Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

Islam, Transmission, and the Decline of Islamic Science • 147itself. This puzzling array of causes—though the list is by no meanscomplete—has been cited in respectable academic publications ina decisive, authoritative manner, with citations and references tosupport these claims. Yet none of this advances our understandingof this complex question; all we have is opinions of various authorssupported with selective evidence often removed from its context.Those who wish to examine the question of decline in relation tothe Scientific Revolution further complicate the matter by readingfuture developments back into history. Given this situation, the mostimportant task for a new work of the present kind is to attempt toclear existing confusion and point to the possible areas of futureresearch that can provide a more satisfactory answer to the questionof decline of science in Islamic civilization.Prevalent Views on the Decline of Science in IslamicCivilizationThe architectonics of much of the Western Academic writings dictatea framework in which most new works are based on previous works.When new ideas arise, they arise due to a quantum leap in someone’sunderstanding of the subject, or as refutations of existing ideas.In the case of Islam in general, and Islam and science discoursein particular, such quantum leaps have been almost nonexistent.Thus, what we have is an intolerable repetition, always going back toGoldziher’s 1916 formulation. Here is an example.“During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Islamic sciencewent into decline; by the fifteenth century, little was left. How did thiscome about?” asks David Lindberg in his 1992 book, The Beginnings ofWestern Science. While he admits “not enough research has been doneto permit us to trace these developments with confidence…severalcausal factors can be identified” (Lindberg 1992, 180). The first factoris none other than what Goldziher identified in 1916: “conservativereligious forces.” The second is the “debilitating warfare, economicfailure, and the resulting loss of patronage” without which “thesciences were unable to sustain themselves” and the third is, onceagain, a repeat of Goldziher’s basic thesis: “In assessing this collapse,we must remember that at an advanced level the foreign sciences hadnever found a stable institutional home in Islam, that they continued