بیشترتوضیحاتافزودن یادداشت جدید Many people feel that that in fact there is no such thing as the Islamic problem of science. They say science is science, whatever it happens to be, and Islam has always encouraged knowledge, al-ilm in Arabic, and therefore we should encourage science and what's the problem? -there's no problem. But the problem is there because ever since children began to learn Lavoiser's Law that water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen, in many Islamic countries they came home that evening and stopped saying their prayers. There is no country in the Islamic World which has not been witness in one way or another, to the impact, in fact, of the study of Western Science upon the ideological system of its youth. Parallel with that however, because science is related first of all to prestige, and secondly, to power, and thirdly, without [science] the solution of certain problems within Islamic society [is difficult], from all kinds of political backgrounds and regimes, all the way from revolutionary regimes to monarchies, all [governments] the way from semi-democracies to totalitarian regimes, all spend their money in teaching their young Western science. I see many muslims in the audience today, many of you, your education is paid for by your parents or your government or some university in order precisely to bring Western science back into the muslim world. And therefore we are dealing with a subject which is quite central to the concerns of the Islamic world. In the last twenty years [this subject] has begun to attract some of the best minds in the Islamic world to the various dimensions of this problem. And therefore I want to begin by first of all by expressing for you, (making things easier, categorizing it a bit), three main positions which exist in the Islamic world today as far as the relationship between Islam and modern science is concerned, before delving a bit more deeply into what my own view is. First of all, is the position that many people re-iterate. I am sure many of you in this room, and especially at a place like MIT, who would not have had much of a chance to study the philosophical implications of either your own tradition, that is Islam, nor of Western science, believe that one studies science and then one says prayers, loves God and obeys the laws of the Shariah, and that there is really no problem. This position itself is not something new. It is something that was inculcated in many circles of the Islamic world during the past century and going back historically, it was the position taken up by Jamaluddin Al-Afghani who migrated to Eygpt and called himself Al-Afghani. The famous reformer, a rather maverick [figure], of the nineteenth century was at once a philosopher, political figure, Pan-Islamist and anti-Caliphate organizer *. Nobody knows exactly what his political positions were, but he was certainly a very influential person in the nineteenth century, and was responsible, directly, and indirectly, through his student Mohammed Abduh, for the so-called reforms that took place in the 1880's and 1890's of the Christian era, that is the beginning of the fourteenth century of the Islamic era, in Eygpt. Jamaluddin has been claimed, interestingly enough, by both modernists and anti-modernists forces like the Ikhwan-ul-Muslameen in Eygpt during the early decades of this century.