Islam, science and philosophy

Overview

Recall questions on the Qur'an and the study of nature, medieval Muslim medicine, mathematics and astronomy, Ghazali's crises and his judgement of the philosophers and causation, Ibn Rushd on philosophy and religious law, levels of knowledge and his reply to Ghazali, and their lasting influence.

What you need to know

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Questions from this subtopic

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1. 1

   How does the Qur'an encourage the study of the natural world?

   Model answer

   It repeatedly directs attention to the created order, calling the heavens, the alternation of night and day, rainfall, plant life and the formation of the human being signs for those who reflect, and it rebukes people who accept inherited opinion without thinking. Knowledge is presented as a good in itself, and the first revealed command is to read. Muslims also point out that Islam has no doctrine of a fallen or untrustworthy intellect and no scriptural account of creation that fixes a timetable, so investigating nature is understood as a religious activity rather than an intrusion on one.

2. 2

   Give examples of medieval Muslim contributions to medicine.

   Model answer

   Ibn Sina's medical encyclopaedia organised Greek, Persian and Indian medical knowledge into a systematic whole and was used as a teaching text in Europe for centuries. Al-Razi wrote the first clinical account distinguishing smallpox from measles and insisted on observation and case notes. Al-Zahrawi produced a surgical treatise illustrating instruments he had designed. Institutionally, hospitals with wards, teaching and licensing of practitioners developed across the Muslim world, and Ibn al-Nafis described the passage of blood through the lungs long before it was known in Europe.

3. 3

   Give examples of medieval Muslim contributions to mathematics and astronomy.

   Model answer

   Al-Khwarizmi set out systematic methods for solving equations, giving algebra its name, and his work transmitting Indian numerals gave Europe the decimal system; the word algorithm derives from his name. Later mathematicians developed trigonometry as an independent discipline and worked on optics and geometry, Ibn al-Haytham being notable for insisting that theories be tested against controlled observation. In astronomy, observatories at Baghdad, Maragha and Samarkand produced improved star tables, and mathematical models developed by al-Tusi and Ibn al-Shatir to repair Ptolemy's system reappear in the work of Copernicus.

4. 4

   Why did such scientific work flourish in the medieval Muslim world?

   Model answer

   Several factors combined: a large multilingual empire that inherited Greek, Persian and Indian learning and funded its translation; wealthy patrons and rulers who supported libraries, observatories and hospitals; religious requirements that generated technical problems, such as calculating prayer times, the direction of prayer and the lunar calendar, and dividing inheritance shares; and a scholarly culture that treated the pursuit of knowledge as meritorious. Trade and pilgrimage moved scholars and books across an enormous area, so results circulated.

5. 5

   What were Ghazali's two crises?

   Model answer

   Abu Hamid al-Ghazali went through two crises. The first was intellectual. Early in his career he found he could not justify his beliefs, doubted the reliability of the senses and then of reason itself, and was unable to reason his way out; he describes the doubt lifting not by argument but by a light God cast into his heart, restoring the first principles on which all argument depends. The second was personal and came at the height of his career in Baghdad, when he concluded that he was teaching for reputation rather than for God, and suffered a collapse in which he lost the ability to speak or eat. He abandoned his position, gave away his wealth and left for years of withdrawal and travel.

6. 6

   How did Ghazali resolve his crises, and what did he conclude about certainty?

   Model answer

   He surveyed the paths available to him, the theologians, the philosophers, the followers of an infallible teacher and the Sufis, and concluded that only the Sufis offered what he wanted, because they sought not information about God but direct experience of Him. Living their practice rather than reading about it, he found the certainty that argument had failed to give. His conclusion was that the deepest religious knowledge comes by tasting, by actually undergoing a state, and that intellectual proof can defend belief but cannot produce conviction.

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