ISLAM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Philosophy of science is the study, from a philosophical perspective, of the elements of scientific inquiry and of their validity.  The philosophy of science attempts first to elucidate the elements involved in scientific inquiry—observational procedures, patterns of argument, methods of representation and calculation, metaphysical presuppositions—and then to evaluate the grounds of their validity from the points of view of formal logic, practical methodology, and metaphysics. The philosophy of science is thus a topic for explicit analysis just as are other subdivisions of philosophy.  The first attempts to move beyond traditional mythologies to a rational account of nature, begins with the Ionian and south Italian philosophers around 600 BC. Questions about nature discussed in Plato's Timaeus and Aristotle's Physics, for instance, were neither purely metaphysical nor purely empirical in character though they had a methodological aspect akin to that of modern philosophy of science. In the High Middle Ages, all the central questions in the philosophy of science were restated as theological questions about the relationship between God's omniscience and the more limited knowledge of man.

Correspondingly, the philosophy of science has been approached in very diverse spirits, ranging from the highly abstract and mathematical to the concrete and historical and from the severely positivistic to the frankly theological. Pierre Duhem, a French theoretical physicist, have argued that the claims of science are inherently limited and so leave room for other, more embracing varieties of metaphysical and religious truth.

The Islamic world during this last one hundred and fifty year period produced very few historians of science and very few philosophers of science. It produced a very large number of scientists and engineers, some of whom were very brilliant and studying in the best institutions of the world, but it produced practically no major philosopher and historian of science until just a few decades ago. All the debate that was being carried out in the West itself about the impact of science upon religion, upon the philosophy of science, [about] what this kind of knowing meant, these were circumvented, more or less, in the Islamic educational system. The only exceptions, perhaps, was when Kamal Ataturk came into power in Turkey. Though in many ways a brutal soldier, he saved Turkey from extinction. We know what he did to Islam in Turkey. But he had a certain intuition, certain visions of things. The first thing that he did was to say that in order for Turkey to stand on its feet as a modern ``secular’’ state, what it has to do is [to] learn about the history of Western science. So when the program for the doctorate degree in the history of science headed by the late George Sarton, scholar and historian of science, was established at Harvard University which was the first program in America, Ataturk sent the first student to study the history of science there. The first person to enter the PhD program in the history of science at Harvard University is a Turk, Aideen Saeeli.

Anti-religion philosopher of France in the nineteenth century, Ernst Renan, who was known as  the grandfather of rationalism in nineteenth century French philosophy, wrote a book which is now a classical book on Averroes, (Ibn-Rushd), [and] which has been reprinted now after 140 years in France, in which he says Averroes represents rationalism which led to modern science. Ibn Rushd tried marrying revelation with philosophy. He produced a series of summaries and commentaries on most of Aristotle's works (1169–95) and on Plato's Republic, which exerted considerable influence in both the Islamic world and Europe for centuries. He wrote the Decisive Treatise on the Agreement Between Religious Law and Philosophy (Fasl al-Makāl), Examination of the Methods of Proof Concerning the Doctrines of Religion (Kashf al-Manāhij), and The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahāfut al-Tahāfut), all in defense of the philosophical study of religion against the theologians like Al-Ghazzali.

Later religious scholars of Islam whose names paradoxically enough, meant scientists, in fact, disdained science completely. And so you have this dichotomy within the Islamic world, in which the modernists refuse to study the philosophical and religious implications of the introduction of Western science in the Islamic world, and the classical traditional ulema, all refused to have anything to do with modern science. This left a major vacuum in the intellectual life of the Islamic community for which every single Muslim suffers in one way or another.

Jamaluddin Afghani, Muslim politician, political agitator, and journalist whose belief in the potency of a revived Islamic civilization in the face of European domination significantly influenced the development of Muslim thought in the 19th and early 20^th centuries. He came up with view that science per se is what has made the West powerful and great. And the West is dominating over the Islamic world because it has this power in its pocket. And since this is being allowed, this is being done, there must be something very positive about this science, that science itself is good, because it gives power. This was the first part of his argument. Secondly, [he argued], science came from the Islamic world originally and therefore Islamic science is really responsible for the West’s possession of science and the West’s domination of the Islamic world itself. And therefore, all the Muslims have to do is to reclaim this science for themselves in order to reach the glories of their past and become a powerful and great civilization. This is the gist of a rather extensive argument given by Jamaluddin Afghani which equates, in fact, Islamic science with Western science. Secondly, it equates the power of the West with the power of science. To some extent this is true, but not completely so. And thirdly, it believes that acquisition of this science of the West [by the Muslims] is, no more no less, than the Muslims claiming their own property which has somehow been taken over by another continent and [the Muslims] just want back what is really their own. Why are we (Muslim) left behind?

Many people think this was all the fault of the ulema. I do not think this was all the fault of the ulema, this is also the fault of the authorities which had economic and political power in their hands, and the two in fact went together. We must add to this a third element [which] is that while science was spreading in the Islamic world, there had been created within the Islamic world, a reformist puritanical movement, especially within Arabia, associated with the name of Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahab, the so-called Wahabi movement, which is still very strong in Saudi Arabia, which in fact gave rise to [the country] with the wedding of Najd and Hejaz in 1926-27. Its roots [lie] in the eighteenth century when this man lived, and his way of thinking then proliferated into Egypt and Syria. Similarly the Salafia movement in India and other places, [also] wanted to interpret Islam in a very rational and simple manner and was opposed to ``philosophical’’ speculation and was opposed to the whole tradition of Islamic philosophy. [These movements] all but went along with the more quarrelsome and troublesome dimensions of the impact of science upon the faith system and the philosophical world-view of Islam. It is interesting that the Wahabi ulema in the nineteenth century opposed completely any interest in modern science and technology. It is today that Saudi Arabia of course has one of the best programs for the teaching of science and technology in the Islamic world. The centers at Dhahran and other places are really quite amazing but it is a very modern transformation.

It is fruitful and possible for one civilization to learn the science of another civilization but to do that it must be able to abstract and make its own. There was a period of transmission but there was also a period of digestion, ingestion, and integration which always means also rejection. No science has ever been integrated into any civilization without some of it also being rejected. And the best example of that is exactly what Islam did with Greek science and what Europe did with Islamic science, which is usually called Arabic science but is really Islamic science. The Muslims did not just take over Greek science and translate it into Arabic and preserve its Greek character. It was totally transformed into the part and parcel of the Islamic intellectual citadel. Anyone who have actually ever studied in depth the text of the great Muslim scientists like Al-biruni or Ibn Sina or any Andulusian scientists know that you are living within the Islamic Universe. You’re not living within the Greek Universe. It is true that the particular descriptions might have been taken from the [works] of Aristotle or a particular formula from Euclid’s Elements, but the whole science is totally integrated into the Islamic point of view. The greatest work of Algebra in the pre-modern period is by the Persian poet Omar Khayyam. When we read his book, of course, if when you get [to a] particular formula or equation you could be writing in Chinese or English and could be in any civilization, but the impact that the whole work makes upon you makes you feel that you belong to a total intellectual universe- the Islamic Universe. And this is precisely what the West did to Islamic science. When in Toledo in the 1030’s and the 1040’s the translations of the books from the Arabic into Latin began which really began the scientific changes of the 12th century and again in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries of the West, books were simply being translated from Arabic into Latin.

Abdus Salam, the only Muslim to have won the Noble Prize in physics, who was asked `what happened to Islamic Science?’ He said `Nothing. Instead what we cultivated in Isfahan and Cordoba is now being cultivated in MIT, Caltech and at Imperial College, London. It’s just a geographical translation of place’.

The phenomenon that is going on [today] is the [gradual] attempt being made to study both the meaning and the history of Islamic science. I think that in this field, to put it mildly, Muslims should really be ashamed of themselves. Let me give you some examples. There are now today a billion Muslims in the world. Probably in the first to the second century of the history of Islam, that is the eighth and ninth century Christian calender, there were something like 20-30 million Muslims. It may be wrong, but it was anyway a much smaller number than the population of Muslims today. During that 100 year period, more books in quantity, not to speak about the remarkable quality, were translated [about] the basic philosophical and scientific thought of Greek science than has been translated during a comparable 100 year period by all Muslims put together in all Islamic countries. This is really unbelievable. Not to talk about the quality, which is of a very high nature, in the early translations from Greek which made Arabic the most important scientific language in the world for 700 years. Despite the golden age of Islamic supremacy for at least 7 centuries (which we proudly reminisce), we are now sleeping for another 7 centuries. Are we ever going to wake from this slumber?