Islam vs Science?

Are Muslim beliefs compatible with critical inquiry?

Almost every standard world history textbook celebrates Islam’s golden age of science. Between the ninth and 13th centuries, Muslim scholars not only translated the great works of Greek medicine, mathematics, and science but also pushed the frontiers of discovery in all of those areas. They improved and named algebra, refined techniques of surgery, advanced the study of optics, and charted the heavens. Then, toward the end of the 13th century, something mysterious happened: The scientific spirit seemed to die almost completely.
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Some modern scholars make a more serious intellectual argument for the compatibility of science and traditional Islamic thought. And those thinkers believe that ignorance of an Islamically based understanding of science is what really impedes its pursuit in the contemporary Muslim world.

One of the more articulate proponents of that position is the Iranian-born philosopher of science Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University and the author of, among other books, Science and Civilization in Islam…

I think the analysis of the problem should include two additional factors:

1. The kind of scientific inquiry that is dominant in today’s world plays a large part in Muslim suspicions of it. Modern science, after all, prides itself for propagating a world-view that has little or no need for a Creator.

2. The perception that science and technology are tools that the Western world will use to gain control over Muslim societies. Thus, in some societies (not necessarily Muslim), rejecting the tangible signs of technology is tantamount to rejecting Western hegemony.

For a quirky view of how technology affects the different factions within the Muslim world, read my early essay entitled: Terrorists, always on time.

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