Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

162 • The Making of Islamic Sciencethe Turkish hat which had remained a sign of nobility for centuries,was deemed “an emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism, andhatred of progress and civilization” (Lewis 1961, 268). In anotherspeech, Mustafa Kemal declared: “I do not leave any scripture, anydogma, any frozen and ossified rule as my legacy in ideas. My legacyis science and reason.”This dissociation from Islam by the new rulers of Turkey wasnot shared by the masses, who continued to practice their religion.But the state had gained enormous powers and ruthlessly curbedany public display of religious loyalties. It expunged Islam from thecurriculum and imported a large amount of “science” from Europe.Islam was now perceived as the greatest enemy of science, which wasseen as the only means of progress and civilization. This officialperspective on the relationship between Islam and science was to bepropagated vigorously throughout Turkey.This is the social, political, and intellectual backdrop againstwhich the new Islam and science discourse is to be explored. Thisnew discourse took shape alongside the violent changes just describedand was directly influenced by them. The new Islam and sciencediscourse that emerged in the post-1850 era is so different from theold discourse that a modern Muslim scientist is unlikely to find anyresonance with men who were the most learned scholars and scientistsof the period from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries: Ibn Sina, al-Biruni, and Ibn al-Haytham are not household names in the Muslimworld; even an educated Muslim today knows very little about theirwork and the kind of understanding they had about nature. What ismost remarkable in this is a total break with the past, and the mostimportant vehicle of this transformation is education: since theircolonization, Muslims have learned to forget the intellectual traditionthat produced men like al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn al-Shatir.This tradition was violently plucked out of Muslim lands, leavingthem bereft of historical depth. Muslim societies have become victimof a cultural schizophrenia in which the past appears as a ghost to beexorcised.The new Islam and science discourse that emerged in the Muslimworld in the nineteenth century has two main strands: (i) a dominantand popular discourse in which Islam is seen as a justifier for the