ISLAMIC SCIENCE: THEN AND NOW. Salon features an interview with Taner Edis, the author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam. Among the claims Edis makes is that the Muslim science of the past was more like pre-science:

Yet there was a time, from the 9th through the 12th centuries, when Islam was arguably the center of the scientific world.

Very much so. If you're talking about the proto-scientific thought that was inherited from the Greeks and Romans, all of the action was taking place in the Islamic world. Western Europe at the time was a land of barbarians -- intellectually, totally negligible. In fact, Muslim thinkers developed Greek science; they didn't just preserve it. But it is a mistake to think of this as analogous to modern science. What Muslims were doing back then was still a medieval, pre-scientific intellectual enterprise. They never quite made the breakthrough, the scientific revolution, that took place in Europe.

Today, it's something of an impediment for the Muslim world to continually look back to the glories of the past and keep saying that the Islamic world used to be a world leader in science. This tends to obscure some very important differences between modern science and medieval thinking. They did some very interesting things in medicine and optics. But all of this was mixed in with astrology and alchemy and what today we would consider dead ends. This was not thinking of nature mechanistically, as happened in the scientific revolution in Europe, but in almost an occult sense.

...Many historians would disagree with your assessment that what Muslim scholars did during the Golden Age wasn't real science. They point to major discoveries in mathematics, physics and chemistry. And they say later European discoveries owe a direct debt to Muslim scientists. For instance, didn't Copernicus use the mathematical work of Iranian astronomers to construct his theory of the solar system?

I don't disagree with any of this. Muslims inherited the precursors of science developed in antiquity and developed this much further. Still, I have to emphasize how such ancient and medieval ways of thinking about nature are different than what we understand as modern science. Much of the praise heaped on medieval Muslim science is due to a very selective reading of history. We tend to pick out ideas that are similar to what eventually became successful and downplay ideas that seem occult and outright crazy today. But medieval Muslim thinkers took the weird stuff as seriously as anything that fed into modern science.

There's no reason to disparage Muslims and their real scientific achievements during the Middle Ages--But as long as CAIR and others are going to insist that we become 'sensitive' to Muslim beliefs and history, lets do so honestly. Edis' opinion is not the only one out there, but it should be included with the rest.

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