Islam and Modern Science

[RebelLion]

Islam and Modern Science A Lecture by Seyyid Hossein Nasr

The author is persian shia, but he does make some interesting points and goes through the history of science in islam. A good read.

"Now, all these views which are expressed for you today are not given force in the Islamic world. There are people all the way from Abdus Salam, the only muslim to have won the Noble Prize in physics, who was asked what happened to Islamic Science?' He said Nothing. Instead what we cultivated in Isfahan and Cordoba is now being cultivated in MIT, Caltech and at Imperial College, London. It's just a geographical translation of place. All the way from that position, which is really an echo of what Jamaluddin Afghani presented in a new garb by a great physicist, over to the views of the so-called ajmalis in England who emphasize the ethical dimension of Islamic science and who at least realize that modern science is not value-free [and finally], to the position which is held by yours truly and many others in the Islamic world, and which has now given rise to the only institution, Aligarh University in India, which is trying to deal with this subject in a living fashion I'll get to that in a moment. As I talk of these three ways of thinking about the relationship between Islam and modern science there are several important phenomena that are going on in the Islamic world which I must describe for you before analyzing them.

First and most powerful, is the continuous flow and absorption of western science and technology into all existing Islamic countries to the extent that they can absorb it. In every single Islamic country, whatever political regime, whatever economic policy, whatever attitude towards the west they may espouse, whether they are completely pro-western or have demonstrations in the street against the west, the adoption of western science and technology goes on. Which is a very telling fact for the whole of the Islamic world.

There are some places where some thought is being given to what is the consequence of this. Now there are many questions to ask here. First of all is this transfer of science and technology going on successfully? is it not going on successfully? If it is not successful, what is it not going on successfully? And if it is, why? This is a very major issue. The whole question of the transfer of science is not really a subject for me to deal with today.

The second phenomenon that is going on today is the gradual attempt being made to study both the meaning and the history of Islamic science. I think that in this field that muslims should really be ashamed of themselves to put it mildly. Let me give you some examples. There are now today a billion Muslims in the world. Probably in the first to the second century of the history of Islam, that is the eighth Christian century, no one knows exactly, but there were something like 20-30 million muslims. Despite that vast Islamic empire the numbers were somewhere around there [according to] the demographers. It may be wrong, but it was anyway a much smaller number han the population of muslims today."

http://web.mit.edu/mitmsa/www/NewSite/l ... eech1.html

[Padishah]

Syed Hossein Nasr, everyone's favourite Shia.

[Malina.A]

Oh Rebelion.....

[RebelLion]

Ms nalia aka Malina.A

Good morning mamacita.

I see the eunuch screw has banned you.