Where is Islamic Science?
Perhaps, most ask, “Where is islamic science in the modern era?” This question immediately tugs the heart of islamic civilisation. Nonetheless, actually we can still reconsider such a dismaying question. Our reconsideration concerning that question is a sort of questioning what islamic science means. I personally feel incensed and aggrieved when poked in by the question, but I should reevaluate what it does mean so as to make the question unambiguous in the front of our clarification of it.
I have ruminated on the question and arrived at one clarity that what the question means that, firstly, where science that is done by muslims is; secondly, what (the doctrine of) Islam has contributed to persuading or inducing muslim society to build islamic science; third, the questions being a sort of sarcasm that Islam and muslims cannot construct their unique science based upon the doctrine of Islam.
We have to have be in the same agreement that what “science” purports above is none other than “natural science” such as biology, physics, astronomy, and the like. To settle such a dismaying question, we need to reexamine whether or not the question is proper and apt to be highlighted onto the characateristics of modern science itself, that modern science does neither include teistic point of view on which the doctrine of Islam anchors, nor visit any holy book as one of its sources.
The characters of modern science itself annul the question itself on the grounds that there is not any doctrine of religion which can be permitted to interfere the objectivity of science which lays on the strictly empirical observation. I do not know why the question can still emerge, whereas if we really understand the character of modern science, we can easily and quickly catch its mistake along with and within that question. Accordingly, we need to firstly reconstruct the face or character of modern science so as to propose the question properly.
Implicitly, the question sounds undue enough and disproportionate enough to be responded. Then, the second accusation that questions the contribution of Islam in modern science has to be regarded as superficial query due to the lack of historical reading with regard to the landscape of historicity of modern science itself. Many historians have declared and admitted a large number of the contributions of Islam to science.
It is undeniable that modern science is not one big bang and suddenly becomes completed as such, given the fact that the age of scientific revolution is a result of the act of translating and learning all Islamic civilisation had codified. Objectively, modern science is much indebted to the medieval civilisation of Islam that has been built by Islamic scholars and scientists such as Averroes, Avicenna, al-Biruni, al-Haitam, and Umar Khayyam — to mention several.
Eventually, we arrive in the third question, which is, according to me, indeed disturbing muslims themselves. I think islamic scholars recently endeavour to conseptualise a science which can be called “islamic science”. Unluckily, that can trespass on the characters of modern science, can’t it? Therefore, we need to go deeper to check the basis (or bases) of philosophical premises of modern science. That is its worldview underlying what science in fact is, by which we can point out that science has metaphysical ground on which and only on which science can undergo.
Subsequently, we can position islamic science as one of the kinds of theistic science. Even though modern science does not permit any single experiment based upon such a theistic viewpoint, we know that science has a huge assumption which is none than metaphysical assumption, that is materialism. Materialism is the only ground that enables and endures the existence of modern science. That is, we cannot deny, a unique form of modern science, but we cannot also deny that science is inclusive of curiosity to keep pursuing the truth.[]
