Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

148 • The Making of Islamic Scienceto be viewed with suspicion in conservative religious quarters, andthat their utility (especially as advanced disciplines) may not haveseemed overpowering” (Lindberg 1992, 181).Cohen in his The Scientific Revolution: A Historical Inquiry first tellsus, “the upshot of all this is that, in 1300, the world of Islam lookedquite different from three centuries previously” (Cohen 1994, 408).His proofs come from an essay by J. J. Saunders, which in turns leadsus back to Goldziher:The free, tolerant, inquiring and ‘open’ society of Omayyad,Abbasid and Fatimid days had given place, under the impactof the devastating barbarian invasions and economic decline,to a narrow, rigid and ‘closed’ society in which the progress ofsecular knowledge was slowly stifled. (Saunders 1963, 701–20)Saunders adds further that “no more borrowings took place fromthe world outside Islam; Hellenistic philosophy now came to be seenas a danger to the faith. All this was codified in writing by al-Ghazali,and Ibn Rushd’s defence of the awâil sciences, one century later,failed to carry conviction” (Saunders 1963, 408). Even ignoring theunmistakable Goldziherism (awâil sciences versus Islam as well as al-Ghazali against science), there are conceptual problems as well. Forexample, Saunders’ prognosis above would have Islamic civilizationkeep on borrowing from the world outside Islam even after the threehundred years old translation movement had exhausted availableoutside sources!There is a long history of such texts, almost all of which werewritten in the twentieth century. Some of these works have becomesegues to other works merely because they are more exhaustive andhave a smattering of Arabic words spread throughout the text, givingthe impression of being the work of Arabists. One such is The Riseof Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, the 1993 book ofAmerican sociologist Toby Huff.Huff constructed a more comprehensive framework for his thesis,which however ultimately makes the familiar claim that there issomething inherently flawed in Islam as far as science is concerned;science therefore could not flourish in Islam, and Muslims did notproduce a Scientific Revolution. To construct his arguments, Huffidentified four factors from within the framework of sociology of