Nauka i Islam

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www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/nasr.html

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www.ahmedbaki.com/index.html

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www.nytimes.com/2001/10/30/science/social/30ISLA.html

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www.nytimes.com/2001/10/30/science/social/30ISLA.html

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Nic tam nie znalazlam..

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Dosłownie "nic" czy też nic ciekawego?

HOW ISLAM WON, AND LOST, THE LEAD IN SCIENCE

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New York Times
October 30, 2001

HOW ISLAM WON, AND LOST, THE LEAD IN SCIENCE
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was still a young man when the Assassins made him an offer
he couldn't refuse.
His hometown had been devastated by Mongol armies, and so, early in the 13th
century, al-Tusi, a promising astronomer and philosopher, came to dwell in the
legendary fortress city of Alamut in the mountains of northern Persia.
He lived among a heretical and secretive sect of Shiite Muslims, whose members
practiced political murder as a tactic and were dubbed hashishinn, legend has
it, because of their use of hashish.
Although al-Tusi later said he had been held in Alamut against his will, the
library there was renowned for its excellence, and al-Tusi thrived there,
publishing works on astronomy, ethics, mathematics and philosophy that marked
him as one of the great intellectuals of his age.
But when the armies of Halagu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, massed outside the
city in 1256, al-Tusi had little trouble deciding where his loyalties lay. He
joined Halagu and accompanied him to Baghdad, which fell in 1258. The grateful
Halagu built him an observatory at Maragha, in what is now northwestern Iran.
Al-Tusi's deftness and ideological flexibility in pursuit of the resources to
do science paid off. The road to modern astronomy, scholars say, leads through
the work that he and his followers performed at Maragha and Alamut in the 13th
and 14th centuries. It is a road that winds from Athens to Alexandria, Baghdad,
Damascus and Córdoba, through the palaces of caliphs and the basement
laboratories of alchemists, and it was traveled not just by astronomy but by
all science.
Commanded by the Koran to seek knowledge and read nature for signs of the
Creator, and inspired by a treasure trove of ancient Greek learning, Muslims
created a society that in the Middle Ages was the scientific center of the
world. The Arabic language was synonymous with learning and science for 500
hundred years, a golden age that can count among its credits the precursors to
modern universities, algebra, the names of the stars and even the notion of
science as an empirical inquiry.
"Nothing in Europe could hold a candle to what was going on in the Islamic
world until about 1600," said Dr. Jamil Ragep, a professor of the history of
science at the University of Oklahoma.
It was the infusion of this knowledge into Western Europe, historians say, that
fueled the Renaissance and the scientific revolution.
"Civilizations don't just clash," said Dr. Abdelhamid Sabra, a retired
professor of the history of Arabic science who taught at Harvard. "They can
learn from each other. Islam is a good example of that." The intellectual
meeting of Arabia and Greece was one of the greatest events in history, he
said. "Its scale and consequences are enormous, not just for Islam but for
Europe and the world."
But historians say they still know very little about this golden age. Few of
the major scientific works from that era have been translated from Arabic, and
thousands of manuscripts have never even been read by modern scholars. Dr.
Sabra characterizes the history of Islamic science as a field that "hasn't even
begun yet."
Islam's rich intellectual history, scholars are at pains and seem saddened and
embarrassed to point out, belies the image cast by recent world events.
Traditionally, Islam has encouraged science and learning. "There is no conflict
between Islam and science," said Dr. Osman Bakar of the Center for Muslim-
Christian Understanding at Georgetown.
"Knowledge is part of the creed," added Dr. Farouk El-Baz, a geologist at
Boston University, who was science adviser to President Anwar el- Sadat of
Egypt. "When you know more, you see more evidence of God."
So the notion that modern Islamic science is now considered "abysmal," as Abdus
Salam, the first Muslim to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, once put it, haunts
Eastern scholars. "Muslims have a kind of nostalgia for the past, when they
could contend that they were the dominant cultivators of science," Dr. Bakar
said. The relation between science and religion has generated much debate in
the Islamic world, he and other scholars said. Some scientists and historians
call for an "Islamic science" informed by spiritual values they say Western
science ignores, but others argue that a religious conservatism in the East has
dampened the skeptical spirit necessary for good science.

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Szkoda , bym z checia poczytala ale moj angielski mi nie wystarczy.

HOW ISLAM....cd

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The Golden Age

When Muhammad's armies swept out from the Arabian peninsula in the seventh and
eighth centuries, annexing territory from Spain to Persia, they also annexed
the works of Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Hippocrates
and other Greek thinkers.
Hellenistic culture had been spread eastward by the armies of Alexander the
Great and by religious minorities, including various Christian sects, according
to Dr. David Lindberg, a medieval science historian at the University of
Wisconsin.
The largely illiterate Muslim conquerors turned to the local intelligentsia to
help them govern, Dr. Lindberg said. In the process, he said, they absorbed
Greek learning that had yet to be transmitted to the West in a serious way, or
even translated into Latin. "The West had a thin version of Greek knowledge,"
Dr. Lindberg said. "The East had it all."
In ninth-century Baghdad the Caliph Abu al-Abbas al-Mamun set up an institute,
the House of Wisdom, to translate manuscripts. Among the first works rendered
into Arabic was the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy's "Great Work," which
described a universe in which the Sun, Moon, planets and stars revolved around
Earth; Al-Magest, as the work was known to Arabic scholars, became the basis
for cosmology for the next 500 years.
Jews, Christians and Muslims all participated in this flowering of science,
art, medicine and philosophy, which endured for at least 500 years and spread
from Spain to Persia. Its height, historians say, was in the 10th and 11th
centuries when three great thinkers strode the East: Abu Ali al- Hasan ibn al-
Haytham, also known as Alhazen; Abu Rayham Muhammad al-Biruni; and Abu Ali al-
Hussein Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna.
Al-Haytham, born in Iraq in 965, experimented with light and vision, laying the
foundation for modern optics and for the notion that science should be based on
experiment as well as on philosophical arguments. "He ranks with Archimedes,
Kepler and Newton as a great mathematical scientist," said Dr. Lindberg.
The mathematician, astronomer and geographer al-Biruni, born in what is now
part of Uzbekistan in 973, wrote some 146 works totaling 13,000 pages,
including a vast sociological and geographical study of India.
Ibn Sina was a physician and philosopher born near Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan)
in 981. He compiled a million-word medical encyclopedia, the Canons of
Medicine, that was used as a textbook in parts of the West until the 17th
century.
Scholars say science found such favor in medieval Islam for several reasons.
Part of the allure was mystical; it was another way to experience the unity of
creation that was the central message of Islam.
"Anyone who studies anatomy will increase his faith in the omnipotence and
oneness of God the Almighty," goes a saying often attributed to Abul-Walid
Muhammad Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes, a 13th-century anatomist and
philosopher.
Knocking on Heaven's Door
Another reason is that Islam is one of the few religions in human history in
which scientific procedures are necessary for religious ritual, Dr. David King,
a historian of science at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt,
pointed out in his book "Astronomy in the Service of Islam," published in 1993.
Arabs had always been knowledgeable about the stars and used them to navigate
the desert, but Islam raised the stakes for astronomy.
The requirement that Muslims face in the direction of Mecca when they pray, for
example, required knowledge of the size and shape of the Earth. The best
astronomical minds of the Muslim world tackled the job of producing tables or
diagrams by which the qibla, or sacred directions, could be found from any
point in the Islamic world. Their efforts rose to a precision far beyond the
needs of the peasants who would use them, noted Dr. King.
Astronomers at the Samarkand observatory, which was founded about 1420 by the
ruler Ulugh Beg, measured star positions to a fraction of a degree, said Dr. El-
Baz.
Islamic astronomy reached its zenith, at least from the Western perspective, in
the 13th and 14th centuries, when al-Tusi and his successors pushed against the
limits of the Ptolemaic world view that had ruled for a millennium.
According to the philosophers, celestial bodies were supposed to move in
circles at uniform speeds. But the beauty of Ptolemy's attempt to explain the
very ununiform motions of planets and the Sun as seen from Earth was marred by
corrections like orbits within orbits, known as epicycles, and geometrical
modifications.
Al-Tusi found a way to restore most of the symmetry to Ptolemy's model by
adding pairs of cleverly designed epicycles to each orbit. Following in al-
Tusi's footsteps, the 14th-century astronomer Ala al-Din Abul-Hasan ibn al-
Shatir had managed to go further and construct a completely symmetrical model.
Copernicus, who overturned the Ptolemaic universe in 1530 by proposing that the
planets revolved around the Sun, expressed ideas similar to the Muslim
astronomers in his early writings. This has led some historians to suggest that
there is a previously unknown link between Copernicus and the Islamic
astronomers, even though neither ibn al- Shatir's nor al-Tusi's work is known
to have ever been translated into Latin, and therefore was presumably unknown
in the West.
Dr. Owen Gingerich, an astronomer and historian of astronomy at Harvard, said
he believed that Copernicus could have developed the ideas independently, but
wrote in Scientific American that the whole idea of criticizing Ptolemy and
reforming his model was part of "the climate of opinion inherited by the Latin
West from Islam."
The Decline of the East
Despite their awareness of Ptolemy's flaws, Islamic astronomers were a long
ways from throwing out his model: dismissing it would have required a
philosophical as well as cosmological revolution. "In some ways it was
beginning to happen," said Dr. Ragep of the University of Oklahoma. But the
East had no need of heliocentric models of the universe, said Dr. King of
Frankfurt. All motion being relative, he said, it was irrelevant for the
purposes of Muslim rituals whether the sun went around the Earth or vice versa.
From the 10th to the 13th century Europeans, especially in Spain, were
translating Arabic works into Hebrew and Latin "as fast as they could," said
Dr. King. The result was a rebirth of learning that ultimately transformed
Western civilization.
Why didn't Eastern science go forward as well? "Nobody has answered that
question satisfactorily," said Dr. Sabra of Harvard. Pressed, historians offer
up a constellation of reasons. Among other things, the Islamic empire began to
be whittled away in the 13th century by Crusaders from the West and Mongols
from the East.
Christians reconquered Spain and its magnificent libraries in Córdoba and
Toledo, full of Arab learning. As a result, Islamic centers of learning began
to lose touch with one another and with the West, leading to a gradual erosion
in two of the main pillars of science — communication and financial support.
In the West, science was able to pay for itself in new technology like the
steam engine and to attract financing from industry, but in the East it
remained dependent on the patronage and curiosity of sultans and caliphs.
Further, the Ottomans, who took over the Arabic lands in the 16th century, were
builders and conquerors, not thinkers, said Dr. El- Baz of Boston University,
and support waned. "You cannot expect the science to be excellent while the
society is not," he said.
Others argue, however, that Islamic science seems to decline only when viewed
through Western, secular eyes. "It's possible to live without an industrial
revolution if you have enough camels and food," Dr. King said.
"Why did Muslim science decli

obcieło kawałek

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"Why did Muslim science decline?" he said. "That's a very Western question. It
flourished for a thousand years — no civilization on Earth has flourished that
long in that way."

HOW ISLAM...dok.

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Islamic Science Wars

Humiliating encounters with Western colonial powers in the 19th century
produced a hunger for Western science and technology, or at least the economic
and military power they could produce, scholars say. Reformers bent on
modernizing Eastern educational systems to include Western science could argue
that Muslims would only be reclaiming their own, since the West had inherited
science from the Islamic world to begin with.
In some ways these efforts have been very successful. "In particular countries
the science syllabus is quite modern," said Dr. Bakar of Georgetown, citing
Malaysia, Jordan and Pakistan, in particular. Even in Saudi Arabia, one of the
most conservative Muslim states, science classes are conducted in English, Dr.
Sabra said.
Nevertheless, science still lags in the Muslim world, according to Dr. Pervez
Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani physicist and professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in
Islamabad, who has written on Islam and science. According to his own informal
survey, included in his 1991 book "Islam and Science, Religious Orthodoxy and
the Battle for Rationality," Muslims are seriously underrepresented in science,
accounting for fewer than 1 percent of the world's scientists while they
account for almost a fifth of the world's population. Israel, he reports, has
almost twice as many scientists as the Muslim countries put together.
Among other sociological and economic factors, like the lack of a middle class,
Dr. Hoodbhoy attributes the malaise of Muslim science to an increasing emphasis
over the last millennium on rote learning based on the Koran.
"The notion that all knowledge is in the Great Text is a great disincentive to
learning," he said. "It's destructive if we want to create a thinking person,
someone who can analyze, question and create." Dr. Bruno Guideroni, a Muslim
who is an astrophysicist at the National Center for Scientific Research in
Paris, said, "The fundamentalists criticize science simply because it is
Western."
Other scholars said the attitude of conservative Muslims to science was not so
much hostile as schizophrenic, wanting its benefits but not its world
view. "They may use modern technology, but they don't deal with issues of
religion and science." said Dr. Bakar.
One response to the invasion of Western science, said the scientists, has been
an effort to "Islamicize" science by portraying the Koran as a source of
scientific knowledge.
Dr. Hoodbhoy said such groups had criticized the concept of cause and effect.
Educational guidelines once issued by the Institute for Policy Studies in
Pakistan, for example, included the recommendation that physical effects not be
related to causes.
For example, it was not Islamic to say that combining hydrogen and oxygen makes
water. "You were supposed to say," Dr. Hoodbhoy recounted, "that when you bring
hydrogen and oxygen together then by the will of Allah water was created."
Even Muslims who reject fundamentalism, however, have expressed doubts about
the desirability of following the Western style of science, saying that it
subverts traditional spiritual values and promotes materialism and alienation.
"No science is created in a vacuum," said Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a science
historian, author, philosopher and professor of Islamic studies at George
Washington University, during a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology a few years ago. "Science arose under particular circumstances in
the West with certain philosophical presumptions about the nature of reality."
Dr. Muzaffar Iqbal, a chemist and the president and founder of the Center for
Islam and Science in Alberta, Canada, explained: "Modern science doesn't claim
to address the purpose of life; that is outside the domain. In the Islamic
world, purpose is integral, part of that life."
Most working scientists tend to scoff at the notion that science can be divided
into ethnic, religious or any other kind of flavor. There is only one universe.
The process of asking and answering questions about nature, they say,
eventually erases the particular circumstances from which those questions arise.
In his book, Dr. Hoodbhoy recounts how Dr. Salam, Dr. Steven Weinberg, now at
the University of Texas, and Dr. Sheldon Glashow at Harvard, shared the Nobel
Prize for showing that electromagnetism and the so- called weak nuclear force
are different manifestations of a single force.
Dr. Salam and Dr. Weinberg had devised the same contribution to that theory
independently, he wrote, despite the fact that Dr. Weinberg is an atheist while
Dr. Salam was a Muslim who prayed regularly and quoted from the Koran. Dr.
Salam confirmed the account in his introduction to the book, describing himself
as "geographically and ideologically remote" from Dr. Weinberg.
"Science is international," said Dr. El-Baz. "There is no such thing as Islamic
science. Science is like building a big building, a pyramid. Each person puts
up a block. These blocks have never had a religion. It's irrelevant, the color
of the guy who put up the block."

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

Jak islam stracil wigor intelektualny...

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Dzieki za artykul. Potwierdza to co juz ludzie pisali na tym
forum ze islam stracil swoja pozycje intelektualna jakies
500-600 lat temu. Troche szkoda, bo nie mielibysmy tylu klopotow
z Talibami i Talibo-podobnymi. Obwinianie Hiszpanow za upadek
nauki arabskiej jest nieporozumieniem. Bardziej przekonuje argument
ze to Turcy wbili gwozdz do trumny.

Tak czy inaczej widzc ze islam rozwijal sie w kontakcie z innymi
kulturami, nie w konfrontacji z nimi...

Salman Rushdie

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A WAR THAT PRESENTS US ALL WITH A CRISIS OF FAITH

Salman Rushdie on Islam versus Islamism

Saturday November 3, 2001
The Guardian

'This isn't about Islam." The world's leaders have been repeating this mantra
for weeks, partly in the virtuous hope of deterring reprisal attacks on
innocent Muslims living in the west, partly because, if the US is to maintain
its coalition against terror, it can't afford to allege that Islam and
terrorism are in any way related.

The trouble with this necessary disclaimer is that it isn't true. If this isn't
about Islam, why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of Osama bin
Laden and al-Qaida? Why did those 10,000 men armed with swords and axes mass on
the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, answering some mullah's call to jihad? Why
are the war's first British casualties three Muslim men who died fighting on
the Taliban side?

Why the routine anti-Semitism of the much-repeated Islamic slander that "the
Jews" arranged the hits on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, with the
oddly self-deprecating explanation offered by the Taliban leadership, among
others, that Muslims could not have the technological knowhow or organisational
sophistication to pull off such a feat? Why does Imran Khan, the Pakistani ex-
sports star turned politician, demand to be shown the evidence of al-Qaida's
guilt, while apparently turning a deaf ear to the self-incriminating statements
of al-Qaida's own spokesmen (there will be a rain of aircraft from the skies,
Muslims in the west are warned not to live or work in tall buildings, etc)? Why
all the talk about US military infidels desecrating the sacred soil of Saudi
Arabia, if some sort of definition of what is sacred is not at the heart of the
present discontents?

Let's start calling a spade a spade. Of course this is "about Islam". The
question is: what exactly does that mean? After all, most religious belief
isn't very theological. Most Muslims are not profound Koranic analysts. For a
vast number of "believing" Muslim men, "Islam" stands, in a jumbled, half-
examined way, not only for the fear of God - the fear more than the love, one
suspects - but also for a cluster of customs, opinions and prejudices that
include their dietary practices, the sequestration or near-sequestration
of "their" women, the sermons delivered by their mullah of choice, a loathing
of modern society in general, riddled as it is with music, godlessness and sex,
and a more particularised loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own
immediate surroundings could be taken over - "westoxicated" - by the liberal,
western-style way of life.

Highly motivated organisations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of Muslim
women to be heard!) have been engaged, over the past 30 years or so, in growing
radical political movements out of this mulch of "belief". These Islamists - we
must get used to this word, "Islamists", meaning those who are engaged upon
such political projects, and learn to distinguish it from the more general, and
politically neutral, "Muslim" - include the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the
bloodsoaked combatants of the FIS and GIA in Algeria, the Shia revolutionaries
of Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is their great helper, and the fruit of their
efforts is paranoia. This paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, "infidels",
for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing
of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest-
growing version of Islam in the world.

This is not wholly to go along with Samuel Huntington's thesis about the "clash
of civilisations", for the simple reason that the Islamists' project is not
only turned against the west and "the Jews", but also against their fellow
Islamists. Whatever the public rhetoric, there's little love lost between the
Taliban and Iranian regimes. Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as
deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the west. Nevertheless,
it would be absurd to deny that this self-exculpatory, paranoiac Islam is an
ideology with widespread appeal.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing a novel about power struggles in a
fictionalised Pakistan, it was already de rigueur in the Muslim world to blame
all its troubles on the west and, in particular, the United States. Then, as
now, some of these criticisms were well founded; no room here to rehearse the
geopolitics of the cold war, and America's frequently damaging foreign
policy "tilts", to use the Kissinger term, towards (or away from) this or that
temporarily useful (or disapproved of) nation state, or America's role in the
installation and deposition of sundry unsavoury leaders and regimes.

But I wanted then to ask a question which is no less important now: suppose we
say that the ills of our societies are not primarily America's fault - that we
are to blame for our own failings? How would we understand them then? Might we
not, by accepting our own responsibility for our problems, begin to learn to
solve them for ourselves?

Interestingly, many Muslims, as well as secularist analysts with roots in the
Muslim world, are beginning to ask such questions now. In recent weeks, Muslim
voices have everywhere been raised against the obscurantist "hijack" of their
religion. Yesterday's hotheads (among them Yusuf Islam, aka Cat Stevens) are
improbably repackaging themselves as today's pussycats. An Iraqi writer quotes
an earlier Iraqi satirist: "The disease that is in us, is from us." A British
Muslim writes that "Islam has become its own enemy". A Lebanese writer friend,
returning from Beirut, tells me that in the aftermath of September 11, public
criticism of Islamism has become much more outspoken. Many commentators have
spoken of the need for a reformation in the Muslim world.

I'm reminded of the way non-communist socialists used to distance themselves
from the tyrannous "actually existing" socialism of the Soviets; nevertheless,
the first stirrings of this counter- project are of great significance. If
Islam is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be encouraged until
they swell into a roar.

Many of them speak of another Islam - their personal, private faith - and the
restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal - its depoliticisation -
is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern.
The only aspect of modernity in which the terrorists are interested is
technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned against its makers.
If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the
secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which
their countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001