Philosophy and Science in the Islamic World.

• Author: Livingston, John W.

3. A. Qadir's Philosophy and Science in the Islamic World, now available in this paperback edition, is a book that could be appreciated by devout Muslims who view philosophy and science as levels of cosmic understanding that complement the moral and spiritual truths of Quran, Hadith and Sharia. The book is intended, it would seem, for the Muslim reader. However, as the author composed it in English, it may have been intended to persuade non-Muslims of Islam's scientific rationality. Accordingly, it is a fundamental of the author's faith that "true" Islam and "true" science bear no contradiction one to the other. Qadir's is not a book that would seriously engage the student of medieval or Islamic philosophy and science, except perhaps psychologically as a case study in contemporary apologetics.

Though there is no contradiction between science and scripture in Islam, as the author contends, there is a great chasm between Islamic science and Western. Western science went wrong by cutting away from its moral and spiritual bedrock, following the sixteenth century, to fasten onto the shifting sands of secular materialism. Bereft of metaphysics (here understood as moral and spiritual wisdom revealed rationally by the divine), Western science is today lost in a soulless labyrinth of mechanical materialism where humanism has been lost and life is led in a robot-like manner. This cliche is supported by a reference to George Sarton. One wonders if Qadir has read what Sarton wrote about the philosopher who put soul into philosophy, Plato.

Rather than presenting a critical, objective history of the changing place science and philosophy have had through the centuries in Islamic society, Qadir appears singlemindedly determined to convince the reader of the multiplicity of planes in which God has revealed His wisdom and the structure of His creation in Quran and Hadith. Science and philosophy constitute the rational plane. Since Islam is rational, as he states, all intellectual and spiritual dimensions of it are rational. The moral, mystical and theological planes of discourse are therefore rational and included as dimensions of science and philosophy; or, as God is one, so too are the many planes of reality at one in the rational mind of the spiritually perceptive believer. The mystical poetry of Jalal al-Din al-Rumi and the alchemical symbolism of Ibn al-Arabi equally fall within the realm of science and philosophy, which constitute the intellectual and...