Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

xii • The Making of Islamic Sciencetheir intellectual tradition, physical borders, and their relationshipswith other communities and traditions. Some of these periods wereparticularly stark and accompanied by much bloodshed, othersproduced intellectual displacements, but, throughout the lastfourteen hundred years, the Islamic tradition has remained resilientand has been able to cope with apparently insurmountable obstacles.Whether it was the intellectual encounter with the legacy of Greekphilosophy and science—an encounter we will discuss in detail inthe next chapter—or the large-scale physical destruction caused bymarauding tribes sweeping down from the steppes of Central Asia,Islamic tradition was always able to reemerge with renewed vigor.The current Islam and science discourse needs to be viewed inthe larger context of the encounter of Islam with modernity and itsintellectual, social, cultural, political, and economic outlooks, andso the last part of our story has to be narrated within this broadersetting. Of course, it remains to be seen how Islamic tradition will farein this new encounter, as this is a situation of another kind; modernscience and technology are rapidly reshaping the entire spectrum ofhuman existence—from the way human beings are born to the waythey procure their food, travel, communicate, establish interpersonalrelationships, and die. To be sure, it is a fascinating story whichdeserves full attention, as the world around us reshapes throughencounters of a kind never before witnessed in human history.The questions explored in the following chapters include thefollowing:1.What was Islamic in Islamic science?2.3.4.5.How did Islam affect the course of development of the Islamicscientific tradition?Were there any tensions within the Islamic tradition that mayhave inhibited the full blossoming of this scientific activity?What were the distinct contributions of the Islamic scientifictradition to broader scientific knowledge?When, why, and how did this tradition come to an end? How wasthis scientific knowledge passed on to Europe?