Men like Ibn Sina...

Men like Ibn Sina, `Umar Khayyam, Khwajah Nasir al-Din Tusi and Qutb al-Din Shirazi are some names among many. As long as this vision and perspective ruled Muslim scholarship and science, the Muslims were at the vanguard of the human civilization in those days and their cities were centers of specialized learning. [^31] George Sarton admits that during the period between A.D. 750 and 1100, the Muslims were undisputed leaders of the intellectual world and between A.D.

1100 and 1350 the centers of learning in the Muslim world retained their global importance and attraction. After 1350 the European world began to advance and the Islamic world not only became stagnant but also failed to absorb the progress made out­side it. The theological schools excluded all natural sciences from their curriculum except astronomy and mathematics: This restriction imposed on the religious madrasahs led to grave repercussions on the Islamic world.

Here we point out a few of these effects: Whereas the Europeans were striving to unravel the hidden laws of nature and to discover ways of exploiting its treasures and resources, the Muslims set aside these activities, and left to others what they deserved most to handle. Today they have reached the point where they have to depend on America and Europe to satisfy their elementary needs. They remain largely unable to use their resources, which they continue to leave to foreigners to exploit.

Those Muslims who pursued the experimental sciences were mostly estranged from the religious sciences. Accordingly, they lacked the Islamic world?outlook which was replaced by the atheistic vision that dominates the Western scientific tradition.

The elimination of the study of the natural sciences from the curricula of the religious madrasahs and the lack of direct touch with the sources of modern science on the part of religious scholars gave rise to the two deviated intellectual currents in the Muslim world: a) Some Muslims, under the influence of Western scientific and technical progress and without any knowledge of the limitations of empirical sciences, became singularly possessed with them ....to the extent that they even tried to interpret the Quran and hadith according to their findings.

The Quranic exegeses written by Tantawi and Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan belong to this class. Others have gone still further claiming that all the findings of the modern sciences are found in the Quran and the texts of Islamic tradition (hadith).