Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality.

Pervez Hoodbhoy's credentials as a scientist are attested to not only by the cover blurb, but by the fact that so distinguished a particle physicist as Mohammed Abdus Salam consented to write the foreword to this book. Hoodbhoy's scientific competence is also discernible in the text itself. Regretably, he fails to appreciate the understanding of the relationship of science to religion that is emerging in the reconstructionist wing of the Islamic revival. This puts limits on this otherwise outstanding book. The tragedy is that these limits may cause the book to be too quickly dismissed by the people who would benefit the most from it--Muslims in the Arab World and elsewhere feeling challenged by Western culture who need to understand the universality of science.

In the first eight chapters, Hoodbhoy strongly makes the case for the universality of modern science in several different ways: He documents the universal nature of the great achievements of Islamic civilization. He recites the conventional wisdom about the Copernican Revolution and the replacement of the "spiritual" universe with "Cartesian reductionism." He summarizes what he calls "the war between science and medieval Christianity." He acidly refutes the arguments for "Islamic science" put forward by Maurice Buccaille, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Ziauddin Sardar. He argues against the possibility of an Islamic science by ridiculing the subject matter of its self-styled practitioners, by pointing out the failure of the concept's proponents to agree on a definition, and by noting that the decline of science in the Muslim world followed the triumph of Asharite doctrine. He uses the failure of Marxist and other politically-based science to show the errors of ideologically-based science in general.

In the second half of the book, certain errors in Hoodbhoy's analysis that were inconsequential in the first half begin to undermine his argument. Hoodbhoy accepts without question certain myths shared by Orientalists and anti-modernist Muslims.

Although his discussion of the scientific method would lead us to expect him to know better, he confuses science with rationalism. Indeed, science depends upon reason, but it also makes use of experience (experiment and observation) and transmission from reliable sources (like the reports of other scientists published in reputable refereed journals). Rationalism is the view that reason is our only reliable guide to knowledge. It limited ancient Greek science by its influence. A hallmark of Islamic science in the classical period was that it more regularly and systematically made use of experiments and proper citation of sources. There is no doubt in my mind that the former was inspired by Quranic doctrines about the "signs in the heavens" and the latter by the example of proper citations developed in Hadith science. Significantly, al-Ghazzali, in his attack on rationalism, emphasized that knowledge depends on all three of these sources.

Hoodbhoy confuses the battle of Muslim orthodoxy against Hellenistic philosophy with a battle against science. Because of this confusion, Hoodbhoy contradicts himself by asserting on page 114 that opposition to Ibn Rushd manifested itself in a prohibition "against the study of logic and science by order of the Caliph" and then in the very next sentence says: "All of [Ibn Rushd's] books, except for some strictly scientific ones were ordered burnt" [emphasis added]. Opponents of science would burn scientific books first, not spare them!

Hoodbhoy fails to realize that the appearance of modern science was a gradual process that developed in large part during the Muslim era. It was not an instantaneous epiphany during the Western Renaissance. The question which titles his penultimate chapter: "Why Didn't the Scientific Revolution Happen in Islam?" is thus inappropriate. What is commonly called the "scientific revolution" was not so much a revolution in science as the revolutionary impact which modern science had on Western Europe. As I have explained in my book, Signs in the Heavens: A Muslim Astronomer's Perspective on Religion and Science, the swapping of the positions of the sun and the earth in the cosmological scheme--made almost trivial by the astronomical models of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and Ibn al-Shattir--had no practical implications for the Muslim world, but destroyed the basis of the Church hierarchy in Western Europe.

The interesting question is why did Muslim science collapse to the present dismal state documented in Chapter 3? Hoodbhoy presents the conventional view that it was precipitated by the influence of al-Ghazzali. He lays blame on the Asharite doctrine that the apparent cause-and-effect of natural science is only an apparent relationship with God being the actual cause. The doctrine in question, however, is not a scientific theory, but a metaphysical statement for the accommodation of miracles, which, by definition, are outside the scope of natural science. It need not impede the progress of natural science. Al-Ghazzali himself, for example, argued against Galen's assertion of the eternity of the world using scientific arguments. Similarly, Hoodbhoy's opinion that belief in God's ability to answer prayers--for example for rain--is incompatible with modern science, alienates him from those who most need to hear his message without advancing his argument. It is a cliche of chaos theory that a butterfly's decision whether to flap its wings at a certain moment may affect the course of a storm a month later on the other side of the world. Hoodbhoy feels it is necessary to deny that God can willfully accomplish what a butterfly can do by chance.

The real source of the fall of Islamic science was the "closing of the door to ijtihad (independent judgment)." It was the termination of critical thought that guaranteed the ossification of both Islamic law and science. A misinterpretation of al-Ghazzali turned a battle against rationalism into a battle against rationality. Once original thought became suspect in Islam, scientific progress was doomed.