Islam and Science

Historians of science are well aware of the dazzling outpouring of work in many fields during the centuries-long Golden Age of Islamic science. Iqbal presents an extremely useful guide to the cultural matrix within which this intense flourishing of scholarship occurred. He uses his accurate and wide-ranging knowledge to explore the rootedness of Islamic culture in the holy Qur'an and shows how Muslim scientists were sustained by that world-forming text. And yet the analysis of those factors which led to the decline and stagnation of this tradition 400 years ago are still too little understood. Writing in New Scientist in 2001, Ziauddin Sardar claimed that latterly fundamentalist mystics have hijacked Islamic science, rewriting the relationship between science and Islam such that science must be understood to be subservient to esoteric experience or Sufism. In his view the reintegration of science within the world of Muslim scholarship becomes increasingly improbable. Iqbal, writing in a larger scope, gives a more thorough and nuanced critique. He is certainly aware of the elision of science and technology in the contemporary Muslim world and of the thrall in which the technologies of medicine, telecommunications and weaponry holds so many of its rulers. Ironically, the angry man we see on television denouncing the evils of the godless West, brandishes his cherished Kalashnikov, the product of an emphatically atheist state. Iqbal is clear that the cultural origins and metaphysics of the science available today are those of the Christian and post-Christian West, delivered initially when many Muslim nations became colonies of powerful technologically-advanced Western powers. When Muslim countries assimilated modern science, they tacitly absorbed sets of non-Muslim values corrosive of traditional faith, a theme once explored by the late J.M. Roberts in his book and television series "The Triumph of the West". Awareness of the range of relationships between science and religion has also been, and largely remains, a Western phenomenon, not unreasonably. It was in the West that the impact of science on traditional beliefs was first felt and just as science arose entirely and unselfconsciously integrated into an almost entirely Christian society in Europe, so too when Islamic culture enjoyed its period of domination of science, its great practitioners, Ibn Sina or Al-Ghazzali, for example, could never have perceived two separate entities, science and religion. Such a relationship is unprecedented in Islam and in their attempts to demonstrate religious support for their agenda, many modern Muslim writers generate a literature purporting to prove that every modern scientific discovery must be found in the Qur'an. Iqbal notes the circularity of the argument: "This apologetic literature also attempts to show that the Qur'an is, in fact, the word of God because it contains scientific theories and facts which modern science has only recently discovered". Iqbal would never claim that his book has explained the decline and fall of Muslim science exhaustively, but he has written an accessible introduction to his subject. His account of the decline does give weight to the role of the politics of colonisation and to the shift in the role of the clerisy in reaction. This book is immensely interesting, a valuable contribution to the literature of science and religion and perhaps a timely warning against triumphalist scientism. Science is a cultural artefact: science may flourish and seem to do so inevitably, secure from outside influences such as trends in religion. The history of Muslim science shows that such an account of science is misplaced.