38 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A clash of tradition and modernity, March 10, 2007
This review is from: An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam (Hardcover)
With one famous exception, Muslims don't live in caves. They like the control, convenience and power that technology gives to otherwise weak humans as well as anybody else does. But they conspicuously do not feel comfortable with the "why" questions that underlie the "how" questions that technology answers. That is, to the extent (small as a proportion of the whole umma) that Muslims turn toward modernity, they turn to engineering, not to research science.
Taner Edis, a physicist educated in the allegedly most secular of Muslim countries, Turkey, asks how this came about and whether there is any chance that science, as westerners understand it, could ever become as much a part of Muslim societies as it has in western countries and, as he notes, a few others, like Japan.
Not to give away the ending, but, no, not likely.
Because Islam is based on a sacred text, and because almost all Muslims remain committed to a fundamentalist conception of the text's inerrancy, Edis must start by asking what, if anything, the Koran says about science. Answer: not much, but because of a predilection for finding all things in the sacred words (Koran and hadith), the scholars spend a lot of energy trying to find it.
After setting the stage, he then asks how leading Muslim thinkers have conceived of science and its relation to the restrictions of the Koran. Of course, at this point, Edis might have stopped. Once restrictions are imposed, science slows down or stops. Though Edis, unlike some other commentators, speaks respectfully about Islam, this requires a certain indifference to the elephant in the room -- Islam has not contributed anything to modern science.
It contributed to medieval science, but that was a different animal. Edis writes, "When European science began to take off, education and intellectual life in Muslim lands was completely dominated by orthodox scholars and sufi saints, neither of whom encouraged attention to knowledge that did not have any explicit religious purpose."
The political collapse of Islam in front of expanding Europe (and even expanding but not very modern Russia) forced a reassessment. Edis traces the different approaches various Muslims have taken in trying to tap the obvious advantages of modern thought without abandoning the social harmony on which Islam prides itself. A number of Islamic schools of thought have thought that it could be done.
Edis, correctly, considers these all to have been failures -- illusions of harmony.
As a result, pseudoscience is rife even among the small, sophisticated segments of Islam. As Edis notes, the same can be said about western society. But crackpottery has a different quality in Islam.
For one thing, it is powerful as it is not in the West. Edis does not bring up the examples of Muslim opposition to eliminating poliomyelitis or guinea worm, but he could have.
Edis, a skilled explainer of ideas that he does not himself accept (for example, in his demolition of the Christian fundamentalist "intelligent design" movement in a book he co-wrote with Matt Young, "Why
Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism") packs a lot into few pages.
He rightly dismisses liberalizing tendencies among Muslims, as far as they might create an opening for a genuine science within Islamic societies. Although Edis does not go into earlier history, Islam has always destroyed its liberalizers. From Almohads to Wahhabis, the puritans have always prevailed politically, if not necessarily in every corner of daily life.
Edis then contemplates the possibility that "fundamentalism could inadvertently create conditions more hospitable for doubt and skeptical inquiry . . . For this to happen, however, fundamentalism must fail."
Edis does not relate this to the Bonifacian solution, but that is what it is: Boniface, the apostle to the Germans, cut down the sacred grove. When the gods failed to retaliate, they lost status. As long as all Muslims are persuaded that god prefers them, there will be no incentive for them to suspect that the future history they believe they have been divinely promised could be illusory. This cancels out whatever tendencies toward accommodationism they may feel.
Edis leaves the question of whether one of the alternatives might work for science open.
As a scientist himself, he would like to see real science become part of Muslim societies. But it is doubtful many Muslims, most of whom cannot even read, put such goals high on their priority lists.
The implications for a rejection of genuine science on Islamic political relations with the rest of the world are obvious, but Edis does not mention them.
"An Illusion of Harmony" is probably as fair and respectful a hearing of the options facing Islamic premodernism as Muslims are ever likely to get.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Honest Analysis Of The Relationship of Islam and Science, November 20, 2007
This review is from: An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam (Hardcover)
Taner Edis has done the world a huge favor in writing this book on Islam and Science through time. This kind of relationa is really rare to find due to lack of interest or flat out ignorance on the topics.
This is an honest book that is objective and Taner (of Turkish descent) does not say more than is needed to make his point. Muslims who read this book will of course be disturbed by some facts of historical Islam, but won't come out offended or feel like the author was aiming to ridicule Islam, because he writes in a calm, objective manner. He's after facts not slander.
Islamic creationism and reactions from Islam to science through time are the core focus of the book.
Here is a short synopsis of what is contained within the book:
Discussion of Islam in Turkey
Historical Islamic Views of Science
Different Views of Science from Modern Islam
Scientific Progress and Technological Advances in Muslim Countries
Speed of Technological Progress and Comparison to Western Scientific Progress
Examples of Islamic Creationism and Critiques of Maurice Bucaille, Harun Yahya, and other Islamo-scientific apologetics
Islamic View of History and Social Sciences and their Applications
Islam's Reaction to the West and Modernization (Resistance and Acceptance)
Conservative and Liberal Islamic Views of Science
The Author's Personal View of Science and Belief Systems
This book should be read with Bucaille's Book
The Bible, the Qu'ran and Science: The Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of Modern Knowledge and other Islam supporting science books like
The Quran: Unchallengeable Miracle.
For books on the nature of science please read
The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (2nd edition),
Theories of Explanation, and
The Structure of Scientific Theories. Also check out Taner Edis'
Science and Nonbelief where he does a respectful analysis of the relationship of science and theistic religion and the religions of atheism and agnosticism. He is very well balanced here and simply does an honest job. He is not as militant or zealous or "fundamentalist" as other "nonbelivers" are with "believers" in terms of criticism.
Also here is a good book that I think is well balanced and well researched on the historical and complementary relationship between "religion" and "science" :
Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction - Islam has one essay while Christianity and Greek Theism has more. It's amazing how the "Conflict Thesis" is the most popular yet the most irrational and hastily generalized. Read on.
This is an awesome contribution to Islamic literature. Anyone interested in Islamic creationism or history should read this book. It helps understand and identify what difficulties or simplicities future Muslims must face in order to maintain their beliefs in light of the modern knowledge of nature.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential reading, December 1, 2009
This review is from: An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam (Hardcover)
Islam is, to quote the book, "under reconstruction" as the billion-strong Muslim world, seeking parity with the West, attempts to come to terms with modernity and all that that implies. The author, a Turkish American physicist, is particularly well qualified to comment on this process, and has brought a scholarly approach to bear on an extremely wide range of material, most of it from English language or Turkish language sources. In doing so, he has shown a rare ability to describe in sympathetic terms points of view with which he does not agree, and those who open this book hoping to find yet another anti-Islamic rant will be disappointed. Indeed, the contrasts drawn are not always in the West's favor, especially when we come to compare unbridled individualism with the Islamic concern for community.
Modernity implies technology, and technology depends on science. But science relies on observation, continually modifies and refines its own conclusions, and accepts only natural explanations. This is in direct contrast to the dominant strains of Muslim epistemology, which give pride of place to revelation, especially the final perfect revelation embodied in the Quran, and to faith in an all-powerful God active and manifest in the world. Edis describes a wide range of attempts to resolve this conflict, from the rise (and fall) of Kemalism, to medieval style attempts to subordinate science to theology, to the promotion by those who should know better of the pseudoscience of creationism and Intelligent Design.
The conflict between science and faith is of course not peculiar to the Muslim world, and in his final section the author discusses this conflict in more general terms as he speculates about how it will develop in the future. Here again, his appraisal is much more nuanced than one might have expected from a self-proclaimed Enlightenment rationalist, leaving believers and unbelievers alike with much to reflect on.
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