Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

The Mosque, the Laboratory, and the Market • 73This has produced a body of literature that attempts to show thatwhile Christianity eventually accepted and even supported the newscientific knowledge that emerged in Europe in the seventeenthcentury, along with the institutional structures needed to establishscience on a solid footing, Islam did not; hence its failure to producea Scientific Revolution parallel to that of Europe (Huff 1995).Furthermore, it is argued that this reveals something inherentlywrong with Islam in this regard—that it abhors innovation, freethinking, and objective inquiry, which are all considered necessarypreconditions for science. These studies then attempt to show thatsince science is produced through innovation and freethinking, andsince in Islam “the idea of innovation in general implied impietyif not outright heresy” (Huff 1995, 234), science could not find ahome in Islam. Faced with historical evidence of the existence of aneight-hundred-year-long tradition of scientific research in Islamiccivilization, these studies then consider it an anomalistic case of thesurvival of “foreign” (sometimes called “ancient”) sciences not becauseof but despite Islam.This “Islam versus foreign sciences” thesis was first propoundedby the Hungarian Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) in hispaper entitled “The Attitude of Orthodox Islam Toward the ‘AncientSciences’” (Goldziher 1915), and it has since become a favorite pointof departure for building a “conflict model” for Islam and science a laAuguste Comte and a host of other philosophers, including those whoconceive religion and science as nonoverlapping domains.Islam and Science: Aspects of their RelationshipUsing the conceptual categories inherent in Islamic understandingof knowledge—whether scientific or otherwise—we can reformulatethe question of the Islam and science nexus. Knowledge is ilm inArabic, a word that frequently occurs in the QurāĀn. Knowledge isconsidered meritorious; those who know and those who do not know arenot equal, a verse of the QurāĀn tells us (Q. 39:9). The Prophet ofIslam said that “scholars are the inheritors of the Prophets.” He alsoadvised Muslims to “seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave.”The acquisition of knowledge is virtuous; it ennobles humanity and