Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

Preface • xicivilization and it interacted with other disciplines and branchesof knowledge in an organic, harmonious manner. The ways of itsinteraction did not exist in vacuum; they existed within the largerintellectual universe of Islam—a universe that had its share of sharpedges and discordant voices, but which was, nonetheless, a universeshaped by the QurāĀnic worldview.With the arrival of modern Western science in the Muslim world,Islam and science discourse entered a new period. Because thisarrival coincided with the colonization of the Muslim world it wasaccompanied by numerous other factors, including the economic,political, and military agendas of the colonizing powers. Thisdestroyed the institutions that had produced the eight-hundred-yearoldIslamic educational tradition. The strangulation of centuries-oldinstitutions and the implantation of new scientific institutions withagendas that suited the interests of the colonizing powers changed thedynamics of the practice of science in the Muslim world. Now Islamhad to interact with a science based on a philosophy of nature foreignto its own conception. In order to explain this new relationship we willhave to take into consideration certain foundational epistemologicalassumptions of modern science, as well as developments that led tothe emergence of these new concepts of nature in the post-BaconianWestern world, and see how these radical changes shaped thediscourse on Islam and science. Also important for our purpose isthe complex process of intellectual colonization of the Muslim mind,which produced a deep-seated inferiority complex with respect toWestern science and technology—the factors perceived as the mainreasons for the West’s domination of the world and the colonization ofMuslim lands.Finally the book discusses the post–World War II era, which hasproduced a certain degree of clarity in the discourse on Islam andscience—a clarity that promises to open new vistas in the future.The current fervor of intellectual activity in the Muslim world—asit reshapes and reconfigures in a world largely constructed byWestern science and technology—is accompanied by a tremendousamount of intellectual and physical violence and chaos, but suchataxic disorder is not new to the Islamic tradition. There have beenseveral such periods in history when Muslims were forced to reshape