Avicenna: The Leading Sage
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Meta-physics (and philosophy) was considered the highest form of knowledge. And the tradition of pioneering various sciences and philosophy was started in Medina (present-day Saudi Arabia) by a certain Mohammed Baqir and his son Ja'far Sadiq, who at peak is believed to have taught 25,000 people [1]. Jabir Hayyan (Geber, father of Chemistry) was Ja'far's student. Avicenna's ancestors were Ja'far's followers, too.
At the peak of rivalry between the Abbasids of Iraq and Fatimids of Egypt (who later invented the Pen), the schools of wisdom and schools of sciences were established by both as a means to compete with each other, politically and religiously, and take over the tradition started by Mohammed Baqir. The Nizaris would later scede from the Fatimids and settle at the Alamut Castle in Iran under the leadership of Hasan Sabah, a student of the Egyptian school of wisdom and the founder of the feared Hash-hasins (Assassins).
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ikhwan-al-safa/
[1] https://www.al-islam.org/life-imam-jafar-al-sadiq-baqir-shar...
Also good is one of Avicenna’s biggest critics, Al-Ghazali. His view on occasionalism makes it easy to believe in miracles and is sunni orthodoxy in creed. Basically if you believe that God is the creator of causes, effects, and their relationship which is being upheld in every instance, then a suspense of such a relationship is possible. Al-Ghazali, unlike Avicenna, is also considered a heavy weight in sufism. For example, one critique I heard a while back from Neil deGrasse Tyson on Al-Ghazali was that his writings is basically what caused the end of the Islamic Golden age, because the focus became on more on spirituality than intellectual pursuits afterwards. There could be some truth in that. I got my first B in university when I started reading Rumi. This was probably just laziness and not some spiritual opening.
Also popular is Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. He said something a long the lines that if you hid behind a wall and threw a pebble in front of a baby, even a baby will turn around and see where the pebble came from. There’s a popular story that he was walking on the streets with a large entourage and some old lady asked “who is that guy?” and someone responded “Don’t you know! This is Fakhr al-Din al-Razi! He has 70 proofs of God’s existence!” To which the old lady laughed and responded “If he did not have seventy doubts for the existence of God he would not need seventy proofs!” Upon hearing this al-Razi said everyone should be like the old lady.
If you’re interested in islamic theology, Dr. Umar Faruq And-Allah is good. You can find lecture series for his courses on YouTube. This is also a good series by him (http://qadriyya.org/lessons/aqeedah/dr-umar-faruq-abd-allah-...). It’s a bit advanced as he’s giving the class to a muslim audience. Also good is TJ Winters/Abdal Hakim Murad at Cambridge. I found them both to be honest to the tradition and intellectually honest. For Quran translations, I was told Abdel-Haleem’s is the clearest.
In my layman's understanding of things, I would say that Al-Ghazli was not so much the "cause" as the final nail in the coffin. "Islamic science" had been twiddling over time for centuries, and Incoherence of the Philosophers was simply what put it to bed.
Toby Huff [1] puts forward the thesis that Islam was not really interested in science, and it was simply tolerated by certain rulers. There were no 'universities' as we understand them now, as the madrasas were primarily religious schools (per Huff) and it was all about memorizing and interpreting the Quran. So as time went on (the argument goes), after Islam became the dominant culture in a region, non-religious education institutions tended to dwindle. [2] And this wasn't unique to Islam: Imperial China was also fairly 'non-curious' according to Huff. In ~1600 China was probably more advanced than most/all of Europe, but the Jesuits could not get the Chinese interest in (e.g.) the telescope, and after that point scientific endeavours basically did not occur in China, and neither did technological ones—and so the Europeans were able to walk in a few centuries later. [3] See also Mughal Empire.
As one commentator I ran across put it: Islam never had the equivalent of an Aquinas that could reconcile Aristotle with the faith. A merging of Athens and Jerusalem (or Mecca) as some put it. Christianity was able to trudge on because there was no metaphysical conflict (especially when it came to Occasionalism and secondary causation; Aquinas and even Augustine before him rejected Occasionalism [4]), and so Natural Philosophy (aka, Science) was able to develop.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toby_Huff
[2] See Huff's The Rise of Early Modern Science.
[3] See Huff's Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution.
Not sure if it’s intellectual conflict [1]. I think it’s more of motivation. Do you care to keep exploring horizontal causes if you see causation vertically to the fullest (all causes, effects, and relationships between causes and effects are being upheld by God).
Also, we can’t evaluate occasionalism as a philosophy on its own. Occasionalism is a point of creed only after certainty of God’s existence. It’s irrelevant if you don’t believe in God.
One can still do science. Assume life is simply Conway’s Game of Life. This is an extreme example of secondary causation where “god” wrote the code - then evolution/causation is determined from an initial state without any further input. In addition to doing the science of discovering the patterns of scientific laws (in this example, patterns like oscillators, spaceships), a person that believes in traditional sunni creed may also raise the following questions: (1) Who is sustaining this cellar automation in every moment? In other words, there is constant “power” running the computer. (2) We can’t take stop at the simplest of observations as givens with their own creative agency. In this example, everything we observe was initially defined. Extending this example, things as simple as death can be perceived as a variable that was defined. Death exists because of God created it. It’s not a truth that exists independent of a Creator. (3) There is still creative precision in chaos. In this example, no matter how chaotic the patterns in the game become, the code that is constantly being executed is precise without a single character error.
Al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error [2], an easy read, may also be of interest.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-causation/... [2] https://www.aub.edu.lb/fas/CVSP/Documents/Al-ghazaliMcCarthy...