Islam, science and Muslims

Islam & Science, June, 2003 by Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Then there was the discovery of the School of Maraghah, the great astronomical school. We owe a great deal of that discovery to E. S. Kennedy and several other Western scholars. And also a few Arab scholars, like George Saliba. Then we have the discovery of Mamluk astronomy and astronomy in the Yemen. David King did a lot of work in this field and revealed a whole new chapter in the history of Islamic astronomy. In the last few years, in Istanbul and other places in Turkey, many studies have been carried out on the sciences in the Ottoman period, and a new chapter is being added there to the history of Islamic science.

My own view is that if we study all of these later works seriously, even from the point of view of Western science--which we are now appraising from the Western point of view unconsciously, mostly because the Western science is considered to be so important that we consider it to be the barometer of Islamic civilization, as a kind of Western standard that we have adopted, which I do not accept, but I think the Muslim intelligentsia as a whole accepts it--even if we accept that, this barrier would be pushed forward, that is, the period of decay would not be in the thirteenth century, but much later. For example, just in the last two or three years, people have discovered, and again this goes back to Professor Saliba of Columbia University, that Shams al-Din Khafri, who was always considered to be a major theologian or philosopher, living from the fifteenth century to the sixteenth century, was also a major astronomer. He was one of the most important of the later astronomers.

I believe that if we investigate the whole of the Muslim world, especially in later centuries Muslim India, Persia and the Ottoman world and not only the Arab part of Islamic Civilization, we will discover that very notable scientific activity continued to take place up to the eighteenth century, in some fields perhaps even later into the nineteenth century, until gradually Western science began to come into the Muslim world and it, then, gradually replaced the earlier Islamic philosophical and scientific tradition. In the field of philosophy, the Islamic philosophical tradition has never died. It had some of its greatest representatives in the twentieth century in Iran, people like 'Allamah Tabataba'i and others, with some of whom I studied myself.

We have to write a definitive and complete history of Islamic science, especially in the later centuries, which we do not have. Muslim scholars have been for the most part without much initiative, emulating what Western scholars have said, and Western scholars, until the advent of events about some of which I spoke above, concentrated on the earlier period of the history of Islamic science about which we now have a great deal of knowledge. So a complete history of Islamic science from our own point of view is the first thing that actually has to be done before we can judge about the when and how of the decadence of Islamic science.