Mick Hartley

Taner Edis, author of “An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam“, interviewed at Salon.com (via b&w):

How would you assess the state of scientific knowledge in the Islamic world?

Dismal. Right now, if all Muslim scientists working in basic science vanished from the face of the earth, the rest of the scientific community would barely notice. There’s very little contribution coming from Muslim lands. […]

Yet there was a time, from the 9th through the 12th centuries, when Islam was arguably the center of the scientific world.

Very much so. If you’re talking about the proto-scientific thought that was inherited from the Greeks and Romans, all of the action 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.

Today, it’s something of an impediment for the Muslim world to continually look back to the glories of the past and keep saying that the Islamic world used to be a world leader in science. This tends to obscure some very important differences between modern science and medieval thinking. 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. […]

Why was it so much harder for science to take root in the Muslim world?

It was harder for science to achieve intellectual and institutional independence. This was not restricted just to science. 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. Islamic culture has not been as supportive of intellectual independence for different areas of life. […]

There are some Muslims who talk about the need for an “Islamic science” that’s quite distinct from Western science. They say we shouldn’t separate knowledge of the physical world from knowledge of the spiritual world because they are interconnected. And they often argue that science should have an ethical dimension. We shouldn’t just do science for the sake of knowledge. We should always be concerned about the moral outcomes. Does it make sense to talk about an Islamic science?

There are efforts to formulate a more Islamic science. The people who have this ethical context in mind are thinking not so much about physics or biology, but social science and applied science. Why are we doing this? And how can we include ethical and social concerns in our studies of the world? Debates about this take place among Western scientists as well. It’s perfectly legitimate. What gets more interesting — and from a mainstream scientific view, more dubious — is the notion that you can take an Islamic point of view and allow these faith-based, revealed ideas to constrain how you investigate the world.

That’s very diplomatically put. The parallel that comes to mind is Socialist science, and Lysenko. Not a happy precedent.