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Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History

By Ahmad Dallal (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University
Press, 2010), 256 pp. Price PB £18.99. EAN 978–0300159110.

I often describe the field of ‘Islam and Science’ as a cultural and intellectual space
in three dimensions: a) the historical developments of science during the Islamic
civilization; b) the conceptual discussions of conflict, harmony, or separation
between Islam and modern science; c) the issues of practical application of
science in Islamic life (ranging from the calculation of prayer times to in vitro
fertilization and euthanasia). Ahmad Dallal’s book, though rather concise,
manages to encompass all three dimensions in a grand narrative and with a bold
thesis. Indeed, while surveying the major trends of scientific activity from its
emergence in the early Islamic civilization to the present time, he takes special
interest in at least one specific case of application of science and intersection with
religious rules (the direction of the qibla), and by the last chapter he dabbles in
the conceptual issues raised by Darwinism and ‘the new astronomy’ (i.e. the
heliocentric revolution).
Dallal’s scholarship and erudition are impeccable and manifest throughout the
text and in the footnotes in particular, where references are extensive and nearly
complete. His economy of style has resulted in an elegant and eloquent text, but
the shortness of the book has not quite served him best, for it forced him to make
some generalizations and draw some conclusions from just one or two cases and
to jump sometimes over long periods of time where developments were not
necessarily linear. He is aware of this, acknowledges it, and justifies it on the basis
of his grand historical narrative. The footnotes are often very rich, and many of
them should have been made part of the main text, instead of forcing the reader
to jump back and forth. In fact, in some cases it seems the footnotes were added
after a second reading, for clarification purposes, as when (in the first few pages
of the book) the author starts explaining how the qibla is determined
astronomically but realizes his explanation is confusing; instead of rewriting
the paragraph, he simply adds a footnote that begins: ‘in other words . . .’.
The grand narrative that Dallal has produced is described by the author
himself: ‘This book is an attempt to situate the Islamic culture of science in
relation to social and cultural trends in Muslim societies’ (p. xi). He adds: ‘. . . the
epistemological question that I shall be addressing in this book: the relative
authority of religious knowledge and scientific knowledge’ (p. 3).
The thesis he is attempting to prove, however, is never stated clearly, but any
careful reader will figure it out, especially since Dallal attempts to draw
conclusions toward it at the end of each chapter. What he tries to show is that
science in the Islamic civilization was slowly but successfully extricating itself
from the double embrace of (Aristotelian) philosophy and religion. Dallal clearly
believes that any link, whether strong or weak, made between science and
religion or philosophy is counter-productive and regressive. He writes: ‘When
Muslims were the main producers of science in the world, they did not advocate
wedding science and religion’ (p. 170).
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The book is divided into four chapters: ‘Beginnings and Beyond’; ‘Science and
Philosophy’; ‘Science and Religion’; and ‘In the Shadow of Modernity’.
In the first chapter, Dallal attempts to account for the genesis of science in the
Islamic civilization and determine the causes of its emergence and development.
In this exploration, his goals are: (1) to negate the widespread claim that Islamic
science was produced after and due to the translation movement, and that it was
merely a continuation of Greek science; (2) to show that science in the Islamic era
had its own guild, research programme, and vitality; (3) to establish the
independence of scientific views from, and sometimes their precedence over,
religious ones.
For the first goal, he relies heavily on recent books by George Saliba and
Dimitri Gutas; the former has insisted that ‘the main impetus for the rise of the
Arabo-Islamic sciences [was] the Arabization of the administrative apparatus
during the mid-eighth century’; Gutas has seen the driving force in ‘the imperial
ideology adopted by the early 6Abbasid caliphs’ (p. 14). Dallal insists that a
scientific culture had already emerged within Islamic society when translations
started to be produced in large numbers. For the second goal, he describes the
‘research program’ that was followed by Muslim astronomers after it was
established that the Ptolemaic model was flawed and inconsistent with
Aristotelian principles (an interesting discussion is presented on the two paths
that were then followed: reforming Ptolemy’s astronomy to conform to
Aristotle’s principles or establishing the independence of astronomy from
philosophy). The third goal is pursued by showing how the qibla problem was
in the end recognized to be almost entirely the province of scientists.
As we will find in the other chapters, the problem with the first part is the
brevity of the treatment, which makes the author appear to jump to conclusions
that he has not reached convincingly; for example, it is not shown that ‘[t]here is
ample evidence of a high degree of mobility and efficient and speedy
communication among scientists working in various regions of the Muslim
world’ (p. 49), that ‘[d]emonstrably, the culture of science struck deep roots in
classical Muslim societies’ (p. 50), that ‘communities of scientists [. . .] had a
sense of collective, professional identity [with] shared codes of practice, canons
of study, and research agendas and projects . . .’ (p. 50).
The second chapter aims to show that science, at least astronomy (the ‘single
discipline’ he uses as a ‘prism’), succeeded in extracting itself from philosophy.
What ensues is a very interesting discussion, where the author displays a masterly
ability to analyse and draw conclusions from various (ancient) texts. He presents
various trends: Ibn al-Haytham wanting to adhere more strongly to Aristotelian
cosmology, Ibn S;n: wanting to subject astronomical models to principles of
natural science, al-B;r<n; wanting to critique Aristotelian natural philosophy on
the basis of Ptolemy’s cosmology. But science, mathematics (geometric
principles), physics (natural philosophy), and philosophy proper are often
mixed in the discussions by the various actors. Still, Dallal concludes that
astronomy ultimately established its independence from philosophical/physical
principles, subjecting itself only to ‘geometric principles’, even though assuming
and insisting on circular motion as a supra-geometric principle.
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The third chapter further pursues the aim of establishing the separation thesis.
Dallal reads much into the statement by al-B;r<n; that ‘the Qur8:n does not
articulate on this subject [of astronomy], or on any other [field of] necessary
[knowledge], any assertion that would require erratic interpretation in order to
harmonize it with that which is known by necessity’ (pp. 114–15). He thus
quickly concludes (on the same page) that ‘the Qur8:n, and therefore religion
more broadly, does not interfere in the business of science, nor does science
infringe on the realm of religion’.
Two fields of religious scholarship are examined in this chapter, with the aim of
detecting any mingling in or separation from science: tafs;r (exegesis) and kal:m
(theology). In the tafs;r section, the author focuses on Fakhr al-D;n al-R:z;
(d. 1209), whose famous commentary on the Qur8:n contained many references
to natural science; still, Dallal shows cases where al-R:z; does not use his
scientific knowledge (e.g. the sphericity of the earth) to push for one exegetical
interpretation or another; thus, he concludes that science was not really used in
3afs;r, that the treatment of the 750 verses dealing with the natural order was
only intended to produce an awe of the Creator. The kal:m section also focuses
on one author, al-Īj; (d. 1355); surprisingly, the works of the Mu6tazila, where
theology, physics, and astronomy/cosmology are known to have been thoroughly
mixed, are not mentioned at all. Still, the same conclusion of science’s
independence from, or even authority over, religion, is quickly reached.
The last chapter addresses the modern period. First, to connect with the
preceding chapters and keep the coherence of the grand narrative, Dallal
discusses the decline of the Islamic civilization—and science within it—and
insists that the causes must be found in external historical developments, not in
internal imperatives. He then examines two issues of modern discussion between
science and Islam, the ‘new astronomy’ and Darwinism, scans the discourse on
Science and the Qur8:n, and briefly reviews the contemporary critiques by
leading Muslim intellectuals (Sardar and Nasr) on modern science.
Regarding the Copernican revolution, Dallal is surprised that the influence of
the Maragha school on Copernicus has not been hailed more, but one should
recall first that much of that scholarship is recent and confined to specialists, and
more importantly that since Kepler and Newton showed those models (al-F<s;’s
couple, Ibn al-Sh:3ir’s geometries) to be irrelevant and useless once elliptical
orbits and equations based on gravity were put together, that influence only has
historical value. More important, perhaps, is the work of al-Q<shj;, who
addressed the question of the earth’s motion, which is directly relevant to both
the (real) revolution of Copernicus and the philosophical and religious issues of
the centrality (or not) of the earth.
The analysis of the modern Islamic discourse on Darwinism contains some
weaknesses. First, like most studies in English, his discussion of ‘Islamic
creationism’ is limited to the Turkish movement of Harun Yahya and his BAV
institution, leading to such statements as ‘the Islamic creationist movement
originated two decades ago in Turkey’ and ‘today’s Islamic creationist movement
seems to aspire to serve as the international arm of the American creationist
movement’, whereas we know that literature attacking Darwin and promoting a
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creationist scenario has existed (in Arabic at least) for many decades, very few
Arab (creationist) religious speakers and writers have any knowledge of the
American literature and tactics on the subject, and creationism is rampant and
very strong today in the Arab world and beyond.
On the subject of science and the Qur8:n, Dallal is of course rightly critical of
the very popular Qur8:nic i6j:z 6ilm; (‘scientific miraculousness’) trend, but he
makes no distinction between that and tafs;r 6ilm; (‘scientific exegesis’), as many
authors (for and against i6j:z) do. This is because he wants no connection of any
kind to be made between science and the Qur8:n, even a conceptual one,
asserting that ‘[o]nce a correlation between the Qur8:n and science is asserted, a
small extension of the same logic leads to the arbitrary exercise of [i6j:z]’. He has
no advice for the many Muslims who are struck by the hundreds of verses that
deal with natural phenomena and ask: how do we put these alongside the
modern knowledge we have received from science?
In summary, this is an important book, with a grand narrative and a bold
thesis. It is very well written, though one can find weaknesses, biases, or short-
cuts here and there. It is an important book precisely because it proposes a
viewpoint: separation between science and religion, and even philosophy, is not
only the correct course to follow but also the historical path Muslim thinkers
took over Islamic history viewed overall. This thesis needs to be discussed and
examined in light of the historical record, a fuller treatment that looks at many
more viewpoints and avoids some of the short-cuts or swift generalizations.
Dallal is still to be applauded for having produced an essay that forces us all to
think and argue the merits of his views.
Nidhal Guessoum
American University of Sharjah, UAE
E-mail: nguessoum@aus.edu
doi:10.1093/jis/etr035
Published online 3 July 2011