Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality.

• Author: Ahmed, Imad A.

Pervez Hoodbhoy's credentials as a scientist are attested to not only by the cover blurb, but by the fact that so distinguished a particle physicist as Mohammed Abdus Salam consented to write the foreword to this book. Hoodbhoy's scientific competence is also discernible in the text itself. Regretably, he fails to appreciate the understanding of the relationship of science to religion that is emerging in the reconstructionist wing of the Islamic revival. This puts limits on this otherwise outstanding book. The tragedy is that these limits may cause the book to be too quickly dismissed by the people who would benefit the most from it--Muslims in the Arab World and elsewhere feeling challenged by Western culture who need to understand the universality of science.

In the first eight chapters, Hoodbhoy strongly makes the case for the universality of modern science in several different ways: He documents the universal nature of the great achievements of Islamic civilization. He recites the conventional wisdom about the Copernican Revolution and the replacement of the "spiritual" universe with "Cartesian reductionism." He summarizes what he calls "the war between science and medieval Christianity." He acidly refutes the arguments for "Islamic science" put forward by Maurice Buccaille, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Ziauddin Sardar. He argues against the possibility of an Islamic science by ridiculing the subject matter of its self-styled practitioners, by pointing out the failure of the concept's proponents to agree on a definition, and by noting that the decline of science in the Muslim world followed the triumph of Asharite doctrine. He uses the failure of Marxist and other politically-based science to show the errors of ideologically-based science in general.

In the second half of the book, certain errors in Hoodbhoy's analysis that were inconsequential in the first half begin to undermine his argument. Hoodbhoy accepts without question certain myths shared by Orientalists and anti-modernist Muslims.

Although his discussion of the scientific method would lead us to expect him to know better, he confuses science with rationalism. Indeed, science depends upon reason, but it also makes use of experience (experiment and observation) and transmission from reliable sources (like the reports of other scientists published in reputable refereed journals). Rationalism is the view that reason is our only reliable guide to knowledge. It limited ancient Greek...