'The Making of Islamic Science'

"The Making of Islamic Science is in-depth exploration of the relationship between Islam and science from the emergence of the Islamic scientific tradition in the eight century to the present time."

"Three distinct phases of the relationship between Islam the religion and the enterprise of science.

1) The first phase began with the emergence of science in the Islamic civilization in the eight century and ended with the rise of modern science in the West.

2) The second phase began with the arrival of modern science in the Muslim world in the late 18th and 19th centuries at the time when most of the Muslim world was under colonial occupation.

3) The third phase began around 1950 and continues..."

Facts about Sciece and Islamic Science

i) Prior to the emergence of the 17th century and dating back two hundred years, the scientific activity is termed by many historians of science as "Natural Philosophy".

ii) No known scientist or religious scholar of between the 8th and 17th centuries felt the need to explicitly describe the relationship between Islam and science by writing a book on the subject. "The absence of "Islam and science" discourse as a differentiated discipline is proof in itself that during these long centuries - when the Islamic Scientific tradition was the world's most advanced enterprise of science - no one felt the need to relate the two through some external construct." The need did arise with the arrival of modern science in the traditional Islamic lands during the era when almost the entire Muslim world had been colonized.

iii) "Islam does not view nature as a self-subsisting entity that can be studied in isolation from its all-embracing view of God, humanity, and the cosmological setting in which human history is unfolding."

iv) "In Islamic classification of knowledge, science - the discipline that
studies nature - is taken as but one branch of knowledge, integrally connected with all other branches of knowledge, all of which are linked to the concept of Tawhid, the Oneness of God."

v) "A fundamental difference between the nature of science that existed in Islamic Civilization between the 8th and 16th centuries and modern science; they approach nature in two different manners and hence one cannot use the same methodology for narrating the stories of the interaction of Islam with both premodern and modern science."

vi) "With the arrival of modern Western science in the Muslim world, Islam and science discourse entered a new period...Now Islam had to interact with a science based on a philosophy of nature foreign to its own conception."

vii) "In the post-World War II era, the current fervor of intellectual activity in the Muslim world - as it reshapes and reconfigures in a world largely constructed by Western science and technology - is accompanied by tremendous amount of intellectual and physical violence and chaos."

Excerpts from Muzaffar Iqbal (2009), 'The making of Islamic Science', Islamic Book Trust : Kuala Lumpur.