Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

140 • The Making of Islamic ScienceWhy did Muslim scientists not produce a scientific revolution like thatwhich took place in Europe? This formulation radically changes theinquiry, for now the enterprise of science in Islam is being examinedagainst a preset benchmark belonging to another civilization. Evenin formulations where this benchmark is not so obvious, it oftenremains just below the surface. Perhaps this is unavoidable or evennatural, because Islamic scientific tradition immediately preceded theemergence of the Scientific Revolution in Europe.To begin with, we must ask: what is actually meant by the declineof a scientific tradition? Obviously it is not something like the deathof an individual, which happens at eleven in the morning on the firstday of the fifth month of a certain year. What we should be lookingfor is, therefore, a period of time during which the enterprise ofscience over a large area declined. It also means that this period oftime cannot be identical for all regions of the Muslim world. After all,we are dealing with an enterprise that had different local patrons andinstitutions in different regions of the Muslim world. It also followsthat we must ask: If this decay and decline was a slow process over acertain period of time, were there any attempts to cure the malady? Ifyes, what were they? Who made them? What was the role of religionin this process? Given that science—any science—does not exist inisolation; it follows, then, that we must inquire about intellectual,social, economic, and political conditions of the Muslim worldduring the period of decline and attempt to see certain relationshipsbetween these broad conditions and science. We cannot do justice tothese questions without the discovery, annotation, and publication ofa large number of manuscripts pertaining to the social, economic,and political situation during the period of decline. Nor can we beginto formulate any theory of decline in the absence of a rigorouslydocumented history of the Islamic scientific tradition.Answers have been provided, often with commanding authority,despite the lack of fully documented source material. These answersvary, but most have a common denominator in that they trace themain reason for both the lack of a Scientific Revolution in Islamiccivilization as well as for the demise of its own scientific enterpriseto Islam itself. This perspective originated in Europe and has nowbecome the mainstay of Western scholarship on Islamic scientific