Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

88 • The Making of Islamic Science(Ibn Rushd 1959, 1). To paraphrase it as “grappling with the questionof whether, from the standpoint of the religious law, it was legitimateto study science, logic, and natural philosophy” is to read one’s ownpredetermined agenda into a medieval text that was concerned withcategories strictly used in Islamic jurisprudence (mubah, mahzur,ma’mur, mandub, and wajib), categories that cannot be transplantedfrom their field without doing them gross injustice. Most important,there is no mention of science in the original text! Of course, one canstretch the argument to say that logic is a necessary prerequisite forscientific investigation, but we must remember we are dealing witha medieval text on Islamic Law. At the time Ibn Rushd wrote histreatise, science had been practiced in Islamic civilization for almostfour centuries and various branches of science were well-known bytheir own names (astronomy, alchemy, geography, etc). Ibn Rushd’streatise certainly does not refer to those sciences.The very pointed indicator to the subject matter of The DecisiveTreatise (Fasl al-maqal) is included in its full title: ittišal, from the rootw-š-l, meaning junction and parentage. The purpose of the book hasbeen clearly elucidated by Roger Arnaldez as follows:What “parentage” (ittisal) is there between Islamic religious law(shariah) and wisdom (hikma)? That is the question discussed inThe Decisive Treatise. Let us note the expressions used. Averroesis not speaking about the relationship between faith and reason,or between philosophical truth and dogmatic belief: those aregeneral questions which should be examined under the purviewof a single, specific form of research, since a relationshipcan only exist between works of the same kind. This is whyAverroes uses the word “parentage”, which has a meaningthat is more ontological than logical. For him it is actuallynot a case of bringing a rational view of things into harmonywith a religious view, but of discovering whether or not thereis a subjective parentage between the way of life according tothe wisdom that philosophy has as its goal, and the way of lifeaccording to Religious Law, which is revealed. So it is not fromthe perspective of an abstract problem that Averroes views theissue, but from the concrete perspective of men who are to liveand act in this world. They undoubtedly have a practical mind