There was a time in the 8th century in the Islamic Golden Age when Baghdad was the center of the scientific world during the Abbasid Caliphate. For science to prosper there must be a culture which values knowledge and freedom.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbasid_CaliphateKnowledge is based on language and stored in books. In Baghdad there was at the time a "house of wisdom", a mix between library and university https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_WisdomThe scholars used a form of dialectic debate called "kalam", which is a bit similar to the Jewish method of hevruta/havruta in which a small group of students discuss and debate a shared texthttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/26/baghdad-centre-of-scientific-world-J. -------- Original message --------From: [email protected] Date: 9/25/21 20:23 (GMT+01:00) To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[email protected]>, [email protected] Subject: [FRIAM] Islam-Science-Muslims-and-Technology-Seyyed-Hossein-Nasr-in-Conversation-with-Muzaffar-Iqbal-2009.pdf Dear Colleagues, Because of an interest some of you expressed in Islamic science, I ran down the text linked below. It is an entire book, and I have read only the first chapter, but I found that fascinating. It is a sort of airing of linen concerning the role of science in the modern Islamic world that tracks in interesting ways the recent American ambivalence about science. This first chapter is both unsettling and very familiar at the same time. http://traditionalhikma.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Islam-Science-Muslims-and-Technology-Seyyed-Hossein-Nasr-in-Conversation-with-Muzaffar-Iqbal-2009.pdfOk, just to give you sense of one of the places it leaves me: If the fault of western science is that it is laced with unacknowledged western values, what would a science that acknowledged its values look like. I have argued that the science we practice is absurdly dualistic (given that we have only one source of information). But it is unclear to me how “dualism” is a value. Is the “rape of nature” and all that follows implicit in dualism? I wish I could claim that if I turn you all into monists, you will all become wind=turbine fanatics, but I don’t think that’s the case. Do values guide what we do or are they just the heavy artillery that we muster to convince others to do what we have done? See what you think? Nick
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