Summary
Arab or Islamic or Christian science are but continuations of prior pagan traditions.
“Arab” science wasn’t Arab, but Persian (Avicenna, Biruni, AlKhawarizmi (Algorithm), etc.), Syriac, Chaldean, from long traditions that preceded the Arab invasion. They just wrote in Arabic; Newton wrote in Latin but isn’t called “Italian”. - NN Taleb
Neo-platonic influence and rejection
- “So in reality the so called “Islamic Science” was a venture of the pagan Neo-Platonists fleeing the terror of Isaism, and many of the early “Islamic intellectuals” like Thabit ibn Kurra were by their own admission Hellenistic pagans. In 529 AD the Hellenistic philosophers fleeing persecution by the Isaistic ruler Justinian fled to the Iranian king Khusrau Anushirwan, who granted them a safe haven. After he defeated the Christians, he imposed a clause in the peace treaty with Justinian that he must allow the religious freedom of the pagans in the Byzantine empire. Harran as a border town received considerable protection from the Iranian rulers and the Hellenistic pagans could develop their religion and science. While Islam destroyed the Iranian empire, it failed to impose itself on the pagans of Harran. It was from here that they spread out and seeded the Arabic world with their highly developed science and philosophy.” [MT]
- “However, over time Islamic attitudes hardened. We see this even Al Biruni who is considered by many a moderate Islamic scientist. He sees the similarity between Neo-Platonism and the Hindu dharma, but sees both as errors.” [MT]
- “Timur’s grandson, Ulugh Beg, unlike his father, is described by the Islamic chroniclers as not being a proper observer of Islamic ways and prone to heretical tendencies. He was an extraordinarily intelligent man and a noted scientist who is well known for his astronomical treatise, the zīj-i jadīd-i güregen. … The Shaikhs of the Naqshbandi Sufi silsilā filled with the indignation of Islamic zeal severely condemned these ways of Ulugh Beg. … The Shaikhs of the Naqshbandi Sufi silsilā filled with the indignation of Islamic zeal severely condemned these ways of Ulugh Beg. … However, the opposition from the Sufis and Ulema came to bite him eventually when his own son in a plot to seize power had him sentenced to death by the Sharia court and promptly beheaded. After his death his astronomical observatory was demolished along with his heretical art and his intellectual endeavors based on Greek ideas were condemned severely by the Sufi Khwājah Ahrār [Footnote 2] as being contrary to the right path.”
[MT]
Views regarding natural law
Al Ghazali’s ( a Mujaddid, a periodic renewer of the faith who, according to the prophetic hadith) 11th century book titled The Incoherence of the Philosophers marks a major turn in Islamic epistemology. The book took aim at the falasifa, a loosely defined group of Islamic philosophers from the 8th through the 11th centuries (most notable among them Avicenna and Al-Farabi) who drew intellectually upon the Ancient Greeks. He embraced a form of theological occasionalism, or the belief that all causal events and interactions are not the product of material conjunctions but rather the immediate and present Will of God.
In the next century, Averroes drafted a lengthy rebuttal of al-Ghazali’s Incoherence entitled The Incoherence of the Incoherence; however, the epistemological course of Islamic thought had already been set.[32] Al-Ghazali gave as an example of the illusion of independent laws of cause the fact that cotton burns when coming into contact with fire. While it might seem as though a natural law was at work, it happened each and every time only because God willed it to happen—the event was “a direct product of divine intervention as any more attention grabbing miracle”. Averroes, by contrast insisted while God created the natural law, humans “could more usefully say that fire caused cotton to burn—because creation had a pattern that they could discern."[33] [34][35]