Islam and Science

Muzaffar Iqbal

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351764810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This title was first published in 2002. This text seeks to provide the necessary background for understanding the contemporary relationship between Islam and modern science. Presenting an authentic discourse on the Islamic understanding of the physical cosmos, Muzaffar Iqbal explores God's relationship to the created world and the historical and cultural forces that have shaped and defined Muslim attitudes towards science. What was Islamic in the Islamic scientific tradition? How was it rooted in the Qur'anic worldview and whatever happened to it? These are some of the facets of this account of a tradition that spans eight centuries and covers a vast geographical region. Written from within, this ground-breaking exploration of some of the most fundamental questions in the Islam and science discourse, explores the process of appropriation and transformation of the Islamic scientific tradition in Europe during the three centuries leading up to the Scientific revolution.

CHAPTER ONE
The Beginning

By the time science emerged as an organized activity in the Muslim world, the Islamic civilization had already experienced two profound revolutions. The first was an intellectual revolution of the first order, the second, a social revolution which brought three advanced civilizations into mutual contact in the Muslim world through a language that was to become the lingua franca of Muslim learning: Arabic. Both of these revolutions had far reaching consequences for the emerging Islamic scientific tradition.

The intellectual revolution was brought about by an intense meditation on the Qurʾan by the companions of the Prophet of Islam. In the course of one generation, the Qurʾāan had transformed the entire range of human experience for the Arabs—from the rules of their language to the most mundane matters of daily life. Revealed to the "unlettered Prophet"¹ in "clear Arabic"² during the course of twenty-three years (610-32),³ the Qurʾān not only contained a moral code and the fundamentals of faith, it also had an advanced technical vocabulary. This rich repository of technical terms, which revolves around the Qurʾānic concepts of life, death, resurrection, prophethood and the moral response of the two sentient beings⁴ to its message, provided the First conceptual framework for the Islamic tradition of learning.

The first to emerge in Islam were the religious sciences. During the life of the Prophet, the nascent Muslim community had recourse to him for all their spiritual needs. But after his death, the foremost problem faced by the community of believers was to know how to know God. The path to this knowledge, outlined in the Qurʾān, had to be elucidated. The person most eminently qualified to do this was the Prophet himself but after his death, this responsibility had to be shared by those who were the most learned. The work of these men and women gave rise to the emergence of the sciences of the Qurʾān (ʿulūm al-Qurʾān), which included, among others, the science of its recitation (ʿilm al-qirāʾat), exegesis (ʿilm al-tafsīr), and jurisprudence (fiqh)—the queen of Islamic sciences.

This was followed by the emergence of various sciences related to the preservation of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet, Ḥadīth: ʿilm al-rijāl, (science of biographies), ʿilm al-ansāb (science of genealogy) and ʿilm al-tārīkh (science of history). These religious sciences provided the intellectual context and some elements of the methodology that was later used by natural sciences. The key elements of this methodology were an uncompromising adherence to truth and objectivity, a respect for corroborated empirical evidence, an eye for detail and a refined taste for proper categorization and classification of data. It was only after the Qurʾānic sciences had been firmly established and earliest collections of Ḥadīth had been compiled that the Islamic scientific tradition emerged. But more than the mere chronology, what is important here is the fact that the scientific tradition that was to remain the most advanced scientific tradition anywhere in the world for the next eight centuries, arose from the bosom of a tradition of learning that had been grounded in the very heart of the primary sources of Islam: the Qurʾan and Ḥadīth.

The Intellectual Milieu

Before the advent of Islam, Arabs had no science except for the traditional Bedouin knowledge of astronomy and medicine. There were only a few among them who could read and write. But they excelled in poetry and their memory was legendary. Arabic was already a sophisticated language but it did not have scientific technical vocabulary. The rules for Arabic grammar were first formulated by Abūʾl Aswad al-Duʾālī (d. 70/688-9), who flourished at Baṣra. According to the legend, it was ʾAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, the cousin, and later, the son-in-law of the Prophet and the fourth and the last of the four rightly guided caliphs (r. 36-41/656-661) who is said to have told al-Duʾālī to write a treatise on Arabic grammar based on the tripartite principle that the parts of speech are three: the noun, the verb and the particle.⁵ This he did and Arabic grammar later developed on the basis of this principle, initially in Madinah, Kūfa and Baṣra—the three earliest centers of intellectual activity in Islam.

Arabs viewed the level of civilization of a person or a nation on the basis of linguistic skills. The purest Arabic was spoken by the Bedouins of the desert and initially it was the extraordinary power of the Arabic of the Qurʾān that baffled the Makkan contemporaries of the Prophet; the Qurʾānic Arabic was beyond anything they had ever heard. Its rhythm, its evocative power, its tremendous force and its unearthly syntax was so enchanting that even those who did not believe in its message used to go where it was being recited, merely to listen to its extraordinary discourse in a language that used the alphabet of their own language but that transcended its bounds by a mysterious mechanism.⁶

But more than the sheer linguistic power of the Qurʾān, it was its urgent invitation to act that provided the earliest stimulus for reflection on nature. The Qurʾān contained a large number of verses that called attention to the harmony, symmetry and order present in the natural world. It drew attention to the regularities of the planetary motion, it asked its readers to reflect on the watercycle, on the alteration of the day and the night, on the way certain trees bifurcate and others do not, though they are rooted in the same soil and receive the same nutrients. It asked the faithful as well as the non-believers pointed and enigmatic questions: What was there behind this astonishing order in the universe? Who was responsible for the functioning of such a grand system? Who had established the order that allowed them to benefit from various processes present in the natural world?

This invitation to reflect on nature was such an insistent theme of the Qurʾān that no one could ignore it, not even those who did not believe in its message. One cannot over-emphasize in a work of this kind the central position that the Qurʾān holds in the development of the Islamic scientific tradition. In fact, every doctrine or every branch of knowledge that appeared in the Islamic polity traces its roots back to the Qurʾān. It would not be wrong to state that the Qurʾān is the foundation upon which everything Islamic is built. This revealed text is the primary source, the essential textbook, not only of the religious sciences but also of all other branches of knowledge that emerged in the Islamic civilization. It is the secret spring of the Islamic Weltanschauung, the very heart of the civilization inspired by this faith which made its first appearance in a remote desert, far from the main currents of other civilizations. We will see how the Qurʾān linked the events occurring in nature to its central message in the next chapter; for now, let us briefly reconstruct the intellectual milieu of the early Muslim era and place the emergence of the Islamic scientific tradition in a broader historical context.

The technical terminology' that came into existence as a result of a fervent and profound meditation on the message of the Qurʾān by the first generation of Muslims was employed in the tafsīr (exegesis) literature. This was an attempt to understand the precise and multi-layered prose of the Qurʾān. In this process, the new technical terminology was defined in minute details. Grammar, rhetoric and the study of the pre-Islamic Arabic poetry also developed primarily as linguistic aids to the interpretation of the Qurʾān. Thus, before the emergence of the Islamic scientific tradition, certain fundamental concepts, which had direct relation to the study of nature, had already been defined from the Qurʾānic perspective. This included the very notion of knowledge (al-ʾilm) and its related concepts— gnosis (māʿrifa) and comprehension (idrāk).

But the Qurʾān could not be interpreted merely on the basis of linguistics; it required an inspired heart, a profound faithfulness to its main function (guidance), an indefatigable fidelity to the Law (Sharīʿa) and a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the life and sayings of its first bearer and interpreter—the Prophet of Islam, Thus it became necessary to recall, recollect and use the sayings and actions of the Prophet for a better understanding of the message of the Qurʾān. The greatest scholars of Islam during this early period were primarily linguists, exegetes and jurisconsults (fuqahāʾ) who dedicated their lives to the patient study and interpretation of the Qurʾān and the Traditions of the Prophet (Ḥadīth) for the urgent needs of the Muslim community. They shaped the emerging intellectual milieu of the Muslim world in such a manner that the vision of Islam could be translated into a tradition of learning that was accessible to all and that could absorb new branches as it grew.

Not surprisingly, at the heart of this tradition of learning was the Qurʾān. Committed to memory in childhood, the Qurʾān regulated every event in the life of the Muslim community; it provided maxims to reflect upon, it nourished the hearts of the believers, it guided the scholars in their search but it also guided those who could not even read the text by a method that directly affected the spirit. This initial flowering of the Qurʾānic sciences created the foundations of Islamic tradition of learning upon which was built the study of nature.

The Qur'ānic Data

The resources available to the emerging Islamic scientific tradition were not laboratories and instruments but a grand metaphysics of nature, a framework for inquiry and a language equipped with the technical terms needed to express the results. The Qurʾān restored to the Arabic words their true character by stripping all illusions produced by the fantasy of pagan poets. Thus consecrated, the Arabic of the Qurʾān referred everything back to the direct and sovereign divine influence. The Qurʾānic name, ism, conferred to the thing its reality (ḥaqīqa) according to the divine knowledge, its objective existence (kawn) in creation and its legal value (ḥukm) amongst created beings. This minting of the name (waḍʿ) simultaneously placed the thing so named in its proper domain among things and established its ontological dependence on the Creator.

When the scientific tradition emerged in the Islamic civilization, its initial technical terms came from the Qurʾān and they referred back to the Qurʾānic usage, establishing a fundamental congruity between their scientific usage and their Qurʾānic meaning. The astonishing fixedness of the Arabic roots helped to identify the radicals of the Arabic verbs even in their most derivative form. In all fifteen verb forms, the verbs remain perpetually connected to their living source of fundamental meaning derived from the consonants. This not only helped in the compilation of Arabic dictionaries on a scientific basis but also established a semantic link between the technical terms and the language of revelation.

The conceptual framework that emerged during the early years of Islamic scientific tradition also used the resources of the Arabic language which were first developed for the study the Qurʾān. Arabic morphology had investigated different aspects of each root word as actualization of divine action. It had granted maximum energy to the imperative mood of the verb. All verbal forms were analyzed in composition, classified in their respective logical order (taqdīm wa tāʾkhīr), and examined in their reciprocal situations with respect to the one who utters them (al-mutakallim, the first person), the one upon whom they call (al-mukhāṭib, the second person) and the absent one of whom they speak (al-ghāʾib, the third). They were evaluated in respect to their degree of actualization in time: māḍī, the perfect, the action perfectly decided, realized and muḍāriʿ, the aorist.

This structure of language was affected by the Qurʾānic usage of words through the very process of ordering of ideas. This had a direct relevance to the terminology that was used in the Islamic scientific tradition. For example, reflecting on the fourteen consonants that are spelled like isolated letters (al-ḥurūf al-muqaṭiʿāt) which appear at the beginning of twenty-nine chapters (sūwār, sing., sūra) of the Qurʾān,⁷ early commentators and grammarians established the basis for the emergence of the doctrine of ishtiqāq al-akbar, "superior semantic", codified by Abū 'Alī al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī al-Fāarisī (d. before 370/980-81).⁸ This bold etymological leap was an attempt to fix, outside of time, the idea-type of which such and such a phenomenon should remain constantly a sign. These isolated consonants were also the inspiration for the emergence of the science of the philosophical alphabet (jafr) that the sixth Imam, Jāʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 147/765), is said to have been the first to apply to the Arabic alphabet. Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (d. ca. 160/777), one of the first major figures of Islamic scientific tradition whose works have survived, and its most celebrated alchemist, was to make ample use of these resources of the Arabic language in his "Theory of Balances", as we shall see toward the end of this chapter.

The Social Revolution

The social revolution which was to affect the emerging Islamic scientific tradition in a decisive way was brought about by the rapid expansion of the Muslim world into the regions held by three advanced civilizations: the Persian, the Egyptian and the Byzantine. This expansion started soon after the death of the Prophet of Islam in 11/632 and, over the next century and a half, produced a phenomenal intermixing of a large number of people of different races and religions in an ever-expanding geographical state. The swiftness of this expansion, its cosmopolitan nature and its sustai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Transliteration and Dates
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Beginning
• 2 And these are the Signs
• 3 Making of the Tradition
• 4 Islam and Science Nexus
• 5 Withering of the Tradition
• 6 Transmission and Transformation
• 7 Winds of Change
• 8 The Colonial Cut
• 9 The Colonized Discourse
• 10 The Scientific Exegesis
• 11 The New Nexus
• Bibliography
• Index