I know that I have wandered into difficult terrain. What makes science Islamic, or in other words, what adds a religious dimension to science, is a problematic question because the answer depends on certain definitions that are not universally recognized. But let us try to look at the question from the perspective of Islamic tradition, which has at its very heart the concept of Tawhid, the Unicity of God.
This concept is embodied in the first part of Shahadah, the testimony of faith: “There is no god but God.” Everything in Islamic civilization, including the sciences, has sprung forth from this fundamental statement which is an expression of the transcendence of divine unity. This consciousness of the Oneness of God is placed at the center of the Islamic worldview
so as to act as a directing force that draws to itself all levels of manifest reality in the cosmic plane. To proclaim that there is no god but God is to testify that there is an essential unifying principle behind the apparent multiplicity of the universe which, in Islam, is not restricted merely to observable and perceptible reality but goes beyond to the realm of the Unseen.
For over 1400 years, Muslims, as well as some non-Muslims, have drawn inspiration from the Qu’ran, which they consider to be the actual Word of God, revealed to the Prophet Mohammed by the archangel Gabriel. For Muslims, the Qur’an not only establishes what is lawful and what is not, but also defines the scope of human activity — from conception to death, and beyond physical death to resurrection and life after death.
Because developments in the sciences, as in any discipline, largely depend on the particular worldview of their practitioners, the growth of various branches of science in the Islamic civilization can be related to the Islamic worldview, and this relationship can be studied in a variety of ways. Since science is a discipline with a well-defined subject matter, methodology, theories, and accumulated body of knowledge, the scientific process is both a social and an epistemological phenomenon dependent on the worldview of its practitioners.
