History of Science in Islam (History)

In the modern age, the conflict between science and religion manifests itself in the debate between evolution and creation. If we adopt a creationist's reading of the Qur'an, we discover an interesting anomaly. Reading the Qur'an literally does not necessarily provide the foundation of creationism. Creationists usually have in mind the concept of creatio ex nihilo, or 'creation out of nothing'. However, in the Qur'an, one of the words used for creation, khalaqna, has the root khlq, which means 'to split' or 'to divide'. This root word may even apply to the biological process of cell division. Therefore, from a scientific perspective, using the word khlq to describe this physical process is not problematic. In addition, with close textual analysis of the Qur'an, we realize that the word for creation 'be' (kun) does not truly describe the moment of creation, but rather that of 'being'. The Qur'an separates the notion of creation from being, which poses the question as to what the text constitutes as the ontological nature of the human being and the universe. Therefore, even if we do adopt a literal reading of the Qur'an, we find that it does not necessarily support a worldview that endorses creatio ex nihilo.

In this paper life of India's eminent astronomer of 20th century has been detailed. Dr. Saleh Alladin was leading astronomer of India who earned his P.hd from Chicago. Besides books he authored hundreds of articles, both on science and religious subjects. His specialized in galaxies.

The main problem of Ptolemaic model of the superior planets was about "equant point". It is a geometrical point relating to which the motion of the deferent sphere is uniform. But it cannot be real on the basis of Aristotle's philosophy on the motions of celestial spheres. Astronomers of Maragha School devised some new models to avoid this problem, while they were in accordance with Ptolemy's observations. Qutb al-Din Shirazi (d. 1311 AD) has provided his own model for superior planets in his works: "Nihayat al-idrak fi dirayat al-aflak", "al-Tuhfa al-Shahia" in Arabic and "Ikhtiarat-i Muzaffari" in Persian. His model in Ikhtiarat has not been studied yet and is different from the one that Saliba (1979) and Kennedy (1966) have introduced. Here, I introduce Qutb al-Din's model for superior planets provided in eighth chapter of the second book of "Ikhtiarat-i Muzaffari", and also about a conflict between observations and the theory which this model involves.