Polarising 'Ilm: Science and Religion in Early Modern Islam

Abstract

The polarisation of the traditional concept of ʿilm, ‘knowledge’, into ʿilm, modern ‘science’ versus dīn, ‘religion’, has a short history in the Islamic tradition. Emerging awareness of the conflict between ʿilm and dīn can be traced back to the early decades of the 19th century; however, intense public debate of the polarity began later in the same century. Views about the conflict emerged after exposure to the European Enlightenment ideas generally, and the works of the fabricators of the ‘conflict thesis’, JW Draper and AD White, specifically. Arab and Turkish scholars celebrated Draper’s view that, unlike Christianity, Islam nurtured and advanced science. Taking this as evidence of Islam’s superiority over Christianity, they restricted the conflict thesis to Christendom and saw it as a result of the repressive practices of the Church. By the mid-20th century, new adaptations of the conflict thesis emerged, which mapped the polarity of science and religion over the traditional Islamic division of sciences into rational (ʿaqlī) and transmitted (naqlī). This chapter discusses the polarisation of ʿilm into science and religion, which occurred in the 19th century, in order to show, first, its inconsistency with pre-19th century Islamic sources on the classification of the rational and transmitted sciences, and, second, the distinct trajectory the polarity took in the Arab-Islamic context. It argues that the questions the polarity has raised in the Islamic context are concerned primarily not with historiography and the lost moral guidance of the scientific enterprise, but rather with Islam’s schizophrenic approach to modernity and its humanistic foundations.