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Islam and science

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The relationship between Science and Islam is a matter of controversy. In the Muslim world, many believe that modern science was first developed in the Muslim world rather than in Europe and Western countries, that "all the wealth of knowledge in the world has actually emanated from Muslim civilization," and what people call "the scientific method", is actually "the Islamic method. In complete contrast, others worry that the contemporary Muslim world suffers from a "profound lack of scientific understanding," and lament that, for example, in countries like Pakistan even post-graduate physics students have been known to blame earthquakes on "sinfulness, moral laxity, deviation from the Islamic true path," while "only a couple of muffled voices supported the scientific view that earthquakes are a natural phenomenon unaffected by human activity.

The development of scientific thought and knowledge has caused differing reactions among Muslims. In the Muslim world today, most of the focus on the relation between Islam and science involves interpretations of the Quran (and sometimes the Sunna) that claim to show these sources make prescient statements about the nature of the universe, biological development and other phenomena later confirmed by scientific research, and proof of the divine origin of the Qur'an. This effort has been criticized by some scientists and philosophers as containing logical fallacies, being unscientific, likely to be disproven by evolving scientific theories.

Overview

The religion Islam has its own worldview system including beliefs about "ultimate reality, epistemology, ontology, ethics, purpose, etc." Muslims believe that the Qur'an is the literal word and the final revelation of God for the guidance of humankind.

Science in the broadest sense refers to any system of knowledge attained by verifiable means, and in a narrower sense to a system of acquiring knowledge based on empiricism, experimentation, and methodological naturalism, as well as to the organized body of knowledge humans have gained by such research. Scientists maintain that scientific investigation must adhere to the scientific method, a process for evaluating empirical knowledge that explains observable events in nature as results of natural causes, rejecting supernatural notions.

History

In the history of science, Islamic science refers to the science developed under Islamic civilization between the 8th and 15th centuries, during what is known as the Islamic Golden Age. It is also known as Arabic science since the majority of texts during this period were written in Arabic, the lingua franca of Islamic civilization. Despite these terms, not all scientists during this period were Muslim or Arab, as there were a number of notable non-Arab scientists (most notably Persians), as well as some non-Muslim scientists, who contributed to scientific studies in the Islamic world.

A number of modern scholars such as Fielding H. Garrison, Bertrand Russell, Abdus Salam and Hossein Nasr consider modern science and the scientific method to have been greatly influenced by Muslim scientists who introduced a modern empirical, experimental and quantitative approach to scientific inquiry. Some scholars, notably Donald Routledge Hill, Ahmad Y Hassan, Abdus Salam, and George Saliba, have referred to their achievements as a Muslim scientific revolution, though this does not contradict the traditional view of the Scientific Revolution which is still supported by most scholars.

According to many historians, science in Islamic civilization flourished until the 14th century AD. At least some scholars blame this on the "rise of a clerical faction which froze this same science and withered its progress. Examples of conflicts with prevailing interpretations of Islam and science - or at least the fruits of science - thereafter include the demolition of Taqi al-Din's great observatory in Galata, "comparable in its technical equipment and its specialist personnel with that of his celebrated contemporary, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe." But while Brahe's observatory "opened the way to a vast new development of astronomical science," al-Din's was demolished by a squad of Janissaries, "by order of the sultan, on the recommendation of the Chief Mufti," sometime after 1577 AD.

Arrival of modern science in Muslim world

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, modern science arrived in the Muslim world but it wasn't the science itself that affected Muslim scholars. Rather, it "was the transfer of various philosophical currents entangled with science that had a profound effect on the minds of Muslim scientists and intellectuals. Schools like Positivism and Darwinism penetrated the Muslim world and dominated its academic circles and had a noticeable impact on some Islamic theological doctrines." There were different responses to this among the Muslim scholars: These reactions, in words of Professor Mehdi Golshani, were the following:

  1. Some rejected modern science as corrupt foreign thought, considering it incompatible with Islamic teachings, and in their view, the only remedy for the stagnancy of Islamic societies would be the strict following of Islamic teachings.
  2. Other thinkers in the Muslim world saw science as the only source of real enlightenment and advocated the complete adoption of modern science. In their view, the only remedy for the stagnation of Muslim societies would be the mastery of modern science and the replacement of the religious worldview by the scientific worldview.
  3. The majority of faithful Muslim scientists tried to adapt Islam to the findings of modern science; they can be categorized in the following subgroups: (a) Some Muslim thinkers attempted to justify modern science on religious grounds. Their motivation was to encourage Muslim societies to acquire modern knowledge and to safeguard their societies from the criticism of Orientalists and Muslim intellectuals. (b) Others tried to show that all important scientific discoveries had been predicted in the Qur'an and Islamic tradition and appealed to modern science to explain various aspects of faith. (c) Yet other scholars advocated a re-interpretation of Islam. In their view, one must try to construct a new theology that can establish a viable relation between Islam and modern science. The Indian scholar, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, sought a theology of nature through which one could re-interpret the basic principles of Islam in the light of modern science. (d) Then there were some Muslim scholars who believed that empirical science had reached the same conclusions that prophets had been advocating several thousand years ago. The revelation had only the privilege of prophecy.
  4. Finally, some Muslim philosophers separated the findings of modern science from its philosophical attachments. Thus, while they praised the attempts of Western scientists for the discovery of the secrets of nature, they warned against various empiricist and materialistic interpretations of scientific findings. Scientific knowledge can reveal certain aspects of the physical world, but it should not be identified with the alpha and omega of knowledge. Rather, it has to be integrated into a metaphysical framework—consistent with the Muslim worldview—in which higher levels of knowledge are recognized and the role of science in bringing us closer to God is fulfilled.

Compatibility of Islam and the development of science

Whether Islamic culture has promoted or hindered scientific advancement is disputed. Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb argue that since "Islam appointed" Muslims "as representatives of God and made them responsible for learning all the sciences, science cannot but prosper in a society of true Muslims. Many "classical and modern [sources] agree that the Qur'an condones, even encourages the acquisition of science and scientific knowledge, and urges humans to reflect on the natural phenomena as signs of God's creation." Some scientific instruments produced in classical times in the Islamic world were inscribed with Qur'anic citations. Most Muslims agree that doing science is an act of religious merit, even a collective duty of the Muslim community.

Others say traditional interpretations of Islam are not compatible with the development of science. Author Rodney Stark, explains Islam's lag behind the West in scientific advancement after (roughly) 1500 AD to opposition by traditional ulema to efforts to formulate systematic explanation of natural phenomenon with "natural laws." They believed such laws were blasphemous because they limit "Allah's freedom to act" as He wishes. This principle was enshired in aya 14:4: "Allah sendeth whom He will astray, and guideth whom He will," which (they believed) applied to all of creation not just humanity.

Decline

In the early twentieth century ulema forbade the learning of foreign languages and dissection of human bodies in the medical school in Iran. The ulama at the Islamic university of Al-Azhar in Cairo taught the Ptolemaic astronomical system (in which the sun circles the earth) until compelled to adopt the Copernican system by the Egyptian government in 1961.

In recent years, the lagging of the Muslim world in science is manifest in the disproportionately small amount of scientific output as measured by citations of articles published in internationally circulating science journals, annual expenditures on research and development, and numbers of research scientists and engineers. Skepticism of science among some Muslims is reflected in issues such as resistance in Muslim northern Nigeria to polio inoculation, which some believe is "an imaginary thing created in the West or it is a ploy to get us to submit to this evil agenda.

Qur'an and Science in Muslim thought

The belief that Qur'an had prophesied scientific theories and discoveries has become a strong and wide-spread belief in the contemporary Islamic world; these prophecies are often provided as a proof of the divine origin of the Qur'an.

The scientific facts claimed to be in the Qur'an exist in different subjects, including creation, astronomy, the animal and vegetables kingdom, and human reproduction.

"a time is fixed for every prophecy; you will come to know in time" (). Islamic scholar Zaghloul El-Naggar thinks that this verse refers to the scientific facts in the Qur'an that would be discovered by the world in modern time, centuries after the revelation.

This believe is, however, arguable in the Muslim world, while some support it, other Muslim scholars oppose the believe, claiming that the Qur'an is not a book of science; al-Biruni, one of the most celebrated Muslim scientists of the classical period, assigned to the Qur'an a separate and autonomous realm of its own and held that the Qur'an "does not interfere in the business of science nor does it infringe on the realm of science." These scholars argued for the possibility of multiple scientific explanation of the natural phenomena, and refused to subordinate the Qur'an to an ever-changing science.

Specific science-related issues in the Quran and the Hadith

Fossils of ancient humans

Here are three basic verses in Qur'an which are related to human creation: (, ) According to the first two verses, Adam and Eve were directly created by God from clay. They did not descend from any other species as proposed by Charles Darwin. The rest of mankind is the progeny of Adam and Eve. The third verse implies that there were three stages in their creation, and can be interpreted in two ways:

  • First possibility:

    • Adam and Eve were created from clay
    • They subsequently developed the ability to reproduce at a later age
    • Finally, after some more time elapsed, they entered the third phase in which they were perfected both physically and spiritually, and received the divine spirit from God.
  • Second possibility: All these three phases did not pass on the first humans created, rather each of the phases lasted for many years during which many life forms were created from clay having the characteristic of their respective periods together with that of the previous one.

    • Human forms were initially directly created from clay because they did not have the ability to reproduce. This first stage may have lasted for millions of years, and in it, the humans forms' physical forms after passing through various stages culminated in the homo sapiens of today. Millions of species may have been created from clay like this. Among them, many went extinct and the others lived to enter the second phase, the first of which were Adam and Eve.
    • The human forms now had the ability to reproduce and direct creation was no longer required. Adam and Eve were the first directly created pair from clay which had this ability to reproduce. In the second phase, except Adam and Eve all other pairs who had the ability to reproduce pairs were not perfected and later died away.
    • It was this very pair which entered the third phase and was perfected physically so that it could receive the divine spirit from the God and be blessed with the faculties of sense and reason as is specified by the last part of the verse.

Under the second interpretation, the fossils which we find today belong to the millions of people created from clay in the first and second phases.

Conception and inherited characteristics

The most prominent of the ancient Greek thinkers who wrote on medicine were Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen. Hippocrates and Galen, in contrast with Aristotle, wrote that the contribution of females to children is equal to that of males, and the vehicle for it is a substance similar to the semen of males. Basim Musallam writes that the ideas of these men were widespread through the pre-modern Middle East: "Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen were as much a part of Middle Eastern Arabic culture as anything else in it." The sayings in the Quran and those attributed to Muhammad in the Hadith influenced generations of Muslim scientists by siding with Galen and Hippocrates. Basim Musallam writes: "... the statements about parental contribution to generation in the hadith paralleled the Hippocratic writings, and the view of fetal development in the Quran agreed in detail with Galen's scientific writings." He reports that the highly influential medieval Hanbali scholar Ibn Qayyim, in his book Kitab al-tibyan fi aqsam al-qur'an, cites the following statement of the prophet from the Sahih Muslim:

Ibn Qayyim also quotes a different hadith from the same collection, which is quoted by other Muslim authors as well. Having been asked the question "from what is man created," the Prophet replies:

Embryology

It is widely recognized that the Qur'an and hadith contain a number of verses pertaining to human reproduction and development. In his book A History of Embryology, Professor Joseph Needham describes some of the embryological passages in the Quran, verses (discussed below), , , , , , , and as "a seventh century echo of Aristotle and Ayurveda." According to Keith Moore, professor emeritus of Anatomy at the University of Toronto, the scientific meaning of certain surahs in the Quran has become clear only recently. An example cited by him is verse .

Moore suggests that the verse phrase may describe the following three physiological barriers:

  1. The anterior abdominal wall;
  2. The uterine wall; and
  3. The amniochorionic membrane.

Moore notes that there are other interpretations of this verse, but does not elaborate. Regarding this verse, Basim Musallam quotes the Damascene Hanbali scholar Ibn Qayyim (1291-1351), who reports a different interpretation: "Most commentators explain, it is the darkness of the belly, and the darkness of the womb, and the darkness of the placenta." The extent of human knowledge of embryology stretches back to the second century, when Greek doctor Galen described the placenta and fetal membranes. Basim Musallam writes that the scientific tradition of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen "was native to the Middle East for centuries before Islam." He finds that "the Quran described the development of the foetus in the language of the biological sciences of the time. There was little difference between the language of the Quran and that of Galen on the stages of foetal development." Discussing the "stages" mentioned in this verse, Moore argues that it was probably known to the seventh century doctors that the human embryo developed within the uterus, though their knowing of human embryos developing in stages would have been unlikely. Moore claims that though Aristotle noted the developmental stages of a chick embryo during the fourth century, it was not until the fifteenth century that developmental stages of human embryo had been the subject of discourse. However, Musallam writes that this had been described long before Muhammad:

Further occurrences of verses pertaining to supposed embryological development are and .

The word "nutufah" (Arabic: نطفة) here has been interpreted as the "sperm" or "spermatozoon", and the most respected Muslim translators (Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, and Shakir) all give some variant of this.

Musallam quotes the hadith, where the Prophet gives a more detailed description:

Moore writes that a more meaningful rendering of the word "nutufah" would be "zygote", which divides to form a blastocyst before embedding itself in the uterus — possibly what is referred to in the verse as "a place of rest". This interpretation, he claims, is supported by a different verse in the Qur'an describing the human being as created from a "mixed drop", to which the zygote would correspond, being "the union of a mixture of the sperm and the ovum."

The word "alaqah" (Arabic: علقة), rendered by Yusuf Ali as a "clot of congealed blood", is translated as "a leech-like structure" by Abdul Majid Zendani, professor of Islamic studies at the King Abdulaziz University. Moore claims that the meaning of alaqah is "leech" or "bloodsucker", which he states is an appropriate description of the relationship between the embryo and the endometrium in which it is implanted, between days 7 and 24 of human embryological development. This is because the human embryo derives blood from the endometrium, in the same way a leech draws blood from its host. Morphologically, too, the embryo at this stage resembles that of a leech, he notes, unobservable by anyone in the seventh century without a microscope.

The next stage referred to is "mudhgah" (Arabic: مضغة), which Moore suggests means "chewed substance or chewed lump." This, he believes, corresponds to around the fourth week of development where the embryo resembles the appearance of a chewed lump, a key characteristic of which being indentations or "teeth-marks" signalling the beginnings of the somites, the precursor to the vertebral column. Continuing in his analysis of this verse, he states that the next stage (which mentions formation of bones and flesh) is also in accordance with the stages of embryological development, as first the bones form as cartilage models, after which muscles develop from the surrounding somatic mesoderm. The phrase "then We developed out of it another creature" may allude to the resemblance of a human figure by the end of the eighth week, by which time the embryo (now known as the fetus) has gained distinctive human characteristics and possesses the primordia of all external and internal organs.

Other perceived verses referring to human development cited by Moore include and .

Verse , he suggests, refers to the development of the special senses in the order of hearing, vision, and sensation. According to Moore, this is the correct order of development in the embryo: the primordia of the internal ears develop first, followed by the beginning of the eyes, with the differentiation of the brain (which he refers to as the "site of understanding") occurring last of these.

Moore states that seems to indicate that the embryo is comprised of both differentiated and undifferentiated tissues. He cites the example of undifferentiated mesenchyme present around the differentiated cartilage bone models. This mesenchyme then differentiates to form the muscles and ligaments attached to the bone.

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