Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

198 • The Making of Islamic Sciencethis scholarship emerging from outside the Dar al-Islam is the bestavailable material in a given field; such is definitely the case for theIslam and science discourse. This section provides a brief survey ofcertain new aspects of the discourse.A broad classification of the current discourse on Islam andmodern science identifies three categories: ethical, epistemological,and ontological/metaphysical views of science.The ethical/puritanical view of science, which is the mostcommon attitude in the Islamic world, considers modernscience to be essentially neutral and objective, dealing withthe book of nature as it is, with no philosophical or ideologicalcomponents attached to it. Such problems as the environmentalcrisis, positivism, materialism, etc., all of which are related tomodern science in one way or another, can be solved by addingan ethical dimension to the practice and teaching of science.The second position, which I call the epistemological view,is concerned primarily with the epistemic status of modernphysical sciences, their truth claims, methods of achievingsound knowledge, and function for the society at large. Takingscience as a social construction, the epistemic school puts specialemphasis on the history and sociology of science. Finally, theontological/metaphysical view of science marks an interestingshift from the philosophy to the metaphysics of science. Itsmost important claim lies in its insistence on the analysis of themetaphysical and ontological foundations of modern physicalsciences. (Kalin 2002, 47)Another way of classifying recent developments in the Islam andscience discourse is to study it through the description and analysisof positions of major thinkers (Stenberg 1996). Whatever way onechooses to classify the new discourse, ultimately it is dealing with asmall body of literature that has emerged during the last half of thetwentieth century.These new aspects of the discourse are intimately connectedwith the entire range of issues emerging from Islam’s encounter withmodernity. Muslim thinkers have generally regarded this encounteras the most vital in the history of Islam and they have attempted tofind viable Islamic alternatives to Western economic, social, cultural,and educational systems in order to preserve Islamic values. This