ISLAM AND THE SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT

ISLAM AND THE SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT

The role that in the past the Islamic civilization has played in the development of scientific thought is known to all, but just as well known is the fact that, in the modern and contemporary art, the Muslim world seems to have totally abdicated this role, no longer able to keep pace with the rapid evolution that science was undergoing in European culture. Islam has not seen any scientific revolution, at least in the sense that we are used to attach to this word; Yet, throughout the Middle Ages, it was the Islamic civilization the main inspiration for a broad and deep intellectual movement that gave Europe the keys of that revolution.
What is commonly referred to as the "Arabic science", but it would be more correct to call "Islamic", since they were not the only Arab chief architects, in our history books of science or philosophy is generally regarded as the ' link between the great legacy of ancient thought and the modern era. The classical Islamic thought is in fact the result of a layering of different cultures and traditions, absorbed by Muslim civilization during its expansion and adapted to the general principles of the doctrine of Islam. The assimilation of foreign influences was almost always accompanied by an adjustment of these items to the Islamic vision overall. In the early centuries of its diffusion (Sec. VIII-X), a civilization in the rapidly growing Islam had to forcibly acquire new tools in all areas of its business. The new empire had seen the expansion of the boundaries of faith beyond all initial expectations and very quickly: Egypt, the coast of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula to the west, Mesopotamia, Iran and Central Asia to the borders of China and India to the east.
From all cultures with whom he came into contact at this early stage of his life Islam was able to draw useful elements to building a unitary civilization, intellectually and technologically developed. The administration of the state, the military and civilian technologies, law, science, theology and philosophy were all disciplines that Islamic civilization went constructing in those early centuries, appropriating elements of different origin and blending them in a new synthesis.
Of all the influences received, the Hellenistic and Persian seem the most relevant. Islam unifies it under its hegemony much of what had been the Hellenistic Mediterranean, but at the same time tends to reorient its focus more to the east, undergoing the attraction orbit Persian. The new world is born is composite and multifaceted, as the result of the merger between the original Semitic element, the legacy of the classical tradition and Eastern influences. Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages was affirmed in this way as a natural crossroads between different experiences, Eastern and Western, blended from the principles of Koranic faith, which provided the unifying element to a set so diverse.
It has long been discussed on the originality of this total synthesis. The two extreme tendencies, that is, to consider the Muslim culture as a mere gatherer of knowledge foreigner and that on the contrary, he wants the original inventor in many different fields, have now given way to a more balanced appreciation by scholars. Islam has in fact collected existing legacy, becoming heavily influenced by the cultures with which it came into contact, but did not suffer in a totally passive these influences, impressing upon them the mark of his personality. The originality of Islam lies in having been able to integrate and provide new physiognomy of elements that were not of his original invention.
The clearest demonstration of this attitude can be found in the impressive workings of translation from the greek Arabic that allowed Islam to assimilate ancient scientific thought. This extraordinary cultural enterprise, strongly supported by the caliphs of Baghdad between the eighth and tenth centuries and took place with the consent of the company substantial intellectual and religious at the time, was a phenomenon active and not passive, in the sense that the Muslim thinkers are not They are randomly encountered in the work and discoveries of their predecessors, but they are looking for and translated, planning a grandiose work of arrangement and reinterpretation of that heritage. The success of this endeavor is reflected by the fact that the ancient knowledge reinterpreted by Muslim thinkers will remain for centuries the paradigm required of each course of study, even beyond the Islamic world, so that it will draw on both the Greek Byzantium the West Latin approach to classical antiquity.
One of our great scientist, Giorgio de Santillana, had denounced the distorted view that our historians often send us an Islamic thought reduced to a "ancillary function in relation to the history of the West." As already mentioned, if one side is wrong to attribute to the Muslims a number of theories or scientific discoveries that were largely already known to the Greeks or the Indians, equally misleading is the idea that Islam is limited to transmit 'work of ancient thinkers without adding any original processing. Calculations and original discoveries were however many and significant, but it was above all the different basic attitude towards scientific investigation that is considered one of the greatest merits of Muslim thought. If we accept the division of the scientific philosophy made by Alexandre Koyré, which defines the vision impostasi in the seventeenth century as "the universe of precision", and the previous one as "the world of approximation", we have to note, with Alessandro Bausani as Islamic thought is just the forerunner of that precision. Especially in fields such as astronomy or medicine, examples of this trend can be multiplied at will, showing a gap between the deep accurate observations of Muslim scientists and "carelessness" characteristic of so much of the old thinking, often tending to round figures or to adjust the phenomena in order to make them conform to a preconceived and abstract "system".
Alessandro Bausani he first sensed that it was precisely the religious vision of Islam to influence this trend. The idea that nothing in nature is due to abstract laws and immutable and that every phenomenon occurs for accurate and instantaneous divine intervention is very strong in the Qur'an and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. Believe the inevitability of a movement the astral, for example, would mean in the eyes of a Muslim attributed to secondary causes and independence almost a will that they themselves do not have nor can have. As reiterated one of the leading Orthodox theologians of Islam, al-Bâqillânî (X sec.), "The heavens and the stars are created bodies like the others, with no special sanctity, and are subject to the same laws as any other body of the universe ". The fact is that the only law is that certain of God, a God, however, is essentially unpredictable and whose action can not in any case be normalized or encoded by the human mind. What appears to us as a fixed law it is not really a '"habit" of God, which tends to follow certain effects to certain causes; but if God willed, it could at any time change the course of things and derogating from its customary. The Koran tells us, for example, that the sun is going to rest at sunset in a muddy spring, and the unanimous tradition of interpreters adds that there, every night, goes to the divine throne to ask for permission to rise the next day. Permission is always granted, but the event itself is not inevitable, and in fact, the end of time, it is said that God will alter this habit by making the sun rise in the West. It is significant in this regard, that the technical term for the "miracle" in both Arabic kharq al-'âdât, which literally means "breaking the traditions": the miracle is thus conceived not as an extraordinary event due to a sort magic power of those who cause, but rather as the divine concession of a "truce" in the usual relationship between cause and effect.
The reflections on the Islamic nature of time are a further confirmation of this information. In stark contrast to the beliefs of the pre-Islamic Arabs, who saw time in a relentless fate and always equal to himself, Mohammed said that "God is the Time", to reiterate that it does not flow linearly and blindly, but is continuously fed from 'divine action, moment by moment. The alternation of day and night, the months, the years, is due to a measurement done by God, who puts in an order flow otherwise undifferentiated with a personal intervention and repeated frequently. That's why, returning to the theme of "precision" which was first mentioned, Islamic law does not allow the simple calculation to define certain deadlines rituals, but claims whenever direct observation of phenomena. The beginning of a lunar month (ritually important to define themselves in the case of fasting or pilgrimage) can not be established in advance on the basis of astronomical predictions, but that certificate every time the instant the new moon is sighted in the sky . Linear time, often remind the Islamic texts, it is an illusion, in all respects similar to that caused by a brand with the red-hot tip that swirled wildly in the dark, gives us the feeling of a circle. But the positions of the tip of the brand, as the contiguous suppose you want, they will never be continuous. The only true reality of time is so instant timeless, unique irruption of eternity in the world of becoming.
Returning to the broad outlines, this attitude of the Islamic mentality in the face of scientific facts has allowed some scholars to define a similar vision as "proto". And in fact there is a strong temptation to put some aspects of Islamic thought nell'alveo of that ancient Tao that Fritjof Capra believes in extraordinary harmony with the contemporary scientific philosophy. These operations, however, should not be made without caution. It is not difficult to extrapolate some elements modern "scientific" work of some daring medieval thinker, and you can also say that these theories could help overcome certain limits Aristotelian classic; would be quite different, however, it says that the insights of ancient metaphysics are organically in harmony with the contemporary physics. It can not escape that different context, beyond certain harmonies while real, assumes very different intentions, which does not allow us to consider the old masters of the Tao, the Vedanta or Islam as pioneers of a modern view of the universe .
The basic problem, in our opinion, lies in the role that different cultures so distant in time, in space and in the mindset attributed to human reason. The dialectic faith / reason did not always and everywhere the same results, and it is in this field that maybe we can find an excuse to different roads taken by the scientific thought in the West and Islam. At first glance, you'd think that the lack of a scientific development is due to the weight that the religious auctoritas exercised on a given culture. In this perspective, the West would have achieved its results as it broke free from the heavy bond of religion, while Islam would not have enough strength to do it, condemned to cultural stagnation lasting until the colonial era. This reconstruction is superficial in more ways than one.
First, orthodox Islam lived in a very different from Christianity the possible conflict between revelation and reason. The debate there was, and it was also very intense, but you can tell that already with the definitive establishment of the theological-juridical schools (between the ninth and tenth centuries), it was resolved by the majority in an attempt to concord between the data of writing and those of the reasoning. Its most rigorist also try later to limit as much as possible the intervention of logical arguments in the interpretation of religion, but the fact remains that the great legacy of ancient thought was poured in Islamic culture, even in the religious in the strict sense, without particular trauma. Thus, the letter of the sacred text in Islam was never able to get into irreconcilable conflict with the rational observation of things, because the way chosen in the interpretation of the data revealed was to avoid narrow literalism as well as any pushed allegory. This conciliatory attitude earned for all branches of speculation Muslim, from the most exquisitely theological ones footprint markedly philosophical and scientific.
Such a situation would therefore seem conducive to the development of science in the modern sense of the word and Western. So why there has been about the rift between Islam and Europe which we have mentioned before? Paradoxically, you could answer in a few words to this complex question by saying that Islam did not experience a scientific revolution similar to the Western because of the lack of conflict between revelation and reason. To clarify, we can say in a nutshell that the effort to harmonize the two sides did not allow to separate more clearly the respective areas, which in the Christian culture are found in position more clearly antagonistic and therefore have better clarified its identity . Historians of science are well aware how much Europe has been crucial to the birth of modern scientific thought aptitude "hermetic" in the sense that the first steps of scientific humanism were conducted in heavily dyed esoteric knowledge. The transformation of alchemy in chemistry until Rosicrucianism of a Newton and the birth of the Royal Society, the component so-called "sectarian" and still antagonistic to official religion (mostly Catholic party) was an incentive not secondary processing scientific . In Islam, nothing like that could happen. Where was already habit harmonize the philosophical-scientific with the spiritual knowledge, has not felt the need to separate the two things dialectically, resulting in not attributed to speculation on the sciences an autonomous status with respect to the common notion of knowledge.
To clarify this last point requires a brief analysis of the very idea of ​​science in Islamic civilization. The importance of this notion is at the heart of Islam, so that Franz Rosenthal was able to call his book on the subject Knowledge Triumphant; but what exactly is in the Islamic world with the term "science"? The Arabic word that more accurately reflected the idea is' ilm, and already in the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet this term assumes the character of a capital notion. "Seek knowledge even if only in China," reads one-quoted phrase of Mohammed, which he added one of the greatest duties of every person acquiring a "useful science". Well, it's just around the latter adjective that has focused the attention of Muslim thinkers. What makes a science really "useful"? The answers, of course, have been multiple depending on the guidelines and eras. For some, the utility had to be interpreted only as what contributes to the spiritual health of the individual or the community; for others, the material benefits that science can bring could clearly fall within that concept of utility. But all he weighed on a Koranic verse (XVII, 85) which reads: "And there was given, in terms of science, if not a little." This divine message intended to allude to the nature of every human knowledge revealed, even material, in accordance with the generally pessimistic vision of Islam on the nature and capabilities of man. For this as it went affirming the idea that a science, to be useful, it must somehow be transmitted from God and can not be exclusively the result of human effort. The concept of 'ilm was so inextricably fused with two other notions, those of ma'rifa ("knowledge" in the sense of higher gnosis) and hikma ("wisdom"). Clearly, this assimilation has encouraged the emergence of an independent science, which contrapponesse with its own autonomous physiognomy wisdom of tradition, in itself considered comprehensive and self-sufficient.
The decline of scientific research in the land of Islam is not so attributable, as dictated by a hasty and widespread analysis, intolerance and fanaticism of the religious culture, but perhaps just the opposite, and that is the fact that, in the past, the 'traditional authority was usually anything but intolerant and fanatical. A Muslim today, even zealous, hard to understand the reasons for the trouble between ethics and technology that seems to afflict so Westerners today, because in his mind science has never been so violently opposed to religious thinking, but it can safely acceptance as an extension, a normal application. This explains why, for example, the official Islamic positions on debated issues of biotechnology, artificial insemination, abortion, appear surprisingly more flexible and open than they are of other religions; nor could we ever expect the intervention of a high authority of Islam in a forum of scientists to dictate ethical principles to be followed by scientific research.
I think that at this particular moment this could give the Islamic countries a new benefit, not equal but in some ways similar to that which they enjoyed in the Middle Ages than the European civilization. An approach to the great technological challenges of today more disillusioned and less dramatising ensures less traumatic impact on society at a time of strong transformations and a more balanced collective acceptance of kickbacks that this inevitably brings with it. In other words, the same reasons that have caused the decline in the long scientific Muslim world within a certain time could turn into a new, attractive opportunities.