By: Ibrahim Kalin

Published at MuslimPhilosopy.com

There is hardly any subject as vexed and vital for the contemporary Islamic world as the question of modern science. Since its earliest encounter with modern Western science in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Islamic world has had to deal with science for practical and intellectual reasons. At the level of practical needs, modern science was seen as the sine qua non of the advancement and defense of Muslim countries in the field of military technology. The Ottoman political body, which, unlike the other parts of the Islamic world, was in direct contact with European powers, was convinced that its political and military decline was due to the lack of proper defense mechanisms against the European armies. To fill this gap, a number of massive reforms were introduced by Mahmud II with the hope of stopping the rapid decline of the Empire, and a new class of military officers and bureaucrats, who became the first point of contact between the traditional world of Islam and modern secular West, was created.

A similar project, in fact a more successful one, was introduced in Egypt by Muhammad Ali whose aspirations were later given a new voice by Taha Hussain and his generation. The leitmotif of this period was that of extreme practicality: the Muslim world needed power, especially military power, to stand back on its feet, and new technologies powered by modern science were the only way to have it. The modern conception of science as a medium of power was to have a profound impact on the relation between the Muslim world and modern science, which was then already equated with technology, progress, power, and prosperity — a mode of perception still prevalent among the masses in the Islamic world.

The second level of encounter between traditional beliefs and modern science was of an intellectual nature with lasting consequences the most important of which was the re-shaping of the self-perception of the Islamic world. Using Husserl’s analysis of Selbstverstandnis, a key term in Husserl’s anthropology of ‘Western man’, von Grunebaum takes the reception of modern science to be a turning point in the self-view of the traditional Islamic civilization and its approach to history. One of the recurring themes of this epochal even, viz., the incompatibility of traditional beliefs with the dicta of modern science, is forcefully stated in a speech by Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, who was as much aware of the practical urgencies of the post-independence war Turkey as he was passionately engaged in creating a new identity for Turkish people: ‘We shall take science and knowledge from wherever they may be, and put them in the mind of every member of the nation. For science and for knowledge, there are no restrictions and no conditions. For a nation that insists on preserving a host of traditions and beliefs that rest on no logical proof, progress is very difficult, perhaps even impossible’.

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