Cemil Akdogan

One of the objectives of this timely and important conference is to display and delineate the historical integrity and uniqueness of Islamic science in its own time and in its own terms. One method to achieve this goal and establish the salient features of Islamic science is to compare and contrast Islamic and Western civilizations. From this perspective, it will be clear that Islamic science is a product of the tawhīdic approach whereas contemporary Western science is a product of dualism. More specifically, in Islam you cannot separate science from Islam, but in the West modern science is Godless and fully independent of Christianity. If we elaborate further, modern science from the standpoint of Western civilization is either completely objective (modernity) or completely subjective (post-modernity), but in Islam science is both objective and subjective simultaneously.

Although Islam, insisting upon tawhīd, the Muslim doctrine of unity, did not accept a real distinction between primary (objective, measurable) and secondary (subjective, unmeasurable) qualities, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle and other philosopher-scientists vehemently defended such a dualistic distinction and made it the backbone of modern philosophy in order to objectify (universalize) and secularize science. With this distinction they "effected a final dualism between matter and spirit in a way which left nature open to the scrutiny and service of secular science, and which set the stage for man being left only with the world on his hands."(1)

The distinction between primary and secondary qualities also turned the organic and purposeful world of Aristotle into a mechanical, inert, devalorized, secularized and disenchanted “cosmos as everywhere the same and devoid of purpose.”(2)  As Syed Naquib al-Attas tells us aptly:

By the ‘disenchantment’ of nature…[the Western philosopher-scientists] mean…the freeing of nature from its religious overtones; and this involves the dispelling of animistic spirits and gods and magic from the natural world, separating it from God and distinguishing man from it, so that man may no longer regard nature as a divine entity, which thus allows him to act freely upon nature, to make use of it according to his needs and plans.(3)

Thus, on the basis of this distinction, the West defended the complete objectivity of science and excluded all subjective factors such as morality, religion, culture, values, meanings, purposes, economic, social and political conditions from it. But if we really want to understand the development of science both in Islam and the West in realistic terms, we can ignore neither the role of objective factors nor the role of subjective factors.

For the first eleven centuries of its history Christianity neglected science because of its abnegation of the value of this world and also the importance of science in favor of ignorance and supernaturalism. According to Christianity this natural world or rather the earth had nothing to do with divinity. It was fallen and an evil thing in the hierarchy of existing things  and it signified suffering because of the first sin. Christians wanted not to know or understand, but to escape from this world the center of which is hell. Therefore, they were through and through otherworldly and ignorant, and literally lived in a dark age. For them not this world but the Empyrean Heaven, the outermost sphere beyond the sphere of fixed stars, was important, since God, angels and paradise existed there. As a result of  this dualistic approach they solely aimed at eternal life with God in the other world. Because of their dismal and pessimistic approach towards this natural world  they did not contribute anything creative and original to science.

In contrast with Europe, the Muslim inspiration for the study of science originates directly from the Qur'ān and depends on the tawhīdic approach, i.e. the fine balance that Islam establishes between this world and the other world. Islam accepts that this natural world is sacred, knowable, and good and that it consists of Allah's signs. Allah, throughout the Qur’ān, exhorts Muslims to pay attention to His signs, to observe particular things, to travel throughout the world to closely examine and see the created things and to use their sensory organs and their mind not only to understand nature, i.e. the subject matter of science, but also to get closer to Him.

Under the guidance of this optimistic, pragmatic, and tawhīdic approach of Islam, Muslim scientists paid attention to phenomena or particulars, made exact measurements, and performed experiments in order to support and extend the paradigm-cores (theories) they had inherited from Greek philosophers. In other words, for the first time in the history of science, they joined particularities (praxis) with generalities (theoria).

Although Europeans did not concern themselves with science in a creative sense from the seventh century until the eleventh century and led a primitive life, Islam in the golden age, which covers the period from the eighth century until the fourteenth century, established a progressive  civilization that became the envy of  Western people. Particularly, the Muslim cities in Andalusia such as Cordoba, Seville, and Granada were called the ornaments of the civilized world.
 
It was none other than Islam, the rightful owner of science and knowledge and the center of the civilized world in the golden age, that woke up Europeans from their dogmatic slumber of the dark ages in the Renaissance period and launched them on the course which resulted in today's modern science and technology. Thus modern science was a product of the constructive  interaction between Islamic civilization and the Western culture. It was not until the Renaissance when Islam's impact had reached its peak that Europeans shifted their focus from  otherworldliness (Catholicism) to this-worldliness (Protestantism and Scientism),  from the static life of prayer and  confession to the dynamic life of action and from deduction to induction.

As we know, in history nothing ever happens in a void and whatever happens in a period absolutely depends on the  intellectual, social, political, and economic conditions of the preceding period. In view of this stipulation, it is particularly impossible to understand and explain the emergence and advent of modern science without paying due attention to  the scientific and philosophical achievements of Muslims from the eighth century until the fourteenth century, because the Western civilization acquired critical philosophy, refined Greek paradigms and the scientific method not from Greeks as usually assumed by the Westerners, but from Muslims. Therefore, we cannot see the Western civilization as the continuation of ancient Greek civilization.

After Europeans translated almost all Greco-Islamic books on science and philosophy from Arabic into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they studied the contents of those newly translated books at Medieval Universities in order to  assimilate and improve the ideas of Greek and Islamic scientists. Especially, they learned Aristotle's ideas through Ibn Rushd's commentaries upon Aristotle's treatises.

But the Islamic heritage they received through these translations was not Greek science or philosophy, but extended, refined and developed paradigms of Muslim scientists and philosophers. Although Greeks had developed the cores of paradigms in astronomy, physics, medicine, optics and other sciences, they did not and could not deal with normal science, since they were after the common properties of species (essences) and were not interested in particulars. Their aim was to contemplate the intelligible structure of species or reality. Consequently, they could not have tied theoria with praxis as Muslims did.

If Europeans had directly inherited the paradigm-cores from Greeks, even they could not have extended them because of their belief in an inscrutable, unknowable and evil world, since, until the impact of Islam, they lived primitively and rejected  "nature...as it was of no use and even obstructive to the Christian endeavour to attain to the world of spirit."(4) Of course, without the extended and refined Greek paradigms (i.e. the Islamic legacy) it was impossible for them to run into anomalies and achieve the Scientific Revolution.

Since neither Greeks nor Europeans could apply the paradigm-cores to particulars or facts, the whole world owes to Muslims for the establishment of the proper scientific method and for the tradition of normal science for the first time in the Kuhnian sense. Although Muslim scientists could not revolutionize science, they “expressed originality and innovation in the correction, extension, articulation, and application of the existing” (5) paradigm-cores of Greeks.

Furthermore, Islamic kalam with its great majority of the Mu'tazilite and Ash'arite mutakallimūn ruptured the fabric of the Aristotelian-Avicennean theory of hylomorphism by its unique theory of atoms and accidents in order to affirm that Allah is the only real agent of all actions. In contrast, in Aristotle's and Ibn Sīnā's worldviews nature was organismic and autonomous, and objects in it knew how to behave even in the absence of any divine intervention. Of course, mutakallimūn could not accept the existence of a passive and contemplative God. That is why, they vigorously argued for the absolute omnipotence and omniscience of God by formulating a brand new atomistic philosophy according to which Allah annihilates all the created and passive atoms in a moment and recreates them anew in the next moment in a similar way, and in the unseen realm this process of continual creation, annihilation, and recreation in a similar way from one moment to another will continue until the last moment of the whole universe. With Allah's will these changes happen so fast that they are imperceptible to human beings. Thus Islamic kalam not only taught Europe the possibility of how to Christianize atomism, but also effectively rejected the Aristotelian paradigm in order to open the way to the Scientific Revolution.

But most importantly, if Muslim scientists and philosophers had not developed the necessary ground work both in science and metaphysics and taught the West the proper scientific method, specifically, the method of how to verify theories by means of particulars and experiments, modern science and today's technological achievements might not have occurred at all.

Notes

1 Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism (Kuala Lumpur: Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia (ABIM), 1978), p. 33.
2 Robert N. Proctor, Value-Free Science (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 7.
3 Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism, p. 18.
4 Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism, p. 32.
5 David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 176.