Islam During The Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, the relationship between science and religion was central to the ability of intellectuals to pursue the natural sciences. Without approval from their religious leaders, the great thinkers of the Middle Ages were unable to make any large strides in natural philosophy. Islamic societies were no exception. Muslim intellectuals of the time were simultaneously thinkers devoting to solving problems in the natural world as well as religious scholars. The usual narrative on Muslim scientific development relates that many Muslim religious leaders in the Middle Ages maintained a degree of distrust in the teachings of ancient Greek natural philosophers that provided the foundation for burgeoning sciences. This is especially thought

To understand the Islamic attitude towards science, one must first have a grasp of the Muslim view of knowledge in general. In Islam, all knowledge, including natural philosophy, is linked together as one concept. Though this knowledge can be divided into various subsets depending on the topic, a fundamental belief of Islam is that all studies are grounded in an overarching pursuit that is intertwined with the study of God. This discrepancy between the viewpoints of modern historians and medieval Islamic scholars than encourages the belief that Islam is inherently anti-science. Because knowledge, philosophy, and science are all interwoven in a single concept, some historians mistakenly interpret certain phrases as anti-science. For example, many historians who promote the Islamic rejection of science argue that, in the Qur’an, the Prophet asks God for protection from what is sometimes translated as “useless sciences.” However, what these interpretations fail to realize is that the term being used by the Prophet is simply the word used for all knowledge. Iqbal, who draws attention to this linguistic challenge, expresses that it is highly unlikely that the Prophet is referring to ancient Greek sciences in this statement. Interpretations such as this are often responsible for

During the initial development of the Islamic view of the universe, various ideas arose in Muslim societies regarding cosmography, or the physical layout of the universe. Although many Muslim scholars adopted Aristotle’s cosmography, which divided the universe into celestial and terrestrial regions, some Islamic intellectuals could not reconcile Aristotle’s universe with their ideas of the composition of physical objects. In his description of the universe, Aristotle describes a basic substance, his “prime matter,” which makes up the entire universe. Aristotle claims that this substance “is neither a particular thing nor of a certain quantity nor assigned to any other of the categories by which being is determined,” a description with which many Islamic scholars could not agree. Scholars such as Jabir bin Hayyan could not overcome the perceived vagueness of such a description of matter, and even relatively Hellenistic philosopher-scientists of the time had trouble with some of the details of Aristotle’s concepts. Thus, even though some of the larger, more wide-scale opinions of Aristotle were shared by some Muslim intellectuals, there still existed fundamental disagreements which could not be