ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Islamic Environmental Stewardship: Nature and Science in the Light of Islamic Philosophy The Separation of Science and Sacred Tradition The divorce between science and sacred tradition is rooted in a number of things.

In regards to Islam, the decline of the Islamic sciences seems tied to the decline of Islamic civilization, and there are reports today on both correlation and causation between the two.23 Internal and external factors in Islamic civilization, such as socio-political issues in Muslim lands and the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, are held somewhat responsible for the loss of the Islamic sciences.

However, the true instigating factors behind the decline of both the Islamic sciences and Islamic civilization seem to be a topic of debate in Western literature.24 Regardless of these causes, it remains today that the “Golden Age” of Islamic civilization is far behind and the Islamic sciences of today are in no way near the pinnacle they had reached then. On a universal level, the loss of a public connection between science and sacred tradition seems rooted in a number of inter-connected events.

In the spread of Christianity into the West, and in its dialogue with Hellenist Greeks who seemingly had a metaphysical intelligibility of nature but not of God, a Christian movement had come about in which there was no transcendental approach to nature, but only a strictly nominalist theological way of understanding and reaching God.25 As noted by the philosopher, metaphysician and Perennialist thinker, Frithjof Schuon: If a simple and rather summary formulation be permissible, one could say that for the Greeks truth is that which is in conformity with the nature of things; for the Christians truth is that which leads to God.

Thus Christian attitude, to the extent that it tended to be exclusive, was bound to appear to the Greeks as “foolishness”; in the eyes of the Christians the attitude of the Greeks consisted in taking thought for an end in itself, outside of any personal relation to God; consequently it was a “wisdom according to the flesh”… it was in some respects a dispute between a love-song and a mathematical theorem.

It could also be said that the Hellenists were predominantly right in principle and the Christians in fact, at least in a particular sense that can be discerned without difficulty.