“One wonders who knows more about the coyote, the zoologist who is able to study its external habit and dissect its cadaver or the Indian medicine man who identifies himself with the “spirit” of the coyote?”

“The theory of evolution also had a very great effect in alienating science from religion and creating a world in which one could go about studying the wonders of creation without ever having a sense of wonder in the religious sense of that term.”

“The traditional doctrine of man and not the measurement of skulls and footprints is the key for the understanding of that anthropos who, despite the rebellion of Promethean man against Heaven from the period of Renaissance and its aftermath, is still the inner man of every man, the reality which no human being can deny wherever and whenever he lives, the imprint of a theomorphic nature which no historical change and transformation can erase completely from the face of that creature called man.”

“The ideal of the 11th/17th century physicists was to be able to explain all physical reality in terms of the movement of atoms. This idea was extended by people like Descartes who saw the human body itself as nothing but a machine. Chemists tried to study chemical reaction in this light and reduce chemistry to a form of physics, and biologists tried to reduce their science to simply chemical reactions and then finally to the movement of physical particles. The idea of reductionsm which is innate to modern science and which was only fortified by the tehory of evolution could be described as the reduction fo the spirit to the psyche, the psyche to biological activity, life to lifeless matter and lifeless matter to purely quantitative particles or bundles of energy whose movements can be measured and quantified.”

“The tradition of Islamic science of course gradually weakened but it did not decay as rapidly as some people have claimed in the West. It continued on into the 10th, 11th and 12th Islamic centuries especially in the fields of medicine and pharmacology. If one is going to talk about the decay of the Islamic sciences, it is only of the last two or three centuries that one should speak if one takes the whole of the Islamic world into consideration. And one should not be ashamed of that fact because no civilization in the history of science has always been avidly interested in the natural sciences throughout its whole history. There have been periods of greater interest and those of lesser interest in every civilization, and there is no reason why one should equate the gradual loss of impetus in the cultivation of the sciences in the Islamic world with an automatic decadence of that civilization. This is a modern, Western view which equates civilization with science as understod in the modern sense.”

“Islamic science is related profoundly to the Islamic world view. It is rooted deeply in knowledge based upon the unity of Allah or al-tawhid and a view of the universe in which Allah’s Wisdom and Will rule and in which all things are interrelated reflecting unity on the cosmic level. In contrast, Western science is based on considering the natural world as a reality which is separate from both Allah and the higher levels of being. At best, Allah is accepted as the creator of the world, as a mason who has built a house which now stand on its own. His intrusion into the running of the world and His continuous sustenance of it are not accepted in the modern scientific world view.”

“Furthermore, in the 13th/19th century philosophy began to see itself as a complete replacement for religion as one can see in the rise of the very idea of ideology at that time, a term used widely today even by Muslims who rarely realize the essentially secular and anti-religious character of the very concept of ideology which has gradually come to replace traditional religion in so many circles.”