Assignment

Name: Muhammad Talha

Roll No: 23ET004
Submitted to: Sir Abdul Haseeb
Subject: Islamic Studies

DEPARTMENT OF
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY
PUNJAB TIANJIN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY,
LAHORE, PAKISTAN.
Reference: Islam In The Modern World By Jeffrey T. Kenney & Ebrahim Moosa

Relevance Of Islam In The Modern World:

(globalization, challenges and prospects)

Globalization & Prospects:

Modernity can be understood simply as a period of time during which a series of dramatic
social, economic, and cultural transformations took place. The period, however, is not the
same for every region and people around the world. In Europe, where modernity and the
benefi ts that fl owed from it fi rst emerged, the transformations began, more or less, in the
seventeenth century. In the Muslim world, as noted above, the story began later.
Modernization constitutes the processes by which societies and peoples become modern.
Being modern is often associated with being aware, or self-conscious, of the changes that are
occurring in society and of actively engaging with these changes. The condition of being
modern, then, as one scholar has noted, is “an attempt by modern men and women to become
subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make
themselves at home in it” (Berman 1988: 5). In theory, the fact that Muslim societies were
latecomers to the experience of modernity and the process of modernization need not impact
the way in which Islam is studied and understood. After all, if one views modernization as a
series of technological and economic developments, “there is no such thing as a ‘modern
society’ plain and simple; there are only societies more or less advanced in a continuum of
modernization” (Berger et al 1974: 9). In practice, however, the latecomer status of Muslim
societies has created an interpretive dilemma with broad implications. Put simply, Europe’s
path to modernization established a model that other peoples were expected to follow, and
this expectation was reinforced by Europe’s power and sense of purpose. European
modernity brought in its wake advancements in science, technology, and bureaucratic
organization that transformed the region into the center of global power and trade. As a
result, Europe brought much of the rest of the world into its sphere of infl uence. A clear
demonstration of this infl uence was the imperialist expansion of European nations (into
Latin American, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East), during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and the colonial systems that followed. Colonialism reinforced the dominance of
Europe by exploiting the resources, both human and natural, of territorial possessions,
imposing foreign control of local economies and governments, and establishing new social
and cultural patterns that disrupted traditional life. Thus the “developed” center integrated the
“developing” periphery into a subordinate role. There are, to be sure, exceptions to this global
assessment, which is derived from world systems theory. But the exceptions do not
undermine the historical rule: that for much of the modern period, the West (initially Europe
and then the United States too) has set the pace for modernity and modernization, and others
have followed. Not surprisingly, Muslims found it diffi cult to “get a grip on” and “make
themselves at home in” a modern world that was seemingly made by and for the advantage of
others. Thus being modern for Muslims meant, at least in part, being self-conscious about
their lack of control over global modernity, and about the search for a way to be modern
without being (or becoming) Western. For this reason, the process of modernization in
Muslim societies—related to industry, state bureaucracy, education, and social and legal
reform—was accompanied by a steady stream of cultural assertions, of claims that the
modernizing changes taking place in Muslim societies were fully compatible with Islamic
tradition and Muslim identity. Islamizing modernity and modernization addressed two
pressing concerns: First, it breathed new life into Islamic culture(s) threatened by Western
infl uence and invasion. Second, it legitimized the changes that Muslims societies needed to
undergo if they were to develop and become competitive in the new world system. Of course,
modernization discourse, Islamic culture-talk, should not be confused with structural and
institutional modernization. But these two should not be separated either, for how people
think and talk about change provides insight into how they have integrated change into their
identity, making it part of who they are. This is particularly important to keep in mind for
students of modern Islam and Muslim societies. Because most Muslims, contrary to some
Western critics, embraced modernity and the opportunities that it entailed, and because they
did so by thinking and talking about modernity in Islamic terms, modern identity and Muslim
identity were often fused in public discourse and popular opinion. Thus the study of modern
Islam brings one in contact with a range of issues, institutions, and developments that some
might otherwise understand as secular or removed from religion. This is evident in the
ongoing discussions/debates that have taken place in Muslim societies. Assertions of Islamic
culture and Muslim identity were not simply a once-and-done phenomenon, something that
occurred in the aftermath of contact with the West and the initial impulse to modernize.
Instead, these assertions have come in waves as Muslims and Muslim societies encountered
new challenges in domestic, regional, and international contexts.

Reference: Islam in a Globalizing World By Thomas W. Simons

Challenges :
The seventeenth century of the Common Era saw the awakening of a world in which much of
mankind's impulse toward globalization took on new forms and adopted new means-a
process at which non-Muslims eventually proved more adept than Muslims. "Blood and iron"
is a nineteenth-century coinage referring to the German empire founded in 1871. But the
same phrase could characterize all industrial and military power based on coal and iron, then
steel, and then petroleum, the motors for globalization over the next three centuries, and for
the territorial nation-state, which was its main vehicle, and for the racism which was often its
fuel. "Blood and iron" were central to the type of globalization Muslims grappled with for
three centuries, up to our own day, in about 1970, when the globalizing impulse began to take
on the newer shapes and contents that we are still trying to understand and control.
Globalization by blood and iron was born at the western end of the small European peninsula.
It was commercial before it became industrial. Its impulse was strongest on Europe's Atlantic
seaboard, among the English, the Dutch, and the French, whose economies were going
beyond the agricultural bases that had underpinned every previous civilization. New ways of
thinking were emerging, new ways of setting and pursuing goals and power, and new groups
interested in accumulating and maintaining that power. After more than a century of bloody
wars fought in the name of religion, there was less and less resorting to religious rationales, to
collective definitions of value-although sometimes old ones were replaced by new ones.
Increasingly, the concepts of reason and the individual framed thought and action. Islam
today is facing challenges from within and from the wider world. The critical problems are
the fundamental tensions within Islam. The attitudes and criticisms common in the outside
world can be ignored as misguided or hostile, but the tensions within Islam throughout the
world must be confronted. In a simple geographical sense, Islam has to come to grips with its
changing centres. The religious centres define the heartland: Saudi Arabia maintains its
guardianship of the shrines at Mecca and Medina, and the conduct of the hajj, against the
claims of Shii Iran, the Shii tradition, and other sects disillusioned with Saudi Arabia's
credentials within the ummah. Saudi Arabia enjoys much of its strength to repudiate other
claims because it remains the economic centre of the ummah. It takes a combination of the
incomes of Kuwait, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and Yemen even to come close to
Saudi Arabia's oil wealth. However, this wealth is based on finite resources, and in the years
to come the economic centre will shift to those parts of the Muslim world with sustainable
resources and reproductive assets. West Asian financial investments recognise this long-term
problem, but they remain overwhelmingly located in the Western and non-Muslim
economies. The intellectual centre of Islam is Al-Azhar in Cairo. The ideas and attitudes
taught here are spread throughout the ummah, particularly through the population centres of
Islam: Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Malaysia. The relative power of the
different centres is shifting. Over time the claims on and against the heartland from and by
the peripheral Muslim communities will exacerbate the tensions already present. The
conservative centre will be under greater pressure from the more vigorous, prolific and liberal
Muslim societies on the periphery.
Despite the ideals promoting an equitable and productive material life, the overwhelming
majority of Muslims experience living standards which are hardly enviable by any standard.
This frequently appears to be a greater paradox in the wealthy oil-producing Muslim
countries. Where justice and brotherhood are recommended by the ideals, in such countries
we see the conspicuous consumption of the very rich, the purchase of very expensive military
technology and armaments, and we see the exploitation of 'guest workers': fellow Muslims
from Palestine, Pakistan, the Philippines, among others. The plight of these groups was
obvious during and after the Gulf War in 1990-1991. Unemployment of masses of people;
rapid urbanisation; unbalanced development - all need to be addressed quickly by the ummah,
if the ummah is to become the social force of international Islam. The wide imbalances in the
distribution of incomes and wealth between Muslim societies are obvious, but since effective
redistribution is not happening within most Muslim societies it is unlikely to occur to any
major degree between different Muslim societies.

Development investment in Muslim countries is slow simply because investors are put off by
the more extremist agitations and the perceptions in the West about Islamic legal
proscriptions of such financial mechanisms as interest. Muslim investors appear quite happy
to send their money into the non-Muslim economies, where greater profits are available and
the political and social circumstances are much more settled. In other cases, where people are
trying to help their communities they often encounter problems from unlikely sources. The
Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has been lending small sums of money, mostly to rural women
so that they can engage in small enterprises, but also to collective groups. The sums are small
and the interest is fixed, with the principal being repaid first and the interest calculated on the
diminishing principal. Twenty per cent interest per year still seems high, but it is tiny when
compared with the twenty per cent per month or ten per cent per day demanded by the
traditional money-lenders, or the compound interest at Bangladesh's commercial banks. The
Grameen Bank lends money to people who would not be eligible in the normal commercial
sense. People are helped to determine the best way to satisfy their needs and are helped by the
bank's officers in the villages. The Grameen Bank goes out to its clients and it permits the
good sense and honesty of its clients to prevail: it has a recovery rate of some ninety eight per
cent. The bank faces conflict from the traditional money-lenders, the commercial banks
which claim that the scheme is too small to create the economic growth necessary in
Bangladesh, and from the Muslims who see the scheme emancipating women in the villages.
The bank fulfils the ideals of Islamic thinking, but is attacked by established interest groups
defending their interpretation of Islamic practice.

Economic frustration and unequal opportunities are fertile breeding grounds for dissent and
protest. Equally important is the failure of most Muslim governments to confront the
demands of general education. "Modernity, the circumstance of being 'modern', is, in a
central sense, inescapable. It is the necessary context for every tolerably well-informed life-
journey undertaken in the contemporary world." [1] Being modern does not mean being
Western but it does mean that some degree of secular knowledge will have to be given far
greater prominence in Muslim epistemologies. Dr Mahathir bin Mohamed has made the point
that there can be no separation between secular and religious knowledge because all
knowledge, all life, is encompassed by Islam. It is interesting that so prominent and
successful a Muslim leader as Dr Mahathir had to tread a fine line: advocating on the one
hand an independent and progressive Muslim attitude to acquiring the widest possible
knowledge, while placating the traditional sensibilities by insisting on the moral rectitude of
learning as the only way to protect the faith. There are Muslim intellectuals working to
understand what it means to be a Muslim in the modern world, but they do not receive the
prominence given to the extremists in Western reports. Western media are more interested in
the violent and emotional than they are in quiet, but deeply significant, debates about the
eternal values that remain, despite the anarchic individualism of Western communities, the
essence of being human. Not only are Muslim intellectuals under pressure from the
conservative elements of their own societies, they are not receiving the recognition and
support they deserve from the West. Yet it is at this level of ideas and reassessments that
Muslim leaders will have to convert the de facto modernisation of their societies into general
acceptance. The renaissance of ijtihad will be needed to reinterpret the principles of Islam, to
retain the critical moral core while jettisoning the dubious accretions of traditional and
worldly Muslim authorities.The main danger arises if Muslims accept the more extreme view
of the difference of Islam and the insistence on establishing 'the third way'. If everything
Western is to be discarded, then the creative and productive dynamism inherent in Islamic
traditions will be suppressed yet again. Is Islamic resurgence giving enough attention to the
challenges of poverty and hunger, disease and illiteracy? Have Islamic resurgents gone past,
or are they still stuck on, their rhetoric regarding education and knowledge, science and
technology, politics and administration, economics and management in their preferred
Islamic order? To what extent have Islamists become pre-occupied with forms and symbols,
rituals and practices? Do they regard laws and regulations in a static rather than a dynamic
manner ? Is there a tension between the extremists' positions and the principles of the Quran
and sunnah about the roles of women in society and the place of minorities in Muslim
societies? Is the main problem a betrayal of the spirit of the Quran in the extremists'
exclusiveness in a variety of matters ranging from charity to politics? Are the activities of
extremists encouraging sectarianism in the umma through their insistence on their
interpretations being the only correct ones? Have extremist views contributed to the
factionalism and fragmentation of the ummah. [3]

The moral question is at the heart of the matter. Fazlur Rahman stated the position precisely.
Islam needs: "some first-class minds who can interpret the old in terms of the new as regards
substance and turn the new into the service of the old as regards ideals". [4] Can the
modernists who want modernisation without Westernisation expect to realise their hopes?
There is evidence enough in Western society that modernisation, with all its technological
developments, has radically changed values by putting traditional attitudes under pressure
and then instituting a new ethic.

Reference: Islamophobia and Radicalisation By Tahir Abbas

Islamophobia:
Racism has long been present in Britain, and it has persisted in the postwar period, shifting
from an explicitly racialist discourse to include a focus on culture and the religious practices
of ethnic minorities. Unlike the racism directed at black people, which is primarily based on
the colour of their skin, anti-Muslim racism is based on perceived cultural relativism and the
presumption of potential radicalisation on the part of conservative Muslim groups. Elite
actors have sought to construct a conflict narrative between far-right and ‘Muslim extremist’
groups, using the oppositional positions taken by mutually competing groups to reinforce
reductive discourses on the threat of extremism and the apparent failures of multiculturalism.
Islamophobia and Occidentophobia sustain a national and international hegemon that
objectifies working-class and ‘underclass’ groups in order to reinforce existing local and
global ethnic and class relations. In reality, both positions reflect the struggles of economic
marginalisation, cultural exclusion, political alienation and social anomie specific to each
group.1 The previous chapter’s examination of the media’s role in manufacturing, sustaining
and reinforcing Islamophobia suggested that the problems are deeply entrenched in a range of
institutions. The focus in this chapter is on the ways in which Islamophobia can also be seen
as a form of structural racism, where the anti-Muslim dynamic reveals itself not merely in
terms of misrecognition and misrepresentation but in the physical manifestation of outcomes
that have deleterious consequences for groups in society already facing the weight of
‘othering’. The growth of the radical right is a consequence of Islamophobia, but it also has
the implication of recreating Islamophobia, as the radical right does not merely reinforce an
existing political discourse; it also generates anti-Muslim sentiment among groups seeking
violent, vengeful retribution against Muslims. The cultural and the structural interactions of
Islamophobia feed into different radicalisations of the radical right as well as Islamist
extremist groups. An elite discourse depicts social conflict at the bottom of society as
mirrored misrepresentations of each other, omitting their shared characteristics. Such is the
nature of racial and class formations in Britain today. In thinking through the issues on
British Islam and Muslims in Britain, one of the first topics that caught my attention occurred
in the 1980s. Known as the Honeyford Affair, the controversy centred on the utterances of a
disgruntled head teacher, Roy Honeyford, who criticised multiculturalism and its effect on
British education in terms that were described as borderline racist. But was Honeyford racist
or correct in calling out the need for Muslim integration through and in education?2
Alternatively, should an anti-racist multicultural education cater for differences, providing
opportunities to celebrate those differences as part of a collective national psyche? The
controversy erupted during a period when there was a growing disparity between the home
lives of Muslim children and practices within schools in parts of Bradford where the outrage
surfaced. However, the incident was not a peculiar local anxiety, as swathes of the British
Muslim community, especially Muslims in the Midlands and in the North, were suffering the
deleterious consequences of deindustrialisation and automation. Their lives were moving in
the opposite direction from that of wider society. With Thatcherism came financial
deregulation and the liberalisation of markets through global trade and financial exchange.
Moving farther apart became the dominant paradigm during this period, but it was also
indicative of something deeply problematic. To some extent, the episode can be seen as the
beginning of an attack on political correctness and on the race equality or race relations
sector. It was only a matter of time until the dismantling of these systems, originally
established to keep racist, sexist and homophobic individuals and institutions in check.4
In 1999, seven UK-born Pakistani Muslims, implicated in the kidnapping of foreign tourists
and a plot to bomb the British embassy and a nightclub in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen,
served around five years each in a prison in Yemen. Soon after, the events of 9/11 took place.
The world today continues to live with the implications of this event and the ensuing war on
terror. The present urgency is over Islamophobia, which has increased dramatically since
these events and is based on the widespread perception that the problem of violent extremism
is a problem within Islam itself. This was reflected in the British response to 7/7, when four
British-born Muslims hailing from Bradford were implicated in the London suicide bombings
of three tube stations and a bus. In the aftermath of the incident, Prime Minister Tony Blair
announced that the ‘rules of the game’ were to change,5 and the ‘Prevent’ policy
subsequently became the main means for engagement, community-development and
countering violent extremism in UK counterterrorism policy.

Reference: Advances in Religious and Cultural Studies By Samuel Peleg

Interfaith Dialogue:
Interfaith dialogue refers to cooperative, constructive, and positive interaction between
people of different religious traditions and/or spiritual or humanistic beliefs, at both the
individual and institutional levels.In today’s fragmented global reality, in which hatred and
fear of otherness is increasing and tolerance to diversity is shrinking, intercultural and
interfaith dialogue is imperative, not simply for placation and comfort but for survival. In
Ramsbotham, Woodhouse, and Miall’s (2016) important distinction about types of conflict
resolution dynamics, they distinguish between peace-keeping, peace-making and
peacebuilding. The former is the endeavor to keep the belligerents apart, maintain cease-fire
agreements and try to prevent new outbursts of violence to allow for the peace-making stage
to begin. That stage is centered around a negotiation process, in which all stakeholders in the
conflict attempt to convince that their way is the correct way to understand the issues on the
agenda. Most efforts, including energy, time, and money are invested in persuasion and
discounting the other’s narrative. The peace-making phase is culminated successfully, with a
signed agreement, or unsuccessfully, with resuming hostilities.
But even an agreement doesn’t really eliminate the conflict if it is not followed by the
peacebuilding stage. This is the most daring and wholesome to uproot the sources of
contention and preventing from ever recurring. But such an undertaking necessitates a
different mindset and approach than the previous conflict resolution engagements. The
peacebuilding task is about confronting deeper issues and dissimilarities that are embedded in
identity, group-cohesion and sense of purpose and belonging. This is a daunting territory to
enter. However, in order to prevent such hubs of potential friction from being galvanized
again as sources of mobilization against others, they must be raised and discussed together,
by former foes who seek a shared future. Peace-building is founded on trust and
collaboration, anchored in empathy and partnership, not on the collision of narratives aiming
to wear each other out. For this purpose, dialogue is the ultimate pattern of communication.

Reference: Muslims,Trust and Multiculturalism By Amina Yaqin

Multiculturalism:
All successful relationships are built on trust, as all successful societies must also be. Trust
offers an important lens through which one can understand relations between Muslim and
non-Muslim at this fraught moment in history. Trust also yields to study through a number of
paradigms: psychological, philosophical, political, phenomenological and so on. view of the
operation and frustration of trust. In multicultural societies particular historical pressures
come to bear on social trust, and there has arisen a range of views on how best to organise
society and relations within it. At the present moment, if we seek to build a more trusting
society then one of our most urgent tasks is to address the breakdown of trust between
Muslims and others.Not all of the many definitions of trust available to us capture its
essentially dialogic nature. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), quoted by
Marek Kohn, defines trust as ‘confidence in or reliance on some quality or attribute of a
person or thing, or the truth of a statement’ (Kohn 2008: 9). This is too broad, since it tends to
conflate the confidence one might have in a ‘thing’—possibly an inanimate object such as a
car—with the trust one might actively place in a person or persons. In the former case, we
may have confidence that the car will function well, which might in turn be based on trust in
its human designers, mechanics or even the driver. However, this is different from trust
placed in other people directly. Moreover, the OED definition implies trust is a one-way
street. We are doing the trusting and the definition says nothing about what might come the
other way in the arrangement, which puts the one in whom trust is placed in a passive
position: something that is not often the case with this most interdependent of acts. Instead, if
we venture our own definition of trust as an investment of belief in reciprocal socially
oriented intentions and actions in another (or others), we see more clearly that there is an
implied mutuality involved in placing trust. We also see that what applies to individual
interactions is also true of bonds between different constituent parts of a group or nation. We
place trust in our leaders to govern us, but more insistently, we place trust in others in our
day-today interactions with them. Onora O’Neill makes the point that we supposedly live in a
world where trust is breaking down all around us: surveys repeatedly show low levels of trust
in politicians, the police, the health service, the legal system and (especially) journalists.
Despite this generalised mistrust, she points out, we still ‘constantly place active trust in
many others’ every day (O’Neill 2002: 12). any others’ every day (O’Neill 2002: 12).
Trust depends on the assumption that an other’s best interests will be compatible with ours.
Marek Kohn cites Russell Hardin’s ‘encapsulated interest’ model where, in order to trust, we
must believe that others’ interests incorporate our own (Kohn 2008: 10). It is this mutual
reliance—and what happens when it breaks down or is eroded—that makes the question of
trust so compelling for the field of intercultural relations. It is central to overcoming the
distance between people and therefore at the heart of what multiculturalism has been about.
Yet, within modern multicultural societies, the glue of historical fellow feeling often taken to
be central to social and cultural trust is sometimes felt to be absent. In the same way, can we
always be sure that the vision of society projected by elites on behalf of the majority will
always encompass the good society as envisioned by minorities? In Europe, the tensions that
have come to exist, at least at the level of political rhetoric, between established populations
and those migrants whose numbers have swelled in the last 60 or so years are in part due to
the collision of Enlightenment traditions of political philosophy and the inequitable legacies
of the empire.
Multiculturalism is broadly understood to reflect an acknowledgement of the fact that modern
Western nations are composed of diverse ethnic and cultural groups. In some cases—such as
the so-called settler nations of the United States, Canada and Australia—immigration is
perforce part of the national narrative. However, the countries of Europe have been slower to
embrace diversity, at least as a political challenge, in spite of the Challengs.
This all underlines the importance of symbolism in current critiques of multiculturalism: the
desire to ‘read into’ the attitudes, behaviour and dress of an Other who is taken to be opaque
or evasive. In the questions of trust that circulate around the Muslim subject in today’s
multicultural societies, the burden of signification falls disproportionately on women. The
Muslim woman is often read through her choice of dress, public visibility (or otherwise) and
degree of subservience to what is deemed the fiercely patriarchal Muslim culture of which
she is part. In her chapter on the imagery of the Muslim woman, Alaya Forte examines the
resonances of one particular image used in an anti-radicalisation campaign by the counter-
extremism group Inspire, featuring a woman posed in profile against a plain grey background
and wearing a hijab fashioned from a Union Jack. Forte deconstructs the ideological
resonances of this image, using Roland Barthes’ idea of myth as her template. The Inspire
image, supposed to accompany invocations to women not to join Islamic State, in fact
dehistoricises and obscures the loaded and problematic use of the Union Jack—an imperial
symbol—at the same time as it enshrouds the young woman, posed here in the manner of a
police mugshot. Far from symbolising female agency in the fight against radicalisation, Forte
claims that the image freezes time, ironically imbuing a supposed message of peace with the
violence of colonial history.

Reference: Islamic Perspectives on Science and Technology By Mohammad Hashim Kamali

Islamic View Point Towards Socio-Cultural And

Technological Changes:
In this article, the issue of how Islam can give a proper orientation to science and technology
is considered. The position is fi rst taken that science has a longitudinal relationship with
religion, i.e. scientifi c activity is a specifi c kind of religious activity and the Islamic
worldview engenders a suitable comprehensive framework for scientifi c work and its
applications. This provides fi ve roles for religion in scientifi c activity: fi rstly, it gives an
impetus for the exploration of nature as the Handiwork of God; secondly, it provides a
metaphysical basis for science; thirdly, it supplies a suitable epistemology for science;
fourthly, it answers questions which are brought up in science, but science per se cannot
answer; and fi nally, it gives a proper direction to applied science and technology (S&T).
Under the inclusive Islamic worldview, S&T should be used for understanding God’s magnifi
- cent creation and for securing human felicity at both the individual and societal levels.
Some policy recommendations are provided for S&T development in the Islamic world.
Some other scholars consider that science and religion belong to two contradictory realms.
Among the people of this category, there are some who are religious conservatives whose
main source of information is religious texts, and they do not take scientifi c fi ndings
seriously. There are also materialists whose sole source of information is claimed to be sense-
based data, and they do not believe in God nor non-material beings. In their view, empirical
science can explain everything. As Jacques Monod explained: ‘Anything can be reduced to
simple obvious mechanical interactions. The cell is a machine, the animal is a machine, man
is a machine’. Some scholars believe there is a common ground between science and religion.
For example, there are questions which are brought up in science, but for which science per
se cannot provide any answer – such as the role of human beings in the creation and the
purpose of creation.

The Role of Religion in Shaping Science and Technology

As mentioned above, science has a longitudinal relationship with theistic religions.
Consequently, such a religion can provide a suitable comprehensive framework for
conducting scientifi c or technological work. This is because:
1. It emphasises the study of nature.
2. It provides the metaphysical basis of science.
3. It introduces legitimate ways of discovering the mysteries of nature.
4. It can provide responses to our ultimate questions.
5. It can give the proper orientation to the applications of science and technology.

Emphasis on the Study of God’s Handiwork

According to the Qur’an, natural phenomena are signs of God, and through the understanding
of these signs, one attains cognition of the Lord of signs:
Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of night
and day, there are signs for those who possess intellects. Those who remember God
standing, sitting, and lying on their sides, and refl ect on the creation of the heavens and
the earth [and say] ‘Our Lord, You have not created this in vain….’ ( Al ‘Imran 3:190–
191)
Thus, the study of natural phenomena is strongly recommended:
 ‘And in the earth there are signs for those who are sure; And in your own souls
(too); will you not then see?’ ( al-Dhariyat 51: 20–21)
The golden era of Islamic civilisation was indebted to this Qur’anic emphasis on the study of
God’s Handiwork.

The Role of Metaphysical Principles in Science

As stated above, scientifi c activity is a kind of religious activity, with its own specifi c tools.
Based on this outlook, the Islamic worldview provides a metaphysical basis for all activities
of a believing Muslim, including so-called scientifi c activities. To clarify this point, we
notice that although some scientifi c activities start with experiments and observations, the
presuppositions of a scientist are important in his/her choice of experiments and in his/her
choice of theories and their interpretations. This is especially important in the case of
fundamental theories. Furthermore, very often empirical data does not lead to a unique
theory, and we have an underdetermination of theories by empirical data. Here, the
metaphysical biases of a scientist are determinants in his/her choice of theories. For example,
in the realm of atomic physics, we have two versions of quantum theory: The standard
formulation denies the principle of causality, while the Bohmian mechanics respects
causality. The choice between these two formulations of quantum theory is based on the
metaphysical prejudices of the scientists. Similarly, in cosmology, it is noticed that the
natural constants, determining the strengths of the forces of nature, are so fi ne-tuned that
they have permitted the appearance of life in our planet. In order to negate fi ne-tuning by a
supernatural agency, some cosmologists have appealed to the hypothesis of the multiverse,
according to which there are many universes, rather than one. In each of these universes,
different laws and forces, with different strengths, are present. Thus, there is a possibility for
the existence of another universe with the characteristics of our universe. Of course, in both
of these views, one incorporates one’s own metaphysical assumptions. However, as the
eminent physicist, Paul Davies , believed, the assumption of a designer is much more
economical than that of a multiverse: ‘Not everybody is happy with the many-universes
theory. To postulate an infi nity of unseen and unseeable universes just to explain the one we
do see seems like a case of excess baggage carried to the extreme. It is simpler to postulate
one unseen God. This is the conclusion also reached by Swinburne’ (Davies 1993 , p. 190).