Did Islam have some kind of Renaissance-era?

[DetlefK]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance

The european Middle-Ages were defined by a very religious and very fundamentalist mindset.

The Renaissance was a cultural re-orientation away from contemporary religion and towards the "wisdom and glory" of the past.

The Renaissance was very fruitful for art as contemporary christian elements were mixed with pre-christian and non-christian elements: mythological and religious concepts from Ancient Europe and Ancient Middle-East.



My question:
Was/is there a similar cultural era where muslim artists/thinkers/scholars combined islamic and non-islamic religious ideas?

(The Al-Nahda seems more like a political Renaissance to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Nahda )

[carpetbagger]

1. Yes.

Medieval Islam had extensive trade and cultural ties with the remnants of the Roman Empire, especially in the Eastern/Byzantine areas, as well as with India and the Steppe. The folk practices fused together in Spain/Andaluz and in Anatolia/Turkey, many of the seeds of the Christian Renaissance were planted during this time. There's a good BBC documentary "An Islamic History of Europe", it's on Youtube, and deals with some of this. It's great watching, and I came away really having hope for just how much we could actually learn and replicate from this.

[BainsBane]

2. The center of scientific and mathematical knowledge

during the Middle Ages was in the Muslim word, Isfahan and Baghdad, for example. Islam also didn't see science as being in conflict with religion as was common in the Christian world. The height of literary, spiritual and scientific fluorescence is referred to as the Golden Age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age

They did travel to the West, and Westerners traveled to the East. Islamic science records from the era can be found in the Vatican archives.

[DetlefK]

3. Research and "science" are not the same.

"Science" is a specific way of doing research: The dominant way since about 1700.

It is one thing to research how to build an arc, how the human body works, to work on mathematical equations, to develop telescopes and to use them to keep track of the movement of stars...
It's an entirely other thing to apply this knowledge to build a world-view.

There was a shit-ton of research before science came around. Persia, Chaldea, Egypt, China... those were sophisticated cultures already many millennia ago. (The persian philosopher Zoroaster basically paved the way for the later and more famous greek philosophers.) But despite the research, the world-view never changed away from "Gods did it".

This is the big difference between research and science: Science includes the possibility of being fundamentally wrong about everything, including your religion.
The scientific method was born from pure coincidence out of a fusion of the mathematical progress of the late Renaissance and the philosophical justification for practical experiments from the early Renaissance (and a repopularization of the concept of "laws of nature" by Ramon Llull, one of the founding-fathers of Alchemy, in the late Middle-Ages).

Science eventually dared to go to a fundamentally materialistic world-view, without the need for a God. And this development began in the 18th century already, for example with the research into fertilization and the origins of life.
Earlier research never went so far as to doubt religious teachings simply because an experiment showed otherwise.

Daring to doubt religion, that's what makes science so special from other methods of research.

[grantcart]

5. You could not be more mistaken, but it is understandable because the important foundations of

science have been eliminated from the text books.

During the Middle Ages there existed in the east The Golden Age of Islam.

Not only did it establish the principles of the scientific method but it developed the principles of mathematics as we know it today. Algorithm isn't a word, its the Latin name of the Islamic Mathematician who developed the principles.

If you go to the Wiki article on the "History of the Scientific Method" you will see that after the foundational work by Plato, Socrates and other Greek Philosophers there was an unbroken chain of Islamic philosophers who refined the methodology into what eventually becomes the Scientific Method as we know it today.

During the time of the Spanish Inquisition all of the known works of Plato and Socrates were burned in the Western libraries and lost. They were only later retrieved when folks like Newton found them in the works of the Islamic Philosophers and Islamic libraries, the largest in the world, places like Timbuktu that had over a million books.

Newton, wasn't primarily interested in physics at the beginning of his work but optics.

He searches and finds the works of Alhazen who studied optics at a level several hundred years in advance of the West using the Scientific Method

quote
The Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) used experimentation to obtain the results in his Book of Optics (1021). He combined observations, experiments and rational arguments to support his intromission theory of vision, in which rays of light are emitted from objects rather than from the eyes. He used similar arguments to show that the ancient emission theory of vision supported by Ptolemy and Euclid (in which the eyes emit the rays of light used for seeing), and the ancient intromission theory supported by Aristotle (where objects emit physical particles to the eyes), were both wrong.[28]

Experimental evidence supported most of the propositions in his Book of Optics and grounded his theories of vision, light and colour, as well as his research in catoptrics and dioptrics. His legacy was elaborated through the 'reforming' of his Optics by Kamal al-Din al-Farisi (d. c. 1320) in the latter's Kitab Tanqih al-Manazir (The Revision of [Ibn al-Haytham's] Optics).[29][30]

Alhazen viewed his scientific studies as a search for truth: "Truth is sought for its own sake. And those who are engaged upon the quest for anything for its own sake are not interested in other things. Finding the truth is difficult, and the road to it is rough. ...[31]
unquote


There is an equally impressive line of Islamic Mathematicians who weren't doing "research" but establishing universal philosophic principles which are the foundation of modern math. The West didn't even have a decimal system and had to borrow that from the pre Islamic Arabs.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/122469

[DetlefK]

6. Did this "science" allow the possibility that religious explanations could be wrong?

For example, the research done during the European Renaissance was not about discovering.
It was about trying to find practical applications and examples for the theoretical predictions in religious and esoteric writings. The research was never meant to doubt or test the theoretical predictions.

That's why I hesitate to call the islamic Middle-Age researchers "scientists".
It's like this hodge-podge stand some Christians have on evolution: Small changes are thinkable, because they are supported by evidence. Big changes are unthinkable, because it would go against the Bible.
Similarly, experiments on optics are nice and all, but they make no claims about the wider world.

This concept that nothing is beyond doubt, that is why the "scientific method" so different from other modes of research. I do not know whether the medieval arabic researchers went that far that they would begin to doubt the Quran. But in Europe it took all in all about 3 centuries of failures, frustrations and intellectual crisis until the scholars came to the conclusion that the only way to make it work would be to doubt religious teachings.

I do not doubt that arabic researchers made important contributions. I do doubt that their method was the "scientific method".

[grantcart]

4. The Golden Age of Islam was more powerful than our Renaissance

The Renaissance advance a more well rounded "Age of Reason" that included art and science. The Golden Age of Islam advanced science and math by several hundred years. It also included religious tolerance and protection for the Jewish population from the West that could escape the murderous hands of the Inquisition.

A brief summary is here

https://www.democraticunderground.com/122469