Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

PrefaceThis book tells the story of the making of the Islamic scientifictradition and its relationship with Islam, the religion thatgave birth to a unique civilization based on the QurāĀnic worldview.This story can be told from a variety of perspectives ranging fromthe sociological to the historical and from the metaphysical to thescientific. The methodology used for this narrative depends, to alarge extent, on how one perceives the relationship between Islamand science. This question of perspective and methodology hasbecome important in recent years, because the enormous amount oftheoretical work published by scholars working in the field of scienceand Christianity has established a certain model for exploring issuesrelated to the interaction between science and religion, and thismodel seems to have gained general acceptability. In this model,which can be called the “two-entity model,” science and religion aretaken as two separate entities. These two entities are then positedagainst each other and are allowed a variety of possible modes ofinteraction, such as “conflict,” “independence,” “dialogue,” and“integration” (Barbour 2000). This variety, however, is within thetwo-entity model; in other words, these ways of explaining therelationship between science and religion all assume that “science”and “religion” are two separate entities that have a finite number ofpossible modes of interaction. Each of these modes can be furthersubdivided into various possibilities, refined, classified, and gradedin terms of the degree of interaction being strong or weak, but the