Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

24 • The Making of Islamic Sciencethe broader doctrines of Islam, which conceived the universe in itsown specific manner—a definable, specific, and distinct conceptionthat placed a unique, personal, and singular Creator at the center ofall phenomena. Viewed from this perspective, the Islam and sciencenexus can be explored as a much more fruitful encounter within thegreater matrix of Islamic civilization.Islamic Science or Natural Philosophy?As already mentioned, our current knowledge of primary sourcesabout the first half of the eighth century does not permit us totrace the beginning of the natural sciences in Islamic civilizationin detail. By the end of that formative century, however, therewas already a small and vibrant scientific community whosemembers were exploring the world of nature in a milieu filled withintellectual curiosity and creative energy. As was usual at that time,this community consisted of individuals who were interested in awide range of subjects dealing with nature, history, and philosophy,and not with just one particular branch of science. Their work issometimes called natural philosophy rather than science. This term isalso used for the enterprise of science that existed in the Greek andRoman civilizations. This linkage adds weight to the view that sciencein Islamic civilization was somehow merely an extension of theearlier Greek and Roman science. There was, however, no one termin Greek or Latin equivalent to our contemporary term science, andwhat we understand as science was often called philosophy or inquiryconcerning nature by the Greeks and Romans themselves (Lloyd 1973,xi–xiii). Unlike Greek and Latin, Arabic does have a specific word forscience: al-‘ilm. This word as well as its derivatives frequently occursin the QurāĀn. It is used to denote all kinds of knowledge, not justthe knowledge pertaining to the study of nature, but this semanticlinkage of all branches of knowledge does not mean that knowledgewas not differentiated or classified into various hierarchical branches.Rather, it indicates that within a given classification of knowledge, allbranches of knowledge were intimately linked through a vertical axisrunning through the entire epistemological scheme—a grounding inthe QurāĀnic concept of knowledge.