Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

Islam and Modern Science: Contemporary Issues • 203an attitude of care and preservation, and so on, without adding orsubtracting anything from the enterprise of modern science. WhatSardar and his associates failed to see was the foundations on whichthe modern enterprise of science emerged. Their discourse was moreconcerned with deconstructing myths, producing an awareness of theenormous differences between the status of Western scientists andthose working in the Muslim world, and vehemently rejecting certaintrends in the development of Islamic perspectives on science that werebecoming increasingly pronounced during the late 1970s and early1980s. Among these was the phenomenon of “Bucaillism” alreadymentioned in the previous section. Although Sardar did not realize,he criticized these trends as “dangerous” and traced their motif backto the psychological need of some Muslims to prove that the QurāĀnis “scientific and modern.” He took a contemporary pamphlet byMuhammad Jamaluddin El-Fandy, On Cosmic Verses in the Quran, tobe “one of the earliest” examples of such works, without realizingthat this apologetic literature was already the high point of Islam andscience discourse in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.Regardless of this historically inaccurate aspect, his criticism wasinstrumental in intensifying an internal critique of various positionswithin the Islam and science discourse.The Ijmalis position seemed important during its heyday but wassoon shown to lack solid roots for growth; its strongest advocates,who were mostly freelancers, did not make efforts to sustain theirdiscourse. All three champions of this position, Ziauddin Sardar,Pervez S. Manzoor, and Munawwar Anees, moved to other topicsduring the 1990s.The result of inter-Muslim debates on the nature of Islamic andnon-Islamic sciences was the maturity of the new discourse on Islamand science during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Thisprocess was helped by a number of international conferences andseminars held in various Muslim countries. Two of the most importantconferences of this nature were held in Pakistan in 1983 and 1995. Atsuch conferences, a whole range of perspectives on modern sciencecould be stated, debated, and thrashed about, with participantsreturning to their countries with fresh insights. Through this processthe new discourse sifted the important from the unimportant.