GOD, LIFE, AND THE COSMOS

This is a pioneering work; the first in which Muslim and Christian scholars in conference together have addressed issues in science and religion. That they have not done so interactively is an indication of just how new such an initiative was when the conference on "God, Life and the Cosmos: Theistic Perspectives" was held in November 2000. Since then the world has changed and the atmosphere in which these papers were delivered is a thing of the past. Nevertheless, one can but hope that the exploratory work and the scholarly contacts established before 9/11 were not in vain. The title is correct: only a few topics were actually addressed and the papers presented were not of equal weight. Some, and those will be the ones highlighted in this review, were remarkable. The general approaches were historical and philosophical. Central to the common work of the conference was the exploration of methodological issues and the historical context in which the Islamic scientific tradition once flourished. One would need to look elsewhere to find a fuller account of the decline in the fruitfulness of scientific progress within the Muslim world. However, the standard view, still repeated in textbooks, that science withered on the vine in the 11th century within Islam, is shown to be a misrepresentation. Iqbal wisely refutes those who say that there is such a thing as specifically Islamic science: "the mere presence of an NMR spectrometer in Makkah does not make it Islamic just like the presence of thousands of Muslim scientists in European and North American laboratories does not make their scientific research Islamic". No hydrogen atom, nor its spectral lines, come labelled Christian, Islamic or non-theistic and the language of science, mathematics, is universal. But science always occurs within a social context and the lesson to be learned from the history of science within the Muslim world is that societies antipathetic to science disclose that the scientific enterprise is historically and culturally contingent. The central issue is the conceiving of the Cosmos as created by God, and the doctrines of God within Islam give a fascinatingly different perspective from those of the Christian West. The Cosmos is a sign given to humankind by God and therefore not devoid of meaning and not capable of study apart from their relationship to God the Creator. And there remains the intractable (seemingly) problem of how to accommodate the exegesis of the Qur'an, especially the soi-disant "scientific verses", with the shifting understanding of the Cosmos presented by modern science. Fascinatingly, this volume does deal (albeit too briefly) with the sort of difficulties thrown up by the application of Shar'ia, (Islamic Law) with respect to developments in genetics and biotechnology and with the concept of the human. Other areas covered are cosmology and the way in which the Islamic scientific genius was transmitted to the West before its decline. An important, hitherto too much neglected, area is the contribution of original Islamic scholars who went far beyond the passing on of Aristotle's works and commentary on these (such as Ibn al-Haytham's Optics.) Some of the chapters will require considerable readjustment of the presuppositions of readers exclusively versed in the Western canon. Those of Haq and Rashed, for example, repay careful reading and re-reading. I found myself stopping to compare Ibn Sina's neoplatonised monotheism with that of the Florentine and Cambridge neoplatonism of the Renaissance. One doesn't simply read such a collection of essays without a sense of the shock of the new. William Chittick was the keynote speaker at the Islamabad conference. His "The Anthropocosmic Vision in Islamic Thought" is an impressive work and worth careful study. One has the sense that many of those writing and speaking through these chapters are the fortunate first to have engaged in this work, founders of university departments, scholars for whom a new and uncharted territory has opened before them. As to the book itself, it possesses a workable index and is presented well except for occasional niggles such as the eccentric variation in font size in the list of contributors, or lapses not picked up by proof readers such as the word "external" instead of "eternal" in the passage describing the Steady State Theory of Bondi, Hoyle and Gold. The sense of excitement in having one's understanding of one's academic field suddenly broadened, however, allows one not to be put off by such infelicities and errors.