Science and Civilization in Islam pdf download

Science and Civilization in Islam by Seyyed Hossein Nasr With a Preface by Giorgio De Santillana

SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN ISLAM

The portrayal of Islamic science which follows may surprise some readers both West and East, if for very different reasons.

There can be no question as to the author’s qualifications or his familiarity with our Western point of view.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian by birth, breeding, and early education, also studied in Europe and graduated in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he developed in his undergraduate years a strong interest in the history of scientific thought as, I was teaching it.

He went on then to Harvard for graduate studies in geology and geophysics, but soon decided to make the history of science a career, and obtained a Ph.D. in the subject in 1958. He has been teaching it ever since at the University of Tehran.

His Western background makes it all the more significant that we should find here the passionate, direct, and uncompromising statement of a modern Muslim, who deeply believes in the coming rebirth of his own civilization.

His text is a new departure in many ways. Islamic culture is too often presented as the indispensable link between Antiquity and our Middle Ages, but the achievement of its historic mission is implied when it has handed on the texts and techniques of the Greeks.

This is a way of turning a great civilization into a service department of Western history. It is the merit of Dr. Nasr to have shown convincingly that the mind and culture of Islam embrace a far wider arc, and that the cultivation of the Greek heritage is only a phase in the development of essentially independent thought.

What is central in other histories becomes here incidental. The figure of Aristotle is commonly accepted as the great shaping influence of Islamic thought.

He was for the Muslims “the Philosopher” par excellence, his systems and logical dis­tinctions harmonizing so well with their taste for encyclopedism and grammatical sharpness.

Yet for the author, “philosophy” in that sense remains a foreign body, and Aristotle is shipped back unceremoniously to the West where he belongs, together with Averroes, his greatest disciple.

The fact is that for Dr. Nasr Islamic thinking is still pro fondly alive, and Aristotle is only a monument of the past. No Neo-Thomist nostalgias here.

If there is something enduring, an immortal spirit in Muslim thought, it is, in the mind of Dr. Nasr, to be found in its retreat from the rationalizing and secular attitude of Hellenistic tradition-in its retreat even from the trials and tumult of history-to become more fully conscious of its own vocation as a Near Eastern religious com­munity.

If Greek thought had fueled the phase of splendor and expansion, there is a further phase which to the outside (critical) historian may look like stagnation and squalid decay, but seen from the inside may reveal itself as a maturing of consciousness, the moment of spiritual insight and timeless Hikmah (wisdom) to replace time-bound discursive philosophy.

And indeed in Islam, we see, from the time when it recedes from the forestage of history, the growth of an imposing new metaphysics which took the name of Sufism, in which the Greek Neoplatonic element inspires the unitary vision of Justice, Harmony, and controlled Order extending to the whole cosmos and reflecting back on man’s life.

From the earliest beginnings of Near Eastern thought, the cosmos is regarded as a unified entity that embraces the whole of being; so that human societies have to reflect the divine rulership. This is what endures.

Islamic philosophy makes its way through Greek science, through the emanations and bits of intelligence of Plotinus, to concentrate upon the one divine principle from whom all being is derived, in whose overwhelming Presence all reality is dissolved into the “world of similitude,” all conscious existence becomes a Surrender­ Islam.

Directly from that Presence issues the Prophet, the “Cosmic Man,” and what he institutes is as complete and immovable as the Cubic Stone of the Kaaba.

This is the vision, and it implies a complete order and hierarchy in the Universe, from the ninth heaven to the rock buried deep in the earth, and that order is reflected in the law and the order of society.

As temporal justice and tangible society decay beyond repair, the mind of the sage retreats into the invisible order entrusted to God’s chosen ones, the unknown Saints in their hierarchy, ever headed by the mystical Pole, the Quf b, who still protect the Community of the Faithful.

Thus the four-square integrity of the whole remains in­ variant, but with the passing of time, a growing part of it is removed from the visible to the suprasensible realm. Dr. Nasr has shown that the withdrawal begins, not with the fracturing of the political body of Islam, but before it, in the midst of the golden age of success, before the ascendancy of the meta­ physical doctrines of Sufism.

 The change belongs thus to the intrinsic nature of the Community, and a unitary evolution is seen over the whole arc of time to the present.

Something very similar occurred in the Christian West if we are to believe so Roman Catholic a writer as Franois Mauriac, who wrote that Christendom had been changing from a visible cathedral into a stellar system.

This line of evolution is conceived as beginning very early in the life of the new faith and continuing right into our own times.

It is the story of a thought which goes on forever inside an orthodoxy and never breaks out sharply into secularism as has happened with us. This is also, we should add, what allows the religious ideas of. other Eastern cultures to converge into it through the centuries.

The transition from the time-bound into the timeless, from reason to the suprarational, does not take place at one point either, nor does it coincide simply with political decay, as appears too often in the cliches about his­ tory. It did not in the Near East any more than it did in Antiquity.

 In showing the early thickening web of suprarational elements in <Umar Khayyam and Avicenna, Dr. Nasr has proved his thesis.

One wishes only at times that he had not drawn so tight the web of orthodox piety as to leave in an uncomfortable and slightly alien position, along the course of time, men who stand out more clearly as representing the scientific temper.

These men do not belong to the phase of withdrawal, but to the phase of world leadership; they are good Muslims and true, and a glory of their civilization. Therefore, since this is a his­ tory centered on science, I feel they should have been presented in bolder relief.

 In al-Birilni, the greatest scientist of Islam, we meet a mind in no wise different from the Western lay scientific mind at its best. His religious faith is secure but carried lightly, without protestations.

 It does not impede his freedom of judgment, his love of fact, his free-wheeling curiosity, his easy sarcasm, his strict and watchful cult of intellectual integrity.

We recognize soon, in al-Birilni, the Scientist without qualifications as we mean him, as he has been under­ stood again and again, and the same may be said of the other great men of his ilk–observers, experimenters, analysts, such men as Rhazes, Alhazen, al-Battani, Averroes.

This is what the Islamic intellect was able to bring forth during the golden age, as well as later, and they surely need no apologies for their perhaps-a-shade-too-secular attitude, nor deserve the hint that they were out of step with their own culture.