from the third century of the Islamic era onwards and the place of science in relation to other branches of Islamic learning.

In defining what Islamic science means, Professor Osman Bakar shows how these sciences are organically related to the fundamental teachings of Islam. Covering all the natural and mathematical sciences, The History and Philosophy of Islamic Science illustrates what Islamic science shares with modern science. Professor Osman Bakar also highlights where the Islamic approach to science differs from the secular, modern approach.

Review:

‘[Osman Bakar’s book] marks a most valuable contribution both to the effort of revealing the Islamic intellectual and spiritual approach to science, and to the concomitant endeavour to highlight the deeper causes of the contemporary crisis in western science and technology...it opens up, with clarity and simplicity, the philosophy of Islamic science.’ ----Islamic Quarterly                   

Table of Contents : 

Part One:The Epistemological Foundation of Islamic Science

1. Religious Consciousness and the Scientific Spirit in Islamic Tradition

2. The Question of Methodology in Islamic Science

3. The Place of Doubt in Islamic Epistemology: al-Ghazzali’s Philosophical Experience

Part Two: Man, Nature, and God in Islamic Science

4. The Unity of Science and Spiritual Knowledge: The Islamic Experience

5. The Atomistic Conception of Nature in Ash’arite Theology

6. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Islamic Medicine

Part Three: Islamic Science and the West

7. The Influence of Islamic Science on Medieval Christian Conceptions of Nature

8. Umar Khayyam’s Criticism of Euclid’s Theory of Parallels

Part Four: Islam and Modern Science

9. Islam and Bioethics

10. Muslim Intellectual Responses to Modern Science

11. Islam, Science and Technology: Past Glory, Present Predicaments, and the Shaping of the Future

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About the Author: Professor Osman bin Bakar was born and raised in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. Since 1995, Professor Bakar has served as the Deputy Vice Chancellor/Vice President of Academics and was the first (1992) and present holder of the Chair of the Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur). 

He completed his undergraduate degree with Honors and an M.Sc. in Mathematics (specializing in Algebra) at London University. In 1981, Osman Bakar entered Temple University where he completed an M.A. in Comparative Religion and his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science/Islamic Philosophy at Temple University.

Osman Bakar's literary work appears in numerous journals, chapters in various books as well as in encyclopedias. His books, Classification of Knowledge in Islam; Tawid and Science; and Civilizational Dialogue, among others, have been translated into Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, Persian, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. In 1994, he was awarded the Dato'ship by Sultan of Pahang and has received additional recognition for his work to include the Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. In addition, he has served as a consultant to various agencies to include the United Nations and UNESCO.

Currently, Dr. Osman Bakar is the Malaysia Chair of Islam in Southeast Asia, Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and is a member of the Center's Academic Council.

 
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Science and Civilization in Islam  

Paperback - 388 pages                                                                      by Seyyid Hossein Nasr

Description from the publisher:

When Science and civilization was published originally in 1968 by the Harvard University Press, it was the first work in the English Language to deal with the whole of Islamic Science. Based on the century of scholarship by Western historians of science and Islamicists as well as the scholarship of Muslim scholars, the work sought to present Islamic science not as a chapter in the history of western science, but as an integral aspect of Islamic civilization and the Islamic intellectual traditions.

This book has played and continues to play a humble role in this historic debate. It continues to be taught and studied in many universities in both the Islamic and western world.

Extract from the Introduction:

The Principles of Islam : The history of science is often regarded today as the progressive accumulation of techniques and the refinement of quantitative methods in the study of Nature. Such a point of view considers the present conception of science to be the only valid one; it therefore judges the sciences of other civilizations in the light of modern science and evaluates them primarily with respect to their "development" with the passage of time. Our aim in this work, however, is not to examine the Islamic sciences from the point of view of modern science and of this "evolutionistic" conception of history; it is, on the contrary, to present certain aspects of the Islamic sciences as seen from the Islamic point of view.

To the Muslim, history is a series of accidents that in no way affect the nontemporal principles of Islam. He is more interested in knowing and "realizing" these principles than in cultivating originality and change as intrinsic virtues. The symbol of Islamic civilization is not a flowing river, but the cube of the Kaaba, the stability of which symbolizes the permanent and immutable character of Islam.

Once the spirit of the Islamic revelation had brought into being, out of the heritage of previous civilizations and through its own genius, the civilization whose manifestations may be called distinctly Islamic, the main interest turned away from change and "adaptation." The arts and sciences came to possess instead a stability and a "crystallization" based on the immutability of the principles from which they had issud forth; it is this stability that is too often mistaken in the West today for stagnation and sterility.

The arts and sciences in Islam are based on the idea of unity, which is the heart of the Muslim revelation. Just as all genuine Islamic art, whether it be the Alhambra or the Paris Mosque, provides the plastic forms through which one can contemplate the Divine Unity manifesting itself in multiplicity, so do all the sciences that can properly be called Islamic reveal the unity of Nature. One might say that the aim of all the Islamic sciences and, more generally speaking, of all the medieval and ancient cosmological sciences is to show the unity and interrelatedness of all that exists, so that, in contemplating the unity of the cosmos, man may be led to the unity of the Divine Principle, of which the unity of Nature is the image.

To understand the Islamic sciences in their essence, therefore, requires an understanding of some of the principles of Islam itself, even though these ideas may be difficult to express in modern terms and strange to readers accustomed to another way of thinking. Yet a statement of these principles is necessary here, insofar as they form the matrix within which the Islamic sciences have meaning, and outside of which any study of them would remain superficial and incomplete.

Science and Civilization in Islam has remained unsurpassed as the authoritative statement on this subject. With his characteristic breadth of learning, clarity of exposition and insight, Seyyed Hossein Nasr presents here for the first time a full picture of Islamic science, not as a chapter in the history of Western science, but as an integral aspect of Islamic civilisation and the Islamic intellectual tradition. By means of an historical presentation, an analysis of its forms, including the use of passages from the writings of many Muslim scientists and philosophers, the author is able to convey not only a sense of the operative context of Islamic science but he also demonstrates its inter-relatedness with the sapiential wisdom on which it is based. An introductory chapter provides the reader with a necessary orientation to the subject according to the principles of Islam, while subsequent chapters survey the whole spectrum of the individual sciences from cosmology, philosophy, theology to alchemy, physics, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine concluding with a chapter on the gnostic tradition. For this edition, Dr Nasr has written a preface surveying the fields covered in the book since its first appearance in 1968, and has provided a supplement that brings the Bibliography up to date.

 
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