Why We Need Islamization of Science

Today I saw Mr. Gill’s article titled “What is Islamization of Science”, and was disappointed to read his conclusion that there is no such thing as “Islamization of Science”. Nevertheless I am grateful to him for his piece has finally given me the motivation to stop being lazy and share my views on the subject.

Some definitions and a bit of context:

Before going further, some ground must be cleared regarding terms to be used in this discourse so as to avoid any confusion. So let me define three key terms: “religion”, “science” and “traditional science”.

The Latin root of the word “religion” is connected with the idea of “attachment”. In my definition, “religion” denotes the link by which humanity is effectively attached or linked to what is greater than itself. By the word “science” I mean the whole body of modern observational and experimental science in all its branches, but more especially the unique modern world-view of the universe that has grown up around it (as distinct from the scientific or the experimental method itself).

Now let me briefly explain what I mean by “traditional” science. While its meaning will be made clear as this article progresses, for now note that a traditional science existed in every religious civilization in recorded history, that is, in every civilization that was brought forth through a religious revelation be it the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Incan (South and Central American), Vedic (Indian), Tao (Chinese) etc. And while the principles and aims of traditional sciences in the different religious civilizations remained the same (they all primarily dealt with a science of the human soul or the intellect and they dealt only secondarily with practical or technology applications), each civilization also had its “experimental methods”.

Having established some context, the next logical investigation is to examine some of the claims of modern science, especially the right it has usurped to be the arbiter of certainty for all of us.

Does modern science deliver certainty?

Nothing strikes the contemporary mind more as full of certainty and even authoritative than the findings of physics, chemistry, astronomy and more recently those of cellular biology and genetics. These are the “hard” sciences of the present age, which, by experimental means have put us in touch with what we perceive to be fundamental realities and “underlying truths” that we assume could not even have been conceived in bygone days. Moreover, this group of sciences has been in a sense “practically validated,” for all to see, by the technological applications and gadgets that now surround us (and sometimes even stifle us, though as good citizens of the scientific age we always try to adjust them in our lives e.g. “always-on” TV or radio or CD player, “always-on” cell phone, “always-on” internet, use up of frequent flyer miles etc.); how, then we wonder, can we doubt its findings? Modern technology is so overwhelming and overpowering that it leaves us paralyzed; encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin, quantum particles and fields and top quarks, galaxies and quasars and black holes, molecules and the genetic code—all these appear as undeniable facts, which must henceforth be reckoned with.

We must remember, however, that facts and their interpretation is not the same thing. And since “facts” are invariably associated with an interpretation of some kind, it is crucial to understand that science as a rule presents us with two disparate factors: with factual findings on the one hand, and an underlying world-view on the other, in terms of which the formulation and disclosure of these discoveries is framed. In its actuality science is never the kind of purely objective or unbiased enterprise it is generally assumed to be; subjective presuppositions do inevitably play an essential role.

For example, let’s say that a scientist is looking at an object in the universe. Now if she attempts to define that object, she can never do it fully or objectively, because she can only define it as it appears to her. So the image of an object is not independent of the observer who makes it. This is the inescapable dilemma sometimes expressed by the phrase “eyesight cannot see itself”. Our relationship to our universe is therefore not as simple as we think for we are a part of the universe and cannot separate ourselves from it.
I can hear many intelligent readers saying: “So what? We have nothing to go on but our powers of observation and analysis and must do our best with what we have. What else can we do?” But this question precisely takes us to question the validity of the world-view that surrounds the experimental method, to which I referred above. Whereas this world-view consists of the foundational ideas one absorbs, as if by osmosis, in the course of one’s scientific education and forms an integral part of the scientific unconscious, it is rarely if ever examined or subjected to critical scrutiny by the scientific community. In fact these foundational ideas can never be “proved” and so can only be given a status of a symbol or a dogma that conveys a message, but we don’t know if that message is a fact of certainty. It can therefore be said that in the minds of scientists today, good science and inferior assumptions (philosophy) about the universe coexist and are in fact inextricably intertwined.

What is Islamic Science?

As explained earlier in this article, by Islamic Science is meant the manifestation of traditional science in the specific Muslim religious universe. Islamic Science is wed to the Islamic revelation and to the Prophetic Traditions of Muhammad (Upon Him Be Peace) and essentially deals with reform of the human soul, which is considered the raison de aitre of human life on earth and the primary objective of Islamic Sciences. Before going further however, a bit on the history of the development of Islamic Science is in order.

Islam became heir to the intellectual heritage of the traditional sciences of all the major civilizations before it (including the Greco-Alexandrian, Hellenic, Iranian, Sabean, Indian and even Chinese but to a lesser extent), although transformed within a new religious universe, that of Islam. The result of fervent intellectual activity during the eighth and ninth centuries AD and beyond in the Islamic universe culminated in the establishment of a vast educational system that resulted in the classification of the sciences and the development of a cosmology. While almost all branches of science were developed by Muslims as is well known, the all-important science was that of cosmology. More important, its primary goal was always the alignment of the soul with the cosmos, not the acquisition of wealth or the plundering of Earth’s resources or the destruction of the eco-system through production of consumer goods for mass consumption or the build-up of military arsenals. For the ordinary folk, the cosmology of Islamic Science with the earth as the center of the universe and the sun as the symbol of God’s grace and life-giving power, allowed Muslims to grasp within themselves the axis of the cosmos. In this conception, which is a far more “humane” than a mechanistic one, ordinary folk can internalize the whole of the qualitative or “vertical” dimension of the cosmos, and in this connection their knowledge of the world was enough and adequate, in spite of the fact that they were always ignorant of much, or even nearly all, of its quantitative or “horizontal” dimension. It is thus perfectly possible for a traditional science to deliver a knowledge that is more real, or more precisely, more “graspable” than that delivered by modern science.

As Titus Burckhardt has said: “There is no such thing as modern cosmology. What the modern scientist possesses is merely a cosmography, where the form has been confused with content, the symbols have been ignored, and the content (or the timeless message) in the symbols, which beckons man to a remembrance (dhikr according to the Qur’an) has been forgotten.”

Conclusion

The great argument in favor of the modern science of nature is its technological applications. In reality, applications are nothing but “horizontal” quantitative forms that conform to the scientific framework that gives birth to them, but they in no way prove that the framework from which they are derived is a representation of certainty. In fact, most of the great technical inventions (such as semiconductor materials and computer chips) were developed on the basis of inadequate theories, inadequate in the sense that they violated their own quantitative framework yet are practically efficacious for the purposes for which they are designed. In reality, modern science displays a certain number of fissures or gaps that are due to the fact that the world of phenomena is indefinite and that therefore no quantitative science can ever hope to exhaust it. These fissures manifest themselves right down to the foundations of modern science and in domains as seemingly “exact” as physics; they become gaping cracks when one turns to the study of less “exact” sciences such as biology or the social sciences. In fact it is these fissures that are the seeds of catastrophe and the destructive technologies that is the fruit of modern science.

Islamic Science however, like any authentic traditional science, provides a picture of the earth as an island surrounded by the primordial ocean and covered by the dome of heaven, and the medieval man, who saw the heavens as concentric spheres extending from the earth at the center, while being mistaken regarding the true dispositions of the sensible universe, was nevertheless fully conscious of the fact (infinitely more important as regards both his “here” and his hereafter) that this material world is not the whole of reality but that there is a greater unseen reality that in its turn is contained in the Spirit.

The man of our time cannot see the divine signs in the skies any more.The remembrance of astronomical theories blocks his intuition. In actual practice, he thinks neither of the abysses of the stellar world nor of the terrible forces latent in every particle of matter. To bring man back to the human, science needs to be once again “Islamized” in the Muslim world, and “traditionalized” according to the respective religious heritages in other civilizations. The flood of useless and distracting gadgets needs to be controlled. Only a sophisticated traditional science like that of Islam can stem this tide of decay.