Symposium on Science and the Muslim Civilisation

The KSS feels that there is a growing need in the country to foment debate on fundamental discourses that sufficiently overlap with our national conscience and are also of far-reaching social and intellectual verve. The tradition prevailing in our science curricula is one of insulation with social and historical traditions. As a result, there is a pressing need to broaden a wider historical perspective in most of our intellectual exercises. Recently, there has been an upsurge of literature and international debate on any relation between Islamic civilization and modern sciences, ranging from extreme positions such as “Islamization of Science” to the “Marginalization of Islam”. Religion and culture are the two values deeply engrained in our society and as these values come face to face with modern science, deep questions need to be asked. One such question is the question of history and sociology. However, these discussions are mostly limited to academic circles and are awaiting a wider appreciation inside our country. In the same spirit, the KSS feels that it is important to organize a public symposium touching upon the historical crossroads between Islam, Muslim socities and science.

George Saliba is one of the leading authorities on this subject. Currently, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Columbia, New York, Saliba has written extensively and spoken frequently on the topic with passion as well as critical academic scholarship. He is a recipient of a number of awards and honours, including the History of Science Prize given by the Third World Academy of Science in 1993, and the History of Astronomy Prize in 1996 from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science. He is author of the books: “The Origin and Development of Arabic Scientific Thought” (Arabic, 1998), “A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories During the Golden Age of Islam” (1994), “The Arts of Fire : Islamic Influences on Glass and Ceramics of the Italian Renaissance” (2004), “The Crisis of the Abbasid Caliphate” (1985), “Planispheric astrolabes from the National Museum of American History” (1984) and “Islamic Science in the Making of the European Renaissance” (2007). He is also an inspiring and motivating speaker.

Dr. Syed Nomanul Haq, who studied electronic engineering as an undergraduate in England, is trained at University College London and at Harvard in the field of Islamic intellectual history with particular concentration on the history of science. His first book, Names, Natures, and Things, published by Kluwer in the Netherlands and England, is a philosophical and textual analysis of history of alchemy, and since then he has published and taught widely in the history of sceince disciple. His writings have appeared in such prestigious journals as Nature on the one hand, and Isis on the other. He is also a recipient of the Templeton Year 2000 Science and Religion Award and is a member of the International Society of Science and Religion based at Cambridge University. After having been on the faculty of two Ivy League Universities—Brown and the University of Pennsylvania—and serving as Scholar-in-Residence at the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, he is currently a senior faculty member at LUMS.

Basit Koshul received his PhD in 2003 from Drew University, specializing in the sociology of religion. He taught for four years at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota and joined the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS in 2006. His areas of interests include the relationship between religion and modernity, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, the sociology of culture and the contemporary Islam-West encounter. He has a number of publications to his credit, including a book titled The Postmodern Significance of Max Weber's Legacy: Disenchanting Disenchantment (Palgrave, 2005). He has co-edited a collection of essays titled Scripture, Reason and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter: Studying the Other, Understanding the Self (Palgrave, 2007). He is in the final stage of completing his second PhD (from the University of Virginia). The dissertation begins with an integration of Max Weber’s methodology of the social sciences and the philosophy of Charles Sanders Perice. It goes on to show that the conversation between Weber and Peirce opens up the possibility of the conceptual integration of science, philosophy and religion.

There are no deadlines for registering for the symposium, no registration fee and the event is open to public.

This illustrated talk examines the often repeated characterization of the role of Islamic science as preserving the Greek scientific legacy. It will demonstrate with concrete examples the extent to which Greek science had to be transformed in order to respond to ritual and cultural requirements of Islam, thus critiquing that science and eventually replacing it with a science that was more scientifically consistent. It was this transformed Islamic science that inspired later on the Renaissance scientists.

Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance
(Dr. George A. Saliba)

This illustrated talk will examine the scientific ideas that were first developed in the Islamic world, especially those dealing with planetary theories, and later used in the Latin sources that were produced during the European Renaissance, and in particular in the works of Copernicus. All the evidence for these ideas comes from pages of original Arabic and Latin manuscripts.

Double Incoherence and Double Jeopardy:
Retelling the Story of Attitudes to Science in Islamic Societies
(Dr. Syed Nomanul Haq)

Living as we do in the twilight of the Enlightenment, a simple ready-made myth about the career of science in Islamic societies still lurks about. This myth has two pseudo-historical elements that fit nicely into a comforting ideological framework. These two elements can be described as reductionism and double-marginalism. The first has it that any achievement made by scientists in the classical Islamic world is reducible to a linear growth of Greek science; the second that those who engaged in genuine science in the Islamic culture were marginal to their society’s mainstream, and that science itself is marginal to Islam. It is an inevitable expression of this alien nature of science in relation to the Arabo-Islamic milieu, so the pseudo-history announces, that Ghazali wrote his Incoherence of the Philophers, an attack that was refuted by Ibn Rushd’s Incoherence of the Incoherence: but Ibn Rushd was fighting a losing battle, and science came to a grinding halt after Ghazali in the early 12th century. My lecture promises to revisit this story and to demonstrate (1) that it is historically absurd and that (2) it stands on the ideological ground that science—that rational, naturalistic study of nature which is doing wonders for us—is essentially a Western phenomenon.

With Friends Like These Who Needs Enemies:
The Irrationality of Supporting Science by Attacking Religion
(Dr. Basit B. Koshul)

A number of recently published books claiming to support and defend science in the face of mounting threats from the dark forces of religion have made it to different best-selling lists. Almost invariably their support and defense of science is premised on (or requires) an attack on religion. The line of reasoning adopted in these books is based on the claim that science equals rationality and religion equals irrationality. Looking at this argument from the perspective of Max Weber's study of the historical development of rationality it is clear that this argument is held together by an insidious sleight of hand—changing the definition of "rationality" in the middle of the argument and then changing it again just before the conclusion. Weber's thoroughly researched findings at the beginning of the 20th century shed light on the current discussion in two ways: a) his research lays bare the intellectual chicanery of those whose support of science necessitates an attack on religion, b) his insights demonstrate that this irrational and unethical attack on religion is actually a frontal assault on the integrity of science. In short, Weber's work helps us to see that science has very little to fear from (some of) its enemies in comparison to threat that it faces from (many of) its friends.