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THE HOLY QURAN AND SCIENCE

Let me say at the outset that I am both a believer as well as a practicing Muslim. I am a Muslim because I believe in the spiritual message of the Holy Quran. As a scientist, the Quran speaks to me in that it emphasizes reflection on the Laws of Nature, with examples drawn from cosmology, physics, biology and medicine, as signs for all men.

Says the Quran:
“Can they not look up to the clouds, how they are created; and to the Heaven how it is
upraised; and the mountains how they are rooted, and to the earth how it is outspread?”
(88:17)

And again:

“Verily in the creation of the Heavens and of the earth, and in the alternation of the night
and of the day, are there signs for men of understanding. They who, standing, sitting or
reclining, bear Allah in mind and reflect on the creation of the Heavens and of the earth,
saying: 'Oh our Lord! Thou has not created this in vain.’” (3:189-190).

The Quran emphasizes the superiority of the alim-the man possessed of knowledge and insight, asking: How can those, not possessing these attributes, ever be equals of those who do? Seven hundred and fifty verses of the Quran (almost one-eighth of the Book) exhort believers to study Nature, to reflect, to make the best use of reason in their search for the ultimate and to make the acquiring of knowledge and scientific comprehension part of the community's life.

The Holy Prophet of Islam emphasized that the quest for knowledge and sciences is obligatory upon every Muslim, man and woman. He enjoined his followers to seek knowledge even if they had to travel to China in its search. Here clearly he had scientific rather than religious knowledge in mind, as well as an emphasis on the internationalism of the scientific quest.

This is the first premise on scientific knowledge with which any fundamentalist thinking in Islam must begin. Add to this the second premise, eloquently stated by Maurice Bucaille in his perceptive essay on The Bible, the Quran and Science. There is not a single verse in the Quran where natural phenomena are described and which contradicts what we know for certain from our discoveries in Sciences.

Add to this the third premise: in the whole of Islamic history there has never been an incident like that of Galileo or Giordano Bruno.

Persecution there has been; denunciation, even excommunication (takfeer) over doctrinal differences, but never for scientific beliefs. And paradoxically, the first Inquisition (Mihna) in Islam came to be instituted, not by the orthodox theologians, but by the so-called rationalists, the Mu'tazzalatheologians themselves who prided themselves on the use of reason. The saintly Ahmad ibn Hanbal was one of those subjected to the lash of their fury.

EARLY ISLAM AND SCIENCE

How seriously did the early Muslims take these injunctions of the Holy Quran and of the Holy Prophet?

Barely a hundred years after the Holy Prophet's death the Muslims had made it their task to master the then-known sciences. Systematically, they translated the entire corpus of the then known knowledge in their religious language, Arabic. Founding institutes of advanced study (Bait-ul-Hikmas), they acquired an ascendancy in the sciences that lasted for the next 350 years.

A semi-quantitative measure of this is given by George Sarton in his monumental History of Science. Sarton divides his story of the highest achievement in science into Ages, each Age lasting 50 years. With each, he associates one central figure: thus, 500-450 BC is the Age of Plato, followed by the Ages of Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes and so on. From 750 to 1100 CE, however, it is an unbroken succession of the Ages of Jabir, Khwarizmi, Razi,Masudi, Abu'I-Wafa, Biruni and Omar Khayam. In those 350 years, Arabs, Turks,
Afghans and Persians chemists, algebraists, clinicians, geographers, mathematicians, physicists and astronomers of the commonwealth of Islam-held the world stage of sciences. Only after 1100 CE, in Sarton's scheme, do the first Western names begin to appear; however, for another 250 years, they share the honors with men of Islam like Ibn Rushd, Nasir-ud-din Tusi and Ibn Nafis.

An important reason for the success of the scientific enterprise in Islam was its international character. The Islamic commonwealth itself cut across nations and color; and early Muslim society was tolerant of men from outside it, and of their ideas. An aspect of reverence for the sciences in Islam was the patronage they enjoyed in the Islamic Commonwealth. To paraphrase what H.A.R. Gibb has written about Arabic literature to the parallel situation for the sciences; 'To a greater extent than elsewhere, the flowering of the sciences in Islam was conditional... on the liberality and patronage of those in high positions. Where Muslim society was in decay, science lost vitality and force. But so long as, in one capital or another, princes and ministers found pleasure, profit or reputation in patronizing the sciences, the torch was kept burning.'

THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCES IN ISLAM

The Golden Age of Sciences in Islam was doubtless the Age around the year 1000 CE, the Age of Ibn-i-Sina (Avecenna) , the last of the mediaevalists, and of his contemporaries, the first of the moderns, Ibn-al-Haitham and AI Biruni. Ibn-alHaitham (Alhazen, 965-1039 CE) was one of the greatest physicists of all time. He 'enunciated that a ray of light, in passing through a medium, takes the path which is the easier and "quicker".' In this he was anticipating Fermat's Principle of Least Time by many centuries. He enunciated the law of inertia, later to become Newton's first law of motion.

He described the process of refraction in mechanical terms, by considering the movement of 'particles of light' as they passed through the surface of separation of two media, in accordance with the rectangle law of forces-an approach later rediscovered and elaborated by Newton. Part V of Roger Bacon's 'Opus Majus' is practically a copy of Ibnal-Haitharn's optics. No wonder Bacon never wearied of declaring that a knowledge of
Arabic and of Arabic Science was the only way to true knowledge.'

Al Biruni (973-1048 CE), Ibn-i-Sina’s second illustrious contemporary worked in Afghanistan. He was an empirical scientist like Ibn-al-Haitham. He was as modern and as unmedieval in outlook as Galileo, six centuries later, with whom he shares the independent (prior) discovery of the so-called Galilean invariance of the laws of Nature the liberating statement that the same Laws of Physics apply here on earth and on the
starry-orbs in the heavens.

There is no question that Western Science is a Greco-Islamic legacy. However, it is commonly alleged that Islamic science was a derived science, that Muslim scientists followed the Greek theoretical tradition blindly and added nothing to the scientific method.

This statement is false.

Like all periods of intense scientific work, one first builds on what one has inherited; this is followed by an Age of maturity when doubts are raised on the teachings of the old masters followed by a break. Such a break came with the rise of observation and experiment, early in the Sciences of Islam; its clearest exponents were
Ibn-al-Haitham and AI Biruni. Listen to this assessment of Aristotle by AI Biruni:

The trouble with most people is their extravagance in respect of Aristotle's opinions, they
believe that there is no possibility of mistakes in his views, though they know that he was
only theorizing to the best of his capacity, and never claimed to be God's protected and
immune from mistakes.


Or this on geology, with its insistence on observation:

...But if you see the soil of India with your own eyes and meditate on its nature, if you consider the rounded stones found in earth however deeply you dig, stones that are huge near the mountains and where the rivers have a violent current, stones that are of smaller size at a greater distance from the mountains and where the streams flow more slowly, stones that appear pulverized in the shape of sand where the streams begin to stagnate near their mouths and near the sea-if you consider all this, you can scarcely help thinking that India was once a sea, which by degrees has been filled up by the alluvium of the streams.

And finally, AI Biruni on medieval superstitions:

People say that on the 6th (of January) there is an hour during which all salt water of the earth gets sweet. Since all the qualities occurring in the water depend exclusively upon the nature of the soil... these qualities are of a stable nature.... Therefore this statement ... is entirely unfounded. Continual and leisurely experimentation will show to anyone the futility of this assertion.


According to Briffault
the Greeks systematized, generalized, and theorized, but the patient ways of investigation, the accumulation of positive knowledge, the minute methods of science, detailed and prolonged observation and experimental inquiry were altogether alien to the Greek temperament. What we call science arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of inquiry, of new methods of investigation, of the method of experiment, observation, measurement, and of the development of Mathematics in a form unknown to the Greeks.



That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs. 'Modern' science is the most momentous contribution of the Islamic civilization. These remarks of Briffault are reinforced by Sarton
The main, as well as the least obvious, achievement of the middle Ages was the creation of the experimental spirit and this was primarily due to the Muslims down to the 12th century.

One of the tragedies of history is that this dawning of the modern spirit in Sciences with AI Biruni and Ibn-al-Haitham, was interrupted; it did not lead to a permanent change of course in scientific methodology. Barely a hundred years after they worked, creation of high Science in Islam came to a halt. Mankind had to wait a full 500 years before the same level of maturity and the same insistence on observation and experimentation was
reached again, with Tycho Brahe, Galileo and their contemporaries.

MODERN SCIENCE AND FAITH

What is the situation today? Of all the major civilizations on this globe, science is the weakest in the Islamic Commonwealth. I sometimes suspect that some of us Muslims believe that while technology is basically neutral, and that its excess can be tempered through an adherence to the ethics of Islam, science, on the contrary, is valueloaded; that modern science must lead to 'rationalism', and eventually apostasy; that scientifically trained men among us will 'deny the metaphysical presuppositions of our culture.' There
is in this sentiment an implied insult to our cultural values for their fragility; but leaving this aside, to such thinking, all I can say is: Do not fight the battles of yesterday when the so-called 'rational philosophers', with their irrational and dogmatic faith in the cosmological doctrines they had inherited from Aristotle, found difficulties in reconciling these concepts with their faith.

One must remind oneself that such battles were even more fiercely waged among the Christian school men of the Middle Ages. The problems which concerned the schoolmen were mainly problems of cosmology and metaphysics: 'Is the world located in an immobile place, does anything lie beyond it; Does God move the primum mobile directly and actively as an efficient cause, or only as a final or ultimate cause? Are all the heavens moved by one mover or several? Do celestial movers experience exhaustion or fatigue? What was the nature of celestial matter? Was it like terrestrial matter in possessing inherent qualities such as being hot, cold moist and dry?' No wonder when Galileo tried, first, to classify those among the problems which legitimately belonged to the domain of Physics, and then to find answers to them through physical experimentation, he was persecuted. Restitution for this is being made now 350 years later.

At a special ceremony in the Vatican on May 9, 1983, His Holiness the Pope, in the presence of 33 Nobel Laureates and 300 other scientists, declared:

The Church's experience, during the Galileo affair and after it, has led to a more mature attitude ... The Church herself learns by experience and reflection and she now understands better the meaning that must be given to freedom of research ... one of the most noble attributes of man. It is through research that man attains to Truth ... This is why the Church is convinced that there can be no real contradiction between science and faith.... (However), it is only through humble and assiduous study that (the Church) learns
to dissociate the essential of the faith from the scientific systems of a given age, specially when a culturally influenced reading of the Bible seemed to be linked to an obligatory cosmogony.