Taner Edis, on The religious state of Islamic science:
If you’re talking about the proto-scientific thought that was inherited from the Greeks and Romans, all of the action [in the 9th through 12 centuries] was taking place in the Islamic world. Western Europe at the time was a land of barbarians—intellectually, totally negligible. In fact, Muslim thinkers developed Greek science; they didn’t just preserve it. But it is a mistake to think of this as analogous to modern science. What Muslims were doing back then was still a medieval, pre-scientific intellectual enterprise. They never quite made the breakthrough, the scientific revolution, that took place in Europe….
They did some very interesting things in medicine and optics. But all of this was mixed in with astrology and alchemy and what today we would consider dead ends. This was not thinking of nature mechanistically, as happened in the scientific revolution in Europe, but in almost an occult sense….
[I]n Europe, you had a three-way interplay between science, orthodox religion and more occult religious alternatives. You could have interesting alliances. These end up being separated through historical accident—I don’t see anything special about Western Christianity that sets it apart from Islam—and they go their separate ways. This type of separation never really happened in the Muslim Middle East….
Much of the praise heaped on medieval Muslim science is due to a very selective reading of history. We tend to pick out ideas that are similar to what eventually became successful and downplay ideas that seem occult and outright crazy today. But medieval Muslim thinkers took the weird stuff as seriously as anything that fed into modern science….
[A] number of factors came together so that scientific institutions in Europe got lucky. They were able to break free of church constraints and unleash a powerful technology that plugged into emerging capitalism at that moment in history. After that, it was too late to go back and strangle science even if somebody wanted to….
[I]f you want to talk about the Catholic Church seeking an accommodation with modernism and science, you really have to come into the 19th and 20th centuries….
In the Western world, the institution of law achieved a kind of autonomy from religion early on. Some historians argue that this was really a precursor to science achieving autonomy as well. In the Muslim world, law was never entirely disentangled from religion….
It’s not so much a story of Islamic decline as Europe inventing an entirely new way of thinking about the natural world and really making a break with medieval ways of thinking. That didn’t happen in the Islamic world….
One of the features of medieval Islamic science that some modern Muslim thinkers want to revive is the way of perceiving the universe as a spiritual, God-centered place. This tends to work against the independence of science from religious institutions. It’s precisely this autonomy that helped science make the breakthrough in the Western world. In the Muslim world, this is still a relatively controversial concept. There is a tendency to say that science should operate under the guidance of religious concerns….
You can find many Muslim thinkers who say that Western Christians made a mistake by allowing science to operate independently of religious constraints….
People who read the Book of Genesis literally believe in a creation that happened 10,000 years ago [er, actually 6000 years ago, in 4004 BC—it was agriculture that began 10,000 years ago, and which gave us the myths which, ironically, lead people to believe that the world is only 6 ky old], literally done in six days. But the Quran is much vaguer about the time frame of divine action. Therefore, they are not as committed to fitting earth history into thousands of years. So Muslim creationists are almost invariably “Old Earth creationists.” They tend to think of Noah’s flood as a local event— not such a big thing—unlike the American creationists who think of the flood as the major geological event in earth history.
From the same piece, as this branches into a separate issue:
If you look into the literature on Islam and science, one of the names you will very soon encounter is Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who is a Muslim philosopher of science…. Seyyed Hossein Nasr says he’s trying to revive certain distinctly Muslim ways of thinking about the universe. But it’s a revival of all the strands of classical Islamic thought, including those strands which are very antithetical to science as we understand it today.
I remembered that name. Guess from where?
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one of [Fritjof] Schuon’s main disciples, was actively involved with promoting as well as working for and supporting the unjust regime of the Shah of Iran. The Shah embodied a puppet dictatorship in Iran, a client state set up by the U.S that was both fascist and monarchist. The Shah had a secret police organization which tortured, maimed and killed thousands from 1953-1979. Nasr was closely allied with this government even up to its final days. Nasr seems to have transferred this political zeal to Schuon, after the fall of the Shah in 1979. But besides serving the Shah, Nasr also had some influence on helping the Iranian revolution come about, since Nasr ran the Iranian academy and promoted Traditionalist ideas. The Khomeini revolution of 1979 was a Traditionalist revolution of sorts. Nasr would end in disliking its populism. It was not aristocratic enough for him. But he had an influence on it. Both the Shah’s regime and the Iranian revolution resulted in violating the human rights of the Iranian people. Nasr contributed to both systems. The free floating nature of Spiritual Fascism allows these kinds of multiple reactionary influences. Nasr’s Spiritual Fascism allowed his ideas to be acceptable to various far right dictatorships….
Many of the traditionalists, like Hossein Nasr, Ananda and Rama Coomaraswamy and Guenon were alienated and displaced individuals who were forced out of their parent countries or left it in the hopes of finding a romanticized and idealized culture elsewhere. They idealized the nostalgia they felt for cultures they romanticized as lost or on the brink of being lost. These idealizations are what the call ” traditions”….
Schuon Guenon, Whitall Perry and Hossien Nasr have all written absurd, silly and empty denials of evolutionism. Their arguments are basically the same as the creationists which have been refuted thoroughly….
[...] July 30: The religious state of Islamic science [...]