HAhmed.com

Many of us Muslims like to look back at our history and glorfy the golden ages of Islam where the Islamic Empires were the most powerful and advanced, and when our ’science’ was leading the rest of the world by far. And it was. In fact, Muslims made significant breakthroughs in all the scientific fields from medicine, physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathemtics, and so on, virtually every modern science today! In fact, many western scientific discoveries (Harvey’s circulation system, Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system, and many more…) were all uncovered by Muslim scientists centuries before their western counterparts. On many accounts they actually plagurized from Muslim scientists without giving any credit at all. Suffice it to say, Islamic science as we understand it today (level of understanding of the physical world) was quite advanced in the Islamic empires.

However these Muslim scientists had entirely different world-views than western scientists! Most Muslim scientists only worked on science part time, and as a secondary vocation, as they were even greater theologians, scholars, philosophers, etc. And their understanding of science was completely different with that of later western science. How? This relates to how our own mentality of Muslims differs from that of most other people, specifically western scientists.

Personally, throughout my education, particularly scientific education, I always admired science, how precise the nature of science was and how perfectly everything works in the world in perfect harmony - and this was all because it was from Allah , The Creator, this is how any Muslim views everything around him/her - as a creation of Allah . Only Allah could have created all this, and for us to try to observe and understand the nature of the physical/observable mechanisms were in fact signs of Allah .

Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the alternation of night and ady, and the shops taht sail the sea for the benefit of humanity, and the water God sends down from the sky, and which God enlivens the earth after its death, and distrubtes all kinds of animals thereupon; and the coursing of thr winds, and the clouds employed between sky and earth, sureley they are signs for people who discern. (Quran 2:164)

All the further scientific discoveries that have been discovered or will be discovered in the future does not really concern Muslims much. Because in the long run - so what if we learn that X is controlled by a specific mechanism of Y, does that affect how we live our daily lives? With the rise of western science, traditional world views which valued The Creator, were replaced with an understanding that with scientific observances, investigations and experimentations, eventually we will be able to uncover all real knowledge, and everything not verifiable from science was bogus.

However Muslims never felt this way, as tradition was always revered. Professor Chittick gave an excellent example about this in class: If Galileo were a Muslim, his discoveries would have not been a big deal. So what if the world was not physically how we saw it before? Does that diminish the significance of the ’sign’ itself? For Europe the fact that the Earth was not at the center of the physical solar system was blasphemous, and gave rise to the questioning of tradition in general! For Muslims it would not have been a big deal. Why should we concentrate of the level of reality which is most temporal and most meaningless? What is most Real? what is the most meaningful?

In otherwords, western science focuses on the physical world and everything within it, and its goal is to uncover the nature of the way things are in this world. However as Muslims, we view the physical world, and all the perfection of it and the uncovering discoveries that explain the nature of this world only as signs for something Greater…

Is the goal to focus on the signs themselves, or what the signs themselves are actually pointing to? For western science, the science itself is the ends, however for Muslim scientists although it provided great insight into many various natural phenomenon, it did not at all aid in theunderstanding of what actually is Real.

Verily, in that (creations) are signs for a people to reflect. (59:21, 45:13, 39:42, 30:21, 16:69, 16:11, 13:3, … and many more)