Islam, science and Muslims
Islam & Science , June, 2003 by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
The understanding of the relationship between Islam and science is intimately connected with many foundational issues. In this wide-ranging conversation Seyyed Hossein Nasr shares his ideas, hopes and aspirations for the Islamic polity. How can the Muslim world successfully come to terms with challenges posed by a science and technology-driven era without losing the Islamic characteristics of its civilization? What are the ways to revive the Islamic tradition of learning? How can Muslims living in the West contribute toward this revival?
Keywords: Islamic intellectual tradition; spiritual ambience; Islamic civilization; critique of modern science and technology; authentic madrasah system; revival of Islamic tradition of learning; cosmology; Faustian science; origins.
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Iqbal: For more than two centuries, Muslims have faced a dilemma which seems to be insurmountable: in a world driven by science and technology produced by the West, how can the Muslim world cope with numerous problems requiring scientific and technological expertise without destroying the Islamic characteristics of its civilization? The answer suggested by the nineteenth century reformers was to import Western science and technology, without importing the value-system and the worldview that characterizes the modern West. Their premise was based on the notion that science and technology are value-free. On the other hand, you have always emphasized the need to ensure the preservation of the "Islamic space"--that unique aspect of Islamic civilization that is reflected in its relationship with the Transcendent. But this formulation has been severely criticized for lacking practicality. What is your response to this criticism?
Nasr: In the Name of Allah, the Infinitely Good, the All-Merciful. This is a vast question that has many dimensions. There is a practical aspect and a theoretical aspect. As far as the practical is concerned, I accept that if, let us say, someone has malaria in Bangladesh, we should try to find the best vaccine against malaria. As for the various forms of Western science--whether it is in the form of medicine or electronics or other things that are mostly technology rather than science but nevertheless applied science--that are coming to the Muslim world, they are on a certain level, impossible to avoid by governments. No government can say we will not have telephone or something like that--there is no doubt about that. However, there is a much more profound issue that is involved. Most of the centers of power only concentrate on this question, with the idea that more science means more power and hence the Muslim world should try to follow as much as possible the developments of technology and match Western technology and science and outdo the West, like the Japanese who make better cars than those made in Detroit. This mentality, which is very prevalent in the Muslim World, is extremely dangerous, especially now that a part of the human family--that is the West which has already developed a technology on the basis of modern science--is already facing insurmountable difficulties and problems such as the questions pertaining to the destruction of the environment, those related to defining the human person and ethics and a thousand other questions. If the Muslim world also tries to join the camp of confusion and the destruction of the environment in the name of being in the twenty-first century, I believe, it will be suicidal. So on the practical level, while the Muslim World opens up to the application of modern science and acquires pure science itself, it has to learn this science and its applications with a certain amount of constraint and restraint in their application in the sense that it should not necessarily jump into every development and not try to emulate everything that is going on in the West. But as far as the theoretical aspect is concerned, Muslims must try to master the Western sciences, there is no doubt about that, but this mastery must be combined with a critical perspective based on the Islamic intellectual tradition.
Having said that, I now come to the second point--this is what I have been saying for so many decades. Islamic Civilization cannot simply emulate Western science and technology as they are without destroying itself. Anyone who says anything else does not really know what the philosophical foundation of modern science is, and what the impact of its applications are upon the world. If Islamic Civilization wants to continue to be a living civilization, it is imperative for it to rethink the foundations of modern science at the theoretical level. It must initiate a process that will reinterpret, reintegrate, accept or reject various aspects of modern science in light of Islam's own worldview and metaphysical vision of the nature of Reality. And on the practical level, it must try to evolve independent criteria of what to accept and what not to accept.
So there are two different dimensions of what to do with modern science. One is on a practical level: Do we have airplanes or not, or something like that? On that level there are certain decisions that cannot be avoided in the fields of medicine, communications, and so on and so forth. But while doing that, the Muslim World cannot go, as the Americans call it, "gung ho", that is, going head long down a blind alley, trying to simply emulate whatever the West is doing. First of all, if we do that we will always be behind the West and secondly, we copy the errors of modern technology, which is wedded to greed to a large extent, and which is not independent at all of the failings of the human being, we will simply follow these errors, making it much worse for the Muslim World. Emulation has to be done with a fair amount of restraint, giving the Muslim World time to develop alternatives wherever possible.
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