Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

164 • The Making of Islamic Scienceemergence of able scientists, laboratories equipped with instruments,and libraries filled with research papers. It is strange, for example,that the Organization of Islamic Conference, with its headquarters inJeddah, has a permanent “Committee on Scientific and TechnologicalCooperation” with the expressed aim of promoting science andtechnology in the Muslim world, yet it has no scientific institutions,laboratories, or journals. Almost all Muslim states have ministries andministers of science and technology, who ceaselessly issue statementson the need to acquire modern science, but none of these fifty-sevenMuslim states produce any science worth its name and most ableMuslim scientists live outside these states.The following section explores various facets of the two mainstrands of the new Islam and science discourse. While the first strandis discussed under the simplified subheading of “Islam as a Justifierfor Science,” it is more complex than that, for it has given birth toa new kind of tafsir (commentary) literature—the tafsir al-ilmi, thescientific tafsir of the QurāĀn—which attempts to prove scientificfacts and theories from the verses of the QurāĀn. This first strandof the new discourse is mixed with many challenges of modernitythat Muslim societies face, a new agenda for education and varioussocial and political events in the Muslim world. Rather than beingan academic discourse, it has dimensions that often spill over intopolitics. In short, it is a highly complex mixture with the desire tojustify acquisition of science through religious rhetoric, political andsocial awareness of the need for reform, and various other aspects ofthe Muslim world as it came into direct contact with Europe throughcolonization.The Making of the New Islam and Science DiscourseProminent among those who shaped the new Islam and sciencediscourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are theIndian scholar and reformer Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898); Jamalal-Din al-Afghani (1838/9–1897), whom we have already met; hiscontemporary Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abduh (ca. 1850–1905);his Syrian student and later colleague Rashid Rida (1865–1935);the Turkish writer Namik Kemal (1840–1935) and his countryman