Three Views of Science in the Islamic World

The Epistemic View of Science: For and Against the Method An important channel through which the contemporary Islamic world, especially in the last three decades of the 20th century, has come to terms with modern science is philosophy science as developed in the West. The impact of the deconstruction of the epistemological hegemony of 19th century positivism together with the critique of Newtonian physics and scientific objectivism and realism on the Islamic world has been stupendous and caused a torrential release of intellectual energy among students and intellectuals. Needless to say, the influx of ideas associated with such names as Kuhn, Feyerabend and Popper and their current students continues almost unabated in spite of the fact that the post-antirealist thinking on science seems to have come to a serious stalemate. Being on the receiving end of this debate, many Muslim students and intellectuals are still experimenting with these ideas with little effort, as we shall see shortly, to extrapolate their full implications. Before doing that, however, a few words of clarification on the scope of contemporary philosophy of science are in order.

The primary concern of the contemporary philosophy of science is to establish the validity, or lack thereof, of the truth claims of modern natural sciences. The theory-observation dichotomy, fact-value distinction, experimentation, objectivity, scientific community, history and sociology of science, and a host of other problems stand out,inter alia , as the most important issues of the field, which leaves no aspect of the scientific enterprise untouched. What concerns us here, however, is the emphasis of the philosophy of science on epistemology to the point of excluding any ontological or metaphysical arguments. The majority of contemporary philosophers of science, including such celebrated vanguards as Kuhn, Popper and Feyerabend, construe science primarily as an epistemic structure that claims to explain the order of physical reality within the exclusive framework of scientific methods. Scientific realism, anti-realism, instrumentalism, empiricism are all, needles to say, anchored in different notions of knowledge with profound implications for the natural as well as the human sciences. Given its exclusive concern with epistemic claims involved, contemporary philosophy of science can be stated as the epistemology of science. In this regard, the epistemic view of science is surely a respected member of modern philosophy for which any concept other than the knowing subject and its paraphernalia is simply a non-starter for a proper understanding of the world.

Thinking out the question of being in terms of how it is known, to use a Heideggerian language, is the leitmotif of modern philosophy, including its prima facie foes, rationalism and empiricism.[^25] Whether we consider the knowing subject as a rationalist, empiricist, structuralist or deconstructionist, the anthropocentric ethos runs through the veins of how we perceive the world around us, how we interact with it, and how we position ourselves vis-à-vis the other human beings with whom we share the intentional as well as the physical space of our life-world. Here the eternal paradox of all subjectivist epistemologies is brought into clarity: to put the subject before the world, of which he is a part, is to claim the square inside

the circle to be larger than the circle. Said differently, to ground the intelligibility of the world in the discursive constructions of the knowing subject is to see the world, or rather anything outside the subject, as essentially devoid of intrinsic meaning and intelligibility.[^26] The Muslim critique of modern science based on the premises of modern epistemology has usually lost sight of this crucial fact as we see in the otherwise commendable literature produced by Ismail Faruqi and his protégé International Institute of Islamic Thought (mentioned hereafter as IIIT).

There is no denying the fact that Kuhn's radical anti-realism or Popper's concept of verisimilitude cannot be interpreted as lending support to the epistemic hegemony of modern science. On the contrary, they are meant to destroy it once and for all. The anti-realist component of their positions, however, reinforces the anthropocentric imagery: it is the knowing subject who is willing to deny science its self-proclaimed objectivity and appeal to credibility.[^27] It is this aspect of contemporary philosophy of science, I believe, that has been totally mistaken and ignored by its adherents in the Islamic world. Today we can hardly come across a book or article written in English, Arabic, Turkish or Bahasa Malaysia that does not have recourse to Foucault, Kuhn, Feyerabend or Lyotard to denounce the philosophical underpinnings of modern science.[^28] From the academic papers of Muslim graduate students to the writings of the so-called 'ijmalis' led by Ziauddin Sardar, the names of numerous philosophers of science sweep through the literature with indigenous additions from the Islamic point of view. To put it mildly, this has led to the overemphasis of epistemology and methodology among many Muslim thinkers and young scholars while questions of ontology and metaphysics have been either left out or taken for granted. The concept of Islamic science, in this point of view, is centered around a loosely defined epistemology, or rather set of discrete ideas grouped under Islamic epistemology whose content is yet to be determined. In many ways, the idea of Islamizing natural and social sciences has been equated, by and large, with producing a different structure of knowledge and methodology within what we might call the epistemologist fallacy of modern philosophy. The crucial issue has thus remained untouched: to reduce the notion of Islamic science to considerations of epistemology and methodology, which are without doubt indispensable in their own right, is to seek out a space for the Islamic point of view within, and not outside, the framework of modern philosophy.

Ismail Faruqi's work known under the rubric of Islamization of knowledge is a good example of how the idea of method or methodology ('manhaj' and ‘manhajiyyah’, the Arabic equivalents of method and methodology being the most popular words of the proponents of this view) can obscure deeper philosophical issues involved in the current discussions of science. Even though Faruqi's project was proposed to Islamize the existing forms of knowledge imported from the West, his focus was exclusively on the humanities, leaving scientific knowledge virtually untouched. This was in tandem with his conviction that the body of knowledge generated by modern natural sciences is neutral and as such requires no special attention. Thus, Faruqi's work, and that of IIIT after his

death, concentrated on the social sciences and education.[^29] This had two important consequences. First, Faruqi's important work on Islamization provided his followers with a framework in which knowledge (al-‘ilm ) came to be equated with social disciplines, thus ending up in a kind of sociologism. The prototype of Faruqi's project is, we may say, the modern social scientist entrusted with the task of the traditional*'alim* . Second, the exclusion of modern scientific knowledge from the scope of Islamization has led to the negligence, to say the least, of the secularizing effect of modern scientific worldview.[^30] This leaves the Muslim social scientists, the ideal-type of the Islamization program, with no clue as to how to deal with the question of modern scientific knowledge. Furthermore, to take the philosophical foundations of modern natural sciences for granted is tantamount to reinforcing the dichotomy between the natural and human sciences, a dichotomy whose consequences continue to pose serious challenges to the validity of the forms of knowledge outside the domain of modern physical sciences.[^31]

A similar position, with some important variations, is to be found in the works of Ziauddin Sardar and a number of closely associated scholars known as the “ijmalis” and the “Aligarh School”.[^32] Although the ijmalis do not accept the appellation of being a 'merely Kuhnian', one can hardly fail to see the subtext of their discourse based on Kuhn, Feyerabend and others in their critique of modern Western science.[^33] Sardar's definition of science shares much of the instrumentalist and anti-realist spirit of the Kuhnian science. For him, science is 'a basic problem-solving tool of any civilization. Without it, a civilization cannot maintain its political and social structure or meet the basic needs of its people and culture.'[^34] The ijmali's socio-cultural point of view certainly points to an important component of scientific activity, viz., the social setting in which the sciences are cultivated and flourish. It is, however, to be noted that the relegation of physical sciences, or any scholarly activity for that matter, to social utility is bound to have serious consequences insofar as the philosophical legitimacy of sciences is concerned. As we see in the case of Van Fraassen and Kuhn, the instrumentalist definition of science entails a strong leaning towards anti-realism, a position whose compatibility with the concept of Islamic science is yet to be accounted for.

Yet, there is another paradox involved here. The most common critique of modern science has been to present it as a culturally conditioned and historical endeavor with claims to universality and objectivity. Kuhn's philosophy of paradigm, which has become the most fashionable buzz word in the Islamic world, Feyerabend's defense of society against science, or Van Fraassen's scientific instrumentalism are all profusely used to show the utter historicity and relativity of modern science. Since every scientific, and, by extension, human activity is embedded in a historical and cultural setting, we can no longer speak of sciences in isolation from their socio-historical conditions. This implies that no account of science, be it Western or Islamic, is possible without the history and, more importantly, sociology of science, whose task is to deconstruct the historical formation and genealogy of sciences. Furthermore, this approach has been applied to humanities as well,

with almost total disregard to its implications for what is proposed in its place, i.e., Islamic science and methodology.

At this point, philosophy of science becomes identical with sociology of science, and any appeal to universal validity and objectivity by physical sciences is rejected on the basis of their utter historicity, contingency, ideology, cultural bias, and so on. Even though these terms are used as household terms by many Muslims writing and thinking on modern science, they rarely appear in their defense of Islamic science, which is proposed as an alternative to the Western conceptions of science. If science, as the advocates of this view seem to imply, is culture-specific with no right to universal applicability, then this has to be true for all scientific activity whether it takes place in the 11th century Samarqand or the 20th century Sweden. This is in fact what is so clearly intended and stated by all the major expositors of the philosophy of science. If it is the modern secular science that is culturally and historically constructed, then Islamic science, as understood by this group of scholars, has to explain how and why it is entitled to universal validity and applicability. It will simply be short of logical consistency to say that Kuhn's language of paradigms is an adequate tool to explain the history of Western but not Islamic science.

What I have called here the epistemic view of science, which has taken the form of an extremely common tendency rather than a single school of thought, has certainly raised the consciousness of the Islamic world about modern science, and contributed to the ongoing discussion of the possibility of having a scientific study of nature based on an Islamic ethos. We can, however, hardly fail to see the contradictions in this point of view especially when it is most vulnerable to the temptations of modern epistemology. The emphasis put on epistemology to the point of excluding ontology and metaphysics has grave consequences for any notion of science, and it is for this reason that we do not see any serious study of philosophy, metaphysics or cosmology among the followers of this point of view. Furthermore there is a deliberate resistance to these disciplines in spite of the fact traditional Islamic philosophy and metaphysics had functioned as a gateway between scientific knowledge and religious faith. At any rate, it remains to be seen if the adherents of the epistemic view of science will be able to overcome the subjectivist fallacy of modern philosophy, i.e., building an epistemology without articulating an adequate metaphysics and ontology.