ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A History of Muslim Philosophy Volume 2, Book 5 Chapter 66: Natural History A Inasmuch as the sciences studied in any traditional civilization, that is, one based upon a divine revelation, depend upon the metaphysical and religious bases of that civilization, Muslim sciences have always echoed and reflected the central Islamic doctrine of unity (tauhid).

Just as the Islamic religious and moral sciences have begun from and returned to the idea of divine unity, the natural sciences have tried to discover the interrelation of all created beings.

It is a general feature of all medieval cosmological sciences[^1] that they seek to express the “unicity of all that exists.” Especially in the Muslim natural sciences this goal has been central, and the idea of the unicity of nature and the interrelatedness of all parts of the universe has remained as a complement to and necessary consequence of the oneness of the Creator.

Since the most legitimate and meaningful way of studying a science is with respect to its ultimate aim and from the point of view of those who have cultivated it, we shall best understand the Muslim sciences if we keep in mind that their primary aim, unlike that of the modern natural sciences which are only analytical and quantitative, has been to arrive at the unity lying behind the veil of multiplicity of natural forms by a synthetic and qualitative study of nature.[^2] This search for unity is clearly manifested in a general science like natural history.

As studied by the Muslims, natural history covers a large number of fields and includes not only such subjects as geology, botany, zoology, and anthropology, but also cosmogony and sacred history[^3] Natural history means essentially the history of nature in the vastest sense of the word, and because Muslims have never separated the spiritual and the mundane, they have usually written natural history within the context of sacred history as is seen so clearly in the universal histories like those of Tabari and Mas'udi.

The many allusions in the Qur'an to natural phenomena and the fact that the verses of the sacred book as well as the phenomena of nature are called ayat (signs) signify that in the Islamic perspective there is a fundamental affinity between the divine and natural orders and indicate, therefore, the legitimacy of connecting sacred history with natural history.