In the shadows of glories past : jihad for modern science in Muslim societies, 1850 to the Arab Spring / John W. Livingston.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Livingston, John W. (John William), 1932- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Islamic modernism.

Islamic renewal.

Science--Islamic countries--History.

Science.

Islam and science.

History.

Islamic countries.

Islam and science--History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

viii, 450 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018.

Summary:

The title of this volume implies two things: the greatness of the scientific tradition that Muslims has lost, and the power of the West, in whose threatening shadow reformers now labored to modernize in order to defend themselves against those very powers they were taking as models. Copernicus and Darwin were the names that dominated the debate on science, whose arguments and rebuttals were published mainly in the religious and secular journals in Cairo and Beirut from the 1870s. Analysis and interpretation of this literature shows the hope that Arab reformers had of duplicating the Japanese success, followed by the despair when success was denied. A cultural malaise festered from generations of despair, defeat and foreign occupation, and this feeling transmogrified after 1967 to a psychosis in a significant number of secular writers, educators and religious reformers. The great debate on assimilating science was turned inward where defensive mechanisms of denial spun out perversions of science: the Quran becoming a thesaurus of science; and a more extreme derivative of that, something called "Islamic Science," arising as an alternate science that was to be in harmony with the Quran, Shari'a and Muslim belief. This volume reveals the undermining effect of European imperialism on western oriented religious reformers and secular intellectuals, for whom science and political reform went together, and concludes with a chapter on the state of science in contemporary Muslim societies and the efforts to institutionalize science (before the upheavals of 2011) so as to bring to life an authentic and indigenous culture that would sustain scientific study and research as autonomous pursuits. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Copernicus, Darwin and Islamic intellectual reform in Muslim societies during the last half of the 19th century 1

1 The Ottomans: Absolutist state reformers versus Young Ottoman constitutionalists 3

2 Post Muhammad Ali reform in Egypt: Khedive Ismail and Ali Mubarak's Dar al-Ulum and Rawdat al-Madaris 36

3 Beirut: the American College and the popularization of science 59

4 Muqtataf, Rawdat al-Madaris and the Fikri treatise on a moving earth 79

5 Darwin between Muqtataf and the American evangelists 114

6 From Copernicus to Darwin 133

7 Shibli Shumayyil's Darwin: a theory for everything progressive 147

8 Scientific Interpretation: Shaykh Husayn al-Jisr and Darwin 175

9 Darwin between Sayyid Ahmad Khan's Natcheriyya and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani's refutation 190

10 Muhammad Abduh 210

11 Abduh's legacy 226

Part II Science, society and government in the modern Muslim world 251

12 Overview of the 20th century 253

13 Darwin at the center of debate 262

14 Inverse appropriation: science by Quran 314

15 Scientific Interpretation 334

16 Scientific Interpretation and evolution 351

17 The place of Al-Azhar and the ulema 371

18 Science and the contemporary state 389.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781472447340

1472447344

OCLC:

995805943

Publisher Number:

99976790755