Islam and Science
Islam and Science
Islam and Science
Stanford University
MSEA Award Night
May 23, 2007
Abbas Milani
intellectual intolerance and spiritual rancor, and in the West by self-appointed pundits
whose poverty of knowledge about the rich and varied heritage of Islam is only matched
Islam has been not just a faith, but many civilizations, sometimes ruled by those
driven by dogma, other times by early but enlightened advocates of tolerance and
pluralism. A thousand years ago, the greatest libraries in the world, and the greatest urban
centers of living, the most creative advocates of Aristotle and Plato, and certainly the
most accomplished astronomers of the time were found in the Islamic world—in cities
In Spain, a good five hundred years before the advent of the Italian Renaissance
Muslims created what one scholar calls “The Ornament of the World,” an opulent culture
of eclectic aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual values, where “Muslims, Jews and
Christians created a culture of tolerance” and engaged in scientific debate and inquiry. In
their long days of exilic Diaspora, spanning over millennia, from Babylon and the
Assyrian empire to Boston and the “New City on the Hill,” Muslim Andalusia was where
Jews reached one of their three summits of cultural, Talmudic and economical
accomplishments (with other summits reached in Alexandria during the early days of our
common era, and Austria-German empire between 1890 to 1930.) Ironically, Islamist
the Church, and finally the devastations of the plague ended that noble experiment.
Today, the word Islam hardly conjures the tolerant cosmopolitanism that created the
Even in the heartland of Islam, the centuries from the eighth to the twelfth saw the
Goldziher and Makdisi, to Kennedy and Saliba, have argued, for almost five hundred
years, it was amongst the Muslims that the natural sciences and mathematics, astronomy
and physics “reached their highest state of development.” While Kharazami invented
algebra, and Razi began to write treatise on the merits of experimental science, alchemist
were laying some of the foundations of chemistry, and the Maraga School of astronomy
constituted the kernel of the scientific revolution, and that the scientific revolution itself
is the core and engine of the Renaissance. But in eleventh century, the most sophisticated
observatory in the world was in the city of Maragah, not far from Tabriz. Students from
as far away as China and Europe traveled there to enjoy the fully endowed program of
learning.
The Maragah Observatory was the best example of the Islamic system of
endowment, or vagf, where the entire institutional expenses, from student tuitions to
faculty salaries, were endowed. Moreover, as early as 1048 a Muslim scholar wrote what
he called Al Shukua Ala Batlamyus, or Dubitations on the Polemic system. In those years,
astronomers like Tutsi, and Biruni, Shatar Dameshgi and Shirazi, began to offer models
in recent years found some tantalizing hints about how the work of the Maraga scientists
Surely like other monotheistic religions, Islam, too, has had many moments when
false certitudes that are inimical to the iconoclastic spirit of scientific inquiry dominated
the intellectual discourse of the land. The promise of permanence ( in pillars of faith no
less than in the pleasure of paradise), is surely at odds with the necessarily contingent
Christianity, Islam too should not just be reduced to the dogmatic intransigence of its
A few years before his death, Pope John Paul II, issued an encylical that tried to
end for the church the trauma of Gallileo. He tried to reconcile the dictates and demands
of faith, and of Scriptirual Truths, with the cognitive contingency that is the kernel of
science—the belief that human knowledge is historic, temporal, and errant. The Pope
argued for patience, prudence, and intellectual tolerance, when divine revealed truth
seems to come into conflict with the multiplicities of truths discovered by scientists, or
created by artists. We must, he said, wait for the time we can develop the wisdom to
Almost eight hundred years earlier, Ibn Sina, or Avi Cina, as he is called in the
West, and arguably one of the greatest scientists in the history of Islam, argued much
along the same line, suggesting that Muslims must adapt the same posture of
likely to shape, or taint issues of method and narrative, the Islamic world has had singular
accomplishments. Long before Vico and Herder heralded modernity’s age of multi-
cultural tolerance, and advocated the “belief that every nation has its own inner center of
happiness,” and suggested that no one must dismiss the cultural Other simply because of
difference or “Otherness,” Biruni, a foremost Islamic scientist visited India and wrote a
treatise that covered with commendable impartiality the pluralism of faiths and rituals he
Today, if we want to free our perceptions from the doom and dogma of prophets
of intolerance and violence in the Muslim East, and from the jingoism of champions of
Western cultural or religious hegemony, we must adopt the kind of humble, curious and
respectful disposition about others that characterized the work of Biruni, no less than
opinions and facile stereotypes. And once we appraise History through such a humanistic
prism, we will, I submit, conclude that today, the image of Islam is hijacked by cultural
or political terrorists, and that Islam has a rich legacy of scientific inquiry, and has