Science & Islam: A History by Ehsan Masood

Author:Ehsan Masood
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: History/Science, Medieval, Science, Religion & Science, General, Religion, History, Islam
ISBN: 9781848310810
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2006-05-14T18:30:00+00:00

Ibn-Sina’s critics

Ibn-Sina and other doctors of the period were very much experimentalists. They would play with different treatments and if something didn’t work, they were happy to discard it and try an alternative method.

But theirs was not the only medical system in use at the time. Shortly after the time of ibn-Sina, Sufism began to take root, and Sufi ideas became more popular in Islamic territories. Sufism – in all its forms – has much to say on health and wellbeing, as well as the protection of the environment. One of its ideas is that asceticism (the suppression of worldly desires, shunning wealth and living on modest means) is both a route to good health and a way of pleasing God.

The proponents of such an approach to wellbeing included Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, an influential Sufi scholar and theologian from the 12th century. However, al-Ghazali was also critical of ibn-Sina and wrote a book called The Incoherence of the Philosophers. In this book, he took issue with what he considered to be the hubris of science and philosophy in their claims to be able to explain the natural world, which in al-Ghazali’s opinion denied a space for God.

In one of his writings criticising ibn-Sina’s attempts to produce a unified theory of the mind-body relationship, al-Ghazali wrote:

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