Alparslan Acikgenc, Islamic Science: Towards a Definition

Also, al-Attas has said that "science is definition of reality," (2) (this Alparslan also overlooks or ignores) which is consistent with his definition of the Islamic worldview as the Islamic vision of the totality of being and existence and not of this temporal, phenomenal world alone. (3) Now, this realist definition of science and worldview will be problematic from within the perspective of the famous Kantian distinction, even demarcation, between noumena and phenomena. For it follows from this demarcation that (for Kant at least) science can only be about phenomena and never noumena, whereas for al-Attas, true science must ultimately be also about noumena, i.e., that the study of phenomena should lead the intellect into some insight into the underlying noumena. The danger for Muslim scientists and philosophers who unwittingly follow the Kantian framework lies in the neglect on their part of any serious attempt at an ontological interpretation of empirical scientific data that is consistent with their religious belief-system or worldview. If this happens, science will be purely instrumentalist, manipulative and exploitative in the Baconian sense, and never really cognitive and hence salvific, and so bye-bye to islamization and Islamic science.

To make matters worse, in his attempt to work out his conception of 'worldview' from the Kantian synthetic a priori, Acikgenc falls into tautologies, circularities, conceptual gaps, inconsistencies and contradictions too numerous and tedious to exhaust in any detail here. By way of indications, one may cite the many cases in which claims are asserted as conclusions only to be reasserted as conclusions with no new informative content (pp. 8-9); in Kant the synthetic a priori is not conceived as being the property of a created mind and hence ontologically grounded in a transcendent "noumenal" intellect, whereas Islamic epistemology posits the real objective existence of a universal intellect as the ontological ground for all human cognitive processes (p. 10); proper procedures of inference are absent throughout the book since the conceptual gaps between propositions and conclusions are not filled; his statement that "no scientific knowledge is possible" within certain worldviews (p. 12) is a mere assertion without citing any anthropological studies, and which contradicts the very notion that "human reason is by nature architectonic" (p. 11). For if human knowledge is by nature architectonic, then scientific knowledge is possible in all worldviews, even in so-called primitive, pre-historic cultures, unless of course one chooses to define science by the way science is being done in the high-tech, overly commercialized modern West.

In sum, the first chapter on "Islamicity" turns out to be an attempt to explicate the Kantian synthetic a priori rather than the Attasian conceptions of islamization, worldview and science, which explication turns out in the final analysis to be neither Kantian nor Attasian nor anything coherently novel. Would it not have been more relevant, consistent and fruitful to begin simply from al-Attas' outline of Islamic faculty psychology as the framework for Islamic epistemology, flesh out the conceptual connections between that outline and his definition of islamization, worldview and science, and then proceed thereby to a definition of Islamic science? The inferential procedure in this case would then be something like this schematically: