Islam and Science 2/4: Where does Islamic law stand on science?

0:00 Outline
0:19 Principles
6:40 Semantics
11:15 Cosmology
14:29 Evolution
18:47 Medicine
21:31 History of science in Islam
32:36 Conclusion

In the Islamic tradition, prophets are beacons of knowledge and wisdom that light torches, passed down through generations from teacher to student. Prophets establish the axioms of science, or apodictic knowledge, in scripture (Qur’an 2:2), which are subsequently developed by scholars as aporetic or probabilistic knowledge. As Muhammad said: "The sages are heirs of the prophets" (Riyad as-Salihin 12:13). Thus, it is crucial to obtain knowledge from a correct source or lineage of teachers. This was the underlying concern of Imam al-Ghazali (d. 1111) when faced with the question of the place of Greek philosophy in Islam through its professors in the Muslim world, notably Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi.

Many Muslim intellectuals had been impressed by ancient Greek philosophers who seemed to have discovered fundamental religious truths like God, the immortal soul, and rewards for the righteous and punishment for the wicked (Hades and the Isles of the Blessed) through reason. Al-Ghazali's concerns as an intellectual and headmaster of a prestigious Nidhamiya academy were both curricular and genealogical. Should speculative philosophy be included in Islamic curricula, and do its purveyors have legitimate prophetic lineages to qualify them as teachers? His conclusion, reflecting the consensus of Muslim scholars since the 12th century and not significantly challenged to date, is that formal and empirical sciences are valuable while speculative philosophy is not.

The history of science from an Islamic perspective consists of the genealogy of knowledge from prophets sent to various civilizations. Science is thus seen as a product of ancient civilizations; it's neither a recent discovery nor invention by "barbarians" who attacked or destroyed them.

In this video, we see that Islam has a longer memory than these "barbarians," and takes a highly critical approach to their history of science, emphasizing they are not legitimate heirs of Roman (Western) or Judeo-Christian traditions which they sacked and now claim as their own.