Islam and Science 2/3: Where does Islamic law stand on science?

Prophets in the Islamic tradition are beacons of knowledge and wisdom that light torches, which are passed on from one generation to the next, from teacher to student. As Muhammad said: the sages are heirs of the prophets (Riyad as-Salihin 12:13). It is therefore critical to obtain knowledge from the correct source or lineage of teachers. This was the underlying concern of Imam al-Ghazali (d. 1111) when confronted with the question of the place of Greek philosophy in Islam through its professors in the Muslim world, notably Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi. Many Muslim intellectuals had been impressed by ancient Greek philosophers whom, it seemed, had figured out fundamental religious truths like the demiurge (God), the immortal soul, the reward of the righteous and punishment of the wicked (i.e., Hades and the Isles of the Blessed) by way of reason. Al-Ghazali’s concerns as a consummate intellectual and the headmaster of the prestigious Nidhamiya were both curricular and genealogical. To wit, should speculative philosophy be included in Islamic curricula and do its purveyors have legitimate prophetic genealogies to qualify them as teachers? His conclusion, which reflects the consensus of Muslim scholars since the 12th c. and has not been significantly challenged to date, is that formal and empirical sciences are valuable while speculative philosophy is not. Again, the history of science from an Islamic perspective consists of the genealogy of knowledge from prophets who were sent to various civilizations. Science is thus the product of ancient civilizations; not a recent discovery or invention by “barbarians” who attacked or destroyed them. As this video shows, the genealogy of Islam goes through the prophets of all the major ancient civilizations. Barbarians, on the other hand, don’t just raid and pillage material entities, but also history, identity and culture, pretending as if they were the first to invent or discover natural science (which they pillaged) like their “discovery” of “America”, which was already inhabited and named. Islam, which has a longer memory than “barbarians”, thus takes a highly critical approach to their “history” of science, emphasizing that they are neither Roman (Western) nor Judeo-Christian; nor are they legitimate heirs of these traditions, which they sacked and now claim as theirs.

0:00 Outline
0:19 Principles
6:40 Semantics
11:15 Cosmology
14:29 Evolution
18:47 Medicine
21:31 History of science in Islam
32:36 Conclusion