Reformulating a comprehensive relationship between religion and science: an Islamic perspective

Islam & Science, June, 2003 by Osman Bakar

In our view, the most significant formulations would be those of practicing scientists. Pertinent to our whole discussion, we are rather fortunate to have a long list of Muslim scientists in the past who were very knowledgeable in religion and other fields of study like history and philosophy. Their works on religion and science strike us as intellectually more revealing and appealing in helping us today to articulate relationships between the two domains than those produced by theologians and other men of religion with a limited knowledge of science. (4)

Islam and Science: Which Science?

If it is appropriate to ask which Islam is being related to science, the converse question is no less appropriate. Which science, or which part of it, are we relating to Islam? Science is not an entity that is obvious to everyone. The different understandings of the term science in contemporary discourse present another major issue that needs clarification. To begin with, there are disagreements on terminological usage itself, whether the domain of knowledge to which the term 'science' is applied is to be confined to the natural sciences, or to be extended to cover the humanities and social sciences as well. Some people use the word in both senses. Given the fact that the term science has been used in modern scholarship in its broadest sense of an academic or scientific discipline, as in Islamic tradition in which the Arabic term 'ulum (sciences) is used, we prefer to adopt this usage. Then there are disagreements on the content of science and its cultural context, whether the content is value-free or much shaped by its cultural context. In other words, there may not be just one way of doing science with the same characteristics over the ages, but there could have been as many types of science as there have been civilizations. We maintain the view that modern science is just one of the several major forms of science that the world has witnessed in its history. Islamic science, by which we mean science as it has been cultivated in Islamic civilization, is another form of science. This means that in speaking of the relationship between Islam and modern science we would be dealing with issues that are not necessarily the same as encountered in discussions on the relationship between religion and science in Islamic civilization. (5)

In this essay, we are limiting the domain of scientific disciplines for our consideration to the mathematical, natural and cognitive sciences including psychology. Our discussion of the kind of relationships that exist between Islam and science is primarily aimed at these sciences. Given the limited length of this essay, it is not possible to deal separately with each of the sciences in its relations with Islam. Furthermore, rather than dealing with specific details in the relationship, we will focus on its main principles that are common to all the sciences. But these principles would provide us with a clear outline of the structural and essential relationships between Islam and science. Since it is in the nature of the sciences as academic disciplines to share many characteristics, we may find that in many instances the issues we raise and discuss and the conclusions reached are applicable not just to the mathematical, natural and cognitive sciences but to all sciences.